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Shallan and Pattern leave Testament to rest and cross the upper wall of Lasting Integrity toward Adolin, Maya and the Herald Kelek, who are talking to a hovering ball of light a head across with an arcane symbol at its centre — what Kelek calls a seon.

As they walk, Pattern asks if her memory of Testament has returned now that Veil is gone. Shallan corrects him: Veil is not gone, but reabsorbed — moved to the back of the wagon, still coaching, no longer driving. Radiant remains nearer the front. She has not so much remembered as begun to. As a small girl she had bonded a Cryptic her mother could not abide; a stranger came to take or hurt her; her father fought him, and her mother came at her with a knife. Shallan killed her mother with a half-formed Testament as a Shardblade, rejected the nascent oaths and buried it all. Before she ever left her father's manor she had known there was a Blade in his safe and pretended she did not — pretended she needed ten heartbeats to summon it, that it answered as any Blade should.

At the railing Wit is speaking through the seon, the spren shaping itself into a soft blue-white version of his face. He confirms what they already feared: the contest of champions is set, contracts signed; nine days from now atop Urithiru. Windrunners are already inbound to ferry the Lasting Integrity party home. Adolin is confident his father will name himself the champion — when the Blackthorn wants a thing done right, he does it himself — though Adolin is uneasy about how true that is.

Shallan presses Wit on her brothers' safety; he confirms they are well. The Ghostbloods are another matter. She has finally refused them after a year and a half of strung-along not-quite-yes, and that refusal is a declaration of war. Wit promises to send her people his drawings of Mraize's crew, warns her that he knows their leader, and says they can be brutal. Shallan admits she also worries about Formless — the no-faced persona she had begun to build in her own head on the trip out, a version of herself capable of terrible things, who she walked away from but whose capacity is still there. Wit tells her that capacity is what makes choice meaningful and heroism heroism, and that he is proud of her. She remembers what she did to her mother, to her father, in part to Tyn, and now to Mraize — is it her destiny to kill every mentor she ever has? Wit does not laugh. Before he goes he leaves her a pointer: the Ghostbloods want something extremely valuable, and the key to it is standing on the wall beside her right now; she may not need to kill them all — leverage will do.

She turns that on Kelek. The Herald knows she is going to ask the question and tries to look for an exit. She wants everything he knows about Ba-Ado-Mishram. Kelek confesses he was at Urithiru when the plan to capture the Unmade was conceived, and joined the mission, and is the only one alive who knows what really happened: a small team of Radiants trapped Mishram in a flawless heliodor and Melishi hid the prison neither in the Physical nor the Cognitive but the Spiritual Realm. He does not know how. He flees down the wall before they can press further.

Maya, watching him go, says he has grown a great deal worse; she had met him before the Recreance and had never thought much of him then either. Shallan and Adolin talk through what the Ghostbloods could possibly want with Mishram. Pattern notes the obvious — power, a near-god who once bonded the singers — and floats the idea that Mraize might be trying to seize the entire enemy army by repeating the trick. Shallan resolves to find the prison first.

Pattern explains, with growing pleasure, why this will be hard: the Spiritual Realm is stranger than Shadesmar by orders of magnitude — the future blends with the present, the past strikes like a clock, distance and time stretch like repeating decimals, even gods are baffled there. Shallan makes the leap that has been forming in her: the deadeye state began the day Mishram was imprisoned, and so something deeper happened on that day — humans, Honor, spren, and bonds all entangled. Maya confirms, in halting words, that the news of Mishram's capture and a rumour that Radiants would destroy the world was what made her choose the Recreance. Whatever is now broken about the Nahel bond, the answer lies in that prison. Shallan tells Pattern they are going to the Spiritual Realm to find it. Pattern, who only yesterday boasted that Shallan would not get him killed, formally requests to withdraw the statement.