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A flashback. Fourteen months before the present, on the plateaus of Narak, during the night the listeners called down the Everstorm and brought the long human–listener war to its end. Venli is scrambling through the chaos she helped make.

She had imagined this night as an organised effort by her people, led by her. Instead the Weeping rains streak down through a blackened sky as humans and listeners fight across the plateaus with steel and red lightning. Beneath the screams she can hear thousands of singing voices: the listeners who have taken stormform are summoning the new storm together, building it to a crescendo. Venli does not sing. She passes a line of singers she knows, glassy-eyed and oblivious to her warnings, and feels the same impulse pulling at her — but somehow, perhaps through her long association with Ulim, she can resist it. Her own attempt to release stormform's lightning earlier had gone in wild directions and hurt no one; the glorious energy has bled out of her and is slow to return.

She hides beside a lump of rock that might once have been a building, listening to the singers behind her get cut down. Surely the other battlefronts are going better, she tells herself.

A human steps out of the rain and drives a spear at her. The point glances off the carapace mask stormform grew across her face, opens a thin slice in her cheek, and she goes down in a puddle with her hand out, pleading in his language that she is a scholar with no weapon. The human stands over her with his spear raised, then simply leaves — jogs off to join his fellows forming up against a line of glowing red eyes. Venli attunes Derision at the fool for sparing someone so important. Derision fades. She finds, to her surprise, an old rhythm of Appreciation underneath it. Some part of her still longs for the rhythms she had when she was *weak*.

She pushes on along the lip of a chasm where the fighting is at its worst, forcing herself to attune Conceit — a proud counterpart of Determination, the rhythm of someone who built all of this and stands inside her own victory. She steps past a dead Ryshadium killed by lightning, proof that at least some of her people can aim their new powers, and sees two Shardbearers duelling along the chasm rim in a patch of weak light. The listener in Shardplate is Eshonai — their last Shardbearer, the warlord her sister has become, almost unrecognisable as the femalen who had spent so long looking for a way out of this war. Venli crouches behind a broken spire to watch. Even the new Eshonai can handle a single duel; Venli would only be in the way.

She believes that until she sees Eshonai shoved off the edge of the chasm. One moment her sister is holding her own. The next she is gone. Venli watches her go and feels nothing — and the absence frightens her more than the fall. In Shardplate Eshonai can probably survive it. Venli tells herself she will go find her later, help her out of the chasm; they will attune Amusement together at the thought of a scholar trying to help in a fight between two Shardbearers. She withdraws.

Around her the battlefield decays further, and underneath the chaos she begins to sense something more terrible than a clash over the future of two peoples. Something that *enjoys* the killing. A presence that grows with the new storm, that loves any strong emotion but especially the ones that come when someone dies — and that emotion, she realises, is never stronger than at the moment of death. She crawls through what is left of buildings turned to crem until she finds a narrow fissure and squeezes in, soaked and overwhelmed, certain that if the new storm sees her it will destroy her.

Then the new storm is on her. Black, then red lightning. She lets herself attune the Rhythm of Panic — a more virulent cousin of the Rhythm of the Terrors. The wind begins to howl. *Another* wind — a highstorm — answers it. Her fingers find a Shardbearer-cut opening into one of the crem-encrusted buildings and she crawls inside. The two storms collide above her in fighting flashes of red and white, the rhythms in her head break apart, debris streams past the opening, and the ground groans. As she passes a doorway looking for somewhere deeper, the floor lurches and throws her down — and a whole section of the building, including the room she has just left, is torn away.

Pressed between two solid chunks of stone with rain whipping in through the broken wall, Venli can no longer hear the rhythms over the storms. She knows which one she would hear if she could. With everything else flayed away, she is forced to admit what the storms have stripped her down to. She is no genius forging a path for her people — everything she has *discovered* was put in her hand by Ulim. She is no queen worthy of rule — she cares for no one but herself. She is not powerful — she will always be small. As soon as she is safe again she will pretend to be those things again, and probably succeed at convincing herself. But here, in the storms, Venli has to admit what she has always been.

A coward.