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Jasnah sits in a small, secure room near the centre of Dalinar's wing of Urithiru — she has rejected the airy balconied rooms on the rim as gifts to assassins, and stuffed cloth into the ventilation shafts so no one in the corridor can listen in — reading through a sheaf of writings copied out of the Kholinar asylum. They are the same name, the same demand, the same warnings, again and again. The Return is at hand. Kalak will teach bronze-casting, Vedel will train surgeons, Jezrien will teach leadership. *I think I am late, this time. I think I have failed.* She trembles as she reads. There is no innocent explanation for the specificity. The abandoned Herald Talenel'Elin came to Kholinar and was sent away as a madman.

Ivory is there beside her, full-sized for the moment, hands clasped behind his back in his stiff black suit. The other inkspren reads the same words and confirms them. Their suspicions are true. The Heralds are. The fallen one still is. They must search Shadesmar for him — souls shine in that place. Unless, Jasnah notes, someone knows how to hide them. In one corner of the room, three rented spanreeds rasp away, copying her stack of research notes for a discreet Tashikk information centre that has been holding her originals safe since Shallan rescued one of her trunks from the sinking ship. Two more trunks went down. She changes a sheet and feels the weight of it — those passages connecting the parshmen to the Voidbringers, teased out of obscure histories at great personal cost, are now common knowledge. In a single moment her expertise had become a footnote.

The two of them turn to other griefs. Shallan, Ivory says with a tightening of his roughed-out features, *is not stable.* Jasnah reminds him that he thinks no human is. He concedes, gracefully: she herself thinks by facts, changes not on whims, is — *practically* — a stone, compared to other humans. She gives him a flat look and corrects him: she is not so much a stone as he thinks. Then she asks him a question she has not asked anyone: has he ever wondered what it would be to lose his mind? He has. He could not help but wonder, considering what the ancient ones [the Heralds] are. Something old in her stirs — a dark room, a voice screaming itself ragged, a childhood illness no one else remembers. The thought of being one of the Heralds — strain-by-strain sifting memories for the few one can still trust — terrifies her in a way she usually does not let herself look at.

They drift on to Shallan again. Ivory does not like that the child's spren is a Cryptic. Cryptics *feast on lies*, he tells Jasnah — speak one untruth at a gathering, and seven will cluster around, humming. They are not, like the honorspren, a martial people; they keep to a single city in Shadesmar and only listen. The bond may make this one different. Jasnah reflects that the trouble with Shallan is not disobedience — she would rather a ward who strained against her boundaries than one who happily lived within them — but the child's tendency to let impulse command her rather than the other way round. Perhaps what is needed is not more structure, but greater challenges.

Ivory observes, after a long pause, that the ten orders are again. For years it has been just the two of them. He has always been dodgy about whether any of the other sapient spren would refound their orders — but always certain the honorspren and their Windrunners never would; honorspren rule of Shadesmar did not endear them to the other races. *Ten orders,* Jasnah echoes, *all ended in death.* *All but one,* he replies. *They lived in death instead* — the unbroken line of Skybreakers under Nale.

Then she comes back to the secret. They must, she tells him, eventually tell the others what they learned from Wit. Ivory is alarmed; it would be the end, he says, another Recreance. *The truth has not destroyed me.* You are special, he says. No knowledge is that can. But the others… She holds his eyes. They shall see. She gathers the day's stack of paper and carries it to the table to begin binding it into a book.