(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

The Oathgate control building shudders as if struck. Adolin falls to his knees; a ripping sound and a blinding flash follow, and his stomach drops as he falls through the air. Shallan screams nearby. He hits a hard surface hard enough to roll, tumbles off the edge of a white stone disc, and plunges into something that gives way under him — not water but a sea of small glass beads, thousands clattering against one another as he thrashes and sinks. For a panicked moment he is sure he will drown in glass. He twists in the beads; a few find his mouth before a hand catches his. Azure hauls him up onto the platform, beads streaming from his clothing. He coughs as if he has been drowning, though he has swallowed almost nothing.

The world the Oathgate has dropped them into is wrong in every direction. The sky overhead is black, streaked with strange clouds that run like roads toward a small, distant sun. The bead sea stretches out to every horizon, and over it hover tens of thousands of tiny lights, each like a candle flame. Their stone disc is an island in that ocean, roughly where the control building had stood. Shallan kneels beside Adolin; nearby, Kaladin gets to his feet and shakes himself like a man trying to wake.

Two enormous spren hang in the air above them: stretched, person-shaped sentinels some thirty feet tall, one pitch-black, one red. Adolin takes them for statues until their clothing ripples in the wind and one of them turns its eyes down to study him.

On the platform itself there are three smaller figures, none of which Adolin understands. A creature in a stiff black robe — the cloth itself looks somehow to be made of stone — stands where its head should be a shifting, impossible mass of angles and lines that refuses to settle. *Oh, this is bad,* it is muttering. *So very, very bad.* Adolin scrambles back and nearly collides with a young woman whose skin is blue-white as snow, dressed in a filmy gown that ripples in air there should not be wind in. Beside her stands a third spren whose features are made of tight ashen cords thick as hair; her eyes have been scratched out as if a knife has taken a canvas to them.

There is no one else on the disc. Adolin counts heads and finds only the four of them — himself, Shallan, Kaladin, and Azure — along with the three smaller spren and the two giants in the sky. The civilians, the soldiers on the platform, the whole press of people they had ordered up onto the Oathgate — none of them are here. Whatever the Oathgate has done, it has taken only those who had been inside the control building. Where it has taken them, none of them yet knows. Azure looks up at the wrong sky and offers the chapter's only certainty: *Damnation. I hate this place.*

With those words the chapter — and the third part of the book — ends, the four of them stranded on a small white disc in a sea of glass under a black sky, with no idea where they are or how to get home.