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Szeth sits on a tree stump finishing his stew, weighing whether to tell Kaladin about the Voice he heard as a child — the one he stopped hearing the day he left Shinovar. He had set out to explain how he knew the Unmade was here, and had managed to talk about his enrolment in the military without mentioning the Voice or his family. It feels like lying. He stands, takes a step — and the world drops out from under him.

He falls into Shadesmar — *Makari Sin*, the place of beads and a too-distant sun — and panics. He fights the panic down, draws a careful sip of Stormlight from a pouch gem, and concentrates a thin pillar of beads up under his feet. He is on a raft of clicking glass. Ten yards off, on a similar platform, sits Pozen-son-Nash — elderly white-haired Elsecaller Honorbearer, the first man who ever taught Szeth in this place, Batlah's sword across his lap. Szeth was supposed to visit Pozen's monastery next; the old man has not waited his turn.

Szeth tries to summon his Blade. It is not a Blade. His highspren floats up nearby as a man-shaped rip into starry blackness and immediately falls into the beads, useless. A second figure explodes from the sea — a younger Shin Edgedancer in grey robes, bow on her back, the Edgedancer Honorblade in her hand; she is the bearer who succeeded Dulo. *Two on one?* Szeth shouts. *Should the mountain feel shame for breaking those who cross it?* Pozen answers. The Edgedancer launches arrows; black eel-shaped spren begin diving at him from the too-still sky.

Szeth sinks beneath the beads and tries to swim toward a long ridge of solid obsidian that marks the river in the Physical Realm. The whispers below are louder than the ones above — voices of the dead. He brushes his spren in the current and orders him to find a weapon. Pozen reshapes the beads into a ten-foot tunnel that runs him to a wall; the Edgedancer skates along it and slices both his forearms. He heals, slams her sideways with a Lashing, and hears a voice cutting through the whispers — *Szeth? I'm here! Use me!* — that is not Kaladin's and not his spren's. *Nightblood?*

His spren surfaces in the beads and presses a single bead into his palm. The weapon manifests: *a wooden cooking spoon.* Szeth throws it at him, hits him in the forehead. He swims for the ridge, Lashes himself down through a hundred feet of beads, and finds a hilt. He grips it. He surfaces holding not a black sword but a blazing line of golden light — *I always glow, don't I?* the sword asks, voice distorted as if heard underwater. In Shadesmar Nightblood looks the way it imagines itself.

The Edgedancer recovers and comes in along the ridge top; Szeth parries her clean with small Lashings to dance lighter, then weathers a beadsurge as Pozen floats nearer to interfere. She drives a Blade through his thigh. *Draw me*, Nightblood says. He unsheathes; light explodes; he meets her two-handed swing. *Blade met Blade.* The crash hurls a fifty-foot crater of beads outward; she is thrown like a leaf. He resheathes, balances, walks to her on his good leg, asks her to stand down. She comes at him; he unsheathes once more and Nightblood makes her burst into motes of light. The Honorblade clangs onto the ridge and slides into the beads; Pozen parts the current to receive it across to his lap.

Szeth starts toward Pozen across hardening beads — Nightblood is helping; the beads *like* Blades and the spren who form them. Pozen holds up a hand. *I will give you a chance, Szeth. You never did learn to Elsegate. Well, let us see if you can figure it out when the stakes are so high.* Then Pozen stands up and falls forward onto his sword. His body evaporates into dark mist; the platform fails under Szeth's knees.

He searches the robes, pockets Pozen's gem pouch, takes the Honorblade in hand. The Blade is *afraid* — it knows something is deeply wrong with Shinovar; it is not part of the corruption; it wants its Herald. Szeth closes his eyes and prays, not to the technique but to his quest itself: if he does not return, his people are doomed, and he will never know why his father died. The Honorblade drinks his light in a rush and slits open reality. He clutches the two Honorblades and Nightblood and tumbles through onto springy grass beside the river — exhausted, the golden Nightblood image gone, the black sword still humming and chatting from where he had left it by the fire. Kaladin looms over him, sees the two extra Blades, and gasps. Szeth's highspren congratulates him on a challenge met; Szeth reminds him, in a deadpan whisper, of his performance in the beads and his choice of weapon. *When you're living an illusion, spren-nimi, be very careful not to do anything to spoil it.*