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Kaladin stands at his window in Urithiru on the first morning of the month, the city two days free from Fused occupation, and notes with surprise that he feels — not great, but good. The cost is fresh: weeks in hiding, Teft's funeral the night before, and Dalinar's pact with Odium for a contest of champions in nine days that will decide the fate of Roshar. He has stepped down as head of the Windrunners, spoken his Words but accepted that Words alone are not enough — his soul needs time the way Stormlight cannot give it — and he will not be the man on the plateau when the champions meet.

Picking civilian clothes from a freshly laundered stack, he ends up reaching instead for one of the spare Windrunner uniforms Leyten keeps in his size, and notices that the Lashing he put on the wall last night to test the new conditions of an awakened Urithiru is still holding ten hours later — far longer than his Lashings normally last. The tower's Bondsmith is changing things.

Syl comes through the curtain without knocking, full human size today in a havah of deep blue with violet embroidery, and floats up to look at him over his shoulder in the mirror. They needle each other about silly faces — last time her gag involved a tentacle sprouting from her forehead — and she catches him admitting that putting the uniform back on, against his own announcement that he was finished with it, just feels right. He confesses he is afraid: more people are going to die in the next nine days, perhaps people he loves, and he will not be there. Syl forbids him to talk himself back into misery; he forbids himself, too, and tells her he is going to remember that days like this exist.

Then the wind speaks. Not metaphorically — it speaks his name, apologises to him for needing more of him, and warns that the worst storm is coming, then is gone. Syl, who had been pacing the room as if to inaudible music, felt only something on the wind. Kaladin asks her if the wind is alive; she answers that everything is.

Across the world, in Shadesmar, Shallan walks the upper edge of Lasting Integrity — the great rectangular honorspren fortress whose inside walls double as floors when one accepts the right perspective — and thinks about the different selves she has been. Two Cryptics follow her up the wall. She bonded one as a child and one as an adult, and only one of them can still string her head into living patterns.

She kneels beside the older. Testament's lines are crooked as broken twigs, scarred in the center as if someone had taken a knife to them, almost frozen — the deadeye state that ought to be the price of breaking a Nahel bond. She differs from Maya, whose strength of body shows through her deadeye torpor: spren break in different ways, the same as people. Testament takes Shallan's hand with the small strength she has left and squeezes, without judgment.

Pattern — vivid, his head spinning in clean geometric pulses — tries to comfort her. He and Testament both knew the risk when their kind chose to come back to humans. He is still alive, against his own expectations. He has been talking with Kelek, the Herald Shallan had been sent to Lasting Integrity to kill, and the two of them now believe that Shallan is, in some ragged way, still bonded to Testament. A clean cut would have left a clean break; the bond a frightened child made and broke with a Shardblade on her own mother left something jagged. That is also what made the deadeyes at the Recreance: ancient Radiants and their spren together expected a painful but survivable break, and got this instead. Pattern does not think speaking the Words a second time would heal Testament. They are walking on unfamiliar ground.

Shallan wraps her arms around Testament — whose robe bends like cloth where Pattern's is stiff — thanks her for coming to a child who needed her, promises to find a way, and stands to keep working.