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Kaladin marches at speed through Shadesmar, trying to throttle the simmering dissatisfaction inside himself. *Humans,* Pattern observes mildly as another screech sounds behind them, *you must stop your emotions. They are very inconvenient here.* They are heading south along the narrow finger of obsidian that overlays the river back in the Physical Realm. Shallan is the slowest of them, so the group has agreed she should hold a little Stormlight — that, or let the screeching things catch them.

Adolin, puffing alongside, asks Azure what the things actually are. The boiling pools of blood that look like angerspren in the Physical Realm, she says, are only their saliva on this side — *they're nasty.* Syl adds that they are dangerous even to spren, and asks how the group drew them when nobody was angry. Shallan wasn't; Adolin was overwhelmed but not angry; Kaladin, pressed, admits he hates that they are abandoning Kholinar to the Voidbringers and that he feels he is the only one who cares. Adolin snaps back — *that was my home* — and Kaladin forces himself to apologise. His emotions, he says, are irrational. He'll try to contain them.

But he can name what is happening inside him now, even if he cannot stop it. The darkness comes whether things are bad or good — it feeds on lost men, on the pain of defeat, but it can also feed on a quiet moment by whispering that the calm is only the wind-up to a bigger fall. Shallan glances at Adolin: they must be whispering about him. Dalinar sends him to protect Elhokar: the highprince must want to get rid of him. He failed at protecting the king anyway. Eventually numbness comes to seem preferable, and then the numbness becomes a sinking, inescapable void from inside which everything looks washed out and dead. He reminds himself that within that dark place he had wanted to betray his oaths; within that dark place he had given the king up to assassins and murderers.

The screeches at last fade behind them. Syl guesses the angerspren were pulled into the bead-sea, drawn toward the storm of emotion still burning at Kholinar. The only road open to the company is the one they are on: south along the obsidian peninsula. Azure remembers from her last crossing that peninsulas like this one ended in lighthouses where ships put in for supplies. Syl remembers them too, vaguely, and warns that this one looks *loooong* — several days at least. *At least it's a goal,* Adolin says with insufferable cheer: hike south, reach the lighthouse, catch a ship. Kaladin flinches at his brightness — *idiot Adolin, who probably doesn't even understand the consequences of —* and forces it down. *Stop it. He helped you.*

The peninsula is not as barren as it first looked. Along its edges grow brittle ferns, mostly black but occasionally vivid as stained glass, none above his knees and most at the ankle; he feels worse each time his boot crushes one. The sun does not shift in the sky no matter how long they walk; through the gaps in the clouds the sky is only blackness — no stars, no moons. Endless. They camp for what should be the night, then hike all the next day. Kholinar dwindles behind them. Azure takes the lead; then Pattern, Syl, and Kaladin; Shallan and Adolin hold the rear, with the silent spren of his Blade trailing them. Whenever Kaladin tries to take the rear position, Adolin re-positions himself behind him. *What did the princeling think? That Kaladin would lag behind, if not minded?*

Syl is troubled by being back on this side. The colourful ferns and other small things make her cock her head as if she ought to remember something. *It's like a dream from the time when I was dead,* she tells him once. They camp another night, then walk again. Kaladin skips breakfast — the rations are basically gone — and welcomes the grumble in his belly. It reminds him he is alive. It gives him something to think about other than the men he lost.

To pull her out of her quiet, he asks Syl where she lived when she was young on this side. *Far to the west. A grand city, ruled by honorspren.* She wanted to travel, but her father kept her there — especially, she says, after *you know.* He doesn't. So she tells him. Soon after her birth she bonded a Knight Radiant, a kindly old man who fought one battle and died in it. Spren normally weather the death of their bond; she did not. She lost herself when she lost him. The Recreance came soon after — men forsaking their oaths and killing her siblings — but because she had no bond at that moment, she survived. Her father found her asleep, after what must have been about a thousand years on the human side, woke her, and brought her home. After that he would not let her leave the city. He was foolish, she says, as were all the honorspren born after the Recreance: they knew something terrible was coming and they would do nothing.

She had heard him calling, even from so far away. She snuck away — gave up her mind and joined his world among the windspren, the spren that live mostly on the human side. *I suppose the wind is always there somewhere, so they don't fade like passions do.* Kaladin is stunned: it is more about her than she has ever told him.

*Oh!* she says suddenly. *Look!* She points, hopping. In the distance, a single bright yellow light glows like a spark in the otherwise dim landscape. A lighthouse.