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Seven years before the present. Eshonai tips her head back as the last of the highstorm runs from her carapace. She, Thude, and Rlain step out of stone hollows on the Shattered Plains, having returned to warform for the first time in a long while. Workform had felt more like home; warform feels like a clearing one only rarely visits. She likes the form, but she does not trust the appetite it puts in her — the way it wants reasons to fight. The pure tone of Roshar she once heard does not come back when she puts the form on again.

Thude charges a chasm and clears it in a great bound; Eshonai tears after him, lands hard, and grins to the listener Rhythm of Confidence. Rlain, slower and steadier, hums to the same rhythm when he lands beside her. The three of them run the plateaus as if the Plains were a playground — chasm, climb, sprint, leap — until Eshonai surveys the broken country from a high formation and tries, again, to picture the oceans she has only seen on Gavilar's map. Water as wide as countries. She attunes Anxiety, and Awe.

She is hungry, the way warform always makes her hungry. She thinks about her little book of papers, bought for a few chips in Kholinar and treasured ever since — the small wonder of an Alethi market where steel weapons sat for sale on tables, while listeners polished and inherited the few blades they had pulled out of the chasms. The trek east had been the most exhilarating thing she had ever done; the trek home had been a long, hunted blur.

Thude joins her at the formation and looks west with her. Dark smoke smudges the sky where the Alethi camps have settled in for a long stay — tens of thousands of soldiers and dozens of Shardbearers, come to wipe the listeners out. *This is going to go poorly for us, isn't it?* he asks. Eshonai catches herself humming the Lost. She says they are stronger in warform than the humans are; the terrain favours them; the chasms will hold.

Thude presses her on what she knows he is going to press her on. Did she really need Gavilar killed? She did, she answers — she had voted for it, and she had been the reason there was a vote at all. He was going to bring the listener gods back, and she heard him say so, and he thought she would be glad. Thude's reply, in agony: now the humans will kill all of them, and how is this any better. *We're trapped*, he says — in the centre of these Plains, for years, perhaps. *You're fine with that, Eshonai?*

Eshonai looks away from him, not toward the cookfires but toward the Origin — the ocean she had planned to walk to. The humans will not turn back for a few chasms; they have resources the listeners can only imagine. To flee out the other side of the Plains would mean abandoning the natural fortress. *I'll do what I have to,* she says, to Determination. *Whatever it costs.* They have generals, Thude says. The listeners have had warform for a year. They will learn, Eshonai answers, and grow their own generals, and bleed the humans until the humans give up — because the listeners are a free people, and will be free always.

Rlain catches up at last, humming to Amusement at the pair of them. The three of them stand together looking out at the smoke.

Elsewhere in Narak, at almost the same time, Venli hums to Craving as she opens her hands to show a handful of gemstones. Five Voidspren, each caught the way Ulim had been when he had first come to her. Ulim hums to her from inside her own gemheart, and the longer he stays the better she hears the new rhythms — the rhythms of power. He has treated her with respect ever since the human city.

She has staked out a section of Narak for her scholars, the friends she and Ulim have argued and re-argued were trustworthy enough — friends who, she tells herself, share her hunger for a better world. Demid stands at her shoulder, his hand resting there; he was the first and the most eager, and she feels braver when he is near. She thinks privately that he makes her braver than Eshonai — that her sister could never have taken a step like this one.

She presses a gemstone into each of their hands. These spren, she explains, will sit alongside whatever spren they already carry, so they keep their current form and only gain a hidden companion. There is another world bound to theirs, Shadesmar, where hundreds of spren wait who can give the listeners the storms' power; only a few can cross at a time, on the new storm, and it is the scholars' job to find a way to bring the rest. Then, she says, they will persuade the listeners to take those forms — and this time they will rule the spren, not the other way around. Eshonai and the others, she tells them, have foolishly pitched everyone into a war no one asked for. The five of them will be remembered as the ones who saved their people.