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Kaladin exists in a place where the wind hates him. He has fragments of memory — fighting in the market, swimming through the well, climbing the outside of the tower into the storm because if he fled he would be leaving Dabbid and Teft behind and Syl behind forever — and Dalinar's voice somewhere in the wind. Days ago, maybe; weeks. He cannot tell. He stumbles across a windswept barren place of red and grey peaks, slammed against rocks, flayed. The faces of those he loves resolve out of the lightning and beg for help: Teft asking why he wasn't rescued, Moash pleading for his grandparents, Lirin dying under Roshone's hand. The wind speaks one word, over and over. *Hate.*

Each utterance breaks something inside him. He has loved the wind since childhood; it has always meant he was free, alive, met by something new. To hear it now turn on him crushes him. He calls for Syl — and remembers that he abandoned her. He tries to climb out of the wind, fails. The wind reverses and pushes him over the edge of a chasm. He falls. He cracks his head at the bottom and lies there letting it pummel him.

Then he sees, far down the chasm floor, a small pure white light — a warmth that does not hate him. He weeps and crawls toward it on a broken arm and broken legs. The wind redoubles to stop him; he gets to within ten feet — and the stone beneath him turns to crem and sucks him down. He realises, sinking, that the light was a lie. It was set there so it could be taken from him. So that he could finally be broken.

A burning glowing arm plunges into the crem, hauls him up, and pulls him into a bubble of light. Cloth, warmth, breath. Honor himself? The figure deposits him on a rock that has been shaped like a seat. The light fades around the figure, drawing in colour. It is Wit.

Wit looks up at the raging sky beyond the chasm rim and grumbles that this isn't playing fair. He explains: Kaladin is asleep — unconscious after fleeing into the tempest — and what he is in is a vision sent by the enemy, the way the Stormfather once sent visions to Dalinar. The landscape is another world, not a pleasant one — no lights of any kind, barely an atmosphere. He cannot understand how the enemy isolated Kaladin like this; a Shard reaching into a mind requires a specific set of conditions. Wit sits on a stool beside a small fire that warms Kaladin straight through to his soul, stirring a pot of stew. Rock's stew, Kaladin recognises. *Old Horneater recipe.* Not real. Eat it anyway.

Kaladin can stay only about twenty minutes; Wit warns him it is going to get worse out there. *I'm not strong enough, Wit,* Kaladin says. *I've never been strong enough.* Wit agrees, mildly. *It's not such a terrible thing to be too weak. It makes us need one another.* If Kaladin is close to giving up, then he had better eat his stew — a man shouldn't lie down and die on an empty stomach.

Kaladin asks, finally, for a story. Wit freezes spoon-in-mouth at the request. *I've been waiting for someone to actually ask.* He leans in and tells the prologue of an inn no one finds on purpose, on a misty street late at night, with a wheel on the door and no name on the sign — a nameless young man behind the bar who knows everyone who comes in, and who will give you a story if you ask for one. He gestures, and a Cryptic materialises beside him, finer-patterned than Pattern, holding a flute. Kaladin recognises it as Wit's old flute. *It's a dream, idiot.* The Cryptic — Design — introduces herself: she is not imaginary, only irrational. She begins to play the flute somehow without lips, fingers moving without obvious system. Wit has, Kaladin gathers, become a Lightweaver.

The story is called *The Dog and the Dragon.* A small farm dog sees a dragon overhead and decides he is going to become one. He breaks the goal into three sequential problems — scales, a voice like a dragon's, flight — and addresses each in turn. He grows colourful seeds on a Shinovar-style farm and rolls in them wet to fake scales; the other dogs laugh. He learns to read and write by watching the farmer's children and scratching letters in the dirt; the other dogs laugh — *that is not the loud and majestic voice of a dragon.* He fashions a pulley harness in the barn, counterweighted, and lowers himself gracefully from the loft; the other dogs laugh hardest of all. The dog accepts he is too small and too silly to ever be a dragon.

Then the farmer's toddler falls into the well. The dog bites the bucket off the rope, has the eldest tie the rope to his harness, writes *lower me* in the dirt, and hops on. He is lowered into the dark, finds the baby underwater, hauls it up in his teeth. The family sets a place for him at the table that night, gives him a sweater with his name written across it in letters he can read, feeds him cake from the child's birthday. He curls into a warm bed by the fire while the other dogs sleep wet in the leaky barn — and thinks to himself, sadly, that he could not become a dragon. He is a complete failure. *The end.*

Kaladin is incensed. The dog learned to write — how many animals on any world can do that? He learned to farm. He saved a child. He is a hero. Wit points with his spoon: *the story has no meaning; you promised.* Design gleefully points out Kaladin was never given the chance to promise. *Your stories always have a point, Wit.* Wit denies it grandly. *Any meaning is for you to assign.*

The bubble cannot last. Wit has violated his agreement with the enemy by intruding here at all; staying longer will get him killed and he has seven more people to insult today. Kaladin asks for the real ending. Wit leans in and gives it: that night, snuggled in his warm bed by the fire with the children, the little dog thought to himself, *I doubt any dragon ever had it so good anyway.*

It won't be like that for him, Kaladin says. *You told me it would get worse.* *It will,* Wit answers, *and then it will get better. Then worse. Then better. I will not lie and say every day will be sunshine — but there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different promise.* He puts a hand on Kaladin's back. *You will be warm again.*

Kaladin turns into the hateful wind. Wit pushes him forward, and the light vanishes.