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Veil rides the back of Vathah's wagon, full of the food they stole from the Mausoleum, up the avenue toward the Oathgate platform under first moon. The cult knows her face now — Swiftspren and Veil are the same person — so she has to enter as herself. Three guards meet the wagon: two in flamespren costume, one barefaced woman in a flat featureless white mask that reminds Veil uneasily of Iyatil's Ghostblood mask. They take the food, refuse her usual rounds for the poor, and ask her — sounding genuinely curious — why she has come. *I keep hearing a voice,* she says, *that says this is the end. I should give in. The answers are up there, aren't they?* Apparently she passes the test. The masked woman waves her up the steps to enlightenment, where her guide will meet her.

Meanwhile, Kaladin comes off evening patrol with his squad and walks down to the barrack mess. Azure arrives in her usual battle kit and runs a formal inspection — friendly, knowing, almost ceremonial — telling the men they may be the finest platoons she has ever had the privilege of leading. Kaladin is certain he has heard those exact words from Amaram's mouth. The men eat it up. At the officers' table he settles in well below the centre, then, when one captain leaves for the privy, picks up his plate and moves directly across from Azure.

On top of the platform, Veil is met by Kharat, an affable, stain-robed ardent who tells her she has been renamed *Kishi* — Mystery — and walks her into the revel. The first thing past the buildings is a bonfire ringed with food-laden tables, candied meats, sugared flatbreads, fruit, and a slow flow of people drifting right-to-left along the outer ring, eating with their fingers, glass-eyed and laughing. A voice slides under Pattern's hum on her coat: *Let go. Feast. Indulge. Embrace the end.* Pattern's humming keeps it from taking her. Kharat mutters as he gorges that they are not allowed to go inward — *it's not our fault, right; we didn't fail her; we were only doing what she asked* — but Veil feigns needing to rest, slips into an empty meditation cell, and weaves Pattern into the wall to whisper revel-voices in Kharat's ear. He goes to fetch a drink. She pins a separate Lightwoven illusion of Veil-snoring to a ruby chip on the bench, settles a new face — Kishi, built off a market-woman sketch — over her own, and slips past him.

At the officers' table, Kaladin and Azure feel each other out in front of a horrified Noro and a red-faced captain. She picks at the shash brand; he picks at her dropped Blade-on-a-peg and her impossible-to-place arrival in the city. She tells him to ask plainly instead of dancing — so he does: *why don't you let anyone talk about the fact that you're a woman?* It is a game her men needed, she says — Alethi soldiers want a story to explain why they're taking orders from a woman. She leans across the table and asks him, quiet and pointed, whether he came to Kholinar chasing *her*. Drums hit the wall outside before he can answer.

Past the outer ring Kishi finds a second ring of crawlers — men and women on hands and knees, ragged finery dragging in the dust, mouths open in giggling or moaning or weeping, each in the grip of a different emotion. A woman crawls with long hair raking the ground and clenched bleeding gums; a man crawls behind her wearing rings glowing with Stormlight, laughing without stopping. The food at the tables here has gone over and is crawling with decayspren. Kishi feels the outer ring trying to pull her back into the easy flow. *Within that ring, time wouldn't matter; she could forget Shallan and what she'd done; just give in…* Pattern hums sharply. Veil gasps, Kishi collapses, and she shoves on inward toward the Oathgate control building.

Where the control building should be there is a covered mass of dark, throbbing flesh, black veins as thick as a man's leg sunk into the surrounding stone. It pulses with an irregular three-beat rhythm — *bum-ba-ba-bum* — and the cult is walking laps around it. *Give in. Join the revel. Embrace the end.* And then, threading underneath those voices, a different one: *Shallan, listen to me. I'm not your enemy. But the heart is a trap. Take caution.* Her own shadow on the wall has crept upward — pointed wrong, toward Salas's light — and has eyes that are holes of pale glow. The same shadow-voice that spoke to her in the cult procession two days ago. She has accomplished what she came for: the Oathgate control building is sheathed in Ashertmarn himself, the Heart of the Revel, the way Urithiru's gemstone pillar had been sheathed in the Midnight Mother.

Distant drums from the city wall reach the platform — the Fused are attacking. Everything threatens to wash her under at once: the heart's pulse, the rings of crawlers, the certainty that the Fused are coming for her because she was seen. Veil takes back over. She pulls Kishi's face on again, crosses the crawling ring, slips back into the outer ring's flow, leaves Kharat to his drink and her decoy on the bench, walks to the platform's rim, and jumps off without looking back to let Stormlight catch her.