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Dalinar no longer fears highstorms. The whip-flinch has finally faded in him; today, hearing Elthebar list the storm's coming, he feels a small surge of excitement. The Stormfather confirms that crossing the continent tires the spren and energizes the man — opposite halves of the same crossing. Dalinar dismisses his scribes and stands alone with his real worry: Navani and the tower. Her letters arrive with the correct passcodes but feel toneless and reassuring in the wrong way. He has begun planning an expedition through Shadesmar to open a perpendicularity at the tower — but no one knows whether it will work where the Sibling suppresses Surges. He wants, with an ugly want he recognizes from giving up the drink, to put on Plate and march to the front. He stays put.

Outside, the Stormfather offers him something new: ride the storm. Like a vision, but happening now. Dalinar warns Martra, his scribe for the day, that he may seem absent, sits facing the Origin in a chair she fetches, and becomes the storm.

He soars at the stormwall like a gust of wind, seeing further and clearer than he ever has under Windrunner power. Green country rolls beneath him, lowland valleys snarled with vine-knit underbrush, tentacled animals squeezing into hollows as the wall hits. He tries to inspect one; the Stormfather refuses — *Forward. Ever forward.* He passes a half-burned village ruined by the Everstorm, and below it two ragged foragers huddled in a too-shallow ravine. Dalinar orders the Stormfather to spare them. The spren answers that he is a storm, that mercy defies the soul of a storm — then admits the men are already dead, a boulder having crushed them as they spoke. When the Stormfather hides behind the excuse of his own nature, Dalinar roars at him as thunder: *You are capable of choice. You hide from that, and you are a coward.* The spren goes subdued, like a scolded child.

They reach snowy mountains. The storms have been creeping higher; the Stormfather explains it as a natural cycle that will reverse. They reach Urithiru and Dalinar flies into an east-tier balcony, scouting through quiet corridors before the storm pushes him out. He demands a second look and — in defiance of the Stormfather's insistence on momentum — forces himself backward against the wind into the inner storm. *Momentum alone is not a virtue. Momentum kept me doing terrible things.* He hovers outside the first tier of the tower, hunting. Something tugs at him, the faint Connection he learned with Surgebinding, and draws him around the base.

He finds Kaladin Stormblessed clinging to the outside of the tower at the eighth level, wounded, soaked, half-dead, head buried in his shoulder against the wind. Dalinar hails him. The young man does not move. Dalinar draws on the soul of the storm and bellows his name as thunder. Kaladin turns toward him, white and matted, and gasps four pieces of news into the wind: singer invasion; Navani captured; the tower on lockdown; the other Radiants all unconscious. *Powers don't work. Except mine. Maybe a Bondsmith's. I'm fighting. I'm trying.* Dalinar gives him the First Ideal — *Life before death.* Kaladin's eyes flutter, his fingers slip, and he drops. Dalinar gathers the winds and, straining, hurls him up and over the balcony rail onto the eighth floor.

The exertion ejects him from the vision. He comes back to himself in his chair in Emul, ringed by an honor guard so onlookers cannot gawk. Martra has dutifully recorded everything he said — though not the parts he spoke as the storm. The truth slams home: the enemy holds Urithiru. Now he understands why they threw away Taravangian and an entire army here in Emul — they were sacrificed to keep him occupied. He sends Martra to call an emergency meeting of monarchs and highlords.

The Stormfather tells him, hurt, that Dalinar has pushed against their bond a second time, forced him to do things that are not right. Dalinar retorts that stretching is always painful and asks whether the spren heard what Kaladin said. The Stormfather heard but disagrees: a Bondsmith's powers will not work at Urithiru — the tower's protections have been turned against them, and Dalinar would have to be orders of magnitude stronger to overwhelm the Sibling. Dalinar demands faster training and is told Honor is dead; no one alive knows what a Bondsmith can fully do. He paces. The others — Kaladin, Shallan, Jasnah, Lift — picked up their powers naturally. The Stormfather answers that Dalinar is different. Greater, more dangerous, more complicated. There has never been another like him. *Except…*

There was another Bondsmith.

Dalinar runs across camp to a small building where Shalash tends a hulking, muttering Talenelat. He seizes her by the shoulders. *No,* she says — the Heralds came before the Radiants, who were modeled on them; only Nale ever joined an order. But one of them *was* a Bondsmith: Ishi, Herald of Luck, Herald of Mysteries, Binder of Gods, Creator of the Oathpact. He still lives, unchained by his oaths — and, if any other than her remains sane, it would be him. He is in Tukar, a short flight from this camp. *Isn't there an army in the way?* Shalash asks; *isn't crushing the enemy into Ishar's army Jasnah's task?* *That is her task,* Dalinar says. *I have another. I need to speak to the god-priest, and convince him to help me rescue Urithiru.*