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A crisp ocean wind flees the Everstorm through Dalinar's window above Thaylen City. The storm's red clouds bleed in from the west, lightning beneath the front; under that shadow, enemy ships sail in unhindered. The Stormfather tells him the enemy steers the storm himself, the way Honor once steered him. The clouds slow and stop above the bay; ships ram themselves up onto the shore. Amaram's troops pour through the gates onto the killing field while Thaylen levies climb the wall behind them. General Khal shouts for runners on the street below. Too slow. Dozens of Fused are already launching from the decks, and the Azish fleet is running before the storm; the coalition has shattered. Everything has been planned for. Dalinar mentions, almost to himself, that Cultivation warned him his memories would return — she called what she did to him a pruning — and asks the Stormfather whether she meant for them to. He does not know. Dalinar picks up the Thaylen copy of *The Way of Kings* from the dresser and walks out of the villa into the city below.

In Shadesmar, on the bank of the bead lake that mirrors Thaylen City, Shallan, Kaladin and Adolin watch the Oathgate from cover. Hundreds of twisted spren stand in the beads. On the obsidian shore, an enormous churning red-lit darkness surges across the rock — something terrible enough that her gaze refuses to settle on it. Six Fused alight on the bridge. The vision that drew them here, Adolin reminds them, was the enemy's; Azure warned them off. There was no other way: every other Oathgate is watched too. Syl points out they cannot turn back; the gemstones will not last. Shallan sinks down. She longs for Stormlight and an illusion that could make the world look like anything else, even for a moment. Some problems, Pattern hums to her, cannot be solved by a lie.

Jasnah threads through a file of soldiers running toward the Oathgate and acknowledges what she has already deduced: Thaylen City is lost. Her remaining tasks are to keep her uncle from dying in a useless fight, to evacuate the city, and — first — to handle something more pressing. Ivory confirms her conclusion from her collar: there is a traitor. She pins back her safehand sleeve over a glove (under a yellow scout's havah, trousers under shorter skirts, boots) and finds Renarin kneeling alone in a Thaylen temple. From his back rises a spren bright red, crystalline and snowflake-shaped, dripping light upward and shimmering like a heat mirage — matching no sketch of a proper Truthwatcher spren she carries in her pouch. She breathes in and summons Ivory as a Blade.

On the dockside below, Venli is shoved off the gangway into a frightened crowd of newly-awakened singers in workform and the occasional warform-without-training. A hulking Fused calls her over and pushes a sheathed sword on her in case she should need to defend herself. He then makes her interpreter for the Thaylen-speaking sailors. The Fused is Turash — calm, reasoning, lecturing reluctant fisher-singers on what it means to earn their Passion and qualify, through service, for elevation to Regal. Many of the new singers do not want vengeance on the Thaylens who treated them passably and would rather just go and settle somewhere quiet. Turash tells her privately that this lot's Passion is wrong; the singers who took Kholinar did the work eagerly.

Then a rhythm shakes the air. Venli sees the field overlaid with ghostly Fused spirits waiting for bodies — and one creature of swirling violent red smoke that tops the other waiting spirits like a small hill towering over them. Heat blooms behind her. He crystallises beside her in marbled gold and white, leaning on his scepter; for once his presence does not vaporise her. He greets Turash as an old friend and tells him that the singer rabble are not his army — they are here to watch. Two of the most warped unbodied Fused crawl into the stone of the battlefield and rip themselves out as thirty-foot stone skeletons with wedge-shaped heads and molten red eyes; a third — the mountain of power — still waits in the bay. There is, Odium says with satisfaction, an abundance of Passion here.

Inside Urithiru, Teft hides. He cannot face the others after his relapse — Eth dead, Rock and Bisig wounded, Nale's Honorblade stolen, and his Bridge Four uniform on him while he did it. Shamespren burst around him in the dark halls. The unnamed honorspren who has been trying to bond him is waiting where he stops. He pushes through her substanceless form and finds himself, by mistake, in the tower's outermost ring. From a balcony there he sees marbled-skinned figures pouring onto the Oathgate platform tied to Kholinar — the one nominally locked and unusable. Scouts shout. Urithiru is under attack.

On the wall above the city, Navani reaches Fen and her consort Kmakl and makes the Alethi case: the current Sadeas is a famed field commander with rested, tenacious men; they can hit the enemy as it disembarks and fall back inside the wall if outnumbered, while reinforcements muster. Kmakl thinks they might even retake some of their own ships in the bargain. Then the ground shakes. Between the armies the stone splits along the outline of a hand, a forearm, an elbow — and a thirty-foot skeleton of rock pulls itself out of the field, scattering chips of stone onto the troops below, molten red eyes opening above its wedge-shaped head.

Then the Thrill-mountain in the bay vanishes from Shadesmar. Kaladin gasps at the tree-line as the great power vacates this place and goes to the other. The enemy spren army winks out of the bridge in waves; only the six Fused remain. He suggests challenging them as a distraction so Shallan can reach the gate — maybe with illusions to thicken the misdirection. Adolin reluctantly agrees, then adds the question he cannot help asking: where has that army gone?

*Passion*, Odium says again. He has prepared a different army for today; he has spent decades preparing it. The singers are here to watch and learn. The red mist climbs out of the boiling bay onto a section of empty rock north of the water, made physical — charging riderless horses, the forms of killing men, mounded bones — and rolls forward over the human ranks, opening soldiers' souls. The unbodied Fused spren flow in where they are now welcome; Turash is astonished and asks whether his master has truly learned to bond humans, and Odium tells him that the capability has always been there — bonding humans only ever needed the correct mindset in the correct surroundings. Ten thousand of Sadeas's men in green raise their weapons, eyes burning a deep dangerous red. Odium whispers his orders to them: Kholin meant to spend their lives; let their rage out; cut down the man who murdered their old highprince; deliver him the city. A man in glittering Plate on a white horse, eyes glowing red inside his helm, turns the new green army around and leads it against Thaylen City itself.