(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Navani watches the portal from Ashyn open onto the Shinovar mudflats. A man in a simple blue robe stands on the far side with arms thrust wide, holding the way ajar; Dalinar identifies him from his visions as Ishi — Ishar before his hair turned white, the Herald he met in person centuries later. Thousands of refugees flood past him with their possessions and withered, unfamiliar animals; behind them the sky itself burns. Navani feels the impulse to comfort them. Dalinar holds her back: nothing here can be saved; nine of these ten are already dead in their time, with Jezrien destroyed.

Then Wit stumbles through, robes hanging off one shoulder, hair already a stark white though his face has not aged a day. Beside Navani, the singers fixated on her and Dalinar's strange skin patterns abandon their prayers and flee, leaving their chulls. *Today is the first step toward a thousand years of war,* she thinks.

They cross the muddy field. Dalinar explains what they came for: Cultivation told him the secret of why Honor's power has refused to bond anyone lies in understanding the Heralds and their relationship with the dead god. Navani balances his goal with her own — there are scholarly gaps to be filled. By every account the Heralds do not become Heralds for at least two generations; Radiants are millennia away; how are they accessing the Surges right now, and how did they cross between worlds? Dalinar, from what the Stormfather has told him, ventures: at the start, people could touch these powers without bonds or oaths to restrain them — exactly what Honor feared would unmake Roshar.

The portal yawns thirty feet wide, Ishar's face a mask of concentration. The refugees stagger and weep through the rain into the mud, her skirt ruined, Dalinar stomping along on booted feet, dryly offering to fetch one of the chulls to help — they aren't real, she reminds him; *I've never been good at paying attention to that*. They reach a man in a blue tunic directing the flow with a spear and an obsidian head, short black beard, keen eyes that could have been Alethi. Navani tries the mythologised name first — *Jezerezeh* — then the older one Ash and Taln use. *Jezrien*. He startles and barks at them in a tongue she does not recognise. Dalinar breathes sharply: he knows this face by another name too — *Ahu*, the kindly drunk who used to share wine with him in the Kholinar gardens during his darkest years. A red-haired woman carrying a stone axe — Chana — steps up beside Jezrien like a warrior; Navani eases Dalinar back before he provokes them. Three Heralds already wielding Surges in this era, and a teenage Ash up the slope under a small guard of spearmen.

Where, she wonders, is Odium? He arrived with the humans; perhaps gods do not need to be visible.

Dalinar raises a finger and wisps of Light begin to stream off it to try his Connection trick; Jezrien growls and answers with powerful Light of his own. *That,* Navani thinks, remembering the first Dawnchant fragment she ever translated, *is what destroyed Ashyn — dangerous powers of spren and Surges, brought begging to us by people whose lands they wrecked.*

She redirects Dalinar to Wit, now through the portal and standing apart, staring at the sky with the same small stone in his hand he will give Dalinar millennia later. Dalinar grasps his shoulder and touches Navani to Connect their languages to his; Wit looks profoundly haunted. *I'm not real, am I?* he says in a monotone. *I have many names. None of them are me. I'm … power … trying to imitate him. But he knows too much, so he would know he's not real, and so I have to make myself know I'm not real …* His face starts to distort, melting like wet paint, and Navani backs away. The thing tells them that the real Wit just watched Ashyn die — one of his first great failures, though not the absolute first — and spent weeks afterward staring at the sky, terrified that at three thousand years old he was losing himself. Then it stumbles off muttering *I must do that, I must do that.*

Dalinar tells her his Connection attempt did not give them the language either — Wit Connected to him instead and learned theirs. He points up the hillside, where the air shimmers and the Stormfather is watching: maybe the spren can get them out. Navani sends him to talk to the Stormfather alone — *he might speak more openly* — and turns to see what she can learn from the refugees despite the language barrier. *There's so much Stormlight here I'd heal before they even pulled the spear out.* Dalinar squeezes her hand. *For my sake, try to be safe.*