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Kaladin flies up the great atrium of Urithiru with Syl beside him, past blood that has not quite been scrubbed off and balconies broken two days before. He remembers the last time he flew this corridor — the night after Teft's murder, when he killed the Pursuer in a poisoned rage — and the man he became then still scares him. Painspren like severed hands leap from the balconies as he passes. He banishes the memory, lands on a high floor, and notices a glow in a nearby room. Syl whispers Navani's name, shrinks to her old uniform light blue, and zips off; the bonded Bondsmith is intoxicating to spren in the awakened tower.

Outside Dalinar's meeting room Kaladin finds Wit sprawled across the new couch reading a novel and chuckling at fictional courtships, a hovering ball of glowing spren beside him. Dalinar is overrunning his meeting again. Wit greets Kaladin as his favourite flute thief, runs the lost-versus-stolen joke as far as he can, then produces a second flute lacquered red and announces he is teaching Kaladin to play. After their negotiated round of mock pleading, Kaladin takes the flute. Over the next hour Wit drills him in fingerings, reading music, and the simple problem of breath, and at the end Kaladin manages a breathy first line of a song he half-remembers — not enough to draw a musicspren, but enough to feel he has climbed a mountain. Syl peeks in and recognises the tune.

Wit tells them what it is: one of the rhythms of Roshar made into a song that guided humans across the void to this world — older than Syl's gods. Kaladin remembers that the first time Wit played for them, on the Shattered Plains, the sound seemed to come back to him after the song ended. Wit denies doing anything special and asks who else was listening. The wind, Kaladin realises. Wit confirms it: when Roshar was made, Adonalsium left something behind on it, sometimes called the Old Magic (a name now often attached to the Nightwatcher instead). The Wind is older than Honor, Cultivation, or Odium — weaker than she once was, but she has seen so very much. If Kaladin listens to her, she will listen to him.

The two of them turn, by stages, more serious. Wit admits something has been wrong for several days that he cannot name. He launches into a small sermon — first on art, that every society on every planet he has visited makes it because it is part of being a person; then on hope, which he insists is wonderful but only if held as a virtue (something valuable even if it pays nothing) rather than as transaction. He attacks the Passions for the inverse — the doctrine, anciently derived from Odium's teaching, that wanting hard enough will move the cosmere. Angerspren boil out around his feet as he describes a starved child he once fed on a road behind a battlefield in a kingdom that no longer exists. The Passions, he says, are a doctrine designed to let the comfortable explain other people's suffering as a failure of caring. He credits the formulation of hope-as-virtue to the writings of someone who once lost everything he believed and began again: he hopes one day to meet Sazed.

Then he gives Kaladin his orders. Dalinar will send him to Shinovar hoping Ishar can help with the contest of champions; Ishar cannot, Wit says flatly, but Kaladin needs to go anyway — this is the last part of his journey, and along the way he must practise the flute until the sound returns to him, because that will mean Roshar is listening. He confirms what he has been talking around: Kaladin is not coming back to fight at Dalinar's side. He cannot be optimistic enough to believe even one of them will survive what is coming; immortality, he says, does not go as far as it once did.

When Kaladin asks for words of wisdom, Wit tells him only that everything he has done has prepared him for this; that life has been hard, so he is working under familiar constraints. He compares the work in Shinovar to inventing the world's first therapist (none of them yet know the word). And before he goes he does the thing he has never done: extends his hand and lets Kaladin take it. He thanks Kaladin for the inspiration, says he was first drawn to him because he gave himself a second chance, and tells him to find out who he is when he is not needed to save or to kill anyone — a question Kaladin cannot yet answer, and is sent off to answer.

Kaladin asks the question both of them are circling: will I ever see you again? Wit declines to answer it as a goodbye, calls it an extended period of necessary separation in which he will be composing the perfect insult, and asks Kaladin to do him the favour of imagining how wonderful it would have been if it never gets delivered. He raps on the meeting-room door. Dalinar opens it grumbling that he has been waiting an hour. Wit walks away whistling and tells Kaladin, over his shoulder, that this time he will tell his own story — and if he is lucky, the Wind will join in.