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Back in Adolin's command tent at Azimir, Notum stands at formal attention and explains himself. He had already decided to follow Adolin before Adolin left Lasting Integrity — *staying behind was cowardice on my part* — but he means to do it without a Radiant bond. *I will not give any human that power over me. That doesn't mean I can't help.* May cannot quite let it go: the Radiant bond is symbiosis, she says — the human gets the Surges innate to the spren, and the spren gets a mind and soul to anchor it to this realm. Notum does not find this realm hard. *I am firm about not being bonded. You aid the war effort without being Radiants. Why can I not do the same?*

Adolin grants him a field commission as captain in the Cobalt Guard and puts him in charge of the messenger corps — pending May's approval, which arrives with the dry observation that an invisible flying spren leading the runners would be an advantage. *And maybe he'll eventually realise what he should truly be doing.* Adolin tries to shake hands and can barely feel the touch; Notum bows instead, then quotes Dalinar back at him: *Honor is not dead. Not so long as he lives within us.*

Once Notum is gone, May still finds his arrival improbable — the mind-dampening usually takes much longer — and Adolin reminds her, mostly to tease, that *we should never assume we have all the answers; we should keep testing what we observe.* *Where did you learn that?* *Shallan talks about it.* May huffs, tells him their lost-courtship would have made them miserable, that he has found someone better suited to him, that he and Shallan share *a sense of whimsy*. *I don't have a whimsical bone in my body, May.* She lets that sit. Reports from elsewhere arrive — the Shattered Plains holding against a great many Fused but worried about Stormlight supplies; nothing yet at Thaylen City; no word about Shallan, save Navani's short message that she and Renarin are *doing a very important task*. Adolin heads off to dinner with Yanagawn still feeling the day's brutality chasing him. *I kill for a cause — something that matters.* He cannot quash the fear that he will not be enough.

East, in the chasms of the Plains, Sigzil flies low along the slot floors with Leyten and two squires, having received a *something is happening here* alert. The chasms are quieter than Sigzil remembers them — fewer corpses, more shellfish and growth, lifespren and rotspren dancing together in the rain. He thinks of Bridge Four and the punishment that became their shelter and their training ground, and is unwilling to admit out loud how much he misses it. Leyten points at a screen of Heavenly Ones patrolling a particular stretch of stony hills north of the Plains. They are keeping people away from something.

Vienta reads the patrol pattern and gives him a heading. Sigzil sends Weiss and one of Leyten's squires forward in cloaks, leaves a recall plan, and then climbs himself — alone, hooded — toward the cloud line of rippling red lightning. The lightning's blinding flashes will hide him from anyone below. The army gathering on the field beneath him is impossible: hundreds of Regals in wet carapace, far more than could have crossed Alethkar by foot or wing in the days since the Fused committed to other fronts. *Weiss guesses Lightweaving*. Leyten doubts it; Sigzil thinks the same. Vienta whispers another possibility — *unless they've figured out how to Elsecall.*

He rises higher. At the centre of the gathering army is a hole in the ground — a wide ring of violet light, the inside falling away like a pit. Soldiers leap up from inside it, get caught by waiting comrades, are stabilised on landing. *Storms. An Elsegate.* Vienta gives him the only two ways it could be possible: either the enemy has re-empowered Dai-Gonarthis — *outside reason; barely worth considering* — or they have the Elsecaller Honorblade. Sigzil and Vienta indulge a brief, futile fantasy of having an Elsecaller of their own to study perpetual motion with.

He puts the spyglass on the portal and finds the silvery-skinned Fused kneeling beside it. Then a figure jumps up — brown hair flecked with black, black uniform, carrying a familiar Honorblade, eyes glowing violet as if his sockets were gemstones of Voidlight. Sigzil knows him. Once friend. Teft's killer. Moash.