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Shallan surfaces onto a Shinovar hillside in the body of a singer — Glys and Tumi's sneak-in does more than a Lightweaving; the vision itself has assigned each of them a person to take over. She kneels and shoves her fingers into actual soil — *just like she'd read* — while Rlain and Renarin, also wearing singer bodies, take a moment to adjust. Their spren hover outside the vision so as not to be seen by the gods. Rlain notes Renarin sounds like his father in the best of ways; Renarin blushes; Shallan tucks the moment away to ask Adolin about later. She tries Rlain's rhythm and produces a perfect one without intending to — *uncanny*, he says, warning her she will hum the wrong rhythm for the conversation if she only imitates.

Below, Dalinar and Navani are by the Ashyn portal. The two assassins are presumably also disguised. Renarin wants to chase them; Shallan, thinking like Unseen Court, stops him — the first objective is to remain unobtrusive. Veil coaches quietly; her childhood with an abusive father and a mad mother trained her in faces, and she may as well weaponise that. *Continue pretending to be scouts. I'm going in.* She moves out from behind the rocks, layers another face over the singer — *no drawing first*, Radiant notes, she has never done that before — and walks down through the mud as a refugee in a simple brown gown, Anti-Light dagger added to the costume.

She drifts toward an animal mired near Dalinar and Navani and joins the people pulling at its ropes — and immediately realises she has just found the easiest seat next to Dalinar without being noticed, because someone else has too. The kneeling man who checks the beast's legs is bumbling rather than Mraize-confident, but his rueful little stand-and-smile is the same one he used as a soldier at Urithiru — *having one or two default personas is almost as much of a tell as acting like yourself.*

Dalinar pushes past on his way to speak to the Stormfather; Mraize traces his departure with his eyes; Radiant takes over and swings the knife at his neck. He catches her arm — genuinely panicked — and forces her into the side of the muddy animal. Radiant tries to summon her armor and produces only a litter of tiny knives in the dirt, *quivering and saying Other Shallan!*. No armor in this realm. She rips out of his grip — a move he should have stopped — and presses him: *how long have you been afraid of me?* *Since I learned you'd killed Tyn*, he says with that confident smile. *Why would I recruit someone I wasn't at least in part afraid of?* Knowing that a brawl with a stronger man and a knife is the trap Adolin taught her against, she feints, hides the knife, raises her arms and shrieks. The exhausted refugees, who probably didn't see her opening move, grab Mraize instead; he keeps his knife, doesn't escalate, lets himself be led away in the language she cannot understand.

*Kill him*, a voice says beside her. Her own voice. Formless stands dressed identically to her, head a column of curling grey smoke. *I am you, Shallan. You cannot reject me forever.* *I banished you*, Shallan hisses. *And yet you come to a realm of possibilities. Are you better because of one good day? Will you ever be fully better?* Shallan screams; the vision goes to swirling mist; Pattern embraces her. *Calm. Calm.* *Well*, Rlain says somewhere nearby, hum to his words, *that could have gone better.* *Our spren are panicking*, Renarin says; another few moments and they would have been noticed by the gods. *Murdering someone makes a scene*, Shallan mumbles, and lets herself be pulled away into the mists.

Higher up the slope, Dalinar finds the Stormfather as a shimmer that today almost holds the shape of the dead Tanavast. The spren is sad. *The dogs will die*, he says of the floppy-eared friendly beasts crossing the portal; too small a breeding population made it through; gone in three hundred years. Tanavast missed hounds. Axehounds were bred to fill the niche — convergent evolution turns up some of the same companion traits when you breed for obedience. The pigs will thrive — they eat anything; the minks will go feral; the rats made it through, as rats always do. Thousands of chickens come pouring through the portal in two dozen varieties of parrot, herded perhaps by the Wind from the burning sky on the other side. He admits he has *echoes* of Tanavast's memories from a time he himself was not aware.

Dalinar presses: are there gods on Roshar beyond Honor, Cultivation and Odium? *Pieces of the god who made the planet*, the Stormfather answers, no longer relevant; humans poorly adapted to the land grew to fear the storm above all else, and so the storm took on life as *an Adversary*, a new demigod for Roshar. Dalinar hears in this the shape of his own developing faith in a God Beyond who left caretakers in the spren and was shattered. He asks again why Honor's power refuses him. *It will never accept you.* *Why not?* *Because it cannot stand another who would do what Honor did.* Dalinar catches it — the secret is in *what Honor did*, the manner of his death, the rule for taking his place. The Stormfather grows storm-shaped and threatens to send him home if Dalinar swears never to come back. He refuses. He reminds the spren of their recent talk about being able to change. The spren whispers *it is too late for me — please, just come back*, then thunders that Dalinar will die wandering for eons. He calls him *so like your brother — so arrogant.* Dalinar catches the slip about Gavilar — *did you interact with him?* — and the Connection evaporates. *This is your stew. You can simmer in it. I will return when you are reasonable.* The spren fades; Dalinar tries again to open a perpendicularity, gets nothing, and trudges back to find Navani.