POV: adolin
Summary
On a watchpost above the bronze domes of Azimir, Adolin meets a new toy and a new dread on the same balcony. Colot hands him a hinged pair of lenses the Azish have just finished tuning — binoculars, with depth perception and an attached fabrial that lights up when you consciously tell it what to find — and through them Adolin picks out four Heavenly Ones hovering above the city, ribbons flapping. He wants a hundred of the things in scout hands tomorrow. Today he wants every reserve told, quietly, to be ready, and Notum fetched: something is going to happen.
Far from the dome, but in the same chapter, Navani is walking the halls of a Urithiru that should not exist. Dalinar's Cultivation-given visions have landed them in the years just before the tower went to sleep: the lights in the strata weak, the air cold enough to draw coldspren, Radiants streaming out the gates with carts and children. She carries Gav, who keeps asking if they're home. Following one Windrunner in living Plate — sleek, glowing the wrong shade of an antiquated *peace* glyph — they reach a standoff outside, the man flanked by no one, a hundred armored Skybreakers flanked by everyone else. Their leader hovers a foot off the stone and accuses him of *condemning Kazilah,* of lying, of cons. The Bondsmith of the tower — Melishi — is between them. So Dalinar strengthens the line of light Connecting Navani to Melishi and, without asking, drops her into the Bondsmith's body.
Navani mediates a fight she does not know the shape of. The Skybreaker has told her order the *truth of where humankind came from,* and intends to tell everyone else; the Windrunner, Garith, wants the orders united against a new uprising among the *parsh.* The Skybreaker turns her back, salutes ironically with an arm overhead, and her order flies off. Garith tells Navani coldly that he warned her this would happen, that he will gather what is left near Cabridar, and that fighting is coming for Iri and Feverstone. Pressed on the *lying* charge he says nothing and rises into the upper reaches of the tower.
Standing alone on the cold plateau Navani reaches for the Sibling — and this time, in this nearer copy of Urithiru, finds a faint teal thread of light and a frail, familiar voice on the end of it. *I sense you, suddenly, in me — and not. How?* She explains where she is. The Sibling cannot bring them out, does not know how the days of the abandonment unfolded — those memories are shadowed — and only manages, before the thread slips through her fingers like water, a piece of advice. *Is there a Windrunner from Rira, with hair the color of a heliodor? Follow him. He lies.*
Back in the dome, the day's lull is fraying. Adolin finds Kushkam on a balcony staring out across the bronze ring at a field crusted with blood and corpses and pushed-out furniture — the emperor's own, contributed by the bedroomful, gold and red and occasionally jeweled. They have hours, not days. The commandant is half-ready to drop the oil sacks tied above the dome and burn the lower ranks of the enemy along with the structure; Adolin holds him off and they agree instead on Soulcasting bronze plugs into hallways to slow the inside push. Both know the math: with no more reinforcements, with Masked Ones, Flowing Ones, Magnified Ones and Husked Ones possible, the dome is going to fall. The fallback, Kushkam says — citing a three-centuries-old court ruling — is whoever holds the throne room of the palace. *As long as the emperor is on his throne, Azir stands.*
Adolin passes Maya's three-word promise — *Hold. Help. Comes.* — to Kushkam as if it were his own oath, though privately he no longer believes the honorspren errand he sent her on will be enough. On the balcony he is pulled into a smaller skirmish with Zabra over the weight of her war bow and an even smaller one with May over how much he's been sleeping; *I'm your ex,* she says, *which makes me the closest thing your wife has to an advocate here.* Then a ribbon of blue arrives. Notum — not bonded to anyone, only able to glimpse Shadesmar — reports that the Fused are massed on the other side and, worse, a great shadow is forming with red eyes. A thunderclast soul. Adolin runs for his Plate as the trumpets sound, and from the elevated ramp around the dome watches a mountain of stone, bent on breaking the bronze open, climb to its feet outside Azimir.