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Dalinar floats in warmth. As long as he keeps his eyes closed it is *enveloping, safe* — a beautiful peace where nothing at all matters. When he peeks, the Spiritual Realm tears him from the warmth and dumps him into a chaos of his own past: a boy carrying water for grandfather, his drunken wedding night with Evi, the moment a year ago when news came of Elhokar's death, the corpse of a friend dragged across an old battlefield, a young Dalinar furious at Gavilar for standing back while well-dressed Kholinar men mocked his timid father. He understands he has lost his tether home — the perpendicularity he and Navani opened at Urithiru severed his anchor — and that without effort he will simply drift here, eyes closed, forever.

He fights the current and finds salvation in his pocket — the stone Wit gave him to tie him to the past. *Show me. Take me here.* The warmth resists; a voice that might be Honor's own power warns him *it will destroy us*. He insists. He drops onto something hard and opens his eyes to find himself kneeling among nine singers in basic clothing — a form heavier than workform, not yet warform — on a mountain pass. They call him *Moash* — an ancient name that Navani's Dawnchant research has turned up — because, as in his other visions, he has taken the place of someone from history; the vision papers over his failings (his missing rhythm goes unnoticed) and the others see him as the man whose place he holds.

He tries to leap out — slaps his hands together to open a perpendicularity homeward — and nothing happens. Wit had explained: perpendicularities do not work the other way. He checks the Navani-built fabrial clock on his bracer and finds with mounting horror that he has lost an entire day floating; the clock-tether to Wit does not let him climb home either. He keeps pace, draws a little Stormlight from the air around him — *everything here is made of Stormlight* — and treks with the singers to the lip of the pass, where below them stretches *a vast wasteland of crem*, a flat brown plain he has never seen on Roshar before. If Wit was right, this stone has brought him to the day humans arrived. The brown expanse is Shinovar.

The chase below — *chull rustlers* — is over by the time he sweats his way down. The recaptured chulls are barely more than human-sized, juveniles. He sits, draws a thread of Stormlight to ease his fatigue, and walks with the femalen of the group out to the edge of the mud. It is firmer than crem and not crem at all — *mud*, like the word for *dirty*, the strange substance the ground of Shinovar is said to be. The femalen has heard old stories of entire hunting parties swallowed; she wonders if this plain only takes you when you go farther out.

She announces it is time to make camp before the storm. *The storm.* A highstorm over Shinovar would be calmer here, he hopes, but he is anxious for Navani, still floating somewhere in the chaos. He thinks her name. A silver-cord bond latches on, like the way he pulled on Wit's rock — now he is hers. The femalen stiffens, her form melting like a Lightweaving, and Navani stands beside him in her red havah, dizzy. She felt a tug toward him she could solidify — *and others*, she says, *I think there might be someone else in here with us*. Perhaps Wit too. Perhaps the Stormfather, who exists partly in the Spiritual Realm.

Dalinar walks straight up to the singers and demands *what do you lot think of Honor, the god?* Navani hides a laugh behind her hand. *Chull in a storming glassware shop, Dalinar.* A bearded malen rises, weary: *I didn't realise they'd gotten to you, Moash.* A tall femalen, not even looking up from her work, declares that Honor did not give them the spren or the forms; those were gifts from the Origin of Songs, and *They* will return someday. Dalinar feeds her Wit's name for the maker: Adonalsium. She agrees, and names the things they should worship in the meantime — the Wind, the Stone, the spren, the life of trees, the light of day. The others grumble. *A problem with bluntness*, Navani tells him; *sometimes you cut off future opportunities.*

The sky darkens. The highstorm over Shinovar arrives not as a stormwall hurling boulders but as a strong rain — fifteen, twenty minutes of deluge, rainspren dotting the ground like candles, then softening into something almost pleasant. The singers kneel and sing — each their own words, all on the same rhythm — and Dalinar suddenly feels like an intruder. Then *something* crests the mountains: a shimmering, colourless distortion that shifts the rain and frightens rockbuds, a flowing river trailed by thousands of windspren. It breaks around Dalinar and Navani like water around two stones, and a chorus speaks in their ears. *We see you. Man from another time. Woman from a tower reborn.* Dalinar names them travellers and witnesses; the Wind confirms why they have come — to see *the arrival*. *Very soon.*

The Wind notes she is *quieter, in your time*, and losing her voice as new gods arrived. The windspren continue; she does not. She mentions *the ones you sent — Bondsmiths — the soldier and the assassin* now stand at this same place in another time. So Szeth and Kaladin are in Shinovar; that is something. Dalinar asks how to take up Honor's power. The Wind laughs. *It surrounds you, but you cannot persuade it. Honor's power is stubborn. Now, watch. It is time to see.* She flows past them onto the mudflats. A light splits the sky in the near distance, and a portal opens to another world. One on fire.