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EIGHT YEARS AGO. Eshonai walks Jaxlim out into a highstorm, carrying a wooden shield as a buffer against the wind while her mother cradles a bright orange gemstone trapping a captured painspren — one of a couple of dozen the First-Rhythm family carry tonight, little smudges of light winking through the rain. Eshonai attunes the Rhythm of the Terrors not for herself but for Jaxlim, who has been frail; she ducks them into a hollow she had scouted earlier, where she had hoped the rain would not find them. It finds them. Rainspren dance along the ridge above, windspren whip past laughing, and Eshonai notices for the first time that her mother is humming — and grinning. Jaxlim shouts across the wind that this is how she and Eshonai's father had done it the first time, paired in a storm so neither would be taken without the other, and adds, since the topic has presented itself, that Eshonai is far too afraid of mateform and that Jaxlim would like grandchildren some day. Eshonai snaps that they are not having that conversation now and to please, *think about it, not mateform.* Jaxlim laughs that the lifespren are uninterested in someone her age and tells her daughter she had begun to think she would waste away without an outing like this.

They huddle a long while. Eshonai's shielding arm aches. Jaxlim does not know the proper mindset; Venli had told her to attune Confidence or Excitement, and she is trying. Lightning cracks the sky, thunder buries her next words, and Eshonai attunes Resolve and grips the shield harder. Let her mother see, she thinks: Eshonai not unreliable and prone to fancy as she was always called, but solid, dependable, determined.

Then the gemstone brightens — and the light leaps not into Jaxlim but into Eshonai's own gemheart, as water rushing into an empty vessel. All her rhythms cut out at once; one tone takes their place, a steady pure note she has never heard before, the pure tone of Honor. The little gravitationspren that had been in her gemheart since her workform days is ejected. The shield flies away into the dark. She had not meant to be taken tonight; in the moment she does not care. She had felt the wrongness of her people being only workform and dullform and mateform for too long. This is right. She embraces it. For a moment it seems to her that all of Roshar is pausing to sing Honor's long-lost note alongside her.

She wakes lying in a puddle of crem-clouded rainwater, a single rainspren rippling beside her, eye fixed on the empty sky. Jaxlim had shouted to her at some point that she needed cover and had gone for it, and Eshonai had been too far inside the transformation to follow. She sits up; her shirt and coat are shredded and her skirt has snapped at the waist; the back of her hand is plated with carapace as grand as human armour. She is bigger. She stands and is propelled to her feet by unexpected strength, gasps, attunes Awe. A voice she does not recognise shouts her name, and a monstrous orange-red carapaced figure steps over storm-debris toward her with a wrap tied awkwardly at his hip. She means to attune Amusement and finds she cannot — he does not look silly at all; he looks the way Awe should be sung in a deeper key. It is Thude, his voice dropped to depths the listener forms have not contained in living memory. *If you've ever wished to sing the low tones, Eshonai, it seems we've found the perfect form for it.*

Others stand up out of the storm-cracks around them, perhaps a dozen. About two dozen had volunteered for the experiment; some had not taken. Dianil — the curl of black down her brow unmistakable even under a carapace skullcap — finds them and says she had felt an overwhelming need to stand in the storm and bask in the new tone. Eshonai remembers a song of those who first took workform that described the same: an outpouring of power, an amazing tone belonging purely to Cultivation. *The tones of Roshar,* Thude says, *welcoming us home.* They jump as high as they can and laugh and throw rocks, Eshonai's drawing a gloryspren of her own with flowing tails and long wings. Then she hears the family's battle drums beating in from the city — a raid, while their best are still standing here marvelling — and Thude asks if the raiders are insane to come now. They do not know what we've done, Eshonai answers, looking around at the listeners only now climbing out of the storm-cracks. The defenders left at home would be drawn up in the small strong structures inside the city; right after a storm is one of the better times to claim a city if you have the numbers, and more than one family has done it.

She leads the twelve of them in toward the city. Boasts are still rolling — the formal challenges that precede a city-claim battle, the white-clad attackers shouting taunts and the defenders shouting back — which means the actual spears have not yet started flying. She stops the group at a fissure in the worn-down wall and finds Venli waiting in the shadows, somehow already at the city ahead of them. Venli looks the new warforms up and down, satisfied: *So it worked. Praise the ancient storms for that. You look good, sister.* Eshonai answers that this is not who she is, even if there is a thrill to wearing it. Venli sends her on through to Sharefel, the family's old Shardbearer, in his well-kept hut by the front wall.

Eshonai protests — they do not use the family's Shards against other listeners, only in greatshell hunts — but Venli, attuning Amusement, walks around the group, eyes on Thude and the rest as well as on her: if they ever hope to stand against the humans when the humans turn on them, the family will need to be ready to bear what they were blessed with. The Blackthorn's old words come back to Eshonai, that without unity her people will be easy pickings, and she pushes past Venli toward the hut. Melu, hot for the fight, mutters an anticipationspren into being behind her, eager to use this new body. Thude says he thinks it would be unfair to kill anyone in this form. Venli urges, again, that they take the Shards and show the challengers what they are now. Eshonai is not listening.

In the hut Sharefel sits in his seat, mostly-black skin pattern lit by the open doorway, humming softly to the Lost. *So it is true,* he says. *We have warriors once more.* Eshonai kneels — feels it appropriate without quite knowing why — and answers his questions: painspren, captured by a human method using gemstones in the storm. He says he will try it himself at the next storm, then asks the obvious one: a new era deserves a new Shardbearer; which of them will take his Shards? Melu volunteers loudly, and Thude puts a hand to her breastplate as if to restrain her, and they hum challenge-rhythms at each other and the whole moment is on the edge of getting ugly. *No,* Eshonai says. *None of us will take them. None of us are ready.* She tells Sharefel to keep them — with Plate he is as firm as any warrior — and asks only that he stand with them today. Sharefel agrees, on the condition that he will not lift the Blade against another listener. He will not need to, Eshonai promises; their goal will not be to win a battle but to promise a new beginning.

A short time later the warforms and one ancient Shardbearer step out of the wall together. The two families have not yet rushed each other; spears are still in the back-and-forth phase. Spren of all varieties spin and hover around the engagement. The challengers stop dead when the warforms appear with a full Shardbearer in shining Plate beside them. Eshonai picks up a spear, several of the others do the same, and they walk out into the centre of the field. *We have found warform,* she calls in a rhythm of Joy, an invitation rather than a challenge. *Come, join us. Enter our city, live with us. We will share our knowledge with you.* The challengers shy back; one shouts that they will be consumed and made slaves of their family. *We are all one family,* Eshonai answers, and points to the slaveforms the humans have brought, to their armour and weapons and clothing and wagons, and asks whether anyone here would fight that alone. *I cannot. You cannot. But together we could fight that.* She gestures to her dozen warforms and to Sharefel. The Living-Songs family, she tells the challengers, is the next she will approach. They may choose to be the first family to join the new nation and be honoured for generations, or the last to come begging at the end, after the union is nearly complete.

Then she hefts her spear and throws it, and the throw shocks her — the spear soars over the heads of the challenging family and disappears far into the distance. More than one of them, audibly, hums the Rhythm of the Terrors. The warforms turn and march into the city. A few of them are annoyed not to have had a fight to test themselves on, and Eshonai admits to herself she felt the same eagerness — they will need to train, she tells the group, to work some of it out of themselves — Melu says only if it can be done in front of everyone else so that all may understand how easily she could have cracked the rivals' skulls. *That was well done,* she allows, *but I'm glad I didn't have to rip anyone apart.*

Another of them, behind her, asks where she learned to give speeches like that, and ribs her about her wilderness wandering — Eshonai answers, attuning Irritation, that she is no hermit, only one who has wanted to know what is out there, on the conviction that the family will keep being caught flat-footed by surprises as long as it does not bother to look around the next hill. She does feel a spring in her step. Perhaps warform will turn out to be a better form for exploring than her current one — quicker, stronger, better at leaping obstacles. So much to learn from this body. They pass Sharefel's hut and there is Venli again, lurking in the shadows — this is, in a way, her victory — and Eshonai knows she ought to congratulate her sister and finds she cannot bring herself to do it. Venli does not need yet more songs praising her; she already has a big enough ego. Instead Eshonai leads the warforms on toward the stormshelter, where the rest of the family is climbing out into the daylight. Each and every one of them deserves to see the new form up close.