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Navani is still standing in vision-Urithiru when the Skybreakers finish leaving and the tower begins, by inches, to die. The chill on the plateau is the kind that draws coldspren in upside-down icicles; the Radiants left behind shiver in robes that don't fit a coming winter. She reaches for the Sibling again and finds the same teal thread of light — frailer this time — and a frailer version of the same voice on the end of it. *I sense you, suddenly, in me — and not.*

The Sibling cannot bring them out. What they can do is name what happened inside their own walls. Melishi withdrew from them. He found the means of *imprisoning spren* — the lineage of the modern fabrial — and mixed it with a Bondsmith's premonition of *so much pain.* That is the foundation of the Recreance that is now perhaps a decade away. And there is a Windrunner from Rira, hair the color of a heliodor — Garith. *Follow him,* the Sibling says. *He lies.*

Dalinar, sitting on the cold stone with Gav asleep in his lap, takes the news in tandem with Navani's mild dressing-down: *please ask before you do something unexpected with your powers.* They take a breather. Navani then reframes their predicament as a question of method. *Science is about control. Being able to repeat the same experiment, get the same results, then use those to your advantage.* They test it. Dalinar uses his Connection to a stranger — a passing mother of two whose grief Navani guides him to share — and drops Navani into the woman's body. Melishi rushes off, dizzy. *Perception changes Investiture,* Navani says, citing earlier spren research.

From there to a method for the jump itself. The Stormfather knows. The very secrets the Stormfather is trying to hide hover in his mind, forging a path for them. Dalinar uses his Connection to him as an anchor, and the three appear, ten years later, on a battlefield. Singers arrayed in a line. The grey-haired Windrunner from earlier walking up to a tent.

Mid-chapter the camera cuts. In Azimir Adolin is in the street with his aluminum chain and a thunderclast is taking its boots one cobble at a time. The monster's hand swings — chips of stone falling like rain — and the near miss launches him sliding across oiled stone. He scrambles into a tenement (mercifully cleared) and out the back, dragging the chain. Neziham keeps the thing distracted with the Blade, harrying at the ankles. Adolin manages, on his second try, to slip the hooked end of the chain through two links on the far side of the right ankle. First leg, done. He needs to find an anchor for the other end.

He doesn't get the chance. The thunderclast kicks with the locked leg, snapping the chain taut and whipping Adolin through the air until his oily armored fingers slip. He lands in a crumple — Plate spider-webbing — and looks up just in time to see a stone fist drop on Neziham. The local Shardbearer becomes a mash of bone and steel; his Blade clangs free and does not vanish. The monster grabs the chain in both fists and snaps it like wire, and walks on toward the dome.

Meanwhile, in the plaza outside the dome, Kushkam has lost his footing entirely. He comes awake on the cobbles confusion-spelled, his arm bloodied, soldiers down around him in a blast pattern, Deepest Ones reaching up through the stone to stab thighs. A Radiant in a green dress arrives in the middle of the chaos — Rahel — and her Stormlight clears the fog from his head. He throws a guard around her and a helmet on her head and turns back to the dome just in time to watch the wall blow outward and ten beings with glowing red eyes step through — including a variety he has never seen, skin like tightly wrapped belts. He gives the only order left. *Tell those inside the dome to prepare to drop the firebombs.*

Back in the visions, Adolin lies dazed in the street, exhausted, defeated, the thunderclast passing him by toward the dome.