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For a heartbeat as she falls toward the water, Rysn is back in the Reshi Isles — falling, hitting, sinking, watching the light retreat above her. The shock of cold separates the two memories. Cord swims her downward with powerful kicks of her legs while Rysn hangs over her shoulder, fearspren trailing behind them like bubbles. Being carried into the dark this way drags up everything from after her fall — the long weeks lying in bed wishing she had died rather than become such a burden, the slow climb back to *I am still a person* — and the helplessness comes for her again.

Then she sees the spren. Not fearspren but luckspren, arrowhead-bodied and glowing, in dozens, in hundreds, lighting the dark water toward a shimmer in the rocks ahead. *I know you,* Rysn thinks. The same kind of spren that had been at the surface of the water the day she fell and somehow did not die. She slips out of Cord's grip and pulls herself along the rocks; the spren guide them through a small tunnel into open air. They surface, gasping, into a freshwater pool inside a cavern under the island. Rysn fishes a diamond mark out of her pocket-purse through her safehand glove for light. Cord climbs out and helps her onto the rocks. The luckspren are still there, Cord says — *apaliki'tokoa'a* — pointing down the tunnel; her father has always had spren blessings, she has not, and being seen by them like this is new to her.

Cord goes ahead to scout while Rysn takes stock of what she has: a few spheres, a money pouch, and the conjoined-fabrial rubies that had been holding her hovering chair up — paired with anchors on the Wandersail's mast, useless for that purpose now but free fabrials. She also reckons honestly with the fact that she is sitting in a cave with no way out, waiting for someone else to come save her, and tells herself she will not do that again. Vstim put her in command for a reason. Cord comes back at a run, eyes wide: *treasure*, *Plate*, *Shardplate*. The gods heard her prayers. She lifts Rysn over her shoulder again, but Rysn stops her — there is a better way — and they rig the rubies onto the legs of a small ancient bench Cord finds in the chambers ahead. With Rysn poling herself along on an old spear, the rebsk floats through the tunnel beside her companion.

The walls of the next corridor are no longer raw stone but carved, murals worked into them: people with hands held forward, falling through doorways, emerging into light. They open out into a small square chamber, perhaps fifteen feet across, dominated by a single enormous round mural on the far wall — a sun being shattered into pieces. In a corner of the room, Cord shows her what she found: a complete set of Shardplate stacked carefully against the stone, with ornate weapons, clothing, and eight Soulcaster devices arranged in boxes — four on a hovering-bench identical to Rysn's own, four on the ground where Cord has moved them. A heavy metal door, slightly ajar, leads out into a much larger vaulted corridor where Rysn can see distant spren-light shimmering and the great skulls of long-dead greatshells lining the walls.

The mural pulls her back. It is inlaid with gold foil and traced in red, the script around its rim unfamiliar — older even than Dawnchant. The sun is broken into mostly-symmetrical sections — four large pieces, each in turn split into four smaller — and the gold seems to glow with its own heat. Rysn catches herself staring; her spear slips from her fingers and clatters to the floor before she realises she has dropped it. She tries to retrieve it and finds she cannot look down. The mural is not angry, she thinks. It is being torn apart with awful patience, and what comes off it feels like resignation, confidence, understanding. *This is the real treasure,* she thinks, and does not know where the thought comes from. Then another thought arrives in the same place, in a voice that is not quite her own: *you were brought here by one of the Guardians of Ancient Sins. There are few of them left. The Sleepless take up the task.* It feels exactly true — and then she realises she is having someone else's thoughts thought at her.

Meanwhile Cord is trying to wake the Plate with the spheres Rysn has handed her, and discovering she needs free gemstones, not the kind sealed in glass for spanreed-style use. Rysn offers the rubies on her bench. Cord hesitates — it means putting Rysn back on the cold stones — and then pries them free and hooks them into the greaves of the Plate, which lock immediately onto her legs. She needs more for the breastplate. Rysn points her through the half-open door toward the spren-light in the great corridor, and Cord clomps off in her new metal boots, carrying the breastplate. Rysn is left on the floor of the small chamber with the mural — which, she now notices, is growing warmer — and the sound of splashes from the pool behind her. Their enemy has caught up.

The mural looms. It is no longer simply a picture. It *waits*. *Accept it,* she hears in her head. *Know it. CHANGE.* It stills, asking for an answer she does not know how to refuse, and she whispers *yes.* Something slams through her eyes into her mind — a streaming, searing weight that grips her, holds, *joins* — and then light consumes her entirely. A moment later she finds herself panting on the ground, blinking tears, skin unburned and sight unblinded. The mural is unchanged on its wall, except that the warmth is gone out of it; it is only a beautiful painting again. Something has changed, but she cannot yet name what. Behind her, hundreds of small feet are skittering up the tunnel from the pool. She grabs the spear she had been poling with, and reminds herself, fiercely, that she is *far* from useless. It is time to prove she deserved Vstim's trust.