In 1851, at Stonehenge, Jerzy mysteriously disappeared from Church's side. He had been kidnapped by the shape-shifting trickster Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, one of the Oldest Things in the Land, to undisclosed ends.

As Veitch, the Libertarian and the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders continued a campaign to stop Church, they also launched a search for a world-shattering magickal artefact, the Extinction Shears, which could cut through all reality. Locating them, the Void's forces used the Shears to sever the Blue Fire from its source and condemn the world to the Mundane Spell. But after this act, the otherworldly Market of Wishful Spirit reclaimed the supremely powerful artefact, and disappeared with it.

At the Woodstock Festival in 1969, the Libertarian offered a world-weary Church a deal – if he allowed himself to be placed in the Sleep Like Death, and locked for ever in a casket in the Far Lands, Ruth, Shavi and Laura would not be killed. Church believed this was the only way to save his friends.

As Church slept in the casket, events he had previously experienced continued apace. The Fomorii invaded, and his past-self fought them through the Age of Misrule. Tom and Niamh died. The Battle of London took place.

Locked inside his head, Church experienced what he thought was a dream or a hallucination: he met me, and the Daughters of the Night, the true owners of the Extinction Shears, and then he was guided to a cave that housed the Axis of Existence, which he perceived as a great reality-altering machine. Using the Axis, Church changed events in the same way that the Void had done, though not as catastrophically: both Tom and Niamh returned to life. But there was a price to pay, as there always is for these things, and Niamh became an agent of the Void.