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EIGHT AND A HALF YEARS AGO. Young Venli sits by the wall of the family home playing with paper and the listeners' first tentative attempts at written letters, while her mother Jaxlim performs her daily recitations at the window. Jaxlim stalls on the same stanza twice, and a second time in a week she cannot recover it. Venli prompts her gently, settles her into bed under the cover of *I am merely tired*, and tries to pretend she has not seen what she has just seen. Outside their home rises not a forest clearing but one of the ten ruined cities at the rim of the Shattered Plains; armed and emboldened by the humans' first visit, her First-Rhythm family has marched and taken it.

Venli hunts the city for her sister and finds her, of all places, on a rickety scout tower above the wall. Eshonai points at distant smoke and is already plotting to leave with the humans the next time they pass, to see the world. Venli tries to tell her about their mother and cannot — putting words to the fear, she is certain, will make it real. Her sister is gone again before the moment can be held, off to lead a scout to confirm the smoke. The humans return; the day after, Eshonai comes back triumphant.

For Venli their second visit is mostly tedium. The humans want the songs again and again, interrupt for clarifications, and cannot hear the rhythms underneath; her mother quietly arranges for them to be sent to Venli each time, so she will never be seen forgetting a stanza. Outside, three parshmen sit on the ground — rhythmless, dull, and somehow more unsettling than the humans themselves. *Is this what the humans think we are like?* she wonders, and looks away.

She loses herself in a small crowd of listeners from other families come to gawk at the visitors. One of them addresses her as *the apprentice keeper of songs of the family who discovered the humans*; she corrects him to plain *waiting upon her mother's word* and then, in spite of herself, lets him and the others draw her into talk. The humans work metal as if it were wax. Their armor is impractical. Their moving wooden shelters outlast listener homes. The current listener forms grow almost no carapace; what they know of the older shapes such as warform survives in song alone, and she has not yet been able to find them.

When Eshonai comes striding down the street — everyone knowing her, of course, the one who found the humans — Venli slips deliberately between two buildings to avoid her. Comfort is not in her sister; only more talk of the wide world, and no talk of the real worry at home. She thinks of going to find Demid in the fields, then remembers that the family has decided not to show the humans their use of Stormlight to grow plants, so the fields are quiet today. She walks instead out onto the plateaus alone with the lifespren, trying to put down the fear about her mother — and about the future her own boast to those listeners has just claimed.

A human female follows her out. The one with the rings on her exposed hand, taken so far for a servant or a surgeon. She sits down beside Venli and, to her startled betrayal, speaks the listener tongue without a rhythm but perfectly. She names herself Axindweth and offers it as a token — *though few here know me by that name.* She has been sent, she says, to find someone who remembers what the listeners used to be; someone who would want their lost glory back. She dismisses the listeners' ancient ancestors as a *random group of people* whose chosen exile Venli is still paying for, and goads her with the question of whether she has ever truly chosen for herself among the old forms of power.

Venli tells her the listeners abandoned those forms because the old gods used them as a leash, and turns to leave. Axindweth mentions, casually, that there used to be forms of power that could heal someone. Venli stops in place — how could the human possibly know about her mother? — and turns back. Axindweth takes a single blood-red gemstone from her sleeve and tells Venli to break it in a storm: inside, she will find a way to save those she loves. Then she sets the gem on the rock and walks away, leaving Venli alone with it.