(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Kalak picks his way across a charred battlefield of red rock and broken bodies somewhere on the edge of the world. The light is dim and the air smells of scorched stone and dying spren. He stumbles past the carcass of a thunderclast the size of a small hill, its red-spot eyes fading slowly out, its stone-fingered hand crushed around a shattered honor-banner. The dead are everywhere — men and women he has fought beside and lost track of through a hundred deaths of his own. He walks because if he stops he will not start again.

He climbs the rocky outcrop where his Brethren have gathered. There are nine of them, including Jezrien who waits at the front of the group with the same tired patience he has worn for centuries. Kalak tells them, plainly, what he has come to say. He cannot go back. He has died so many times that he has lost count, and each return to the place of torment between Desolations has eaten through more of him. He fears that one more death will finish him. The Heralds talk through it, not for long. They reach the decision they have been circling for a long time without naming. They will set down the burden of the Oathpact and walk away.

One after another they pull free their Honorblades and drive them point-first into the rock of the outcrop. Nine swords stand in a ring when they are done — one place left deliberately empty, for the tenth of them, whom the rest have agreed in silence to abandon to the torment alone so that the nine of them can be released from it. Before they part, Jezrien tells the others that they owe the world a story to live on: that the Heralds won this Desolation, that the war is finished, that humanity may rest. The truth is otherwise. The lie is what people will need.

Kalak watches Jezrien go. He drives his own Blade into the rock beside the others and turns the opposite way. Before he walks off the outcrop he cannot keep himself from looking once at the empty place in the ring where the tenth sword should stand. He asks forgiveness, silently, of the one they have left behind, and then he goes.