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Renarin walks the stone-wafer crop fields ringing the base of Urithiru and is, against himself, a little nostalgic for what the tower used to be. The chill, dry air is gone — under the awakened Sibling, the field-band is humid and muggy, while a dozen yards in toward the tower the climate is comfortable again. The new lavis polyps grow inches a day; the farmers expect a crop every two months and the tower can feed itself. Out among the rows, Rlain is teaching the human farmers to interplant lavis with sugarbark between the tubers — listener-cultivated Shattered Plains strain practice, useful for the way cremlings pollinate the rows and the way sugarbark absorbs overflow from the tuber ponds. He stayed out here because the rhythms are harder to hear inside the tower since the Sibling woke; he stays even though the humans still call him *shellhead*, because the people who distrust him will starve without his advice.

Drehy lands nearby — meeting on break, Aunt Navani sending a report. Renarin receives it, drifting, and keeps glancing at Rlain. Glys in his head urges him to pay attention; he promises. Then Drehy settles against a stone workstation and asks, *want to talk about it?* — *the way you look at Rlain.* Renarin panics, then relaxes: at least now he knows what *it* is. *Is it obvious?* he asks, blushing. Drehy shrugs. *You learn to watch for guys who watch other guys.* He has no intention of prying — only wanted Renarin to know he's there. Talla, Drehy's honorspren in the form of a blue chicken, perches between them to insist she is *habitually right* rather than annoying; Drehy declines to concede the difference.

Renarin confides that Rlain isn't even human, that Aunt Navani wants grandchildren and a *normal* son, that listeners don't even court the way the Alethi do, that he can't ask, can't ever ask. Drehy does not push. He answers only as one man with one set of experiences — *no one is normal; trying to dress yourself as normal is just becoming a different kind of abnormal* — tells him that Rlain said something about being in mateform once at a Bridge Four stew that suggests this *could* turn out all right if Renarin is willing. *I know you can carry weight*, Drehy tells him as he lifts. *You did it at Thaylen Field alone.* Then he is gone back to the meeting and Renarin turns toward Rlain — and the sky goes black.

Rlain in workform-tall-with-warform's-shoulders, now able to counteract form's pull because of his bond with Tumi, hums Joy and Anxiety in turn as he watches a shimmering distortion close over Renarin across the field. Tumi confirms that the humans cannot see what is happening to him — that this is one of his visions, and that Rlain's own Enlightened bond ought to let him see it too. He hesitates, then walks across the rows to where Renarin stands staring at nothing. In a *snap*, he is inside. Stained-glass windows rise around them as if from the ground, intricate and colour-soaked, the sky black as a hand cupped over a single gemstone. *Beautiful*, Rlain says, *but very human-shaped.* Renarin turns to him in shock and joy: *you can see them*.

They walk the corridor. The first window shows Renarin enthroned in what looks like his old room in Kholinar — except the clothes are singer, Rlain tells him; he has seen too much singer cloth in the tower these last weeks not to recognise the drape. The image is a *possibility*, Renarin explains, not a foretelling — *truth is just the lie that happened*. The next, the Everstorm looming, gives them nothing they did not already know. Then Dalinar on a cliff before a glowing golden figure with the homeland crumbling into a pit behind — the *first* of his visions, or perhaps the *last*. Then a strangely peaceful image: a green field, twelve figures from many peoples — Rlain picks out a Horneater, a Makabaki, a Natan in vivid blue — distant, peaceful, the grass not fleeing them. Neither man knows who they are.

Glys separates from Renarin as a shimmering red lattice with beads of light dripping upward and vanishing, and answers a question Rlain asks about why the visions appear: there are *swells in the rhythms of Roshar*; *currents, and old gods, watch*. *Old gods*, Rlain echoes — *the Unmade?* *Older*, Glys says. *Older still than Honor, Cultivation and Odium.* The singers were already on Roshar when those three Shards arrived; Glys sees only forward; the Bondsmith sees backward; the answers will come from things older than him. The corridor goes on.

At the *end*, half-hidden in shadow, is one more window. No light shines through it. It depicts a singer-femalen face — black and red marbled, intricate-patterned, staring. Then it *moves*. The image splits into raging, vibrating multiples; the windows around them crack as her hands curl at the frame as if to push out of it. Renarin screams. The flanking windows shatter, exposing a dark wasteland; jagged glass stumps grow up and explode, but for a heartbeat Rlain can pick out images in them — burning cities, broken bodies — over a rising Rhythm of Agony and her voice repeating, *I will break it. I will break IT ALL.* Renarin seizes Rlain's hand and yanks them out in a single step. They are back in the humid field, kneeling on the stone among confused farmers, sweat running down Rlain's carapace.

*That was something new*, Renarin admits when Rlain asks; the rhythm, Rlain tells him, is Agony — one of the new rhythms only Regals and Fused can attune. *Welcome to the fun.* They lie there breathing — Rlain flat on his back, deliberately attuning Peace and counting it — and apologise to each other for the shape of what they are now sharing: Renarin for dragging him in, Rlain for asking for a spren in the first place. *You wanted to fly*, Renarin says quietly. *I'm a listener*, Rlain answers; *I never do things the way everyone does. This seems more useful than flying — if we can make any sense of it.* For the first time since the vision broke, Renarin smiles. *Still just happy*, he says, *not to be the only one.*

A shadow falls. Shallan, hands on her hips in leather armour and a white coat and matching hat, looks down at them: *Resting? Eight days until the fate of the world is decided, and you two are napping in a field?* Rlain hums Irritation. She needs their help — it involves Renarin's father, the Spiritual Realm, and a group seeking the prison of an ancient evil spren named Ba-Ado-Mishram. Rlain knows that name. She had ruled the singers long ago; she had been the queen of the gods his people forsook. And — he suspects — they have just seen her face in the vision.