- Narrator: Rachel
The Animorphs feel like they're not making any progress against the Yeerks when a mysterious higher being appears to them.
Tropes:
- Alien Non-Interference Clause: The Ellimist, with all his power, claims he doesn't interfere in the affairs of mortals. Ax counters by saying he gives mortals choices that aren't really choices at all. In reality, he wants to interfere, but there's something preventing him from doing so...
- Bad Future: The Ellimist shows one to the Animorphs, depicting a future Rachel as a high-ranking Controller chummy with Visser Three.
- Bears Are Bad News: Rachel acquires a grizzly bear as her secondary battle morph in this book.
- Butterfly of Doom: Discussed, when Ms. Paloma explains to her class about the metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings causing a windstorm hundreds of miles away while teaching about World War II. It takes Rachel some time to realize where the butterfly should be to severely harm the Yeerks.
- Circus Episode: In the opening, Dan takes his daughters and Cassie to the circus. But for Rachel and Cassie, who have more empathy for the animals, it's more of a Circus of Fear. Rachel decides to terrorize the elephant trainer (who isn't a Controller) into never harming an elephant again.
- Cosmic Entity: The Ellimist makes his debut in this book by stopping time and turning Tobias back into a human. Ax explains to the rest that the Ellimist is a higher being capable of warping space and time around them.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: When the Ellimist temporarily turns Tobias back into a human, at one point, he panics and tries to fly away.
- Desecrating the Dead: In the Bad Future, Tobias wasn't a viable host, so the Animorph-Controllers and Visser Three cooked and ate him after killing him.
- Eaten Alive: The Animorphs are eaten by a Taxxon while in cockroach morph, and demorph inside its mouth to escape. Luckily, they're too covered in Taxxon gore to be recognized as humans by the rest of the Controllers in the area.
- Grandfather Paradox: When confronting future Rachel and Visser Three, something goes wrong, as they were expecting the Animorphs to be six humans, not five humans and an Andalite. They're thrown for a loop, and think that killing or maiming the past Animorphs will irreparably change the past.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Ax is all for attacking the Yeerk pool directly a second time, since he wasn't there for the first time. The others talk him out of it.
- Parents as People: After dropping the bombshell that he's moving to another state, Dan offers Rachel the opportunity to move in with him. Rachel quickly realizes that it's because he'll feel lonely in his new home, and that he wants her specifically instead of Sara and Jordan because Rachel is the most independent of the three and he'd need to put in less work into taking care of her.
- Sadistic Choice: The Ellimist offers the kids the ability to escape the war with their families, at the cost of letting Earth be taken by the Yeerks. The choice is made even more sadistic by the fact that when time resumes, a Taxxon will eat them and they'll have to demorph near the Yeerk pool to escape.
- Screw Destiny: The Animorphs nearly give in to the Ellimist's offer, until Rachel realizes that the Bad Future they were shown was not set in stone.
- Spotting the Thread: The Animorphs realize that the only old building still standing in the Bad Future is the one that houses the Kandrona generator.
- Time Stands Still: The Ellimist appears to the Animorphs by stopping time before they get eaten.
- Two of Your Earth Minutes: This is the first book where Ax starts using "your Earth minutes" instead of time percentages to refer to the time they have left in morph. It's also the first time Marco insists they're everyone's minutes, since they're all on Earth.
- Visit by Divorced Dad: Rachel's dad visits his daughters in this book, and waits until the last minute after much prompting from his ex-wife to tell them that he's moving across the country. All three daughters are upset with him by the end.
