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EIGHT AND A HALF YEARS AGO. Eshonai strolls one last time through Gavilar Kholin's plains camp on the day the humans pack to leave at the end of their second visit. She wishes they would stay. The way they walk, talk, and look at her — or sometimes do not — fascinates her endlessly. Even now, with listeners beside them as interpreters, the humans do not seem to grasp that her people can hear something they cannot, and the absence of any rhythm in their movement strikes her as it would a kind of loneliness. They are good at judging when a storm will come, less so at the hour. They are packing very thoroughly indeed.

She drifts toward Dalinar Kholin, who stands alone at the edge of camp with his Shardblade sunk into the rock and his gaze fixed eastward toward the Origin. He hears her on the stone before any of the servants do. *Have you been out there?* he asks. *To the center?* They speak haltingly in his language about exploring, about how places have memories that can hold a person down — and then, after he dismisses his Blade, about the cities he has left smouldering. *My brother has taken an interest in you,* he tells her quietly. *Be more cautious with your invitations. Our attention can be dangerous.* He counsels her to stand up for her people without offending his king, and never to give him a reason to decide he wants what they have. *Be careful with us,* she hears underneath the words. *We are far more dangerous than you think.* When she asks how many cities his people have, he says *hundreds* — many times more humans than there are parshmen here — and the number staggers her. *We will send a more permanent envoy,* he promises, and walks toward his stormwagon with the momentum of a shifting boulder.

Inside one of the family's storm slits, Venli huddles with the bloodred gem the human gave her burning, as she imagines, through her clothes. Her mother Jaxlim sings by the light of uncut gemhearts and the family attunes Joy. *I'm supposed to go out into the storm,* she thinks. She has carried the gem for weeks, terrified. She has been near to warform for months and has gotten nowhere — while Eshonai receives more and more acclaim for finding the humans, including from their mother. Her mother is failing in ways no one outside the family yet sees, and the songs hold no cure for that. Before her nerves can betray her, she pulls herself out onto the rain-slick slope and slides behind a boulder, the wind ripping the rhythms in her head from Resolve to Winds to Pleading.

The world goes abruptly silent. The rain dries around her. Something forms in the sky out of clouds and light — vast, unknowable, impossible to take in. *YOU WISH TO TAKE THIS STEP?* the not-voice says, vibrating through her like a rhythm. The songs name him a traitor, the Rider of Storms; she calls him that and demands to know why she should trust an enemy's spren. *YET YOU TRUST THE GIFT OF ONE OF THOSE ENEMIES?* the Rider returns. *REGARDLESS, I SERVE NO ONE. I SIMPLY AM.* And then, withdrawing: *FAREWELL, CHILD OF THE PLAINS. CHILD OF ODIUM.* The storm closes back in around her. She thinks of being careful. Then she thinks of Eshonai not being careful, and discovering a world. She brings the rock down on the gem.

Light puffs out of the broken stone — and resolves into a tiny glowing human male in a male singer's posture, hands on hips, attuned to Irritation. *Finally!* he says. He is a Voidspren. He looks her over and asks whether there is anyone else he could talk to. Venli demands the ancient form she was promised; the spren tells her she will, *and also no.* For a while she will need to appear still to be in workform — he needs to scout the present-day world, it has been a while — and at the next opportunity he means to ride her to a storm in Shadesmar in the south, where he originally entered the gem. *Right, then. We've got a lot of work to do.*

Back at the shelter mouth, Eshonai searches the storm for her sister, attuned to Anxiety. Thude joins her chewing fruit, teasing that for all her complaining Venli has finally sauntered out into the wind to take mateform; Eshonai doubts it — she has been trying to find warform for months. They drift, attune Winds out of reverence for the thunder, and talk about whether anyone should be sent home with the humans when they leave. Eshonai does not say aloud the guilty thought she keeps batting away — that her life would be quieter without her sister's drama always materialising into the calm air.

A figure resolves out of the storm. Eshonai hauls her sister in by the arm. *Didn't work, eh?* Thude asks. Venli stares at him a beat too long, mute as a human — and then, with an uncharacteristic frantic grin, says it didn't work, that she will *have to try many, many more times to find warform.* She is still in workform. *Venli,* Eshonai says, *your words — where are their rhythms?* Venli pauses, then has to try a few times to hum to Amusement. *Don't be silly,* she says. *You just weren't listening.* She strides past them toward the fire with a swagger Eshonai does not recognise — the bearing of a femalen who thinks the storms start and stop on her say-so.