(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Formless wakes early on the morning of Adolin's final day at the trial inside Lasting Integrity and begins to dress in Veil's clothes. Adolin stirs, sees her, and asks her to become Shallan for a moment — he could use her this morning. Formless tells him Shallan is too weak; her thoughts are her own enemy and she will be of no help. Adolin tries to argue strength back into her with examples — a one-armed swordsman who was unbeatable in the only contest he could enter, a swimmer who has fought the current for hours — but Formless is impatient and walks out. She thinks she has bottled Veil safely away. From somewhere deep inside, Veil tells her not to dare use her name.

She slides the cube, Mraize's knife, and her sphere of Stormlight into her pockets, sketches the floor plan of the High Judge's home from memory, and gathers her tools. Veil keeps whispering — *you aren't a new persona, you wouldn't be able to draw like that if you were* — and Formless tries to wall her off. Pattern, in the next room, asks softly what she is doing; she hisses that he is the last person fit to lecture her about right and wrong, and he shrinks into the corner. He stammers that he has spoken to Wit and been told to tell her that they trust her, that she deserves to be loved. She tells him to wait in the room and cover for her.

She draws Stormlight and Lightweaves herself into Lusintia, the honorspren who has been her shadow, and lets her satchel become a honorspren cloth bag. She crosses the south plane of the fortress at the quiet hour, makes her way up to the High Judge's quarters under the battlements, and waits until no one is watching before stepping to the door. The plan is simple: Soulcast the doorknob to smoke, slip into the cluttered storage room beyond, knife Kelek in his lit study, then take his place at the trial.

At the last moment, Radiant speaks from where she has been pinned. *I killed Ialai.* She saw the poison Shallan had hidden in her satchel; she stepped in and did it herself so Shallan would not have to — to prevent the very thing happening to her now. Formless freezes, then forces herself on. The knob vanishes under her touch; the room beyond is packed with stacked furniture and dusty letters and a small glass chicken on the windowsill. She closes the door and draws Mraize's knife.

A cold breeze cuts through her and her Stormlight is suddenly gone. Veil is standing behind her. There is no fourth persona, Veil tells her, not yet — by naming the part of her that wants to tuck the pain away, Shallan has nearly made it real. *You're running again. You think you don't deserve Adolin or your place as a Radiant; you think if you become the thing the darkness whispers you are, your friends will leave you before you can leave them — and you'll be free of having to choose.* Formless dissolves out of Shallan like smoke and leaves her standing alone, trembling.

Shallan insists she is too weak. Veil gives her Adolin's answer back: the strongest swimmer is the one who has fought the seas; the strongest mind is the one whose own thoughts have always betrayed her. *You have fought this fight every day of your life, Shallan. You are not weak.* Shallan flings at her the worst things she knows about herself: that she killed her own father with her own hands, that she killed her mother with a Blade she had not meant to summon — her mother's green eyes burning to coal, her own voice screaming, begging to take it back. Veil does not look away. *You have borne that for a year and a half. You kept going. You were strong enough. You made the oath.*

Then Veil tells her there is one more thing she has been carrying for her — and asks her to take it back. Shallan takes her hand, and the memory floods in. A small child playing in her family's gardens. A Cryptic who came to her there, who could talk, who dimpled the stone where she moved and laughed with her in their hidden place between the foliage. A first true friend, who encouraged her to become strong enough to help her family against the darkness in it. And that companion had not been Pattern. A different Cryptic. One who…

Shallan falls to her knees. She sees the rest. In a sudden wash of Stormlight the room around her becomes the lush garden again, vines and pink and red shalebark, the hidden place — and a younger Shallan crying out the words to her Cryptic that she did not want her, that she hated her, that she had never existed. She remembers the ripping. She killed her own first spren. She broke her first oaths. Veil tells her it will hurt — she protected her too long; she is sorry — and that she has no strength Shallan does not. *We are me.* Veil becomes pure white Stormlight and her memories and skills fold quietly back into Shallan. Her last whisper as she fades: *Did I do well?* Shallan thanks her, and she puffs away.

Shallan also remembers, now without flinching, the needle she had hidden in her satchel for Ialai — and the long shape of her growing certainty that she did not belong with Adolin and the Radiants and needed to invent another way out. Then the study door opens, and Kelek is standing there with his wispy hair and weary eyes, asking whether she is the one sent to kill him. She lays the knife on a table and tells him she is the one *sent*, by someone who did not realise she would be strong enough to say no. He picks up the knife in timid fingers and asks if it is the same as the one used on Jezrien. She does not know; she names the Ghostbloods as those who wanted it used on him. He says *Old Thaidakar* has wanted his secrets for a long time, mutters that perhaps he should wait, that he feels close to finding a way offworld. She offers a trade — her information for him stopping the conviction of her husband.

The door slams open. Honorspren crowd in led by the real Lusintia, demanding to know whether Shallan is colluding with the judge. Kelek covers for her — she is bringing him news from the Physical Realm — and orders them out of his quarters. They stop, then look over their shoulders at Sekeir, the elder who acted as prosecutor on the first day. *I think, Honored One,* Sekeir says quietly, *that you are having another bout of your weakness.* They will have to sequester him. For his own good.