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The weeks after Hearthstone take Kaladin through the worst of his darkness and out the other side. He has been given time, but Dalinar eventually nudges him: ten days to choose. So it is that ten days after the mission Kaladin stands before the army's command staff while Dalinar announces that his role is *evolving*. The room applauds his heroism even as he is shown the door. He names Sigzil companylord over Windrunner administration; Skar, when he returns from his leave at the Horneater Peaks, will be company second and field commander. There is no party, mercifully. He walks out into a long dark hallway and notices, almost surprised, that he is not a danger to himself today.

Now he needs a purpose. The empty open-time reminds him of the dead hours between bridge runs, and that scares him. *Hav's first rule of leadership* — once you decide, commit — takes him to the sparring grounds. Syl flits beside him as the strange sail-bottomed ship Navani sketched in a meeting, then loops the room as a ribbon of light. The man Kaladin has come to find isn't there. Master Lahar tells him Zahel is on laundry detail, which surprises him. Syl catches up at the door and asks, with no small amount of incredulity, why of all the tower's swordmasters he chose Zahel. He cannot quite answer. The others would treat him with reverence. He wants the one ardent who will tell him the truth.

On his way to the washing fields he detours past one of the stone discs that ring the tower base — a project Navani has been running for six months. The thin cold air should not let crops grow here. But Rlain gave humankind a gift: light. A row of enormous emeralds harvested from chasmfiend gemhearts, mounted on iron lampposts, shine over a field of head-sized rockbuds; beside each lantern an ardent drums one of the pure rhythms of Roshar. Lifespren brighten and spin around the drummers, drift to the plants, sustain them. The gemstones drain like fabrials do. The mixture of light, song, and spren is a kind of organic engine. Rlain walks among the stations in his Bridge Four uniform and warform, correcting rhythms.

Kaladin calls him over. He almost can't bring himself to interrupt — Rlain has so plainly found purpose here — but he came with a gift of his own, and he wants his men cared for. *I found you an honorspren.* For a heartbeat Rlain's stoic mask cracks into a face-splitting grin. *Vratim's old spren, Yunfah. He's agreed to try.* And then Rlain's hum softens. *Thank you, sir. Please tell the spren he can seek elsewhere.* Kaladin is stunned. Rlain reminds him of how he came to be a bridgeman in the first place — embedded among the Alethi, given away by a single careless math answer to a mid-dahn lighteyes who was simply frightened by a clever parshman — and quietly refuses to take a spren that has been forced. *That will set a bad precedent.* Kaladin hates feeling shamed by his good intention; he walks on stinging at it. *Or,* part of him thinks, *you could do what you promised him and listen for once.*

He finds Zahel at the very edge of a wash-field, hanging brightly-coloured silk scarves on lines that overlook a drop of cloud, his old tan robe and rope belt of a piece with no swordmaster a soldier's instincts would ever respect. He greets Kaladin without turning — he always knows when someone has come — and tells him to find something strong to drink, that alcohol kills slower than Stormlight does. Kaladin tells him he is being forced into retirement and is thinking of the ardentia, perhaps to teach the sword. *Prove it,* Zahel says. *Land a strike on me.*

What follows is a fight in a forest of sheets. Zahel uses laundry the way other men use blades — billowing cloth as distraction, scarves to bind a wrist and pull a man off balance, a stretched cord to deflect a Shardblade strike and wrap him to the arms and choke him from behind. Kaladin dulls Syl as instructed and tries every form he knows, taught both by his old spear training and Adolin's sword work. He cannot land a clean strike. Between exchanges Zahel's voice drifts to him: *Why do you fight?* For Alethkar. For Dalinar. To protect his men. Closer, but his men are now as safe as they can ever be. *Do you believe in the Almighty, boy?* Kaladin gives him the answer he actually has: he doesn't know what he believes; the people who care can argue. Zahel nods as though that is an honest answer. *I don't have to believe,* he says back. *I know gods exist. I simply hate them.*

He ends the bout by having the sheets themselves attack — they spring from the lines six at once, faces and figures in them — and by deflecting the Blade aside with two fingers. Then he has Kaladin on the stone with a knife to his scarred forehead. *This wasn't about winning or losing,* he says. *It was for me to see how you fought.* He drops the knife and pins the fallen sheets back on the line one by one. Each scarf is now dull grey where it had been bright. He cannot take Kaladin for the ardentia. *You love the fight. It is your mistress, your passion, your lifeblood. You'd thirst for more. Return when you hate the fight. Truly hate it.*

Kaladin joins him at the cliff edge instead, and asks what he is. Not like Wit — there is no one else quite like Hoid, whom Zahel knew in younger days by the name *Dust*. He himself is what he calls a Type Two Invested Entity: a man who died while drenched in power, whose soul left a fossil-duplicate, who was nailed back into a body. The Fused and the Heralds are the same kind of thing; Syl is the other kind — power that came alive on its own. There are ways to kill the weaker Type Twos by re-killing the body and letting no one Invest them again; the stronger ones must be unmade. The Fused, who feed directly from Odium, will need a weapon that unravels the soul itself, and such weapons are very dangerous to make and never seem to work right. He warns Kaladin besides: the longer one of these creatures lives, the more like a spren they become — Intent narrowing into a single chained purpose, men replaced by spren wearing the corpse. *That's why she takes our memories,* he adds. Kaladin asks *she?*. Zahel doesn't answer. As Kaladin leaves, he cradles a fossilised shell to his chest and stares out toward the endless horizon.