POV: dalinar
Summary
Dalinar Kholin stands inside the first of the Almighty's visions, six days after his battered army has fled the Shattered Plains through an Oathgate and taken shelter in Urithiru. The arrangement is by now familiar to him — beside a phantom of the dead god, watching ruined Kholinar from a cliff above — and this is his fourth time through. He has already given the whole speech back to Navani for transcription. This time he ignores it. He wants more out of the painting than its narrator. He asks the Stormfather to carry him down into the rubble. The spren grumbles that this is only painted backdrop and the rest of the vision was built around the cliff, then obliges in an eyeblink.
Down among the broken walls and shattered windblades, the air dry and warm, Dalinar finds claw marks raked through the granite — the same kind he has seen in earlier visions, made by the stone monsters that tore themselves out of the rock. The Almighty did not bother to populate this image with corpses; he wanted a symbol of devastation, not a body count, and he had not expected Kholinar to fall to the new storm but to what would come behind it. As the vision begins its closing wave of destruction, Dalinar refuses to be sent home and stands his ground. When the wave hits, he glimpses past it: a brilliant, terrible golden light, and standing before it a figure in black Shardplate with nine shadows and red-glowing eyes meeting his stare. That terror outlasts the storm.
Dalinar comes back to himself in a stone room in Urithiru with Navani holding his arm, sweat tracking down his face. The Stormfather saw no light. When Dalinar describes the golden glare and the nine shadows, the spren names them for him: the light was Odium himself, the god who killed the Almighty; the shadows are the Unmade, his servants, ancient spren of legend who twist the minds of men. The armored figure is the enemy's chosen champion, and he is coming. The last words of the vision echo behind everything: unite them, quickly.
Dalinar tells Navani he now knows what he must do — bind the kingdoms of Roshar together faster than the enemy can pull them apart, then survive the Desolation alongside them rather than alone. He cannot rely on the Heralds, who have not come; the Knights Radiant should already have been in place and they are not; the only god he had is dead and is talking to him through old recordings. He still has to try.
Navani does not argue the goal but reminds him of the unromantic ground beneath it: this mountainside grows nothing, they are half-frozen, their Soulcasters only make basics and will run out of gems, and the foreign monarchs who matter — in Azir, in Thaylenah — admit a strange storm rose in the east but refuse to believe it will return. The real Kholinar is, by report, consumed by riots; their queen has gone silent. Many of his highprinces never marched on the Plains. The Oathgates would let him move troops, but only the pair linking Urithiru to the Shattered Plains currently works; the rest must be unlocked from both ends by a Radiant sent in person.
Dalinar holds her against him anyway and reflects that the perfect Vorin ideal he tried earlier to make of her — lush lips, violet eyes, the right braid and the right silk havah — is the wrong frame for her. He has always loved the stubborn-storm woman beneath it more: the one who breaks taboos out loud, who would already be drafting tart letters to the foreign kings telling them to take their fingers out of their ears. He needs both halves of her. They will make the world listen when the next storm comes for it, and they will hold this tower while it does.
A knock cuts the conversation. A pale scout salutes from the threshold. There has been an incident in the tower corridors. A corpse. Dalinar asks who. The scout tells him: Highprince Torol Sadeas has been murdered.