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Dalinar traces a vein of red crystal — garnet, Navani tells him — running down a storage-room wall near the top of Urithiru. The records describe the tower as a living thing with a heart of emerald and ruby; the strata seem to ripple out of these new veins. *If it was alive, it is dead now.* Navani suspects only sleeping; nothing they have tried wakes it. He carries his chair into the conference room overlooking the Origin and checks his forearm clock — twelve minutes to the next highstorm.

Creer, the spectacled bridgeman serving as duty sergeant, brings a spanreed message from Brightness Khal. Fen reports a merchant ship vanished off Marat this morning, glowing figures rising from a coastal city to swallow the crew's spanreed mid-sentence. The enemy is building a navy. Dalinar asks Teshav to suggest the next monarch meeting be held in Thaylen City. He sends the guards out, faces the window, and — first rule of war, know your enemy — steps into the storm as it slams into the tower.

He appears in Nohadon's familiar pillared sandstone palace, in the guard's spot by the doors. A slender Parshendi woman appears beside the young king in robes of an advisor. The Stormfather warns immediately that Odium has noticed the vision and is coming. *Can you hold him back?* — *I will try.* No time for the full play. Dalinar strides toward Nohadon and Venli as the king greets her as his friend Karm.

Venli is, in fact, Venli — biting her own hand to be certain the body is real, attuning the old rhythms she has not been able to use under Odium's attention. An older man in blue with hair white at the temples interrupts as Nohadon is summoned away, takes her arm, and gives his name: Dalinar Kholin, the Alethi warlord, in a vision of past events. Only the two of them are real. He wants to talk. *Of course you do,* she attunes Irritation — *now that we have your capital.* He insists. He wants to forget old grievances. What would a truce cost? *Your kingdom, for a start.* Alethkar — laborers, ardents, wealth, a formal apology, even a parshman highprince in a divided kingdom — anything. *I demand that we keep Alethkar.* The singers who live there, her cousins, are from there too; the only difference between them and his Alethi is that they were born as slaves and he as their master. He winces and tries again. *There can be no accommodation, human. Send me from this place. We can meet on the battlefield.*

Then the thump. Out on the balcony she sees a half-destroyed city. The clouds and sky are a painted dome, and the pounds crack a webwork through it overhead. *He's here,* she whispers. *That is why there can be no negotiation, human. Surrender; hope he doesn't care to destroy you.* The dome shatters. Pulses of Odium's yellow light boom through, sucking everything they touch upward — bricks separating in their courses, floorboards lifting on rising nails, a guard's body opening into water and a dried husk drawn up after. Venli crawls back toward the chamber under wind that fights every step, the ceiling exploding stone by stone into the void. She glances back. Dalinar is on the balcony, and he is glowing. Around him the boards tremble but do not move; the railing has torn away to either side of his grip but holds where he holds. *Neshua Kadal. Radiant Knight.* She attunes the old listener Rhythm of Awe — long ago these humans had resisted her gods and won — and his calm light spreads from his hand through the railing and into the floor; her stone settles back under her, and through the city buildings come down out of the air and reknit. The light goes out.

A second pound, a second hole lower in the sky, another inrush of light eating outward from the wall behind her. Heat washes across her; she clamps her eyes shut and clings. *And what of the grand purpose? What of the power he offers?* she asks herself — or was it merely something to grasp, now that she has brought about the end of her people? Faint, the Rhythm of Anxiety threads the wind. Timbre is fighting toward her, then changes to the Rhythm of the Lost and begins to slide back. Venli releases the pillar and rides the wind on her side, jams her foot in a cleft, catches Timbre in her left hand; the spren pulses warm and settles to Praise. *Now we can fall together.* Then the heat fades. The city is almost gone, scoured to its foundations and the knees of its windblades; only a quarter of Kholin's tower remains. Then the ground itself shakes apart. She runs for the broken palace, leaps the fissure, falls short. Above, the man in the blue uniform dives in after her, scraping his hand along the wall — lines of light flashing across him, fingers not bleeding on stone — and stretches the other toward her. The rocks become substantial enough to slow her. Their fingers meet. *Go.* She crashes back to the cave in Marat, opens her left fist, and Timbre floats out, still pulsing.

Dalinar dissolves into pure pain. He feels himself flayed, each piece allowed to hurt in isolation — a personalised torment that could persist for an eternity. Then it ends and he is kneeling on an endless plain of glowing white stone. Odium coalesces beside him in gold and white, scepter in hand; Nohadon's palace materialises out of light. *Ah, this one again? Looking for answers from the dead?* Dalinar knows he has just destroyed any hope of peace by pulling the Parshendi woman into one of the enemy's storms. *It hurts, doesn't it?* Odium says, sitting on a seat of light and laying a hand on his shoulder. *I know pain. I am the only god who does. The only one who cares.* — *Can there be peace?* — *Yes, Dalinar. There can be. There will be. After you destroy Roshar. I am the one who will rebuild it.* Dalinar forces out the words: a contest between champions, let us find a way — and trails off, unable to imagine how to fight this thing. *Be strong, Dalinar. I have faith in you, even when you don't have it in yourself. Push through the agony, my son. Then you will be victorious.*

The vision fades. He is back in the upper room of Urithiru, collapsing into the chair he set there, Navani catching his arm. Through his bond he senses the Stormfather weeping like a child — the most powerful spren on Roshar, who held Odium back at terrible cost, whispering that the enemy is too strong.