POV: nomad
Summary
Zellion flies in the lead gunship — Elegy's vessel, the only one with a cannon welded to the roof — toward the cloud cover where Beacon had been searching the day before. The Cinder King is waiting exactly where Rebeke had predicted, his whole fleet drawn up in front of the Refuge's presumed entrance, ready for anything. He is, however, not ready for ship-mounted sunheart guns.
The opening barrage scythes through the enemy line. Light-bolts as thick as a leg punch the twilight, ships flame down and Charred are blasted off exploding decks. Zellion watches Rebeke at the Dawnchaser's controls and recognises the look on her face: the sick, awed horror of a person meeting her own capacity for destruction for the first time. He has worn it himself. He just hopes the enemy is sharing it.
Beacon's four gunships and four overloaded transports drive straight through the hole and keep going, ignoring the very landscape Nomad is supposedly going to search. Zeal crows over the radio. Solemnity Divine cuts him off: the volley has drained their sunhearts terrifyingly low, and they cannot afford another like it. Confidence asks why they don't simply land and sweep with a prospector. Zellion orders her to push forward at full speed — to project confidence.
He is gambling everything on a hunch: that the Cinder King has been protecting the Refuge's true location by quietly seeding bad coordinates, like a magician misdirecting with one hand while the other stacks the deck. If Zellion is right, the real door is somewhere close, and the tyrant — frightened that his secret has been found out — will betray it himself by rushing to defend it.
The hunch pays off. Aux catches it first: ninety degrees to the right, a squadron of ten fast ships — the Cinder King's own among them — breaks off and roars away. Rebeke asks how he knew. Zellion tells her the Cinder King is a deeply insecure man who fears, beneath the bluster, that his power and his secrets are about to be stripped from him; his intellect cannot outrun the panic, so he is leading them straight to what he is trying to hide.
The reprieve is short. Zeal warns over the radio that the remaining enemy ships are recovering and swarming back. They have realised how slowly the Beaconite formation is forced to fly to shield those packed transports, and likely that the welded gun mounts have no turrets. For all their startling first punch, Beacon's gunships are now soft targets.
Zellion picks up a steel spear the Chorus forged for him, tells Rebeke her job is to put him where he needs to be rather than to aim, and walks back to where Elegy is still chained to the wall. She protests that she is not ready, cannot control herself. He tells her she will never get to be ready — she will simply have to move forward anyway, a lesson he attributes to Kaladin — and undoes her manacle.
She lunges, locks eyes with him, and visibly fights the urge to swing. The punch never lands. A Charred thumps down on the deck outside; this time the Chasm Kata will not be enough. Zellion tells Elegy to stay close, not to lose control, and to remember they are not here to kill — they are here to survive. *Fight with purpose*, he tells her. *Never forget the why.*
Then he summons Auxiliary as a glittering spear — easier now that he has been bleeding the patina off his soul with the little sunheart — and hands the Shardspear to Elegy instead. She lacks training, he says, but a weapon that cuts through anything will more than make up for the wobble in her thrust; just don't stab the ship, and try not to hit him. Together, Elegy's eyes bright with eagerness, the two of them burst out onto the deck.