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Shallan — flush with the new ability to make Radiant briefly physical — runs Abidi the Monarch through, but he ducks the follow-up and reseals around the wound. He notes coldly that her kind have learned substantiation, that he thought it forbidden them, and that Odium will want to know, then dives through the bead wall and collapses the cavern. The illusion of Radiant puffs apart in Stormlight; the bead ocean takes Shallan whole, satchel clutched to her arm. She reaches into the beads with her ungloved hand to search for a blueprint, the way Jasnah taught her — a room, an empty room, any empty room — and finds one almost at once. Suspiciously fast.

A voice she cannot place tells her in her own mind that Adolin is beneath her and to the left. She follows it, nudging the beads with Stormlight until she strikes the obsidian floor of Shadesmar and rebuilds the chosen room around them. Adolin is curled around a small pocket of air, the Windrunner swords he salvaged scattered nearby. The bead in her hand feels eager to be helpful in a way no bead ever has. She lurches dizzy into his arms and asks if he is real, confessing she's frightened she might be making him too — that her own line about reality being what she decides it to be terrifies her now that she has demonstrated it. He reassures her, and a voice — Veil's, or close enough — tells her she can trust him.

Then the beads in the wall lurch into the shape of Ba-Ado-Mishram's crowned face — the same femalen singer she once sketched and Kelek identified — and a woman's voice screams in her head, to the rhythms, that she will burn everything Shallan loves, send the humans back into the flames they crawled from. Vision blacking, Shallan feels the cavern start to come apart. Adolin slams his oversized salvaged greatsword into the bead face; it bursts apart like a struck well, and the room dissolves. She needs a sphere this time, like one of Navani's travelling fabrials. She still cannot create one without a blueprint, but she finds the bead for one with another impossible coincidence and uses it, flinging the two of them up and out of the bead sea in a half-dome vehicle.

Above, Drehy and his squires are still engaging the Heavenly Ones. The wounded squire from earlier comes streaking down trying to reach Shallan's vehicle and crashes into the beads, her Stormlight winking out. Adolin moves to jump after her; Shallan holds him back — swimming in the beads is impossible — and solidifies a twenty-foot ring of beads around the vehicle, lifting the downed squire to its rim. Abidi sees her and dives. As he lands, Shallan tries to summon Radiant again and her knees give out from the strain. Abidi dismisses Adolin as a non-threat and raises his sword for the fallen squire. Adolin deflects with the greatsword held in a half-sword grip — one hand on the hilt, one on the ricasso — then steps inside the next swing and shoves the point between two carapace plates in Abidi's side. The red light in the Fused's eyes flickers. Abidi tears free, flees ten feet into the sky, and falls back into the beads as his Voidlight gives out. Other Fused dive in; Radiant finally manifests beside Shallan, cheerfully observing that Adolin is good, and looses spear-thick arrows from a massive Shardbow that scatter the diving attackers.

Drehy and his squires regroup on the platform around the wounded one, spears up. Shallan builds a room around the whole party with the still-eager bead, sinks it under the surface, and — borrowing technique she watched Jasnah demonstrate — sets it travelling along the obsidian floor like a boat in a current. Inside, the squire drains a sapphire of Stormlight to heal, the next gemstones go unconsumed, and Shallan flops onto her back almost emptied. She locates Pattern by feel — by his mood — and Drehy and his squires reach through the room's walls to pull Pattern, Testament, Maya, and Drehy's own honorspren in from the beads.

Recovering, they ask whether Gallant is still up there. Drehy reads off his small directional fabrial, a compass that always points toward what the Sibling named the *Grand Knell, source of the Current, the death of a god*, and decides they cannot have drifted too far off the Lasting Integrity → Azimir bearing. Adolin paces, anxious; they surface a hatch and Drehy flies up to look.

He comes back grinning. They emerge near a small island and find Gallant trotting along it surrounded by an entire herd of glowing, long-necked, hair-strand-maned horse-shaped spren — musicspren, by Notum's old word for them, though the word never quite fit. When the herd reaches the edge of the bead sea, they keep running into the sky, hooves striking sparks; Gallant runs with them, perfectly unfazed by flying, as if he has done it before. Shallan sees suddenly what the faint outline that has always followed him in Shadesmar might mean: a musicspren of his own, overlapping him. The herd nuzzles him and moves off; one lingers, comes back, and — in a strange, careful moment — touches its muzzle to Adolin's hand before galloping away. Adolin cannot place where he has seen those eyes before, but he is sure he has.

Drehy points the other way. He had spotted the horses first, then a glow. Lights on the bead ocean. Hundreds of singer-crewed ships pulled by flying mandras, trailed by emotion spren in churning wakes — thousands of assault troops. Shallan hangs an illusion of a musicspren herd over them so they can scout in close, lying down lengthwise as they fly. The picture from above is unambiguous: the patrol that ambushed them was a screen for this. Drehy guesses the fleet came from the Horneater Peaks perpendicularity, months in the planning. They are sailing straight for Azimir. Adolin tells Drehy to get them to the city as fast as he can.