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The chapter opens with Lopen stunned on his back on the beach, ignoring the pain in his shattered leg long enough to register that Huio — *Huio* — has beaten him to the Third Ideal. Storm it. Rua cheers. The Shardhammer in Huio's hand obligingly re-forms into a spear, which Huio hurls; it flies straight as a line of silver and slices clean through the grub-monster's carapace head. The thing teeters and collapses. Huio helps his cousin sit up, and they both get a clear view of the bay starting to bubble and churn. Six more grub-monsters begin to rise. Neither cousin has any Stormlight left. Lopen asks for Huio's opinion on carrying his wonderful cousin on his back as they run.

Down in the vault the same roar shakes the ceiling. The hordelings swarming over Rysn and Cord stop. Nikli has only a semblance of humanity left, his chest and face split open. The door opens further onto the great vaulted hall of greatshell skulls, six of them turned somehow toward the smaller chamber. Glowing white arrowhead luckspren swirl around Rysn and Cord like fish in an invisible stream. A squealing roar comes — smaller, behind the first — and a small figure leaps to the top of one of the great skulls, flaps her wings, and tries to be terrifying. Chiri-Chiri has returned. Her chalky white cast is gone; she is bright violet-brown again. She hops off the skull and lopes across the stone, then plants herself on the bench-table between Rysn and Nikli, growling and snapping. Nikli's hordelings withdraw into him and the human shape settles again.

Nikli addresses Chiri-Chiri in Veden — *Ancient Guardian* — and tells her she is no longer needed; the Sleepless took up that role at the fall of her kind. Coincidence, he insists, that she returned now: she had only reached the size at which she needed to bond a mandra. But Cord tells him the Ancient Guardian returned because she was the larkin who brought Rysn here. *The Dawnshard isn't alive*, Nikli snaps. *It doesn't want things. You have stolen it.* And Rysn knows, in a way that feels exactly true, that he is partly right. The thing inside her has no will of its own; it is a Command. But Chiri-Chiri does have a will, and she led her here.

Rysn turns her palms up again and proposes that the negotiation resume. *You claim to want to protect this thing, but all you threaten to do is destroy.* Nikli argues that there are those in the cosmere who could use the Dawnshard for terrible acts; she fortunately cannot. *Then the safest place for it is in my mind*, she says. She names the truth at the heart of his fear: the secret is escaping; the walls crack; his lies undermine each other; the *enemies you cannot locate* will come anyway, and how valuable would it be to be able to watch and identify them when they do — to trap *them* instead of innocent crews of sailors? Don't give them what they say they want, Vstim taught her. Give them what they need.

Nikli's hordelings buzz to the other two swarms. After a pause, he asks what the deal would take. Rysn sketches it: she tells the story exactly as it happened, but leaves out the mural; she and Cord swam down here, found the Plate and Soulcasters, the Sleepless were going to kill them and were stopped by Chiri-Chiri as an Ancient Guardian, Nikli was persuaded to let them go. The Oathgate cannot be hidden; let scholars swarm the island and chase a secret that is no longer there. For the queens and dignitaries who will *want* a second layer of secret, a closer-to-the-truth one: she negotiated for the treasure. The deeper real secret — the thing in her mind — stays between her, Cord and the Sleepless. The trade: she will train hordelings to better pass as human, something his people have always wanted and are openly bad at. He thinks it through. It could work. The half-suit of Plate Cord has bonded is long reserved, Nikli says, for guardians of the Dawnshard. Cord tells him she will consider that after she has fought the Void, as her father refuses to do.

Then Nikli names the thing. Mere words cannot fully explain, he warns. The Dawnshards are Commands — the will of a god. The most powerful applications of Surgebinding transcend mortal understanding; their greatest forms require Intent and a Command on a scale no one person could ever manage, the reasoning of a deity. The four primal Commands made everything that is — and eventually, they were used to undo Adonalsium itself. Cord whispers a prayer in her own tongue and tells Nikli she knows the songs: a Command that came once through the pool. Rysn notices hordelings near her that look strikingly like tiny Chiri-Chiris. The Sleepless long believed the last lanceryn had died and that the few inferior hordeling bloodlines they had bred with them — useful for negating Stormlight — were all that was left. Chiri-Chiri is the third surviving larkin they now know of, the first to grow mature enough to return here. She will need to come back every few years to bond more of Akinah's special small-and-potent mandras or be crushed by her own weight. Fully grown. *Oh storms*, Rysn thinks, looking again at the skulls.

Nikli stands up, robe pulled tight. The other two swarms collapse into piles to vote with all the Sleepless swarms across Roshar; they communicate faster than humans, it will not take long. Before he goes, Rysn asks him one last thing: tell the others honestly what kind of trademaster he has come to know her to be. He breaks into hordelings. Cord quietly works the last gemstones into the Plate in case the answer is the wrong one. Five minutes later Nikli is back. The Sleepless listened. They like the dual-layered lie. Two further terms: she may never bond a spren to become a Radiant; and she may not tell anyone what has happened to her without their permission. Rysn accepts, on condition that no further harm comes to her crew — and learns, with a twist in her stomach, that three of the sailors have already been killed on the beach by the *specialised* hordelings. Cord, asked to swear to guard the Dawnshard, refuses for now: she is no warrior yet and means first to go to war and learn — she will fight the Void, as her father refuses to. She does vow on the honour of both her parents to keep the secret. Nikli bows. *We will speak again.* Cord asks if Rysn is now a Dawnshardbearer. *No*, Nikli answers. *She bears nothing. She is the Dawnshard now. That is how it works.*

Rysn braces against the bench and bows back. *What have I done?* she thinks. And another voice — her own, but not — answers: what you needed to. *You have adapted. You have Remade yourself.* And she begins to grasp, in the smallest way, the nature of the Command inside her: the will of a god to remake things, to demand they be better. The power to change.