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Shallan's Court team — minus Vathah and Ishnah, still stuck in Shadesmar — spends a few hours planning, then queues up at an Oathgate outside Urithiru hidden inside a transfer of reinforcements bound for Narak. She is more terrified than she will admit aloud. Mraize and Iyatil have read her before; the Ghostbloods do not bid for kingdoms, they bid for worlds, and what frightens her is not what she expects them to do but everything she is still too ignorant to expect.

Narak is a fortress now — the Oathgate platform widened with Stoneward work, central plateaus walled and crenellated. She and the team — Gaz, Red, Darcira, and the Riran Lightweaver Jayn she recruited eight months earlier — cross to Narak Four, present Darcira-forged orders at the gate, change Lightweavings to the faces of crem scrapers, and start chiseling a road outside the Ghostblood safehouse so they can talk under cover of work. Jayn reports a half-dozen arrivals already, every one of them searched at the porch by a short masked guard with a jar of black sand that turns white at any intelligent spren or Lightweaving. Shallan takes a Memory of an Azish vizier from Hoid's sketches as he goes in. The team's spren ride under their clothes. Shallan floats the kill-switch question — last chance to back out — and Red, in a sentence Gaz complains is dangerously close to wisdom, points out that no one ever feels ready, only that it needs doing. *Prey can only ever run*, Shallan says, quoting Mraize back at himself; the team commits.

Three floors up at Urithiru, Sigzil tries to be Kaladin in front of monarchs and generals he is suddenly meant to command. Vienta whispers to him invisibly that he survived Bridge Four and can survive this; *live that truth*. He talks logistics with Prince Kmakl and the Windrunner scribe Ka — Fused reborn endlessly, singer foot-troops thrown at the Thaylen walls like bait, Skybreakers redeploying off the broken blockade — and decides where to set Windrunner companies on each front. He fingers his old Bridge Four uniform and the Bridge Four tattoo on his forehead and admits to himself it is what he has instead of a self; without Kaladin, Rock, Teft, Moash, he is not sure Bridge Four still is. Then Vienta's words come back: he is in command at the Shattered Plains now, and he is going to start acting like it. He tells Ka he has an unusual idea for the Narak defence. They look around for the Mink — and the little Herdazian has vanished from the room.

Jasnah follows Dalinar, Navani, and Queen Fen into a side chamber that the awakened Sibling has grown over with vines, lifespren and a fake skylight: *a room for my sister, the Nightwatcher, if she ever visits*. Ivory murmurs that he had heard of such rooms but disbelieved them. Jasnah probes the Sibling on chronology — when were they created, when the Nightwatcher — and gets answers that do not square with the Stormfather's. The Sibling is six thousand years old, born of Stone, sibling to the early Wind and a now-departed Night; both of those siblings have been replaced by beings the Sibling no longer recognizes. Jasnah tucks the inconsistency away for the Veristitalians later.

Dalinar then opens what he came to say: he is not ready to fight Odium, and he means to seek Honor's power. Wit slips in with snacks and an offended smile, and confirms the shape: each god is a slice of a greater entity killed ten thousand years ago, Honor is bonds-that-keep and Odium is wrath without mercy, and the power of Honor is in the Spiritual Realm where Dalinar's visions already touch. Cultivation visited him on the way to the meeting, in her human shape, and steered him there: *expand your understanding, not your powers*. Jasnah hates it. She floats renegotiation with the new Odium — even letting him off-world; Wit flinches and refuses to free him onto the cosmere. Dalinar insists the contest alone will not be enough; *bring a six-man army against tens of thousands, you lose*. Ascending to Honor is the equalizer he is willing to consider.

Wit hears something behind the stacked tables, throws a bowl, and a tablecloth says *eep*. Lift climbs out — and so, embarrassed, does the Mink, who admits he came in through the vents. He had expected to overhear an assault plan on Alethkar — because, he points out to a stilled room, the contract loophole that lets Odium take whole kingdoms by their capitals also lets the coalition do the same. Jasnah sees it before Dalinar does, and sees the bind: Kholinar is too deep and too fortified to be reached in eight days. The Mink then plays his real card — Herdaz is barely garrisoned since the collapse of his rebellion, and Dalinar swore an oath. He puts the tattered banner on the table. Dalinar, over Jasnah's exasperated objection that committing fifty Windrunners to ferry the Mink's personal army across the continent is the kind of move that earns one a place among the ten fools, says yes.

Lift sucks down the rest of the snacks while they argue, then pivots to her own demands — *gonna become a god, Dalinar? Real deevy. Fix toes. Make porridge taste like meat.* Navani reminds her that the Almighty is currently distracted by being dead. Dalinar sits up sharply, looking skyward; Ivory whispers to Jasnah that the Stormfather has overheard the conversation about Honor and is not happy. Dalinar excuses himself, and the room waits for the spren's anger to land.