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Adolin wakes still inside the nightmare — black sky, glass ground, strange creatures — with a crick in his neck. He gasps to find the silent woman with the scratched-out eyes looming over him; her spren keeps standing too close. He swears, sits up, dresses his shallow shoulder cut from yesterday's fight, and notes that Shallan and Azure are already cataloguing supplies and that Kaladin is trudging to join them. Had the bridgeman slept?

He drifts down the slope to the bead-sea. Lifespren bob along the bank, their green motes tufted with white hair that ripples as they dance; dots of light swimming above the obsidian look to him like fish-souls, and he wonders how that works on this side of the world. A fearspren crawls up after him, its purple antenna pointing his way, until he hurls a bead at it and it retreats. He talks at the silent spren — *what do you think of all this?* — because he often talks to his sword without it answering. He turns one of the beads over and gets nothing but a dull impression of *something red.* All his life, since the day he was born the Blackthorn's son, his little life had been the centre of the universe. He hurls the bead into the sea.

To steady himself he starts a morning kata — the first sequence of stretches and stances he ever learned, the one that does not need a sword. The forms calm him: *the world is turning on its head, but familiar things are still familiar.* Azure walks down the slope and falls in beside him without a word, keeping perfect pace as if she has always known the form. Kaladin joins them too, less practised, cursing under his breath when he misses a step — Adolin realises he must have learned it from Zahel. The three of them step back and forth along the rocks, breathing controlled, the bead-sea sound becoming almost rhythmic. The world is the same as it has always been; these things — monsters and Radiants — were only hidden. He is still himself. Same strengths. Same accomplishments. Same flaws.

Shallan perches above them in her white uniform, hat, and single glove, and asks if they are *dancing.* She has the supplies laid out. The inventory is meagre: one bag of gemstones from the emerald reserve, with roughly half their Stormlight burned crossing to Shadesmar; her satchel with charcoal, reed pens, brushes, ink, lacquer, three sketchpads, a knife, and a single jar of jam she had stowed as an emergency snack (Kaladin notes that brushes will be useful in fighting Voidspren; Shallan notes that his tongue has been notably dull lately); Adolin's side knife and Azure's Shardblade as the only real weapons; Kaladin's pack with three meals of flatbread and jerked pork; a water jug and three canteens, two of them half empty. Maybe a day's water, three meals between four people. Last time Azure crossed Shadesmar, the journey took four weeks.

Kaladin insists they have to get back through the Oathgate into the city. Pattern hums beside Shallan, statue-still, and dismisses it flatly: *the spren of the Oathgate are bad now.* Syl, more memory returning, lays out the cosmology: every land is three realms — the Spiritual is highest, where gods live and all times and places are one; they are now in the Cognitive Realm, Shadesmar, where spren live; the Physical Realm is the world the humans came from. The only crossing she knows is the pull of human emotion that brings a spren over, and that will not help them.

Azure knows another. After some pressing she relents: she is from a far land and came to Roshar across Shadesmar herself. She had never heard of Oathgates until Kal told her of them. The portal she used is called Cultivation's Perpendicularity, in the Horneater Peaks — far behind them on the map. There is supposedly a second, unpredictable perpendicularity that wanders, but her guides warned against chasing it. She was hunting a criminal; she joined the Wall Guard in Kholinar only because no one else would do the job and then got stuck when everything went wrong. Adolin eyes her — her hair has recovered its dark colour and her scars seem fainter; she looks, almost, like a spren herself — and pushes the question. *Are you a Knight Radiant?* No. *A Herald, then?* She laughs — *those are basically gods. I'm just a woman who has been constantly out of her league since adolescence.* There is no spren here for her Blade because the Blade is flawed; she cannot summon or dismiss it; it is a handy weapon but *a pale copy* of theirs. Last time she crossed Shadesmar she hired a ship at a spren city — *lightspren* are usually willing guides, they like to travel — *and you're supposed to watch out for Cryptics.* Pattern hums happily: *yes. We are very famous.*

Adolin turns to Shallan — could she just Soulcast them what they need? She doesn't think so. When she Soulcasts in Shadesmar she changes an object's soul on this side, and it reflects in the other world; a transformed bead here would still be a bead to them where they stand. Azure adds that food and water are not impossible to find in Shadesmar if they can reach a port city — humans living on this side need a steady supply, and with their Stormlight the group could trade for it, maybe buy passage to the Horneater Peaks. Kaladin objects — that would take a long time, Alethkar is falling now, the Blackthorn needs them —

He is cut off by a screech, like sheets of steel grinding together, answered in unison by others in the distance. Syl presses her hands to her lips; Pattern cocks his strange head. *What was that?* Azure is already shoving supplies back into Kaladin's pack. She had warned them, before they slept, that they would be fine *unless they attracted the wrong spren.* *We should get moving,* she says. *Now.*