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Kaladin walks into Revolar in the company of Khen's band of armed parshmen — the only group in the column carrying stone-headed spears, hogshide sandals, knives, hatchets, and the slings he has spent the weeks of the road teaching them to use. He had dreamed of soldiering as a boy in Hearthstone for the chance to see places, and here at last is a city, sprawling between leeward hills, untidy after the orderly grids of the warcamps. He had not expected to enter it surrounded by an army of parshmen forty or fifty thousand strong, with more arriving by the hour. Sah carries his small daughter on his shoulder so she can see her people's gathering and whispers that he had imagined a home like this when he was a slave, *and now here it is.*

Syl flits past as a wisp of mist and a wall-rock, then zips up Kaladin's sleeve and into his hair to scout. The streets show looting and axe-hacked doors, the inner-city gate is broken, the guardhouse burned — this is a conquered place. Sah presses Kaladin to imagine joining a war waged not by humans against parshmen but by the oppressed against their oppressors. Kaladin only knows that exterminating either side cannot be the answer. Syl reports humans crammed into army barracks and parshman quarters east of the city and pens watched under guard, and warns that a highstorm is coming — soon, before the charts can be rewritten for a sky that now has two storms in it.

At the processing lines, a parshman in full carapace armor like a Parshendi notes Khen's count of spears, marks them for special training, and asks who their captive is. Khen grudgingly admits Kaladin is not one; an unseen spren named Yixli speaks for him in a voice only the parshmen can hear, and Sah whispers that she sounds impressed. The scribe says only one of *the Fused* can declare a human free — and points to a tall parshwoman with carapace running back along her cheeks into her hair, prickling ridges down her arms, and glowing red eyes. She turns her gaze directly on Kaladin in a way he can feel as weight. Thunder cracks in the distance and the parshmen turn toward it muttering. Kaladin makes his decision: he sucks the Stormlight from Khen's belt-pouch, yanks the pouch free of its strap, tells her to get her people to shelter and that he does not wish to be their enemy, and meets Sah's betrayed eye as he Lashes himself into the air.

A few hundred feet up, Kaladin holds a half-Lashing and surveys what he has spent weeks walking into. Syl swats away gloryspren — *mine* — and they argue, hovering, over the moral arithmetic of this whole war. Kaladin cannot find the line that makes Dalinar's assault on the listeners of the Shattered Plains right and the parshmen taking Revolar wrong. Syl, shoulder-perched, can only tell him the bond is built of what each of them *sees* as right and wrong, not an absolute. Kaladin had hoped, at last, to be given a code without a list of exceptions at the end. He is not.

He spots what he had missed at the city's edge: pens of huddled humans east of the windbreak hills, the parshmen guarding them standing aimlessly with the storm at their back. Kaladin drops out of the sky in a ring of glowing dust and shouts at the guards to move the captives to the storm bunkers. They stare. He summons the Sylblade, leaps up on a chest-high pighold wall, sucks in more Stormlight and rises into the air to quiet the swarm of townspeople climbing it, asks where they sheltered last storm, and drives a frightened parshman guard line into herding the humans toward the bunkers when he severs the heads from their spears and tells them to do it. A few of them obey rather than fight a Shardbearer in the air. He warns the parshwoman whose spear he sliced that the captives are her charge now; if her people want to claim moral superiority over the humans who enslaved them, they must do better.

A red-eyed Fused crashes into him out of nowhere, slams him into the wall, and tries to throttle him; Kaladin kicks free and Lashes himself skyward. Two more Fused rise after him — leaner, longer-haired than the first — flying in a faint blackish-violet anti-glow that Syl can taste in his head and that hurts her. The stormwall thunders in, the sky goes black, and Kaladin Lashes himself straight into the highstorm the way he once did to escape the assassin in white. The pursuing Fused punch through the stormwall after him and are immediately disrupted by the contorting winds, sent spinning. A boulder tumbles past close enough to have taken his arm. He climbs the storm's interior, ringed by windspren, until he stands above the tempest in the place outside reality where he has seen the Stormfather before.

The Stormfather looms as a face wider than the sky — *the memory of a god, the fragment that remains, the soul of a storm and the mind of eternity* — and is asked, *please,* to spare the people below. He considers, and then refuses: it is not a thing he can do. *If the wind stops blowing, it is not a wind. It is nothing.* Kaladin drops back into the storm. He skims down to the pens of Revolar and finds the people scattered, some clutching the bunker walls, others taken away in gusts. He runs into the wind grabbing a father and son, then a woman, and shepherds them with a cluster of survivors toward shelter. A boulder hits nearby; a section of wall tears away and crushes a man into the dark. Syl tells him *I'm sorry.* He bellows that being sorry is not enough — and with Stormlight burning through him, throws his hand against the wind. A hundred windspren spin in as ribbons of light, wrap his arm, and spread to either side of him like wings of light, parting the highstorm around him and opening a calm pocket behind him. The people huddle in the wake and run for the bunker.

A figure with glowing red eyes lands on the field. The last of the townsfolk reach the bunker. Kaladin releases the wedge, lets the storm pick him up, Lashes for elevation, and pushes past Revolar in a heartbeat. He turns into the storm itself, riding the leading edge as one more piece of debris, Stormlight constantly renewed from the source behind him. The pursuing Fused lag and vanish. He and Syl flow westward over cities and mountains for an hour until a current in the winds nudges them south — Syl tells him to listen to *the piece of nature incarnate;* her father is offering an apology in his own way. Kaladin rides the channelled wind for hours, half of his own will, half pressed, and finally settles on the plateau in front of Urithiru as the storm passes on.