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Days pass in Navani's little laboratory and she barely notices them. For the first time in her life she lets go of the rest — Dalinar, Jasnah, the tower, the queue of other duties — and works. With no distractions, she draws up precise experiments and clean charts, the kind of meticulous incrementalisation she has always believed good science to be. Raboniel visits and writes her own musings alongside Navani's in their shared notebook. Two opposing forces in harmony, focused on a single problem.

Raboniel has given her the black sand — explaining the difference between static and kinetic Investiture along the way — and Navani measures: the sand whitens slowly in the presence of Stormlight or Voidlight, faster when a fabrial is drawing on the Light, also (slowly) near spren; wetting resets it. They talk while waiting on a coil experiment. Raboniel does not know exactly where the sand comes from — offworld, somewhere. She wanted, for years, to visit that place herself; her soul is bound to Braize, a planet farther out in the system's orbit, and she cannot leave. The space between worlds is airless; the Heavenly Ones who tried to fly between them in the Physical Realm died within hours even carrying Voidlight for healing. The proper road runs through Shadesmar — and she warns Navani off Braize specifically, calling it a barren place of dark sky, windswept crags, and a great many not particularly sane souls.

Navani's stormform guard, Mizthla — whom the Alethi knew as Dah — runs the test inside the room: the lightning-channeling polarity-swap Raboniel knows from magnets, this time applied to gemstones full of Voidlight. The room flashes. The coils survive this time. Navani makes sure the result lands quietly in her log as another failed search; she has not told Raboniel outright that her real quarry is the *opposite* of Voidlight, but Raboniel surely suspects.

The Fused sets the gem down and asks, more softly than usual, why Navani writes in her journal that she is not a scholar. Navani gives her honest answer — patronage and publicising are her work — and Raboniel tells her that if she is not a scholar, then Raboniel has never met one, and offers Navani the right to drop her titles when they speak privately. The honour is real. Navani presses while the rhythm is right: *let's negotiate*. *Treat with me. Let's set aside Odium and work together.* Raboniel declines, gently. She is not killing the Sibling — she is *unmaking* the Sibling, which she calls worse — and she is unwilling to step off the path until Odium himself is gone. Their notebook (which they have begun calling the Rhythm of War) is the most she can give. Navani hums the rhythm to her in farewell; the rhythm does not work for one voice. Raboniel smiles all the same and says she will bring her a gift.

The gift, when Raboniel returns with two nimbleform singers and oddly-cut metal plates, is music. The plates are clamped to either side of Navani's desk; the singers draw bows along their edges and the metal sings two deep, slightly rough tones at once — Honor's tone and Odium's tone, Navani recognises, in the shifted forms that work in harmony. Raboniel beats accompaniment on a small drum, a sequence that grows loud and stately, then soft and fast. *As ancient music of my kind*, Raboniel says when they stop, *I give you the title Voice of Lights, Navani Kholin. As is my right.* She bows curtly and leaves.

Navani sits at her desk feeling overwhelmed and, beneath it, hollow. What good is a title from the Fused if the tower is still bleeding and her people still cower? She gets up and walks to the back of the room and presses her forehead to the Sibling's crystal vein. *I have tried to find a way to merge spren split by fabrial creation. Please forgive me. We need you.* The voice that answers is small and almost lost: *I am cold. They are killing me.* Raboniel said unmaking, Navani answers. *Then I will die.* Spren can't die, Navani says. Gods can die. Fused can die. Spren can die — *if I am made into someone else, that is death*. The Sibling confesses to having watched a singer it would have liked to bond — a singer with the Radiants — but can no longer see through the barrier or act through it, and would have made a good bond, and is afraid, and *does not want to die*.

When the voice fades, Navani turns back to her desk to write ideas down — *anything* — and her eye falls on the abandoned coil experiment beside her. The vibrating metal plates have made the black sand on the tabletop trace patterns: one shape on the right, a different one on the left, a third where the two have mixed. The realisation comes in a single line. Stormlight and Voidlight are not merely kinds of illumination, not merely strange fluids. They are sounds. Vibrations. And in vibration she will find their opposites.