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Seven and a half years before, twelve-year-old Kal perches on a low ridge of boulders east of Hearthstone with Laral — the citylord's daughter, bright pale-green eyes and gold-streaked black hair — walking the edge above him. He tells her his father wants to send him to Kharbranth at sixteen to train as a surgeon. Laral wants him to become a soldier, to win a Shardblade; she points east at the Origin across the lavis polyp hillsides and the dead snarlbrush under the markel trees and reminds him that Alethkar's noble heritage was forged here in the stormlands. Kal does not know what he wants — only that the dark eel of melancholy keeps coiling inside him and that everything feels heavy.

Tien, picking rocks at the base of the boulder, calls him down to show him something. They join a knot of older boys watching Jost practice with a quarterstaff his soldier-father gave him. Kal asks to try a round. For one bright instant the staff fits his hands; then he freezes against Jost at the close of the bout and takes a blow to the side. He begs Jost to teach him in exchange for working his afternoons. Jost refuses — Lirin would skin him for putting calluses on a surgeon's hands — and tells Kal to go be what he is, that Jost will do the same.

Kal lies on the stone afterwards trying not to cry. Tien sits down behind him, lays a small stone on the ground, and slips away. Kal eventually picks the rock up — Tien's second smiling-face find — and walks back toward Hearthstone, his side smarting. At home he finds Lirin sitting alone in the darkened surgery with his spectacles in his lap. Brightlord Wistiow has been carried by the winds. The citylord is dead; with no son, the village waits on Kholinar to appoint a successor. Wistiow's last act was to leave the surgery's loan-globe of broam spheres to the Lirin family as tuition for Kal to apprentice in Kharbranth. The decision is sealed. Kal walks back out onto the steps with Tien's stones in his pocket and the memory of one bright moment with a wooden staff singing to him in an otherwise constricted world.