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Wit's POV, in occupied Kholinar weeks after its fall, still smelling of smoke. The city's new masters have moved tens of thousands of humans out to work farms, and complete resettlement will take months. Wit shuffles down a refugee line of a few hundred broken people, poking the brutish man in front of him at intervals and lecturing him on art. It is nearly impossible to make a thing nobody hates and trivial to make a thing nobody loves; strip the spice from your stew and what remains is broth — broth he can taste but nobody will fight over. The variance of human preference guarantees hatred for anything sharp enough to be loved, and being hated is better than vanishing entirely. *Vivid extremes, not grey mush.* The absence of hatred, he concludes, is itself proof a thing is small.

He follows that lecture with the most baroque insult-set he can compose — the man's face defies description because it nauseated all the poets — and then discovers the man speaks only Thaylen. He cuts in front of him to force a different kind of performance instead. The man punches him in the face. Wit gets up, prods at his mouth, and picks a loosened tooth up off the stones. *Thank you, dear man.* His healing is suppressed; the tooth will be a few days growing back, the patchy baldness is on its own schedule, and the dust is exactly where he put it.

He moves through the city to the courtyard before the palace. Only the most desperate and the most broken shelter this close to the new masters. He squats by Kheni, who still rocks an empty cradle and stares across the square, and tells her his real question: if art will inevitably inspire hatred, how much love does it need to balance the risk? Her husband, Cob, hovers nearby. Kheni does not answer; eventually she looks at him incredulously, and he marks: *so you are listening.* One more performance, then he must go.

He walks an alley north, gathers the remnants of a child's spren-costume in his hand, twists them around a cord, and stops at a building the thunderclast knocked down. A small dirty face peeks out from the rubble. The girl — perhaps four — tells him his teeth look funny today. He shapes a little doll from the rags and cord and offers it, but she will not leave her mother. The bones of a leg lie inside, just past the shadow. He sets the doll on the broken street, raises it to his lips, whispers a careful set of words, and then sets it down again. It walks. A soft gasp. The girl emerges and runs after it. He picks her up and turns her away from the building, his coat now grey instead of brown. He carries her back across the courtyard, kneels in front of Kheni, and offers his answer: *I think it only takes one.* He waits until she holds out her arms, then places the child in them. Cob takes him gently by the arm and asks him to stay a little longer — possibly the first person ever to. *In truth, the sentiment frightens me.* He leans down and whispers to the doll instead: *forget what I told you before; take care of her.*

Then up the steps toward the palace, the act of madness layered on as he climbs — twitch, shuffle, ragged breath. A Fused sentry hovers above — Vatwha, with whom he once shared a dance back in some lost millennium, since trained alongside all her kind to spot him; today she barely flicks her eyes across him. He decides not to take that as an insult, since it is what he wanted. If Rayse knew he was in the city, he would level it for any slim chance of ending him.

He ducks past the sentries and into the work-project itself, where Fused crews have been breaking down a wall and clearing fallen blocks. He acts panicked, trips against a still-standing piece of the palace wall, and addresses it in a low voice — there are not many options open to it; he can guess it would prefer some grander companion, but circumstances have narrowed the field; he is now sure he came to the city for it. He slams himself against the wall again as singer guards seize him under the arms and haul him out. A moving Pattern slips from one of the cracks in the wall and crosses to his palm, and stays tucked into his rags as the guards toss him onto the courtyard with the other beggars. He rolls over to look at it — trembling — and whispers: *life before death, little one.*

*The end of Book Three of The Stormlight Archive.*