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Thirty-three years before the main story, a young Dalinar dances from foot to foot in the morning fog outside the wall of Rathalas, drunk on the weight of his first set of Shardplate — won the day before by booting a Shardbearer off a cliff. Gavilar in bright blue Plate flanks him on one side, Sadeas in gold on the other; Sadeas is again pushing him to consider a political marriage that might win his brother a princedom without sacking it first. Only four of Alethkar's ten princedoms have bowed to the new Kholin regime, and Sadeas's answer is to make the rest fear them too much to refuse. Dalinar wants only the fight. Gavilar grins at him through his faceplate and breaks rank as Sadeas is still explaining the plan; the brothers charge the wall together with Sadeas cursing behind them.

The defenders empty catapults, ballistas, and arrows onto them; nothing matters against Plate. Dalinar reaches the wall, vaults up between the crenels, drops his hammer on whoever is behind him and clears the wall walk in a few wide swings. The defenders here are penned in and slaughter goes easy enough that he feels for a moment a sour, hollow dissatisfaction — anyone in this Plate could be doing it — and he reaches inward for the Thrill, finds it waiting, and roars himself back into a destroyer. From the wall he sees the city for the first time: a chasm in the ground with houses stacked along the V of either side, gardens, bridges, walkways, all of it strung together over a hundred-foot drop. Sadeas shouts about the catapults still firing on Gavilar's charging columns. Dalinar grabs a rope ladder, the rope snaps under his weight, he goes flat — and resolves on the spot that he will live in this armor until he is more at home in it than out.

He swings a ripped-free door like a maul through the catapult crews, and Sadeas hurls his own hammer down to him to finish the line. Engineers run screaming the name they have given him: Blackthorn. By the time he tips the last broken machine over the side of the Rift, Gavilar has the gates open. Dalinar walks out onto a stone viewing platform jutting over the chasm and gets his first real look down. Behind him, the defenders along the wall are routed; Thakka and a handful of elites join him on the lip. The arrangement of the platform — railing, perfect vantage, catapults conveniently nearby — makes him uneasy in a way he cannot quite explain. He sees the hairline cracks in the stone an instant too late. He turns to shout at Gavilar to stay back, and the ground goes out from under him.

The whole lip of the chasm shears off. Dalinar is flung into the air over the city with Thakka and the elites; he tears through one wooden building, cracks his arm-plate apart against stone, and ends crashed onto a rooftop fifty feet down. None of the others are alive. His left arm and hand are bare and broken, the Plate there bled away in white smoke. He shoves through the floor into a stranger's house, kicks the door open, and steps onto the wooden terrace just in time for fifty archers across the chasm to open up on him. Their commander wears a white plume in his helm: Highlord Tanalan, the city's Shardblade-bearing lord. Dalinar intends to relieve him of the Blade.

He charges along the walkway and out onto one of the slung wooden bridges that cross the Rift. Soldiers immediately set to chopping its support posts. He drops to the lower bridge, his weight crashing one foot through the planks; the next pair of sappers starts on those posts too, and the bridge begins to shake. A single black arrow drops one sapper and a second drops the other — Teleb, far above on the lip of the shattered platform, picking them off with a longbow. Dalinar makes the far side and starts up the ramps to where the highlord waits in a garden platform thick with lifespren and blooming rockbuds.

Tanalan fights him with a hooked Shardblade nearly as tall as Dalinar himself, the two of them circling between squat trees while Tanalan's soldiers stand back as protocol requires. Dalinar feints at dragging the fight out, then rushes in and shoulders the highlord down — Plate ringing against bent steel — and the duel collapses into a brawl on the platform floor. The soldiers attack the moment their lord starts losing. Dalinar drops three of them with the war axe and a fourth with a kick, the platform underneath them all gives way, and they fall again — onto the tier below. Dalinar's helm cracks and he pulls it free.

The remaining soldiers gather their wounded brightlord and run. Dalinar limps after them, up ramps along the chasm wall, to where they unlatch a section of stone that swings open as a hidden door. He kills the two who turn to delay him, kicks the inner door down, and finds the small chamber beyond: Tanalan dying on the floor, his weeping wife draped across him, and at the back a boy of six or seven trying to lift his father's Shardblade in both hands. The boy's voice comes apart. His father has told him that with faith they fight monsters and win. Dalinar looms in the doorway and the chapter does not say what he does next; the next time it speaks, it is hours later and he is sitting on the rim of the Rift with the highlord's Shardblade across his lap and the rest of the Tanalan line ended behind him.

Gavilar walks up with Kadash and Febin from the elites at his shoulder, waves them off, and sits beside his brother. They have lost half of the elites and Thakka with them. Gavilar talks for the first time as if Sadeas might have been right about more than tactics: about building something, about discipline and law and bureaucracy, about not robbing every city they pass. He is a father now — he has a daughter — and he asks why they are out here. Dalinar does not have an answer, and is too distracted by his own shame to give one. (What if Gavilar found out what he feels for the woman his brother married?) When Gavilar stands to go he gives the Blade its name: Oathbringer. It was the Sunmaker's sword once. By the time we are done, Gavilar says, no one will think of Sunmaker when they see it. Dalinar rams the Blade into the stone and closes his eyes, and what stays with him is the sound of a brave boy crying.