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Shallan surfaces from the same drifting warmth Dalinar did — colors mixing around her, images of selves she has been bleeding past — and pulls free into a recognisable room. Her leather armor and the Anti-Light dagger she stole from the Ghostbloods are still on her, but the colors here are wrong: every object's light splits into cyan, magenta, and yellow, like a Thaylen printer's misregistered plate. The lavish room with its wooden fortress and toy Shardbearers turns out to be a memory: Renarin's childhood bedroom in Kholinar, reconstructed by Glys feeding on his memories.

Pattern arrives full-sized, with Testament behind him, hand on his shoulder. He greets her cheerfully, gets distracted lining the wooden soldiers into a perfect three-dimensional pyramid, and leaves Testament silent by the wall. Renarin and Rlain follow in their physical bodies; Rlain looks taller than Kaladin in warform, with a short beard, orange-red skullcap of carapace, and a vulnerable glance at Renarin for reassurance that lands on her hard. Both spren — Glys in his red-fog mistspren body with a swirling void where his crystalline mask should be, and Rlain's Tumi in matching shape behind him — appear more solid than the room.

Shallan apologises for dragging the two of them into this. Rlain shrugs it off — if Iyatil and Mraize are hunting Mishram's prison, then Odium does not need another of his old gods loosed — and notes that Mraize's profile matches the man who captured Lift in Azimir and gave her to the enemy as a gift. Renarin explains the place: a *staging area* their spren can dress up out of his memories, but it cannot show them anything new, since Glys is reading from him rather than from the Connections and tones of the Spiritual Realm. Shallan thinks again that she has always underestimated him.

They sketch the situation. Mraize and Iyatil want the Unmade's prison; Dalinar — and probably Navani — are in here for different reasons, and Shallan admits she overheard that Dalinar is hunting the power of Honor to exploit it. Rlain dryly tells Renarin his father is an *impressively ambitious* person. Renarin, steadying, decides they need to find the prison first.

Their spren reject that plan, urgently. Glys and Tumi step further into the shadows of their Radiants: in the Spiritual Realm they are visible to the gods themselves, and the Enlightened are abominations to all of them. Honor's power, Odium, Cultivation — every god will hate them on sight. They have to move in secret behind illusions; the assassins will be doing the same, hidden inside the visions, following Dalinar and Navani toward the Bondsmith Connections that lead to Mishram's prison. Renarin reframes the goal — they do not actually need to find the prison; they only need to stop Mraize and Iyatil from finding it. Pattern approves enthusiastically: *Shallan is good at murder. Very good at it.* He corrects himself, prim, to *making people who were once alive and threatening, unalive and unthreatening*.

Renarin commits — Mraize and Iyatil sided with the enemy and attacked his cousin Jasnah — and assumes Shallan will too. Shallan finds her heart treasonously hesitant. Veil says they are ready. Radiant agrees to do the killing when the hard part comes.

While Renarin and Glys sit to locate Dalinar in a vision, Shallan wanders the bedroom — stuffed chulls used as the slowest cavalry imaginable — and stops at Testament, whose pattern still twists almost motionless. Pattern tells her quietly that Testament is thinking of her as a child, and that a child should live happily. Shallan admits she did, for a while, in the gardens with her. Pattern takes her hand; Testament lurches her own hand on top; both squeeze. He warns her that this place is shaped by thought and memory and soul, and that her soul will make things appear without her asking — take care; we will stay close. Renarin stands: *We've found my father. He's in a vision.* *Excellent*, Pattern says. *Let's go murder some folks.*