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Dalinar is cast into the Spiritual Realm and loses Navani and Gav in the rush. The visions are wilder this time: a shadow has fallen on the last one and ended it. Past versions of him boil from the surf — armoured selves shattering landscapes, drunk selves weeping over their faults, each demanding *be me, I want to live again.* A figure breaks the tide before him, shifting shapes while keeping the same outline: the Stormfather, pleading that he leave the realm and never return. *I had a plan. I need you to trust me.* Dalinar refuses. He grips the Honorblade like an anchor and hurls himself further than he has ever gone.

He lands on a burning section of stone — Aharietiam — and the Blade evaporates from his grip. He has reached the day the Heralds discarded their swords. He is wearing the body of Chana the red-haired bodyguard, in Jezrien's inner circle. Jezrien calls her over — wearing kingly white and blue marred with blood and ash — and walks her toward a meeting hollow set behind a rock formation like a castle, the same spot where Dalinar once saw the Honorblades rammed into the ground. *Hurry. Ishar is at the meeting place already. I want to get there before the others.*

The decision before them is the decision to leave Taln alone on Braize. Dalinar could call it cowardice, but he sees Jezrien's trembling hands hidden in fists and centuries of haggardness in the king's face. As they walk, Jezrien explains the mechanics: Braize draws souls; Honor forged it into a prison, and the Heralds' Oathpact — born of Odium's old Ashyn Connection — is the lock. All ten must return to keep the Fused from being reborn. Each death on Braize slows the enemy further. The cycle would have repeated forever, save that this time the nine left the one.

At the hollow, Ishar is waiting — and he is chatting with Honor himself. Dalinar's pulse quickens; he has not skipped past the moment that matters. Jezrien confesses their weakness; Ishar asks the god to *change the bond,* let half of them carry it for one Isolation and the other half the next. Honor reasons numerologically: *five is weakness; one is power.* Ten, sixteen, four, *one.* One could remain. *It would be a cracking of the Oathpact,* he tells them — and walks away. *I cannot afford to care any longer.* He vanishes without flash, leaving the Heralds the seed of what they are about to do. Dalinar is staggered: Honor himself nurtured the betrayal of Taln.

Ishar then offers Jezrien a thing Dalinar had not known about: *I first bore Surges. I initiated the Oathpact. I am the Bondsmith. I can bear some of your pain.* He takes a portion of it from each of them. Jezrien, unable to live and unable to carry what remains, lays his Blade in the stone and feels himself *put his burden upon Taln.* Nale is the first to follow, setting his Blade with a single shiver and walking out without a word. Vedel, Ash, and Battar arrive next. Dalinar sits on the stone and asks the question he has been chasing: *if the Almighty could have changed the bond, why has he been working against us?*

Then Navani and Gav appear before him — not from swirling Stormlight but as if the air parted to reveal them, *as if they'd always been there.* Navani hugs the boy; Dalinar tracks the lines of light from his core and counts a faint, familiar one drifting off into nothing toward the Stormfather — and beside it, a *second* fainter shimmer. The modern Stormfather and an ancient one, in the same place. The spren had said he was only a primal force in those days. He was here.

Gav points to one of the Heralds and tells Dalinar that *Aunt Dova* used to visit his mother. Dova — at the palace, visiting Aesudan. Navani does not recognise her either, and resolves to think about why later. Gav asks when they can go home; Dalinar orders the Stormfather to take the boy out, and the spren bats the request back at him: *you brought him here. You can bring him home.*

Dalinar confronts the second shimmer. *That's you, isn't it?* The Stormfather admits he had to witness this day. The accumulated lies surface. The spren turns on Dalinar: *I should never have picked you. You are born of war, and trail blood like a shadow. The sole thing you know how to do is break.* He likens forcing the visions to Dalinar beating Elhokar near senseless to *prove he wasn't a threat,* announces the partnership over, and bids him a death in this realm worse than his brother's. The vision starts to break.

Dalinar seizes the line of light Connecting him to the Stormfather in one hand and the line to Navani in the other. The Stormfather is not just an anchor, he realises; he is the *pathway* — fixated upon the secrets around Honor's death. Like the Thaylen-story giant pulling the sun up by a cord each morning, Dalinar heaves the two lines together by sheer will. Realities overlap. The Stormfather growls in anger as the vision reforms — and they are in the main thoroughfare of Urithiru in old clothing, watching a confident Windrunner in glowing blue Plate walk among the crowd. Dalinar knows him: the first knight to lay down Blade and Plate at the Recreance, still armoured here, still young. Three days remain until the contest, and they are exactly where they need to be. The end of Day Six.