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Returned from the Stormfather's vision and still flying with the Windrunners toward Tukar, Dalinar feels clunky and slow after having been the winds themselves. He cannot influence this lesser flight; he is little more than an arrow propelled by another's power. Beneath them the coast is a denuded landscape of depopulated camps, but Ishar's pavilion remains, ringed by about a hundred soldiers in dark-blue hardened cuirasses. Sigzil insists on landing first to parley. He is met by Ishar himself — a man Shalash had described as bold, energetic, no scholar — and returns to report that the Herald claims to be the Almighty reborn, waiting for Odium's champion to come and fight him for the end of the world. Sigzil thinks Dalinar is the champion he expects. Dalinar descends anyway.

Ishar is a warrior in ardent's robes, his stance and forearms unmistakable. He names Dalinar champion of Odium and refuses to hear him; he is Tezim, first man, Herald of Heralds, sole bearer of the Oathpact, who will absorb Odium and become Adonalsium reborn. Dalinar passes on Ash's plea about Taln and tells him Jezrien is truly dead — Ishar wavers at the names, then summons a Blade. Szeth recognises it: the Bondsmith Honorblade, his father's sword. He demands to know where Ishar got it. Ishar steps forward to strike.

In the Breakaway, Rlain's band of humans and singers — slowed by gathering families, by the unconscious Radiants, by the wounded — is overtaken before they reach the front of the tower. Stormform lightning-cracks scatter the marketgoers; Deepest Ones rise from the floor and dozens of stormforms march in. Leshwi lands beside Rlain and tells him the approaching rhythm is the Rhythm of Executions: these are not Raboniel's troops but Odium's, and her return to Braize will be torment. They will fight. Rlain asks Venli whether other spren might want a singer like him; Timbre answers through her that he is already spoken for. The room goes dark, then crystal blooms from his feet like stained glass — a window showing a figure rising in blue Plate and a tower coming alight. A voice tells him to keep fighting and to speak the Words. *Bridger of Minds*, the spren calls him.

Sigzil blocks Ishar's first stroke and the five Windrunners gang the Herald, but Ishar moves with the grace of millennia, skepping his Blade through their parries and parrying with one finger along the unsharpened edge. He is, the Stormfather notes drily, average among the Heralds — Taln was the best. Then Ishar rushes Sigzil, touches him on the chest, and trails a glowing rope to the stones; the Windrunners' Light starts pouring into the ground as if the rock were their own bodies. One by one all five are tethered, stumbling, draining. Szeth has fallen to his knees, staring at the Honorblade. Dalinar slams his fists together between the realms and opens a perpendicularity, flooding his Radiants with Light. Ishar drops his Blade and steps into the white silence, asks how Dalinar opens Honor's path, and then — when Dalinar pleads for him as teacher — reaches to take the Stormfather's bond and the Connection to Odium for himself. A black shape cuts through the cord. Szeth has drawn Nightblood, and the sword consumes the perpendicularity's light into its own darkness. When the two Blades meet the Honorblade is chipped — something Dalinar has never before seen on Honor's weapons. Ishar opens his own perpendicularity, calls Dalinar by name with sudden clarity and warns that his sanity slips; he can be lucid briefly after an Ideal is spoken near him, and he can reset the Oathpact, but he must be sane to do it. Come to me in Shinovar. Then the champion-of-Odium rant returns and the Herald walks his soldiers into Shadesmar.

At the crystal pillar, Navani and the Sibling create Light — Light that drives Moash back along the corridor, that heals her wound, that wakes fabrials. Navani inhabits the tower as a body of garnet veins and sees thousands of doors and mechanisms the scouts had missed. She proposes to vent Raboniel's Voidlight by inverting it with the anti-Voidlight tone, using the plate on Raboniel's desk as the model. She notices Kaladin flying inward, wrapped in spren as armour at his Fourth Ideal, and flashes lights on the walls to draw his attention. When he touches a crystal vein she answers as the Sibling and redirects him to the Breakaway.

In the atrium Adin grips a borrowed spear beside a Heavenly One in carapace. The stormforms charge with crackling red lightning. Dabbid steps in front of him. A stormform's spear thrust to Adin's chest *clinks* short — he is in glittering blue Shardplate, kicks the singer twenty feet into a wall, then the Plate flies off as windspren to Dabbid, then to the lead Heavenly One, then up to Kaladin Stormblessed hovering above with a Shardspear, brilliant as the sun. He brings word from the Sibling: they do not remember inviting these in, and they are this house. Light runs up the walls; the very mountain trembles; Deepest Ones lock screaming into the stone; Heavenly Ones drop from the air; stormform lightning dies; and the fallen Radiants on the floor begin to stir. Kaladin offers the enemy safe passage if they will carry a message back to Odium.

Dalinar lingers above the empty camp in case Ishar returns, then takes a small team into the pavilion. Sheets cover slab tables. The first body is a Natan man with a clean surgical incision. A second is half a Cryptic, soft black flesh and impossible physiology. Another is a tangle of vines that was a cultivationspren. The Stormfather makes him return to the first; the pale blue-white skin and matching clothing, he realises, are an honorspren — Vespan, he names him. Spren do not have bodies. Spren do not die. Sigzil finds a ledger in Azish: an experiment log by spren type with survival times in minutes, notes flagging honorspren as the most stable and Cryptics and ashspren as physiologically impossible. The Stormfather calls the place an abomination and demands they leave.

Above the awakening tower, Moash Lashes through hallways and out the front gates as Navani's light pursues him. The anti-Voidlight tone has broken his Connection to Odium; pain he had given away returns — he killed Teft. He cannot say he is sorry. He slams blindly into something hard in the air and falls into snow on the mountainside, his vision burned away. A few Heavenly Ones who fell from the sky when the tower came alive find him, give him Stormlight and carry him to a small camp of refugees. Odium's gift lifts his guilt away and his spine knits — but no amount of Stormlight returns his sight.