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Outside Lasting Integrity on the obsidian shore, Shallan watches with her hands on her hips as the Windrunners cheerfully solve her transport problem by Lashing Adolin's Ryshadium Gallant off the ground, Adolin still riding. The enormous black horse glows from the Lashing on top of the soft glow he carries already, working his legs through the air in slow motion. Adolin grins at her, offended by her suggestion that he could possibly leave his armoury behind: he is travelling light — ninety percent of his clothing is staying — and the two-handed greatsword strapped to Gallant's saddle weighs seven pounds, thank you. Shallan concedes she is the wrong person to weigh that complaint and pats the horse, who looks up at the sky as if he has been waiting all his life for permission to fly.

She turns to the shore between the obsidian stone and the bead ocean. Several dozen deadeyes — a mix of spren species, eyes scratched out — stand waist-deep in the beads. There were hundreds here at the height of the trial; Adolin wonders aloud whether they knew somehow what Maya was going to say. Shallan is sure they did, and is sure no one told them. A cultivationspren like Maya turns and walks out into the beads as they watch. Maya explains in her rasping voice: those who leave are returning to where they were lost. Not to wherever their bearer now stands in the Physical Realm, but to the long-abandoned places — stone, water, sunken ships — where centuries ago a Shardblade was forgotten and faded out of the world, leaving the bonded spren to wander forever. They promise Maya aloud that once this is over they will come back, find every deadeye, and try to replicate the progress she has made; Adolin starts working out, then and there, whether Navani could design a fabrial that locates them.

Adolin goes to brief his soldiers on his departure. Shallan hikes over to Vathah and his Cryptic Mosaic at the bead edge, where the Lightweaver is practising commanding the beads — sculpting a chair from them with a single bead held in his hand as model, the next step (using Stormlight to re-create a whole object on this side, what Kelek would call manifesting) still ahead of him. Shallan notes that she keeps wanting to call Vathah the former deserter and needs to stop; he has earned the present-tense version of himself. She tells him she and Adolin will fly on with the Windrunners and the horse, and the rest of the caravan will take the slower route. They settle the question of whether to bring the spren — Maya worries about being left, Shallan has felt the same from Testament, so the Cryptics and Maya and Pattern will all come. Vathah confesses he is not sad to take the longer trip; he likes this place, likes the bead work, feels his Lightweaving getting better with the extra Stormlight the Windrunners brought. He glances toward Ishnah when Shallan mentions her, and blushes. Shallan notes the change of weather with quiet amusement. Among the soldiers, Felt waves farewell — Adolin's shorter, mustached, foreign-looking elite — and she leaves the slower caravan in his hands.

The honorspren delegation comes out to see them off. Kelek is at the front, wringing his hands at the ground. Shallan offers once more to put him on the horse with Adolin and he silently declines. She gives the watching honorspren her brightest smile, the kind she figures will annoy them, and turns to go. Kelek stops her with a warning about her two bonds: with two, a mortal mind may see things it should not. Shallan answers that she has not had a healthy mortal mind in years and makes do with this one; Kelek tells her, with feeling, that he knows the feeling. She speaks then about the work, about training to see the world from many sides, about the small moments she catches — light flashing on the bead ocean in a shape that lasts a heartbeat, light reflecting in a person's eyes as if from the soul. In those moments, she says, she is at least appreciative of what she is. Kelek takes the thread and pulls: light, energy, matter, Investiture — all variations on a single essence, especially important for a Lightweaver to understand. He gestures at the honorspren — they too are Investiture, a form of light — and tells her there were once Lightweavers who could give brief substance to the things they crafted. Shallan remembers the Battle of Thaylen Field and the moments at which her illusory Radiant and Veil alter-egos felt, for a heartbeat, real.

Kelek hesitates, then offers his parting wisdom in two halves: just because something is fleeting, do not imagine it to be unimportant; and likewise, just because something is eternal — but he loses the second half of the thought as soon as he tries to say it, pulls his arms around himself, and apologises that he is not what she wanted him to be. He thanks her for not hurting him, for listening. Shallan takes the trip's tally and finds it less of a failure than it felt: Adolin made headway with the honorspren; they delivered a Radiant ambassador; she banished Formless, incorporated Veil, found the courage to tell Adolin what she had been afraid to. And, she thinks, maybe she helped Kelek a little, an old hero worn ragged by having stood too long in the wind. So she hugs him. The honorspren gasp at the impropriety of grabbing a Herald of myth, and Kelek hugs back, whispers that he wants to be better, and lets her go with tears in his eyes.

Drehy — his own honorspren beside him as a tall fashionable woman — has a glowing yellow heliodor fabrial in hand. He calls it a compass, an old design from the hidden Urithiru storehouses thanks to Bondsmith Navani and the Sibling — names that catch Shallan off-guard until he promises to fill her in as they fly. The plan: hold forty-eight degrees from the baseline for the four-hour flight to the Azimir Oathgate, where the awakened tower has talked the local gate spren into letting travellers cross. They distribute glass wind-masks, Lash the party up, and Gallant gives an excited whinny and leads, galloping in the air with Adolin standing in his stirrups grinning like a boy.

For an hour Shallan takes the wind in the face and admires her husband — the highprince and renowned swordsman who, away from the court, is one of the goofiest people she knows — and takes a Memory of him and his flying horse. Right up until the moment they are attacked.