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Puuli, lighthouse keeper of a small Natan port on the crumbling eastern edge of Roshar, works hard to keep anyone from noticing how secretly excited he is about the new storm out of the east. He pulls his little cart through town, gathering scraps of wood the strange storm has scattered everywhere — branches torn from trees, planks blown loose from roofs, splintered boards from broken homes. To everyone he meets, he calls the storm what it is for them: *truly tragic.*

He gathers boards from Sakin's shattered hut while she weeps for the third husband the sea has taken. Her hut had stood in what should have been a prime sheltered spot west of the northern cliffs — cliffs his grandfather could remember not being there, until Kelek broke the land apart in a storm and made a new safe-haven for the rich. The new storm has come at the *wrong direction*, and so what was sheltered is now exposed. He passes the cove, where a long-eyebrowed, tan-skinned foreign captain — not properly blue-skinned — stares at her ruined ship; lightning had struck it, the waves had smashed it against the rocks, and now only her mast is left above water. Puuli tells her the mast was a very nice mast, picks broken planks of her ship from the surf, and stacks them in his cart. He helps Au-lam clear his storm-broken barn — many of the boards end up in the cart — sits with Hema-Dak's children while she runs broth to her fevered sister, and helps the Drummer brothers drag a tattered sail from the surf and spread it on the rocks. *A tragedy,* he tells each of them. Fishers do not sleep through the Weeping like lazy farmers; they work it, because in the Weeping there are no winds, only the bailing. Until now.

With his cart heaped, he pulls it up the long twisting road to *Defiance.* That is his private name for the lighthouse he tends; everyone else just calls it the lighthouse. He leaves an offering of fruit at the top for Kelek, the Herald who lives in the storm, and rolls his wagon into the bottom room. Defiance is not tall and not fashionable — nothing like the sleek ones along Longbrow's Straits built for rich folk in ships that do not catch fish. She is squat as a bunker, sealed with crem, and good stonework has held her against the highstorms for over a hundred years. Puuli carries an armful of wet stormwood up to the open rim where the mirrors throw his fire across the Origin at night, lays it beside the low daytime flames to dry, and looks east over the cliffs at the sea.

His family, he thinks, is a lot like the lighthouse. Squat and short, but powerful — and enduring. *They'll come with Light in their pockets,* his grandfather had told him. *They'll come to destroy, but you should watch for them anyway. Because they'll come from the Origin. The sailors lost on an infinite sea. You keep that fire high at night, Puuli. You burn it bright until the day they come. They'll arrive when the night is darkest.* Surely, Puuli thinks, with a new storm — that is now. The darkest of nights. A tragedy. And a sign.