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Adolin kneels on the white marble platform under a black sky, beads clattering at the edges, tens of thousands of candle-flame lights hovering above the ocean and terrible spren swarming through the beads in shapes he does not recognise. He has never bothered with theology — that was for ardents and scribes — and the obvious conclusion arrives anyway. *I'm dead,* he whispers. *We're dead, and this is Damnation.* It does not quite explain the pretty blue-white spren girl by Kaladin, or the creature with the impossible head, or the two enormous sentinels above with their spears.

Light explodes to his left. Kaladin pulls in Stormlight and floats into the air; every monster in the beads turns toward him at once. The blue-white spren cries his name — *they feed on Stormlight, you'll draw their attention, everything's attention* — and asks after Drehy and Skar. Shallan answers that the others are still on the other side, that the four of them are in Shadesmar. Lights wink out across the sea — candles snuffing — as some of the souls of Kholinar surrender to the dark.

Azure confirms it. They are not dead; this is Shadesmar, the realm of thought, which overlaps the physical world but is inverted in many ways. Shallan has peeked in when Soulcasting; Azure passed through it on her way to their land a year ago, with guides, by trying not to look at too much. Adolin reaches to summon his Shardblade — and the ashen spren with scratched-out eyes stretches her head at him in an unnatural way and screeches. The creature with the shifting head greets him as Pattern in a perky voice and confirms what Adolin has begun to fear: *that is your sword. She is quite dead. I don't think you can summon her here.* He cocks his strange head at Azure's small thin Blade and pronounces it *very curious.*

Something enormous shifts beneath the platform, beads piling and rolling. Pattern identifies the two giants overhead as the souls of the Oathgate and the great mass below as likely one of the Unmade — *it must be very large on this side.* Eel-shaped spren with purple antennae like fearspren crawl onto the disc; Adolin realises with a chill that they are fearspren themselves, swimming free. A spire of dark stone breaks the surface in the near distance, then resolves into a single jointed claw the size of a building; more begin to lift in other directions while a heartbeat begins thudding beneath the beads. There is no boat. Pattern looks one way, then the other, and admits this is *a problem, isn't it?*

Shallan pulls them out of it. The bridgeman is hollowed; she stops looking at him, makes her mind go blank the way she does before drawing, and locks onto the task. Knowing Jasnah's warning never to enter Shadesmar without Stormlight, she sips a single mark's worth and finds the beads obedient to her touch. Each is the soul of an object in the physical world, and she has only to recognise one to use it as a guide — the way a Memory guides a sketch. With the soul of a shield she shapes a stepping-stone. With the soul of a great keep-door she shapes a flat raft, and with the soul of a building she lifts up the roof of a copy of the Oathgate control house just enough to climb onto. By alternating door and rooftop she begins to ferry the four of them across the bead-sea, breaking each structure once they are off it and re-forming the next ahead.

Living souls drift around her like the rest, and one brushes her — Drehy the bridgeman, panicked about being left in charge, his worries momentarily her own. She drags her own thoughts down into the dark before they can take hold and gets back to work. *You, sword lady, help me. Adolin, you too. Kaladin, see if you can brood this place into submission.* Azure proves able to sense the beads; Adolin cannot make it work at all and feels useless in a way he cannot remember feeling — not in dueling, not even on the field when Sadeas left him and his father to die. Today, he thinks, Adolin Kholin is nothing.

So he takes the small job in front of him. He shoulders Kaladin's pack, walks the bridgeman from one platform to the next with a hand at his elbow, and keeps him talking — about whether the spren with scratched eyes really is his sword, about what kind of place this is — anything to keep Kaladin from staring at the void and waiting for the next bridge to drop him into the sea. Kaladin mutters that he could not protect his men, that he was supposed to be able to. The blue-white spren — clearly his — hovers close and lets Adolin guide the conversation. Pattern notes that with so much emotion on the other side the dark spren are distracted, and that lights of souls have stopped vanishing — meaning Kholinar is surrendering, not being slaughtered.

Shallan has to edge the group close to two of the great rising claws and on into calmer water. Kaladin's spren whispers what she has worked out: those two enormous spren above the Oathgate were always its soul, but the red coloring is new — she has corrupted them. *That's why we're here. They must be His now. That's why we ended up here, instead of Urithiru.* Shallan thinks of Sja-anat's parting promise — *try not to kill you* — wipes her brow, and gets back to work.

They make landfall on a deep, glassy black stone like obsidian. Shallan is staggering; her last platform ruptures and Adolin has to wade through waist-deep beads to drag her onto the bank. Azure sits, her small thin Blade across her lap, and as she rests, her jet-black Alethi hair fades visibly to a faint grey — one more strangeness of the place. Adolin surveys his exhausted little company. Kaladin wants to press on at once — they are still fighting, we need to help them — but Adolin tells him gently that they can barely stand. *We camp.* He scouts the bank, finds a small depression in the glass-stone, and gets the others to move into it. As they pull coats and packs into improvised beds, he looks one last time across the bead-sea at the city where he was born, standing witness to its fall.

And he counts the line of succession. Elhokar is dead. Little Gav has been taken by the enemy. His father is planning to abdicate. Third in line is Adolin himself. King.