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The next day a thousand stone soldiers charge from the gates of the city and run down the highway after the Lifeless who left the day before. Vivenna leans against the city wall and watches them go, thinking how often she has stood under the gaze of those D'Denir without knowing they were alive and waiting to be Commanded again. *And yet they were a gift. The gift that ended the Manywar.*

Vasher leans against the wall beside her, Nightblood in one hand, in his ordinary scraggly mortal form again. *The first thing you taught me about Awakening*, she says — *that we don't know much, that there are hundreds, thousands of Commands we haven't discovered yet?* That one. *I think you were right.* He shrugs that the D'Denir are fast enough to catch the flesh Lifeless and tough enough to win. *Unless that God King decides to use the Lifeless statues to conquer them.* She snorts that he is a grump. The sword in her head agrees enthusiastically. He scowls — *I'm not a grump, I'm just bad with words* — picks up his pack and starts walking up the road.

She walks up beside him. *What are you doing?* *Going with you.* He tries to send her back: to the palace, to be the heroine of Idris; either way a happy life. *No, I don't think so.* Everything she has been was a lie wrapped in hatred. She does not want to go back to being that. *Who are you, then?* *I don't know. But I think I'll find the answer out there.* He shrugs and decides he doesn't really care. *Princess Vivenna died on the streets of T'Telir,* she thinks, *and Vivenna the Awakener has no desire to bring her back.*

So which one is he, she asks — Kalad who started the war, or Peacegiver who ended it? It's odd what history does to a man, he tells her. People could not understand the change in him; they decided he must have been two people. He is still Returned, obviously; he has been carrying extra Breaths above the one that makes him so, eating through them at one a week the way Nightblood eats Breath while drawn. Returned reach the Fifth Heightening not by Breath-count but by the quality of a single divine Breath. The body devours that Breath weekly; if no other is supplied, it eats itself, and the Returned dies. With extras on top of the divine one, it feeds on those instead — gods could in principle hoard. *Wouldn't make them as dependent on their religion to care for them, though.* That's a cynical way of looking at it. He shrugs.

She asks if he is really Talaxin of the Five Scholars — three centuries dead, supposedly. He nods. *BioChroma can keep a man alive a long time.* The sword adds, helpfully, that they used to call him other things too.

Vivenna asks how he keeps from looking like a Returned, and why giving away Breath does not kill him. *Those are my secrets,* he tells her. But she should have figured out by now that the Returned can change their forms. She has Returned blood in her — the royal line, where her hair-colour comes from. *Does that mean I can change more than my hair?* *Maybe. Takes time to learn.* Go stroll the Court of Gods sometime; the gods all look exactly as they think they should — old, heroic, voluptuous, lean. He keeps himself looking like *this*, she thinks: the scraggly man, rough and unkempt. *Is that how he perceives himself?* She does not ask.

*So where are we going?* he is asked. *Ever heard of Kuth and Huth?* *Sure. Your main rivals in the Manywar.* Somebody is trying to restore them — a tyrant of some kind — and has recruited an old friend of his. *Yesteel has resurfaced finally.* Arsteel's brother, the Returned who originally worked out ichor-alcohol. Rumour says he has a new formula, more potent. *Even better.*

The sword complains again of being bored and ignored. *Because you're annoying,* Vasher snaps. The sword huffs. *What is your real name?* she asks. People call him things — Peacegiver, Kalad, Vasher, Talaxin. *Is that last one your real name, the scholar's name?* He shakes his head. He cannot remember the time before he Returned. But when he came back, the Cult of Returned that became the Iridescent Tones kept him alive with Breaths and gave him a name. He did not like it; it did not fit. *Well, what was it?* he is asked. *Warbreaker the Peaceful,* he finally admits. *What I can't figure out,* he tells her, *is whether that was truly prophetic, or if I'm just trying to live up to it.* *Does it matter?* she asks. *No. I guess it doesn't.*

*Should have called you Wartlover the Ugly,* she tells him. *Very mature*, he replies — *you really think those sorts of comments are proper for a princess?* She smiles broadly. *I don't care. And I never have to again.*

The book closes with the Ars Arcanum: a one-page reference table of the ten Heightenings and the approximate Breath-counts that reach each, with brief notes on what each grants — including that the Returned count as Fifth Heightening by virtue of a single divine Breath, and that only the Hallandren God Kings are known to have reached the Eighth Heightening or above.