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Sitting is too easy, which makes it hard. Head against the wall of the Refuge, eyes closed, Nomad listens to the small sounds of life he never hears while running — fingertaps on touchpads, the Awakened Steelmind reading off status reports, low laughter from a joke he missed. With nothing to fight, his thoughts come up too loud. *Am I a coward, Aux?* For being traumatised, Auxiliary tells him, no. The glowing Dor cell is within reach. He has settled near it on purpose and is slumped and tired on purpose, because they will be watching him at first.

A researcher reports a Night Brigade ship in orbit. Do not hail them, hope the business is unrelated. The connection Nomad braces for never comes; the Brigade keeps quiet about why they hunt him because the Dawnshard is not the kind of weapon you advertise.

*That Rosharan was right,* a worker says, switching on a wall screen. Overhead footage shows Beacon's surviving ships fleeing for the shadow with everything they have. Two gunships down already; the last two dogfighting clumsily. A scientist murmurs about ship-to-ship guns the TimeTellers had been withholding *for later*. Another gunship goes down — Zeal, perhaps. Charred drop onto the transports. The survivors land. Surrender. A death sentence, but there is no other choice.

Nomad stumbles against a desk, finally seeing himself clearly. Is this who he is — the man who runs? He whispers the old words of his oaths. Nothing happens. He sinks back to the floor. Auxiliary is stricken: he had thought wanting it back would be enough. *Consequences*, Nomad whispers. He walked away on purpose. *Why?* Aux asks, finally, *after Roshar, after all we'd been through?* For the first time he answers truly: he does not know. He cannot explain the mindset, cannot justify it; the choice feels unlike him; but he made it in the heat of a moment, with no reason worth the name. Humans are sometimes inconsistent. He has been running so hard and somehow ended up exactly where he began. Not a revelation in light. One in tears.

He surfaces because the room has gone silent. Onscreen, the Charred have stripped Beacon's sunhearts and pulled back to Union, leaving roughly a hundred and thirty-five people unarmed in the grass under the coming sun — abandoned as offerings. The cruelty shocks even the Scadrians silent.

Opportunity. The Dor cell is unguarded; no eye is on him. He does not take it. *Are we going to do anything?* Aux asks. *Yes*, Nomad says. *We're going to watch and witness.*

The words pull the attention of a ponytailed researcher working on a pair of sunhearts who had not turned to the screen. *Who were you talking to? I thought you were unoathed. Do you have a spren?* He deflects — old habit, nothing — and turns the question back. She is, she says proudly, *recharging* a sunheart to study how much Investiture can be packed into one. He had been told leaving a spent sunheart out did nothing; she beams, the joy of a scientist finding a peer. Of course, using the sunlight — it has to do with the strange world-current that pulls Investiture and heat from Canticle's sun down to its core like an electric circuit. Months to figure out, she says.

He reasons aloud: anything trapped between sun and core sits between opposite electric poles; a sunheart forms because a soul *resists* the current, like an incandescent filament that lights because it is bad at conducting; a spent sphere is inert because it offers no resistance. To recharge, you prime it — block the circuit so it can intercept again. A little body heat from a captive will do; the same trick with special Investiture yields a corrupted cinderheart for making Charred. She confirms it casually. The locals could end the sacrifice cycle with this one piece of knowledge — and the TimeTellers have simply chosen not to share something so useful.

The air around him fractures: armor pieces from both old orders pushing back into reality at the worst possible moment. The researcher reads him — oathed, arcanist, Rosharan, dark skin — and her eyes go wide. He lunges for the Dor cell; she snatches it away and slaps a glove device. He grabs the overcharged sunheart instead and is hurled into the wall by his own steel belt buckle. *I've read about this man*, she shouts. *He's why the Night Brigade is here. There's a bounty on his head big enough to buy a small planet.*

He rips off the belt and summons Auxiliary in his most ostentatious form: a six-and-a-half-foot wavy Shardblade ornamented near the hilt. The room freezes. He tells them to choose between blocking him and breathing. A Scadrian points out, accurately, that sunrise is less than five minutes off — but Beacon is farther from dawn, Aux notes, perhaps fifteen for them. He backs to the elevator and threatens to cut through the hull if they will not operate it. They do.

The surface has transformed in the minutes he was below: a thin forest of spindly trees has shot up from the mud and is already darkening at the edges. He turns and runs. It is what he does, and it has always been enough before. This time he has rounded an entire planet to find himself exactly where he started.

The light grows oppressive on his back; the trees wither and smoulder. He cannot outrun it, Auxiliary tells him with a softness Zellion has not heard in years — not even him. He will have to fly. He shouts that he cannot, he has tried. Aux tells him gently that he is a better man than he pretends; a callous one would have stripped Beacon's sunhearts the day he reached them, and he did not. The friend Aux addresses by name is, Aux insists, still worth saving. He starts crying as he runs.

Aux tells him: tell those people the secret, save them. He offers, again, the little burst of power the two of them have already discussed. Zellion argues he will use the sunheart — and will that make him fly? No. Because what he lacks is not power. Aux tells him he can restore him to what he once was, briefly: by burning away only himself, only his personality, and leaving the weapon-body intact for Zellion to keep using. That ending is his to choose; Zellion's is somewhere else. Zellion pleads with him to stop; Aux tells him he does not get to decide.

Then he tells Zellion what he has never said: he too swore the words and became a Knight Radiant, a better thing than he had been before — and whatever Zellion did with his own oaths, Aux never broke his. The protection of these people falls to Zellion now. Aux has carried him as far as he can; the rest of the road is his alone.

A familiar, awesome power wells up inside him, drawn from the remnant of Auxiliary's soul. The sun finally breaks the horizon and the dying forest bursts into flame. Armor closes around Zellion. And his eyes come alight.