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Kaladin, still in his window in Urithiru, holds the new Towerlight and finds it calming rather than spurring him to motion the way Stormlight does. He hovers idly until a sudden clap from inside makes him flinch — only Oroden with his blocks, but his nerves now flinch at any loud noise.

In the main room his little brother is playing, and Syl joins him in the air, hopping from hovering block to hovering block. Kaladin and Syl have worked out a convention: when she colors her clothing (the violet sleeves of today's havah, say), she is visible to everyone; the uniform light blue of her old default form is for him alone. The room is busy with laughterspren — like silver minnows — and many other spren who have started showing up around the awakened tower more readily than before.

Sitting with the floating blocks, Kaladin takes inventory of who he is now. Not Dalinar's champion. Not the leader of Bridge Four any longer — Sigzil sits in the meetings he used to sit in. Behind it he hears Teft's voice in his memory needling him to keep his head up. And under both, the wind again, telling him he is what it needs.

Hesina enters, kerchief in her hair as in Hearthstone, and pushes a bowl of lavis grain and spiced crab into his hand. The mothering, embarrassing once, is welcome now. He tells her he is good, not great, worried about what is coming. They marvel at a block drifting past trailing Towerlight and at how Navani has somehow infused the entire city — warmth, equalised pressure, water that flows from the walls and changes temperature at a touch. The empty basins make sense now: their controls are the stone itself.

Syl, full human-sized in her havah, flops onto her back next to them and demands embarrassing stories. Hesina cheerfully obliges with the tale of toddler-Kaladin requiring Lirin to chase him at full speed before he would sleep. She also drags out Kaladin's childhood fascination with dungspren — which he insists was Tien's, not his. Syl, offended, asserts that as the sole living Daughter of Storms she has more interesting questions to answer. Oroden pats Kaladin's knee and consolingly tells him that poop goes in the potty and earns a treat.

Lirin arrives with a sheaf of papers — Dalinar's field medical procedures, which need a complete rebuild on basic sanitary lines. He and Hesina tease their now light-eyed son about his casual first-name use of the most powerful man in the world. Kaladin's eyes have stopped fading back to dark brown, and he is hovering an inch off the floor because air is more comfortable than stone.

Syl rests her insubstantial head on his shoulder. He asks why she is choosing the human size lately; she says her time in Shadesmar reminded her she likes being treated as a person rather than a force of nature, and she has decided to make certain people work harder to ignore her. She has also given herself a safehand glove (something she had never bothered with before) and bantered briefly about how she expects to be worshipped properly by Lunamor if they ever see him again.

The mention of Rock is a different shade of pain from Teft and from the loss of Moash — or of the man they thought Moash had been. Kaladin asks his father what the front looks like: Dalinar expects heavy casualties right up to the deadline; per the contract, whatever each side holds when the contest arrives is what they keep, so both sides are now fighting hard for unimportant ground in the Unclaimed Hills and Frostlands.

Kaladin asks the wind if this is the storm it warned of. No. Worse. The wind asks him to come to it, says he should listen to the Bondsmith. Dalinar has already asked Kaladin to travel to Shinovar in some odd company, on a duty involving the Herald Ishi; Kaladin had already resolved to go and now sees how it might dovetail.

He stands to leave, telling his parents he must find Ishi, who has gone mad — not surprising given how Taln and Ash are faring. His mother is briefly startled at how casually he uses Heralds' names; he reflects that he stopped revering people he did not know on the day Amaram branded him — god or king, they would have to earn it. Lirin, with whom he has spent so many years at odds, awkwardly embraces him: the closest he can come to admitting Kaladin has outpaced his understanding of life. Syl swaps her havah for a Bridge Four uniform with her hair in a Lyn-style ponytail, looking older than she ever has. For the first time in years Kaladin walks out the door choosing his next step rather than being shoved into it, and finds that volition — not just the morning's calm — feels great.