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Lift flees the alley with thunder chasing her. The Everstorm has finally arrived — a vast black thunderhead coursing with red lightning, dominating the sky, no stormwall, just rain spitting down out of an angry mass that should not exist. Wind howls through the slots. She stumbles to a stop at the small amphitheatre and stares back at it. *Mistress, oh, this is bad*, Wyndle says.

She makes for the orphanage and finds the door already open. The bar has been sliced clean through — wood cut by a Shardblade from the outside. Inside, blackness, and the choked sobs of children. She fits the cut bar back into place, listens, hears boots thumping on the wood floor of the second storey. *There are Words that you must speak,* Wyndle whispers. *I know,* she thinks. *Tonight, the Words are the easy part.*

She draws in awesomeness and starts to glow — light steaming faintly off her arms in the dark — and shouts up the stairs. *Darkness! The one they call Nin, or Nale! Nakku, the Judge! I'm here. The one you tried to kill in Azir!* The thumping stops; Darkness appears at the top of the stairs, amethyst sphere in one hand and Blade in the other, his uniform rippling in an unseen wind, his eyes hollow as the Sleepless creature's empty sockets. *I am surprised to see you accept judgement*, he says, and starts down.

She does what she does best — runs. Through the kitchen, up a hidden wall with Wyndle's help, dropping down behind him as he passes through, scrambling away from a sword-cut that takes the doorway off its frame. Slick on her backside, she shoots across the floor into the steps, up to the second floor, looking for the Stump in room after room and finding only empty bunks. *I can make Stormlight*, she tells Wyndle, puffing — *he can't, and spheres are rare. We wear him down.* She quiets her glow and keeps moving, ducking past the Herald when he hesitates over one of her questions, and Slicking back and forth across him to look like she's tiring.

He nearly has her. As she shoots past him on her own Slickness he drops the sphere, drops the Blade — it puffs to mist — and slams a knife down through the back of her overshirt, pinning her to the floor. Slicked as she is, she just bounces and slides back to him. She bites his arm; it does nothing. He summons the Blade again and raises it.

Something cracks against his head. The Stump is on the steps, wet to the skin, a length of wood in her hands — she had been on the roof putting her spheres out to charge, exactly as she had said. *Leave my kids alone, you monster.* She hits him again. He sighs, cuts the plank in half with the Blade, pulls his knife free of the floor — freeing Lift — and kicks her so hard down the hallway her own Slickness can't stop her. By the time she scrambles back the Stump is on the ground at his feet, limp, and he has stabbed her not with the Shardblade but with his knife. *Still alive*, he tells Lift flatly. *But bleeding and unconscious. She is too new to know how to feed on Stormlight in this state. You I will have to impale. This one can just bleed out.*

He has baited her. He knows she can heal the Stump. She doesn't have time to wear him out. *I don't know what to do,* she says. *Say the Words,* Wyndle says. *I've said them, in my heart.* But what good would they do here? Nobody listens. *I can't defeat him*, she thinks. *I've got to change him.* Listen.

She runs past him and past the Stump — past where he expects her to stop — up the next flight, through the trapdoor at the top, out onto the rocky plain above the city. The Everstorm hammers her with stinging rain and a wind she can barely stand against. Wyndle forms handholds for her in the stone. Darkness rises through the trapdoor after her and hefts the Blade like an axe and swings.

Lift screams. She lets go of Wyndle's vines and throws both hands up. Wyndle sighs a long soft sigh and melts away — and condenses, glowing, into a silvery rod in her hands. Not a sword. She doesn't know crem about swords. The rod meets the Herald's Blade and stops it. *Ow*, his voice says in her head. And Lift shouts into the storm the Words she has been listening her way toward all day: *I will listen to those who have been ignored.*

*What?* Darkness demands. She tells him to look behind him. Lightning breaks the sky; the red glare reaches across the farmland to a clump of parshmen huddled in the storm — the ones the prince turned out — and the light *lingers* on them, and their eyes are glowing. *No*, Nale says, the storm seeming to drop its volume around the word. *An isolated event. Parshmen who had survived with their forms…* *You've failed*, she tells him. *It's come.*

He looks up at the thunderheads. Something in him surfaces, like a man waking out of a long daze. His Blade drops from his fingers and puffs to mist. He goes to his knees in the rain. *Storms. Jezrien. Ishar. It is true. I've failed. I knew it weeks ago. Oh, God the Almighty. It has returned.* He weeps. He asks her, looking at her through tears and red lightning, if he is getting worse. *I don't know,* she says. And then, by some instinct she didn't know she had, she hugs him. He clings to her, the monster, the broken Herald, and weeps in the storm. Then he pushes away, glows with Stormlight, rises, and is gone into the dark sky. Lift hauls herself to her feet and runs back down to heal the Stump.