(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Dalinar enters the next Stormfather vision mid-fight, this time deliberately taking the body he wore on his first visit so he can scout the situation before bringing anyone else in. He finds himself in a forlorn squad of primitive spearmen in lavis wraps and bronze-tipped spears, backed to the lip of a cliff by ragged wild men with axes. He charges, drops four of them, and then takes an axe straight through the forearm he never saw coming — the stump of his left arm staring up at him with one solitary painspren by his knee. The Stormfather asks dryly why he does not just heal himself with Stormlight; Dalinar grumbles that it would be cheating, then tourniquets the wound with his belt and gets back on his feet anyway.

He shouts his remaining men over the lip and slides down a steep incline onto a narrow ledge after them, the wildmen above having made the mistake — he tells himself — of giving him their backs. From above a creature in deep red carapace and crimson eyes watches them go, and Dalinar realises with a chill that this is no nightmare-figure from his subconscious but an actual Voidbringer in the distant past. Then a figure in glowing amber Shardplate hauls himself onto their ledge, presses a gauntleted hand against the rock face, and reshapes the stone into steps that climb back toward the enemy. The Stormfather names him a Stoneward and tells Dalinar that this is the other Surge he himself may one day learn — though it may serve him differently. With his men clear of the ledge, Dalinar finally relents, draws in a breath of Stormlight, and watches the flesh of his arm bud back out like a sprouting plant.

He asks the Stormfather to bring in Navani and Jasnah beside him, in their own clothing, and the two women appear in havahs out of a swirl of Stormlight. Navani is awestruck by the realness of the vision and immediately bullies an unnamed Radiant into letting her examine a Regrowth fabrial she is using on the wounded. Jasnah is more interested in the geography — stormland formations she cannot place — and in the dating, since the squad's bronze spears do not match the steel they have seen in another, supposedly older, vision. She concludes that the Desolations really did wipe out whole strata of learning, knocking each successor civilisation back down a rung.

Jasnah takes him aside to thank him plainly for the gift of these recorded visions, and then warns him about his heresy: it is not the heresy itself that worries her but the way he is letting the rumourmongers grind him down. People will reach for whatever makes him an outsider — heretic, in this case — and pin him to it, the same way they keep pinning her to her own refusals; she has long since refused to let them. He is a king, a Radiant, and a father, and the question of how he is defined is one she insists belongs to him, not to them. She leaves to explore the other end of the canyon while Dalinar and Navani follow the same prompt he was given on his first run through — a sergeant promoting his vision-body up the incline toward base camp three.

Up on the ridge, Navani stops him beside strange rippled formations of stone and burnt patches where the rock has been melted as if by impossible heat. Then they crest it and the war-field opens below them: thousands upon thousands of corpses, men in primitive dress mingled with parshmen who bled orange. *Aharietiam,* Dalinar says. *The Last Desolation.* The Stormfather confirms it — but warns him that poets lie. There is no grand monstrous tableau here, only the ordinary ugliness of a battlefield, and the dawning realisation that humans had fought on both sides.

They descend through the dead to a shadowed alcove beneath a spire, where nine beautiful Shardblades stand driven into the stone. Navani recognises one — the plain, long, thin blade that killed Gavilar in the hand of the Assassin in White. Dalinar tells her these are not Shardblades at all. They are Honorblades — the Heralds' own weapons — and the tenth is missing.

The Stormfather, in his low, introspective voice, finally lays the true history out for them both. The Voidbringers were the angry souls of long-dead parshmen, given power by Odium and unable to pass on; the Fused are reborn from those souls into living parshman bodies, growing more fragmented and animal with each cycle. To stop their endless rebirth the ten Heralds went to Honor and took the Oathpact: their souls would seal the Fused into Damnation. But men can break oaths in a way spren and gods cannot, and the only way back open was if one of the ten yielded under torture. They always yielded eventually. Each break began a new Desolation; the gap between them shrank from centuries to less than a year as the Heralds' souls wore thin.

Aharietiam looked to its survivors like a final victory, but it was only another Desolation. The difference was that nine of the ten lived through it, and they realised that one among them — Talenelat, the Bearer of Agonies — had somehow never broken. They planted their nine Honorblades in this alcove and quietly stayed, gambling that Talenelat's solitary endurance would hold the door for both worlds. For four and a half thousand years it did, while he was tortured alone in Damnation. He finally broke — and is now, Dalinar realises, the madman delivered to Kholinar with a Shardblade at the start of the new Everstorm era. The blade was not his Honorblade, though; the Stormfather does not know where his went. Worse, the Oathpact is so badly weakened that the Fused now simply rebirth in each Everstorm when killed.

Navani asks whether the secrets of the Aharietiam are what triggered the Recreance. No, the Stormfather tells her; there is a deeper secret behind the Recreance, one he will not speak. When Dalinar presses, the Stormfather turns the question on him: every man alive has broken an oath at some point, and learning what undid the old Radiants might well undo Dalinar the same way. He will not gamble his children on it again. As Navani begins talking about having Shallan sketch each of the nine Honorblades from memory, a pale-skinned Shin youth stumbles into the alcove, drops to his knees before the Blades, and speaks — for once and the last time — with the voice of the dead Almighty: *Unite them.*