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The morning after the Everstorm, Lift sits on the Stump's dresser interrogating Wyndle about the rules of his condensed form. *So you don't hafta be a sword.* A sword is traditional, he tells her, sounding offended. He must be metal — there is a connection between his power, condensed, and metal — but the shape is up to her. He has heard stories of spren-becoming-bows, though he can't work out where the string would come from. He'd make, he wants her to know, a particularly regal Shardblade one day. Lift is barely listening; she has other plans.

A knock comes at the door downstairs. Not the scribe, by the sound. The Stump climbs back up with a large plate of pancakes — twelve of them — and tries to pretend they were always meant for her own breakfast. Lift starts inhaling them. *Who was at the door?* *A mother*, the Stump says. *Come to insist, ashamed, that she wanted her child back.* Mik's mother came. The Stump tries on the old theory — *obviously she knew her son had been faking* — and trails off, because she had no possible way of knowing.

The Stump fingers the bloodstained shiqua that the Herald's knife had gone clean through the night before. *I've been healing the children. You're sure about this?* *Yeah,* Lift says around pancakes. *You should have a weird little thing hanging around you. Weirder than mine. Like a vine?* *A spren*, the Stump says, and immediately corrects her: *not like a vine. Like light reflected on a wall from a mirror.* Wyndle gives her the confirming nod from the wall. *Congrats,* she tells the Stump. *You're a starvin' Knight Radiant, Stump.* The Stump objects that she expected Radiants to be more majestic. Lift summons Wyndle as a giant silvery fork — a Shardfork, if you would — drives him through the pancakes and the plate and into the dresser, prises up a pancake on the prongs, and proclaims herself majestic as Damnation's own gonads, with bonus fancy-style language for the fork's benefit.

The fat scribe Ghenna from the Indicium arrives — the Stump practically scrapes the floor bowing — with a spanreed kit and a message from Gawx. The empire is *surviving*. The smaller villages were worst hit. The storm was longer than a highstorm, but its winds gentler; the lightning was what did most of the damage to anyone caught out of doors. The state of the parshmen may yet be a greater concern, and Gawx does not want to say more by spanreed. Mostly, he wants to know if she is all right. *Tell him I ain't eaten nearly enough pancakes,* she sends back. She also asks them to put the Stump on the books as a Radiant — *real old, kinda looks like an underfed crab without no shell, but actually kind of nice, and takes care of kids* — and to deploy her against Voidbringers by glare.

Finishing her ninth pancake of an unfamiliar mealy type, Lift announces she's ready for the tenth. *The tenth is dedicated to Tashi*, the scribe tells her absently — *more a thought than a real entity. We bake nine, and leave the last in memory of Him.* Lift is incensed. She has been lied to. She announces she will fetch the Skybreaker back to deal with both of them — he let the Stump off for the spheres, but when he hears about the pancakes she might not be able to hold him back. Then she excuses herself for the Radiant Refreshment Room, slips down the stairs, winks at one of the orphans, and is out the front door without a word of farewell.

The street outside is wet, the city littered with the aftermath of the storm — refuse, broken boards, fallen branches snarled around the steps — but Yeddaw is already at work cleaning itself up. The city has lived its life in the shadow of highstorms. It will adapt. *We're leaving, then?* Wyndle asks. *Yup.* *Just like that? No farewells?* *Nope.* This time, she tells him, she thought they might wander back to Azimir and the palace. Gawx and the dusty viziers need her, she explains — she's got everything figured out. *What have you got figured out?* *Nothing at all,* she says, with the utmost confidence. *But I will listen to those who are ignored*, she thinks. *Even people like Darkness, whom I'd rather never have heard. Maybe that will help.*

They climb the ramp out of the city, passing the guard captain who is processing storm refugees and very nearly leaps out of her boots when she sees Lift again. Lift flips her a pancake — by now mostly a panball — to settle the debt for almost having gotten her killed, and then moves down the line breathing Stormlight over wound after wound until she is empty. The captain watches in silence. A better knight would stay and heal everyone. *A big project*, Wyndle says. *Perhaps too big.* *And too small, all the same*, Lift answers, hands in her pockets. Something larger is coming. She can't quite explain it, but she needs to get to Azir. Wyndle clears his throat, then asks — instead of complaining — whether he was a particularly regal fork. Lift grins at him. *Y'know, Wyndle,* she says, *it's strange, but I'm starting to think you might not be a Voidbringer after all.*