POV: dalinar
Summary
Dalinar steps into a new Stormfather vision in the courtyard of a strange fortress closed off by a single towering wall of bloodred stones — Feverstone Keep. He has brought Navani and Jasnah along by holding their hands, without waiting on a highstorm to overlap them, and the Stormfather is openly impressed that his control of these visions has grown past what He thought possible. Navani notes the soulcast iron weapons; Jasnah places the period at roughly two thousand years past from the Haravingian swords, late classical architecture, and washed-out faux blue dyes, and goes off to gather scraps of history while Navani readies instruments to fix the keep's location in the real world for later expeditions.
Jasnah floats the possibility that this is the legendary False Desolation — Dovcanti's pseudohistorical epic of stray Voidbringers long after Aharietiam — and suspects the truer reading is a fight with parshmen who could still take forms of power. The dating, she notes, pushes the Recreance later than Masha-daughter-Shaliv put it. Dalinar walks to the wall as Yanagawn comes down the steps trailed by a clutch of officers; Dalinar had asked the Stormfather to pull the boy emperor in through the storm now passing over Azir. The youth is tired of these visions in a way that doesn't match Dalinar's exhausted reverence for them.
Together they walk out to the sally port to watch Radiants cross the open plain in twos and threes, summon their Blades, drive them point-down into the stone, and step away. They leave their Plate beside the Blades. To Dalinar the field rings with the unheard screaming of betrayed spren. Yanagawn asks why; Dalinar confesses that ignorance has become the theme of his rule, and gives the boy the only honest reason he can — if Alethkar falls, the Azish may be the kingdom that survives, and the visions are for them too.
Yanagawn, perched on a boulder, drops his guard. He is on the throne, he says, because the viziers were terrified the assassin would come back; the published miracle of the Heralds choosing him was Lift, not him. He is being trained to *act* important. They are scared of Dalinar more than they were of the man who burned the eyes from their emperors, because emperors can be replaced and a Vorin conqueror cannot. Dalinar presses, as gently as he knows how: come to me. Tell them you have seen visions. Let me open the Azish Oathgate. The boy listens, and reports — almost in passing — that Lift thinks anyone who acts as righteous as Dalinar does is trying to hide something.
A soldier strides up and speaks to Yanagawn in the Almighty's voice, delivering the same scripted lines Dalinar himself was once given — the Recreance will go down in history under many infamous names, and the Night of Sorrows and the True Desolation and the Everstorm are coming. On the field men fall to fighting over the abandoned Blades, slaughtering one another for the first time in history with dead spren. Yanagawn fades from the vision; the Stormfather withdraws; everything begins to dissolve.
Except it doesn't. Dalinar is still on the rock outside Feverstone Keep, the slaughter still going, and the Stormfather suddenly distant — a faint, whimpering pressure where the great rumble used to be. He turns and finds a man behind him: ancient and Shin, white-haired with a hint of black at the mustaches, wearing white and gold, a powdery crown sunk into his hair and a golden scepter resting on his shoulder. The eyes are ancient, the smile paternal. Overwhelmed beyond his own understanding, Dalinar falls to his knees and whispers that he knows Him — He is God. The old man agrees that He has always been here, always with Dalinar, that He has watched him for a long, long time. He is not, He confirms, the Almighty — Honor is truly dead, as Dalinar has been told. He is the other one. They call Him Odium.