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Sigzil flies cover over Narak with five of his squires, intercepting a squad of Heavenly Ones who are dropping boulders on the city. The duels are no longer the ritual aerial passes of the year before — three Fused now gang up on one Windrunner and finish him if they can. After one day, Sigzil has already lost eight. He drives in to rescue his squire Rowalan, kills one of the shanay-im through the gemheart with a calculated Lashing, and watches the other five break and run. Vienta reads their cruise as committed retreat, and the squires whisper that he fights *like the wind itself* — Stormblessed's training. He glares them silent. He still misses the older, saner Heavenly Ones like Leshwi, who maintained a code and a measure of mercy; these new ones, after long centuries of torturing Heralds rather than fighting, are wearing thinner.

Back on the planked platform — boarded over the bare stone, to slow the Deepest Ones who move through rock — he takes battle reports. Leyten confirms his weak-point gamble is working: by punching out at the squads heading for the core plateaus, he has channelled the enemy's attention onto Narak Four, the plateau directly north of the Narak Two Oathgate, which he has chosen as ground he can afford to lose. But the Stormlight shipment from Urithiru has not come. Dalinar is gone — keeping an oath, Sigzil reminds Leyten — and without him there is no continuous resupply. They cannot rest their Windrunners long enough to hold five days. Ka shows him a map: stormforms nearly burned the Narak Four gate, the generals want it walled off, Sigzil refuses to box his troops away from a possible retreat to the Oathgate. He worries idly that the Fused he just killed will return from Braize in hours rather than weeks, now that the Everstorm sits parked overhead. A second wave — Magnified Ones — is forming up against Narak Four, exactly as he had hoped. He sounds the warning and flies back into a darkness that has started to feel eternal.

East of the Plains, in the sand-and-crem flats where her people have settled, Venli walks Leshwi out among the listeners with Jaxlim and Thude. Leshwi's flight Light has run out — something that should not happen to a Heavenly One outside Lashing — and she stands cut-robed in the sand, her feet wrapped, unaccustomed to walking. She reads it as Odium beginning to come for her, and offers to leave the camp before she draws his ire down on them. Thude tells her that is not what they came to ask. Venli presses her instead with the older interpretation: as Radiants' oaths deepen, they hold Stormlight better; perhaps the Fused, too, are tied less tightly the further they walk from him. The old songs say that the listeners' rejection of Odium and Ba-Ado-Mishram is what broke their hold. Jaxlim tells her that to be a listener is to belong to no god save Roshar itself — *and the stones that make it*, Venli adds. Leshwi confesses that she is more spren than singer at this point and is not sure she can change; that rejection in words is one thing, but Odium can make her existence miserable on next death. They do not push her. She walks away humming, Venli notes, to one of the old rhythms rather than one of Odium's. Jaxlim says she will make the right choice because *it is her choice to make*, and Venli hums to Praise for one of the rare moments in which she feels she has been enough for her mother.

Thude then takes Venli aside: with permission from the rest of the Five, he is finally ready to share how the listeners came to live with the chasmfiends. He has composed a song of it himself — the keeper of songs role still empty since Jaxlim's long illness — and apologises in advance for its unevenness. He calls it *the Song of the Beasts*, and begins to sing.