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Venli sits alone in a cave she has shaped herself in the wastes southeast of the Shattered Plains, stones still humming around her, a chasmfiend padding past outside with listener children scrambling on its back. For the first time in years, things look hopeful for her people — and she may have led ultimate destruction to them. She places her hands on the wall and sings. *Welcome, child of ancients*, the stones answer. *Welcome, stonesinger. Welcome, Radiant.* They name themselves *Ko*, the stones of the hills, and speak as if all stone, all Roshar, were one. She asks whether her people are doomed for sheltering renegade Fused like Leshwi against Odium's anger. *We do not know the future. We sing of the past.* They show her tiny stone sculptures of her people crossing into this land, looking up, listening. She hears thunder no one else can — the Everstorm approaching — and remembers being Odium's mouthpiece in the slaughter he staged to make false martyrs of the listeners. The remnant survived. She has to help.

She steps out among seventeen hundred listeners: children, elderly, infirm, and the small stalwart soldier band of Eshonai's old friends who refused her forms of power. *These are the true soul of the listeners*, she thinks. They have looked power in the eye and rejected it. Jaxlim, her mother, hums up beside her to Anxiety; Venli returns Confusion. Jaxlim blames herself for the songs that turned her daughter toward forms of power. Venli refuses that excuse for the both of them — the choices were hers — and Timbre inside her pulses Resolve. Jaxlim hints that she has been going back over the old songs and that one of them may give them something. *Come. Let us speak to your friends — the ancient ones you call Fused.*

Dalinar opens his eyes inside the Spiritual-Realm churn and finds himself for an instant on a burned hillside under a strange pale moon, wearing *black Shardplate* and firing lines of light from a weapon he half-recognises. He squeezes the image away — *it's merely a possibility* — and reaches as a Bondsmith for what he knows is there. He finds three strong bonds and several lesser, white lines fanning out from him: he grasps the strongest and finds Navani in a hundred ages at once. *We need an anchor!* he shouts; she lifts her ribbon-wrapped hand. *I got it from Shalash!* He admits he refused the Stormfather's offer of a ride home — the spren is frightened of what they may discover. They agree their target is the day Honor died; their first hops will be small jumps anchored on people they expect to recur — Melishi and the other Radiants who walked into the Recreance.

The vision locks: a dirt-floored dugout, a fire, Jezrien older, Ishar white-bearded and haggard, Vedel glowing softly with something that is *not Stormlight but feels similar* — pre-Radiant Surgebinding; an Alethi-looking woman in green who answers to the name Vedel. Chana (Veden, red-haired, in a sharpened-carapace sword) sits beside Ishar. Older-teen Shalash wears the same red ribbon. *Kalak, you have to make a decision*, Jezrien says. Dalinar plays *Kalak* effortlessly and asks for the problem to be outlined again. Ishar makes an odd palms-up gesture; Chana calls Dalinar *shoshau*. Thirty humans have been killed by singers in retaliation for theft and murder. Vedel's glow draws a spren behind her that Dalinar half-recognises. Ash storms out when Ishar calls Makibak's rebels not their people.

Dalinar reaches again for Stormlight and the web of his Connections, half-expects Elhokar — and instead pulls in Gavinor, who has bodily slipped into the Spiritual Realm after sneaking away from his minder Mararin to watch them in the basement. The boy clings to him, terrified of the *red spren* of his time with his mother. Navani kneels and reframes the whole thing as a Lightweaving like the axehounds Shallan used to make for him, and he calms. A passing soldier sees the boy as *an odd spren*; Dalinar realises the vision is papering Gav into itself.

Outside the dugout, Jezrien meets the singer envoy: Elodi, an old malen with gemmed beard and well-cured leathers, who greets *Kalak* warmly across a fifty-year remembered acquaintance, refuses to *contain* his people for Jezrien any more than Jezrien can contain his, and warns of *new gods* growing loud while the *old gods* — the Wind, the Stone — lose their voices. He will take his people east; he hopes never to meet Jezrien again. Jezrien curses (*Gwythiadri!*) and stalks back to the dugout. Dalinar tries — crudely, in front of all of them — to extract from Jezrien some hint about *Honor blessing humanity to contain their Surges*; Ishar gasps; Jezrien grabs at a pouch on his belt and hisses *how do you know about that?* The hour drains the vision. Dalinar sets the question aside, turns back toward the dugout, and goes looking for the next anchor — Gav still in Navani's lap and the Stormfather still silent.