No servant answered his call.

All the doors were fastened except those which led outside, where he found his steed awaiting him.

When he had passed the drawbridge it rose up slowly behind him, and a voice called out from the tower, "Thou art accursed; for thou hadst been chosen to do a great work, which thou hast left undone!" Then looking upward, Parzival saw a horrible face gazing after him with a fiendish grin, and making a gesture as of malediction.
[Sidenote: Sigune.] At the end of that day's journey, Parzival came to a lonely cell in the desert, where he found Sigune weeping over a shrine in which lay Tchionatulander's embalmed remains.

She too received him with curses, and revealed to him that by one sympathetic question only he might have ended Amfortas's prolonged pain, broken an evil spell, and won for himself a glorious crown.
Horrified, now that he knew what harm he had done, Parzival rode away, feeling as if he were indeed accursed.

His greatest wish was to return to the mysterious castle and atone for his remissness by asking the question which would release the king from further pain.