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Szeth embarrassingly cannot find his own family homestead from the air. The smells and the paths are right — loam, pollen, sea brine, worn dirt roads, the wooden buildings still standing — but his people have vanished, and from above the prairie is unfamiliar. His spren tells him the way is for him to find, that the rules of the quest forbid further help, and warns him to conserve Stormlight and that he is being *tested*. The Skybreakers fear Division, Szeth explains, because it is the Surge related to the burning of the human homeworld; he is forbidden it without permission. They land at a crossroads and walk.

Kaladin presses on the previous night's confession — that Szeth thinks his suffering is *deserved*. Szeth's highspren interjects that the right path is calm, logical, exact: emotion is of Odium while Honor is the path of *promises kept and words followed with exactness*. Szeth tells Kaladin he should have done the killings with cold, passionless understanding — perhaps then the whispers in the shadows would not follow him. Kaladin argues volition: *you're a person, not a bludgeon*; you make choices. Szeth holds his line — humans cannot judge good and evil, only the law can — and asks whether Kaladin himself has killed innocents. Kaladin looks away and admits the parshendi. *If you don't know the answer for yourself*, Szeth says walking past him, *how can you presume to lecture me?* That shuts him up.

Then a third voice joins the conversation — Nightblood, at Szeth's hip, asking softly whether he really killed *the nice old man who liked talking to Dalinar*. Szeth confirms: yes, Taravangian drew him, and his power consumed him. Nightblood is troubled — he is supposed to kill only evil people, and he nearly killed Szeth, who is not evil. He says his brain is metal and slow to change; only recently has he begun to *think about it*. He chats around the realisation: Vasher — whom Kaladin knows as Zahel — made him with Shashara; Yesteel was upset; he hasn't seen Yesteel *in a few weeks at least*; Vivenna is great and super grumpy, and Kaladin would like her because he is super grumpy too; and Adolin has been telling him swords don't have to kill, they can just be beautiful works of art. *Is there anyone or anything you haven't been having secret conferences with?* Kaladin asks. Syl zips in, makes herself human-size purely to roll her eyes at him, and pivots the conversation through a few quick jokes about Kaladin's grouchiness. Szeth tries not to envy the bond they share. *I'm not supposed to destroy anything that isn't evil*, Nightblood tells them. *If I'm not paying attention, who knows what could happen?*

They reach an isolated white farmhouse on the prairie. Kaladin steps inside on complaining boards, runs dust between his fingers, and feels an eerie sense of familiarity to the place: it smells like home. He opens shutters and spots one trembling green mote in a corner — a single lifespren, the first local spren he has seen this far into Shinovar. Syl cradles it on her hand and tells him it is afraid. The Wind whispers through the window: it fears *the end of all spren*. Few spren come to Shinovar anymore, Syl explains, because something *older* is here — older than the gods themselves: the Wind, the Stone, and the Night, ancient spren who were on Roshar before humans arrived. Most spren do not remember them.

From the doorway Syl watches Szeth standing silent in the yard. *He needs help, Kaladin.* They talk about the change in her since the tower. Syl confesses she imagined these last days differently — she wanted to fight, to save the world, and instead the soul of Roshar groans while they wander a prairie. Kaladin offers, stomach twisting, to find her another knight. She lifts at eye level to glare at him and tells him not to dare. She broke with her kind and crossed worlds to find him; she will not now sit out the ending because someone *worthier* is on offer. What she wants is to stay with him but learn another way of helping — to be a scribe, perhaps — and to stop *living for* him. She traces this to the occupied Urithiru weeks, when she was trying too hard for him. Kaladin hears in it the same challenge Wit put to him: who is he now that he is not leading Bridge Four? They agree to figure it out together, assuming the world survives the next seven days.

Outside, Szeth has dug something out of the dirt beside a tree: an oblong stone, a handspan long. *They put it back*, he says — *just a rock. Another meaningless stone that somehow dominated my life.* He drops it and is ready to walk to the monastery. Kaladin tries one more parallel as they hike on into the wind — *you were supposed to be a shepherd, and I was supposed to be a surgeon*, two boys swept off by the current of time. Szeth refuses the parallel: Kaladin *chose* his life. Szeth would have been happy as a dancer if not for the stonewalker raiders who sailed the nearby ocean — *though it isn't the raids I resent most. It's what their raids did to me.* And then, the night he found the stone, the raiders came, but he didn't meet one of them. He met *something else. Something worse* — opening, mid-hike, the long flashback the next chapter will tell.