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Still inhabiting Garith in the False Desolation vision, Dalinar allows the direform Regal to kiss him before the watching Windrunners. He has to fight every instinct to pull back — *I am about to get knifed,* he thinks — but the kiss draws passionspren and is plainly genuine. The femalen even seems concerned when his response is muted. *This is not a betrayal,* Dalinar tells himself. He does not know what it is, but it is not that. He apologises silently to Navani, who he knows is gasping somewhere in the rocks, and lets Shmone introduce them to the assembled Radiants as the proof of concept: a Windrunner and a singer who long ago decided the war had to end.

Then Shmone tells the watchers their new god has agreed to come in person. A pool of liquid night gathers among the rising stones, and from it walks an ordinary-looking singer. No carapace, no barbed display — barefoot and not quite touching the ground, hair drifting on an unseen wind, glowing faintly violet-red where it catches stone. Ba-Ado-Mishram, the most terrible of the Unmade, looking like nothing. She glitches — a second Mishram flashes through her, mouth open in a scream — and stabilises, the kindly version. She greets Garith, tells the Radiants she did not become these singers' god to watch them die — and breaks off staring at the rocks where Navani is hiding.

Navani steps out with Gav at her side. Kalak cowers at the back. No sign of Melishi. Dalinar reads the flanking line at once and spots the Bondsmith slipping out from between two stones ten feet behind Mishram, hands wrapped around a child's-head gemstone. *Fabrials as we know them have not yet been invented,* Dalinar realises. *She has no idea what that stone can do.* Melishi names himself the Bondsmith. Mishram tells him calmly that she infused herself with the full power of Odium's perpendicularity to replace him, and that she brings the singers harmony. *In that we are united,* Melishi answers. *I know how to be certain we will have peace. All you have to do is open your heart.* He raises the gemstone, hesitates — and Honor's voice rolls through the stone hollow. *Do it, Melishi.* He does.

Dalinar steps back into his own body. Navani buries her face in his chest as the False Desolation ends in a single tunnel of light and a hundred overlapping voices, Mishram screaming as her own desire for peace is used to bind her. The rhythms and tones of Roshar go silent for three terrible seconds. Then they return, and Melishi holds a gemstone prison in his hands — and Honor is standing behind him. *You bastard,* Dalinar whispers. *You were responsible for all of this.* Navani sees it too: this is why the power refuses another host.

Around them, the singers collapse as one. Garith catches Shmone as her carapace ripples brittle and rips free, her bones popping and shrinking, her stature reduced to one of the silent slaveform servants who waited on Dalinar all his life. The light goes out of her eyes. She blinks up at Garith, confused and terrified. *I'll fix this, Shmone,* he whispers, and rises with angerspren pooling at his feet to confront Melishi. Dalinar follows. Melishi hides behind Honor. *It was necessary,* the god says. Then he reaches a hand to Garith and pours into him — and every Radiant on Roshar — a single shared vision: Radiants aflame across the sky, Garith himself glowing as he leaves thousands dead. *You are destruction incarnate. You are as Dawnshards. You will soon become Surges unbounded.* Dalinar understands the Recreance at last. After tragedy like this, after a god who abandons them and shows them what they will become, what are spoken words?

The vision was supposed to fade then. It does not. Honor turns and sees Dalinar — actually sees him. *Blood of my fathers,* Dalinar whispers. *You're not dead, are you? You never were.* *No,* the figure answers in a familiar voice. *It's me. I was created in his image.* It is the Stormfather. He was there. He has known the truth all along, and lied. *You have seen far too much,* he tells Dalinar, exhausted. *I must stop hiding you from him. You are his. And this is his domain now.* He vanishes. Dalinar is cast into the Spiritual Realm. The lines of light that Connected him to people and places are gone. A shadow looms.

Renarin kneels beside the fallen singer while the Windrunner hums her the Rhythm of Joy in a futile, beautiful attempt to bring her back. *I know why she hates us now,* he whispers to Rlain. *I'd hate us too.* Rlain will not let him take the easy framing. He sees people in this hollow — some who have done evil, others who have loved. Singers feel love as any human does and fear it because they associate the strongest emotions with him; in that, the enemy already wins. *She is wrong if she hates humans. It only gives him what he wants: two sides delineated simply.* Renarin tells him the deepest truths always sound a little trite. Shallan passes by hunting for Mraize and Iyatil — nobody here plays their part poorly, Glys tells Renarin; perhaps they could not find this day. Rlain points at Melishi still cowering behind the god. *He has the prison.*

Renarin lingers a moment. *I'll make it right,* he tells the Windrunner across time, half-believing he is just talking to no one — and the man looks up, tears in his eyes, and *sees* him. *I promise,* Renarin says. *I'll find a way.* The vision unravels. They lose Dalinar to Honor's last words and find themselves on a featureless expanse of black stone, Glys struggling to hold even that together. Rlain reports that the Bondsmith opened a perpendicularity and was pulled through; Pattern adds that he carried the prison into his own tomb in the Spiritual Realm. They already knew that. They need a Connection. They have to *know* Mishram — not see, feel — and Renarin wonders where the other Unmade were the day she was caught. Glys tells him some watched, Sja-anat among them; that, he says, is part of why she sent them. Something is coming together when something else turns up.

A figure in plain leathers and a face of swirling smoke walks across the stone toward them. Shallan recognises her own work — *I'm making it somehow* — and is panicked. They need to leave. Glys is trying but it is harder now. *His influence.* A shadow crowned in gold rises in the distance, golden light pouring from its eyes. Odium himself. *Rats in the walls,* he says, his voice strangely familiar. *Amazing that you could all hide from me. I'm quite busy. Stay where I put you until I'm ready.* They are scattered into the mist as the vision bursts apart. So ends Day Seven.