POV: dalinar
Summary
Dalinar is back in the Aharietiam vision for the third time, this time perched on a rock above the cliff fight with a borrowed bow and a quiver of black-fletched arrows. The vision-body the Stormfather has placed him in this time is fighting elsewhere; the body that matters down below belongs to Prime Aqasix Yanagawn the First, emperor of greater Makabak, brought into the vision a scrawny boy with too-long limbs and a bronze-tipped spear too heavy for him. Determined not to repeat the trick he played on Queen Fen — leaving her to die without intervention — but also unwilling to spare the emperor any of the visceral horror that drove him in his own visions, Dalinar picks off the wildmen one at a time until the Stoneward in glowing amber Shardplate climbs over the ledge to rescue the squad. Yanagawn sits down hard on the rock, shaking the way men shake when a fight is over.
The boy follows the wounded down off the cliff into the canyon between rock formations, asking the limping men what happened here and who they were fighting, then trailing them to a larger gathering at the canyon mouth. There a tall man in white and blue stands on a boulder above the crowd — Alethi in build but not quite, skin a shade darker, something faintly off about his features — and proclaims that the Voidbringers have been defeated at long last. *This is not my victory, or that of the other Heralds. It is your victory.* He will lead the charge for the Tranquiline Halls; they will not see him again. Too many of the survivors stand silent and dead-eyed; the few cheers that go up are dutiful. Yanagawn whispers *Yaezir, King of the Heralds.* Dalinar, chilled, recognises the man at last as Jezerezeh'Elin himself — and, with a beat of doubt, notes that the king has dark eyes.
Dalinar steps up beside the emperor and introduces himself with what passes for a bow. Yanagawn is briefly delighted — the Heralds may choose to speak through a Prime miraculously raised to the throne, so the first sighting of Yaezir and then of an Alethi enemy in the same hour can only be a sign. Dalinar cuts the awe short: this is no mere dream, and he is not Yanagawn's enemy. He has been called mad; this is his madness, and there is a battlefield he needs the emperor to see.
They walk together out onto the field of corpses that spreads from the mouth of the canyon — men in primitive dress mingled with parshmen in warform whose chitin bled orange, broken stone monsters half-buried in the rubble, a pile of charred cremlings heaped to no apparent purpose. *We fought together,* Yanagawn says, looking out at it. *How else could we have resisted?* says Dalinar. The emperor narrows his eyes: Dalinar wanted him here alone, away from his viziers, and can show him anything that strengthens the Blackthorn's case.
Then Yanagawn tells him a story from his own people's memory. When the Sunmaker rode out of the passes and into Azir, he conquered too quickly to leave fighting men alive behind him. So he set his soldiers quotas — every man to kill thirty captives, the way a child must gather an armload of firewood before being allowed to play. In other towns he simply ordered every captive with hair past a certain length to be slaughtered. Before the Heralds finally struck him down with disease, he had murdered roughly a tenth of Azir's population, the bones of Zawfix piled by highstorms as tall as buildings. *I am not my ancestor,* Dalinar says softly. *You revere him; you carry his storming Shardblade.* *I gave that away.* The one advantage he claims over the Sunmaker, he tells the boy, is that he has lived long enough to see the consequences of what he did.
A new voice cuts in from a boulder above them — a young girl, cross-legged on the rock, telling Dalinar to his face that he is older than she expected and not nearly as dark as a man called the Blackthorn ought to be; she settles on calling him *Dark-tan-thorn* instead. Yanagawn breaks into an enormous grin and scrambles up the boulder shouting her name: Lift. She is not quite back yet, she tells him, but she's getting close. Then she narrows her eyes at Dalinar again and advises Yanagawn not to trust the man — his backside, she informs them, is far too firm for a person his age and obviously belongs to someone who has spent his whole life either swinging a sword or punching someone.
The Stormfather is rumbling against the inside of Dalinar's skull. It should not be possible; he did not bring this girl in, and he cannot account for how she came. Yanagawn gives Lift an enormous hug at the top of the boulder; Dalinar manages only the beginning of a protest, and then she takes Yanagawn by the arm and the two of them vanish out of the vision together. The Stormfather is genuinely upset: this child has been remade by the Nightwatcher into something unnatural, made for the specific purpose of overriding his will, and she has overstepped. He refuses to say anything else, and leaves Dalinar to sit out the rest of the vision alone, haunted equally by the future and the past as he stares at the field of the dead.