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Jasnah arrives at Thaylen City fully armored at the head of an Alethi division — the first female Alethi general in many generations, and, in her own framing, the change she has long wanted to see in the world. Ideas hound her on the march. Has she truly opened the field for other women, or merely become an exception that is suffered? In armoring up to project strength, has she ratified the lie that only one kind of strength counts? The eternal irony of the trained rhetorician, she thinks: a mind that learns to find holes in any philosophy will inevitably find them in its own. She marches her column down the stepped city — past the Royal Ward, past the palace, down the Loft Wards toward the Ancient Ward — surrounded by an honour guard composed entirely of former slaves she has paid and trained as soldiers. She has read the historical precedents for emancipation (Kasaakam's decree in Azir; the post-Bav-uprising nahn elevations of 637 in Jah Keved) and knows perfectly well how badly freedoms tend to stick once decreed. She is haunted by the thought that the human desire to dominate one's fellows may prove more durable than her reign. She is also haunted by a letter — the one she left for Wit formally ending their relationship. *Stop focusing on yourself*, she tells herself. *Fen needs you.*

She meets Fen, Kmakl, and the merchant council at the foot of the steps, defers tactical command to Fen's generals, and walks the bay wall with Fen. Fen is openly worried — about Dalinar specifically, whom she still cannot quite trust, and about being a queen who has presided over two cataclysmic invasions; about the way every aspirant Radiant in Thaylenah now moves to Urithiru and owes loyalty to the orders rather than the homeland. The walls are still part-bronze where Jasnah Soulcast them after the thunderclast a year ago. *Fine work there*, Ivory murmurs. The trebuchets might sink a ship; the Stonewards Jasnah brought can soften the ground beneath a thunderclast and resolidify it. Thaylenah's navy is still thin — wood Soulcasters from Aimia cannot conjure intricate ships — and the Veden blockade has unexpectedly fallen. Roughly a hundred enemy vessels are crossing the channel. Fen presses the obvious mystery: where did those troops *come from*, when Odium's forces were supposed to be committed in Emul and at the Plains? Jasnah sees the shape of the battle: this is the one. No relenting, no retreating. The bay will turn orange. *An ending is*, Ivory says, and she follows Fen down the steps. Either she will be enough, or she will die in this defence.

Above Narak, Sigzil and Leyten watch the enemy mass on the plateau west of Narak Four — two or three hundred ground troops, and a kind of Fused he has not yet faced. Hoid had warned them: *metacha-im*, the Focused Ones. They look obese, but the bulk is dozens of slack leather belts looped over each other to mimic ponderous flesh; twenty of them stand among the regular force. Leyten coins a verb — *goobering*, his grandmother's word for tinkering and inventories — and admits he would rather be back at Urithiru doing exactly that. Sigzil would rather be back sticking people to the ceiling for science. Both know the Shattered Plains is the closest Alethkar has left to a kingdom and will have to be defended.

The two storms meet. The highstorm comes in across the ocean — bluer than usual, carrying seawater itself — and Sigzil feels a startled jolt of hope at the sight of it; the highstorm belongs to Roshar in a way the parked black-and-red dark does not. Then the highstorm *dies*. The grey-blue is consumed by the dark, the stormwall breaks apart, and what reaches them is a brief rainfall. Gemstones still light; Vienta notes the Stormfather pushed the storm thirty-seven minutes early to help. But the wind is gone. *Like two kings met*, Sigzil says, *and one was forced to bow.* No convergence has ever done this.

Outside, the Focused Ones march toward Narak Four supported only by Skybreakers — no Heavenly Ones in sight. Vienta worries; Sigzil reads the march as performative and sends Leyten to find where the shanay-im have gone. He raises his spear to galvanise the wall, still reeling at a highstorm reduced to a whimper. The Focused Ones approach and *condense* — their slack belts cinching tight, weaving under one another, the relaxed-spring posture pulling taut until each stands a tall, sculpted, androgynous figure of immense weight. Hoid had warned that they would weigh more than a Magnified One and that their density would let them stop a Shardblade. The rest of the ground force is mostly Magnified Ones, who begin tearing up the wooden planking laid to slow Deepest Ones — trying, Sigzil judges, to taunt him outside. He passes orders to wait the line. *They'll need to cross that chasm. Then climb this wall somehow.* Then he hears stone footfalls in the dark, and red lightning outlines a gigantic thunderclast coming for the wall.