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The highstorm hits Kaladin head-on where he hangs from the Bridge Four barrack roof, and the first stormwall rips him off the wall into the wind. He flaps once at the end of his ankle-rope and crashes back against the stone, clings somehow to the iron roof-ring his feet are tied to, and lies face down across the lashing rain with the dun skymark Teft gave him cupped in his curled hand. Syl stands on his chest with her hands flung forward as if she could split the air for him. Stones the size of fists hammer the wall; he tastes blood and rain.

In the very worst of it the world goes silent and black, and a vast inhuman smiling face the breadth of a thunderhead appears in front of him — looking back at him out of the storm itself with something that is not pleasure and not malice but interest. A chill rolls all the way down his spine. The sphere in his hand bursts unbidden to sapphire flame, light blooming between his fingers. Then the storm is back, screaming. He passes out clutching the ring with the storm still tearing at him.

Rock is first out of the door after the riddens, before the lull has fully settled. Teft follows on aching knees, telling himself the whole way out into the wreckage of the lumberyard that he does not believe what they are about to find. The body hanging upside down from the barrack roof looks like skinned meat — and then Kaladin's eyes snap open. He blows bloody spit. The sphere drops out of his hand into a puddle of stormwater. Teft kneels in the puddle and finds the sphere lying there. It is dun. *An empty sphere after a storm, and a man alive who should not be. Two impossibilities — together they bespeak something more impossible still.* Teft bellows for a ladder and a knife. The watching soldiers mutter, but no one stops them: Sadeas's own ruling consigned Kaladin to the Stormfather's judgement, and the Stormfather has spoken.