POV: dalinar
Summary
Dalinar wakes on a cut-stone floor in an unfamiliar room, jacket undone, three days into a haze of wine and excommunication that has been keeping the worst of the pain at arm's length. He recognises the painted ceiling: he saw it in one of the Stormfather's visions, the one in which he met Nohadon. He calls for the Stormfather, confused — they had agreed the visions were too dangerous — but no answer comes. A balcony on the far wall pours sunlight so violent he must shield his eyes. He turns away from it, finds a wooden door he had not noticed, and steps through into a smaller circular chamber with windows on a calm sky. An enormous shadow passes one of them.
At a writing desk lit by a loose diamond sits an aged Nohadon — silver-haired and lined, pointed beard, the same man from the earlier vision but decades older. Dalinar whispers that he is watching The Way of Kings being written. *Actually,* Nohadon grins, *it's a shopping list.* He intends to cook Shin loaf bread today, if he can get the ingredients. He springs up, grips Dalinar by the arms like an old friend, and announces that *you've been having a hard time of it lately* — they are going to market.
They leap from the balcony, Nohadon sliding glowing down a cloth banner like the Surgebinder he is and Dalinar following with Stormlight drawn from the diamond on the desk. The market below is a riot of paint and colour — bright stone, layered skirts and ringed gowns, women with bare arms and no safehands — utterly unlike the weathered ancient world Dalinar had imagined. People salute their king without much fuss. Dalinar reminds himself that the figure beside him is not really Nohadon but a construct of the vision.
At a grain merchant's tent, Nohadon haggles like a scribe; Dalinar hangs back and smells the sacks, then sees something move between buildings — a tall shadow, *too tall.* Distant thumps shake the ground, and nobody around him reacts. He shouts a warning; Nohadon ignores him, closes the deal, and crosses an item off his list. Then Nohadon tells Dalinar where he learned to bake the bread: at war, in the west, in a small village beneath one of the Shin passes, where the matron who cooked for his occupying troops accepted whichever army was in charge and offered to teach him. Something very unfair happened to her later; he considered putting it in the book but limited the book to his walk to Urithiru. Nohadon reminds Dalinar of Taravangian just then. *Your life, like that of the woman, is unfair.*
Dalinar pours out everything. The drums of war beat in his head; the coalition is gathered but spends weeks deliberating; the temptation whispers that he could best defend the world if he simply made the others do as they should. *So why don't you?* — *You didn't.* — *I tried and failed; that led me to a different path.* Nohadon then asks what the cost of a principle is. *Isn't a principle about what you give up, not what you gain?* He tips the merchant's scales with one finger to balance them, asks the merchant to give the excess to children, and tells Dalinar not to look to life to be easier just because he has chosen to do something right. Life is fair; one just cannot always see what balances it.
The thumping returns. Dalinar runs out of the tent and sees a thunderclast rising above the rooftops, red light burning deep in its rocky skull. He has no weapon. Nohadon strolls out behind him with the sack of grain, looks up, and smiles; the monster bends down and offers a skeletal hand which Nohadon touches with his own, and the creature stills. *Quite the nightmare you've created. What does that thunderclast represent, I wonder?* — *Pain. Tears. Burdens. I'm a lie, Nohadon. A hypocrite.* — *Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.* The words land like a thrown stone. Dalinar himself had once said that, back when he had felt stronger.
More thumps; more shadows; more thunderclasts approaching from every direction. Nohadon calmly lays out the three realms doctrine: every thing exists at once in the Physical — what you are now; the Cognitive — what you see yourself as being; and the Spiritual — the perfect you, beyond pain and error and uncertainty. *You've said the oaths,* Nohadon calls as monsters slam fists toward Dalinar, *but do you understand the journey?* There is one essential part of it Dalinar has forgotten, without which there can be no journey at all. *What is the most important step a man can take?*
Dalinar wakes huddled in his bed at Urithiru, still in his clothes, an almost-empty wine bottle on the table. No storm has blown over the tower. It was not, it cannot have been, a Stormfather vision. He hides his face in his hands. Something blooms in him — not a new memory, but a recollection turned suddenly crisp — *the night of Gavilar's funeral.*