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Venli climbs down a chasm wall on the Shattered Plains attuned to the Rhythm of Craving, her new stormform body gripping the stone so well she feels no fear of the long drop. The chitin under her skin is thinner than warform's but had stopped a human spear across her face when the Everstorm was summoned, leaving only a cut. Demid, her former mate, and a knot of loyal friends drop down after her. Ulim — the red voidspren Odium himself sent her — flows down the stones beside them as rolling lightning, then settles into his small humanoid form with odd eyes and long, wind-rippled hair on a perch of storm-broken branches at the bottom.

She is sick of obeying him. *Why should I continue to obey your orders, spren? You should obey me.* He ignores her. Demid takes her shoulder and hums Satisfaction to ease her south through the debris, and when she snarls about how their gods have returned but they have barely been told anything — and how many tens of thousands of listeners died to summon the storm — he answers with the Rhythm of Derision that the humans had sought their extinction, and that *at least this way some of our people survived, and now we have great power.* He is, she admits to herself, right. She had wanted power before any of this, and she has it: a spren captured inside the storm within her, pulsing deep where she can feel it.

They cross a wedged bridge-log and Demid spots what they have come for — a figure slumped against the chasm wall in Plate, helmet bowed, a Shardblade shaped like frozen flames rammed into the stone beside her. *Eshonai! Finally!* Venli kneels beside her sister and shakes the Plated shoulder. The head rolls limp. Demid solemnly lifts the faceplate to dead eyes in an ashen face. Ulim crackles back across the stones, *Ah — excellent.* He inspects the Plate — fully drained, broken along the back, but said to *regrow on its own, even now that it is separated from its master from so long ago* — and tells Venli coolly that of course he had wanted the Plate and the Blade all along; why else would they be hunting a corpse? *You thought she was alive?* The chasm flood had drowned her where she clung to the sword to hold her place against the highstorm.

Something old surfaces in Venli. She attunes the Rhythm of the Lost — one of the old, inferior rhythms she has not been able to hear since taking stormform — and cannot explain how she has found it. She whispers her sister's name and nudges the body again. *Touching the bodies of the fallen was taboo.* Demid gasps. Ulim talks over both of them about getting the Plate off *the kids,* and when Venli snarls for respect he tells her flatly that the death is for the best: Eshonai never converted properly to stormform, had resisted, would have been lost to the cause anyway — and was one of those who had sent that assassin to kill the human king specifically to keep them from returning. *Your people are traitors,* he says — though Venli's personal efforts may yet earn her something better.

*I will be a queen,* Venli says, on Spite. Ulim laughs. *If you survive? Maybe.* He demands to know what she can possibly think she will command. She does not lead armies; her six-year war is nothing against an eon. Her ancestors do, and he names them as the ones in charge — the dead. Demid starts at that. *Everything,* Ulim tells him, *seeing as they're the ones in charge.* He orders the armor stripped, the band away, and zips off down the wall as lightning.

Defying the taboo and attuning Derision, Venli helps Demid pull the Plate off her sister. The others gather it up and carry it away under Ulim's direction. Venli is left to bring the Blade. She lifts it from the stone and lingers over the body. The Rhythm of the Lost returns to her, mournful and slow. *I don't have to listen to you call me a fool. I don't have to worry about you getting in the way. I can do what I want.* It terrifies her. As she turns to go, a small spren creeps out from beneath Eshonai's body — a ball of white fire trailing a comet's tail, giving off little rings of light. *What are you?* she snaps. *Shoo.* She hikes off, leaving her sister stripped and alone in the bottom of the chasm — food for either a chasmfiend or a storm.