(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Creeping toward the lighthouse at the tip of the obsidian peninsula, Kaladin is sunk for a moment back into his slave days — a hunter's spring-trap closing on the leg of an older woman, Nalma, whose escape he was leading through the underbrush. Hunters' horns moaned, lanterns flared, his other fugitives scattered into traps and arrows; he held her hand as she bled out, and the brightlords spared only him to carry the warning back. He always did live.

There is no underbrush in Shadesmar, but the old instincts serve him as he scouts. He stays low along rifts in the glassy stone, makes the lighthouse without raising an alarm, and watches the place from beneath an open shutter: a single old Shin man reading by spherelight in the ground-floor room. His stealth, however, attracts three anticipationspren — lurg-like creatures whose heads tip back to unfurl long, flapping tongues — which crowd him and refuse to be shooed off. The keeper calls out anyway. Kaladin stands and walks in.

The keeper is brisk, almost frantic: the highstorm is two minutes off, and the very best readings happen at its beginning. He waves Kaladin through a side door into a chamber dominated by a small table and a lump under a black cloth. *You have come to witness the extraordinary.* The price is two marks of Stormlight. Kaladin tries to explain that he is only there for passage. The keeper, who calls himself the Rii Oracle, whips off the cloth: a head-sized crystalline globe, glowing with a powerful milky light. *Fortunes,* the man says — *the unwalked paths, during the highstorm, when realms blend.*

Out beyond the peninsula, Shallan is waiting with the others in the shadow of a strange obsidian growth shaped like a tree-tall mushroom. Pattern says it is alive — *very, very slow.* She sketches the local spren badly, dissatisfied; Veil is seeping out, *Wit's* voice still murmuring in her head — *find the balance; accept the pain, but don't accept that you deserved it.* Syl sits swinging her legs on a rock and asks Pattern whether the world looks weird to him. *Weird,* he hums. *Same as for everyone.* Neither of them technically has eyes. Honorspren mimic Honor himself; Cryptics mimic *the fundamental underlying mathematics by which natural phenomena occur — truths that explain the fabric of existence.* Syl declares this *weird stuff.* Adolin kneels beside Shallan and rubs her shoulders; she will murder him if he stops. He critiques Azure's tailored uniform on her behalf when she asks, his missing fancy suit on his own.

Then a small odd spren drifts under their canopy. It is shaped like a gloryspren but bone-white and brown, with a cube where the gold sphere should be and the wings and tresses subtly miscut. *Corrupted!* Syl says. *That's one of Odium's.* Overhead, the sky begins to ripple with vibrant colour — a highstorm is passing on the human side. The spren alights on Shallan's arm and the voice Shallan last heard through a mirror speaks in her head. Odium suspects the Kholinar party survived something strange at the Oathgate — Sja-anat has never managed to Enlighten such powerful spren before, so it is believable. She has lied for them, told him they were thrown far from the point of transfer; fortunately he believes Shallan is an Elsecaller, not a Lightweaver. His minions in this realm will be told to hunt them. *I will do what I can, but I'm not sure he trusts me any longer.* The spren darts away over the bead-sea before Shallan can question it; Syl tries to catch it and fails.

Back inside the lighthouse, Kaladin disregards the keeper's *don't touch that* and rests his hand on the glowing orb. The storm catches him. Unlike his nights with the Stormfather, this is colour and pulse and rushing cloud, no landscape, no presence — until Dalinar kneels someplace dark, ringed by nine shadows, and a glow of red eyes flashes through the vision. The enemy's champion is coming. Kaladin *knows*, with a thrumming, unappealable certainty, that without help the Blackthorn is doomed. He screams into the fading light asking where and when and how to reach him. The colours diminish. Just before they vanish he is shown a city built along stone — tall, with a distinctive pattern of buildings at the centre, a wall and the ocean beyond.

He drops to his knees in the keeper's room. The keeper bats his hand off the orb, then takes hold of Kaladin's head and turns it. *You saw something. How? Impossible. Unless… you're Invested. What Heightening are you?* No — *a Surgebinder? It has begun again?* Kaladin stumbles to his feet, shaken, and goes to get the others.

Hours later Kaladin sits in the keeper's main room, named at last as Riino, while Shallan and Adolin negotiate for canned fish, supplies, and passage on the next ship. The keeper will trade only for infused spheres; on this side, Stormlight is the only commodity that matters. Azure tells Kaladin that charlatans like this exist on her world too — selling powders that grant euphoria and calling it a glimpse of the Spiritual Realm. Even the gods of her land see only fragments of that Realm; she has met only one human she believed truly understood it — *and he might actually be a god.* Kaladin knows the name: Wit. The man who gave her the metal that protected her Soulcaster. She nods.

Kaladin sketches what he saw, and Shallan recognises it at once: Thaylen City from above. The Thaylen Oathgate is open and working; since the Kholinar one brought them into Shadesmar, theoretically an uncorrupted gate could return them — though Shallan is not sure she can work an Oathgate from this side. Azure still argues for Cultivation's Perpendicularity in the Horneater Peaks, though Riino says ships from that direction have stopped arriving. Pattern reports the keeper's information: the next ship is bound for Celebrant, the spren city on the island that on their side is the freshwater Sea of Spears — by the ruins of Rathalas. Adolin goes briefly quiet at the name: his mother was killed there, his father broken by grief, the city burned by Sadeas in retribution. But Celebrant is large enough to find onward passage to anywhere.

Kaladin rests his fingers on the sketch. The darkness inside him pulls back. He has a goal now — protect Dalinar — and that is something to hold to other than the men he lost in Kholinar. He returns to eating his fish. A few hours later — the storm overhead at last fading to plain white — a ship comes in from the west across the bead-sea: no sails, no mast, no oars, drawn instead by an elaborate rigging of long sinuous spren with triangular heads and multiple sets of rippling wings, the bead-prow crashing through the sea like a plough. *Well,* Adolin grunts, *at least we'll be travelling in style.*