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Over Narak Prime the enemy arrives exactly as Sigzil hoped they wouldn't — straight at the city he is trying to hold. He fights to keep the Everstorm-dark sky, Vienta spinning visibly around him as he Lashes between clashes, a silvery spear forming and dissolving in his hands. The Skybreakers come in mute as ever, slate-faced, in support of Focused One siege artillery launching boulders at the walls. Sigzil kills two with a anti-Stormlight dagger and a pair of clean Lashings, dropping their frozen bodies through the dark, and rejoins Fent and Kalleb on a wall as a Lightweaver-baited gemstone *find* triggers in the enemy ranks below.

The feint works. The Focused Ones wheel as one toward Narak Three, the singer army with them, and Kalleb lets out the first relieved storm-curse of the day. Sigzil sends confirmation up the spanreed to his generals and the staged-panic phase begins. Then a different spanreed lights from Leyten: *Found him. North side.* Him — Moash. Sigzil sends *Do. Not. Engage.* and gets no answer.

Inside Azimir, Adolin in full Plate strips the top off a wagon-bed box hauling an experimental aluminum chain — the Radiants' best hope against the thunderclast that has just climbed the walls. He coaxes Gallant into the harness with a joke — *yes, I'm trying to manipulate you* — and runs forty soldiers behind him with oil barrels strapped to their backs and ropes and hammers in their hands. Neziham, the local Shardbearer, answers Kushkam's call and falls in alongside him with the oath *For Prime and People, so long as the emperor is on his throne, I fight.* The plan: oil the ground, distract with infantry, chain a leg, trip the stone monster, and send its spren back to Shadesmar with a Blade through the neck.

Behind them, in the medical-side plaza, Kushkam — a commandant who spent his career writing essays asking to be denied promotion — leaves the hospital bedside of one of his wounded just in time. The cobbles erupt as Deepest Ones rise through the stone, smooth-skinned and emaciated-limbed, with the dome's reserves already committed elsewhere. He gathers his personal guard, sends a messenger for any reinforcement that exists, swears *Yaezir*, and leads the charge himself, hoping today is not the day he watches his homeland fall.

Out on the north plateau Sigzil comes screaming in to find Leyten and three squires already trapped — a suppressor hidden in the shell of a rock cancelling every Lashing the instant Sigzil enters its field. He tumbles, his squires panic, and he yells the distance Vienta gives him — *a hundred and twenty-two feet* — and sends them sprinting for its edge. He runs the other way, toward Leyten, who has already lost a squire to Moash's Honorblade. The traitor wears the Blade in one hand and a knife in the other that warps the air around it.

Sigzil arrives a second too late. He slams the anti-light dagger into Moash's back and gets no reaction — only a glance, and then the worst sight on the plateau: Moash's eyes are now two crystalline diamonds glowing with Voidlight, shards of them jutting from the back of his skull like a crown grown through his brains. Those eyes can see Vienta hovering hidden in the air. Sigzil tries words — *you don't have to do this* — and gets only confession. *Of course I don't. … We were brothers, Sig. But then you chose the lighteyes over me.* Moash Lashes upward, swings — but it isn't Vienta he strikes. He plunges the warping knife into Leyten's chest, and a shriek twists Sigzil's insides as Ethenia, Leyten's honorspren, dies with him.

Moash gives the Bridge Four salute and takes to the sky. Edgedancers fetched by the squires find Sigzil kneeling in blood, fingers working at wounds that closed only because their bearer had already passed; in Leyten's last breaths he had spasmed into a Death Rattle naming *the Scholar with a Spear,* his own murder *by the hands of a friend,* and Vienta's death-shriek to come.