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Ellista, a young ardent of the Devotary of the Mind resident at the Jokasha Monastery in the forested western foothills of the Horneater Peaks, reminds herself how lucky she is. Jokasha is sheltered from the worst of the highstorms by the peaks themselves; ardents fight half their lives for a transfer here, away from politics and weather, where you can simply *think.* Usually. Today the library hall outside her reading nook is being filled by two senior scholar-ardents in master's caps shouting at each other about whether three data points are enough to declare a sequence for the new storm's speed and which of those points counts. She glares her best glare, which does not register, slams her book closed, and bustles out.

She tries another hall — open to the elements over a creek, vines stretching and popping as they settle for the evening — but new voices arrive there too, this time about whether the trees that have already been flattened by the new storm mean they will all have to relocate when the slope is barren. Earplugs do not help. She tries the lower building and finds a zoo of spanreed traffic and chatter about every highprince and king on Roshar; she turns on her heel and walks out. Picking her way carefully around dirt and cremlings, she settles on a mossy stump in the woods with bobbing lifespren and opens her book at last.

It is *An Accountability of Virtue*, an Alethi romance epic. Wema has just turned aside from Brightlord Sterling's pronouncement of affection in favour of her uncle's preferred suit, Brightlord Vadam — *you silly girl,* Ellista hisses at the page — and Sterling, accepting the rebuff with a too-perfect bow, declares he will away to the Shattered Plains and trouble her no more. Wema runs to him before the door latches. Ellista, reading wide-eyed in the warm forest, has just reached the part where the window in Sterling's statuesque armor opens to admit Wema's own wound, when she is interrupted: *Ellista?* She yips, snaps the book shut, sits on it.

It is Ardent Urv, a tall, gangly young Siln who has somehow managed quietly. He has come for an update on her work on Bendthel's transcribed Dawnchant codices. She digs them out of her satchel along with the sheaf of pages she has been working on, and he settles on the ground beside her stump to read. A few moments later he pronounces her further along than he is. They get into the work itself, and she explains her central idea: the Dawnchant script appears across Makabakam, Sela Tales, Alethela — and not because the texts spread from one place. It was a codified *written* language used by scholars across Roshar. Different peoples spoke different tongues, but they wrote in the Dawnchant for record. Jasnah Kholin's *Relic and Monument* never quite claimed everyone *spoke* it, only that they *wrote* it. Urv supplies the next beat: *and then a Desolation hit…* Ellista shows him a later page in her sheaf where the Dawnchant script is being adapted to phonetically transcribe other languages, with the earliest proto-Thaylo-Vorin glyphic radicals appearing in the in-between stages. By the time anyone tried to *read* the Dawnchant again, no one had spoken it for generations. Urv sees how this might solve a stubborn piece of his own work, the Covad Fragment — perhaps a phonetic transcription of another ancient tongue rather than true Dawnchant.

Urv catches sight of *An Accountability of Virtue* sticking out from under her, and grunts approvingly — *Good book.* He has read it. He has a fondness for Alethi epics. But, he says with deliberate intent to needle her, *she really should have picked Vadam.* Ellista sputters. He admits he is mostly trying to get a rise out of her, then mentions he has a copy of the sequel — about Wema's mousy younger sister, who must choose between a strapping naval officer, a Thaylen banker, and *the King's Wit.* Three suitors this time; sequels always have to be bigger. Ellista eyes the offer, and asks the price for this magnanimous gesture, Brightlord Urv. He has a particular section of Dawnchant on a deadline, for a patron.