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In the open-air forum at the top of Lasting Integrity, Shallan finally lets herself draw for a few hours, a bright blue havah in place of travelling leathers. The chosen subject is the vertigo of looking up along the fortress's inside walls — an intentionally surreal perspective, the kind she likes to imagine the old surrealists must have caught from contact with Shadesmar. She is pleased with the falling sense she has captured. Less pleased that, on every sheet from today's session, a singer face she did not consciously draw has crept in — feminine, crownlike carapace, shadows arranged in stratalike curves. She remembers the same thing happening at Urithiru when an Unmade was loose in the tower.

Adolin paces the forum floor with the lanky Edgedancer Godeke and her own people — Ishnah, Vathah, Beryl and their Cryptics — waiting for the Windrunners and for whatever the call to arms in Lasting Integrity will bring. The answer is twelve. Twelve honorspren out of a population of hundreds step forward and begin to fade — not vanishing in a blink, as Notum expected, but ebbing slowly out of Shadesmar toward Urithiru and the squires training there.

Notum climbs up to sit with Shallan — the only one of the twelve who has not yet joined them. He addresses her as Radiant Kholin, the title still strange to her a year after the wedding; Dalinar and Navani had wanted her adopted into the line for pragmatic reasons of succession, but what she remembers is the first day in her life that any parents had wanted her. He reports the count and admits he is reluctant to bond a human. Shallan — knowing better than most what a Nahel bond costs — tells him it is neither petty nor cowardly to say no, that he can be a good man and refuse. He elects to stay at Lasting Integrity a little longer to lobby other honorspren and perhaps recover the abandoned navy on the bead ocean; she resolves not to mention his near-bond to Dalinar in any report. He thanks her — he had watched Adolin rise battered in his defence against Tukari thugs with no expectation of reward, and in that moment knew that Honor lived. Lusintia, her guide through the fortress, does not appear.

Returning to her sketchbook, Shallan finds she has drawn another face into Adolin's shadow. She refuses to be afraid of her own art and turns the page — to find Kelek sitting beside her, small and fragile. He has come to tell her he will not be going with her. He cannot leave the seon and the seon is not well enough to travel. Shallan does not argue. He asks if she will release Mishram if she finds the gemstone; he cannot decide. He has advocated her freedom and now fears she will join Odium; Ishar holds that all Unmade should remain contained, yet what they did to the singers by trapping her — He cannot decide. He confesses that he fears options. Shallan tells him she will bring the gemstone to the Bondsmith and let everyone decide together.

She sketches him as she talks, attracting odd creationspren that begin imitating her pencil and eraser instead of the usual changing shapes. She gives Kelek the finished drawing — a tall man in foreign robes carrying an odd-headed staff, walking from a city of coloured walls and long-fronded trees toward a glowing horizon, looking back with a decisive face. He asks her how often she does this. Sketching? she answers. No, Kelek says: drawing on Fortune. Pulling forth one of someone's possible selves into the world. He notes that she has two spren, that strange things happen when the Nahel bond is imbricated, that there were rules against such doublings once, and asks how often she glimpses the Spiritual Realm in her art. Shallan thinks of the sketch found in a dead man's pocket, of the Unmade hovering in her Urithiru pages, of the face haunting today's sheets — and identifies it. Kelek confirms: one interpretation of Mishram. Surfacing because Shallan has been thinking of going to find her. He calls Fortune fantodic — unnerving — apologises for an out-of-date word, and refers her to Midius (her Wit) as the real authority. He folds the page carefully into his pocket, unlacquered, and she does not protest.

The Windrunners arrive over the wall — five of them, trailing windborne spren — and land in the forum. Drehy makes a palanquin joke at the expense of his squire Shiosak, a handsome Veden who long-sufferingly accepts being called dropped-as-a-child. Five Windrunners are not enough to fly everyone home; Adolin's soldiers and some of her agents will take the slower boat route back. Adolin arrives grinning, runs the same math she has, and reaches a not-quite-identical conclusion — his first question to Drehy is how many of them it will take to fly his horse home.