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Rlain and Dabbid are stopped at the last guard post above the basement steps. Rlain is in warform with his slave tattoo painted out to blend with his skin pattern, carrying a small water barrel as cover for the descent to Navani; Dabbid hangs close to him, frightened. A femalen singer guard — not Fused, not a Regal, just a worker — chides him for doing axehound's work and tries to recruit him into her squad, which is hard enough to refuse. When her companion recognises him as the listener pulled from prison by Raboniel's Voice, the tone changes. Rlain insists they are not traitors — Venli is Raboniel's Voice — but the femalen will not let him go down to the human queen without confirmation. Four of them lead him and Dabbid step by step the wrong direction. If the Sibling wants him down there, Rlain thinks, it will have to find another way.

In the atrium, the duel has become an arena. Singers have cleared most of the civilians and lined the walls with soldiers, leaving only the window side open; Heavenly Ones hover above to judge. Kaladin keeps using Navani's gauntlet to yank himself out of every grapple, projecting strength he is starting to actually feel. The Pursuer, rattled, ejects his second body to chase him as a ribbon; Kaladin seizes him out of the air as he re-forms. The highstorm hits the great window with a fury barely audible inside, and the room dims to spheres alone. They wrestle, and this time the Pursuer offers no taunts — only tries to get a hold on Kaladin's head, knowing his healing is broken. Kaladin makes the speech the watchers are meant to hear: he has lived every day with death hounding him, and the Pursuer has never met an enemy who does not fear him. He raises his boot knife. The Pursuer panics and shoots away as a ribbon, materialising a short distance off in his fourth and final body — the vulnerable one. *I am death itself, Defeated One*, Kaladin tells him from atop the spent husk, *and I have finally caught up to you*.

Venli forces her way to the front of a mob blocking the central corridor and finds about a hundred of the Pursuer's soldiers — plus some of Raboniel's personal guard she recognises from Leshwi — holding a perimeter around the duel. She presents herself as the Voice of the Lady of Wishes and is reluctantly let through. She came expecting to head off Rlain's rescue; instead she finds that what she wants, genuinely, is to help — for the songs of the stones and the whispers of the ancestors, not because Timbre is pushing her. She locates Leshwi hovering quietly and crosses to her. *This looks bad for Stormblessed,* Venli whispers. Leshwi disagrees: the Pursuer has used all his husks and must flee — yet has not, because of the wall of soldiers, the perched Fused, and the silent, painted humans watching him through the gaps. A soldier seemingly in complete control, and beside him a Fused who somehow looks small.

In the infirmary Teft dances backward through the rows of unconscious Radiants, unwilling to engage Moash's Honorblade directly, buying time. Lift stirs and begins crawling on her ruined legs toward another fallen Radiant to heal them; Teft keeps Moash's attention by needling him about peace and treason. Moash insists his sergeant routine is cowardice. When Phendorana appears as a distraction, Moash casually swings his Blade through the face of an unconscious Radiant on the floor — her eyes burn out — and turns the threat onto Lift to force Teft to engage. He does. The feint fails; Moash sidesteps, trips him, kicks him in the side hard enough to crunch ribs that will not heal. Beneath Moash's descending Blade, Teft raises his hands and feels Phendorana in harmony with him. *Teft was forgiven. Teft was close.* A phantom spear shaft barely coalesces between his palms, throws sparks under the Blade, and holds.

Then Moash does not lunge at Teft again. He pulls the raysium dagger Raboniel gave him and drives it down into Phendorana where she kneels beside Teft. She looks up in surprise, screams, shrinks, and her essence flares outward like a burst of light. Something deeper than Teft's heart tears away. He collapses near the white patch in the black sand that is all that remains of her. *I cannot feel sorrow anymore, Teft,* Moash says, methodically tucking the dagger away. *For that I am grateful.* He turns Teft over with his foot and admits aloud what this was really for — that he had always resented how eagerly Teft followed Kaladin, and that he had thought he would have to use Kaladin's father but is satisfied to have found something better. *You are a monster.* *I am no monster. I am merely silence — the quiet that eventually takes all men.* Teft, clawhanded in his agony, looks up and answers: *you can kill me, but you can never have what I have, because I die knowing I am loved.* Moash grunts, drops him to the ground, and runs him through the neck with the Honorblade. Confident, and somehow still full of hope, Teft dies.