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It is good to be back at the Dustbringer monastery, Szeth thinks, breathing pine air. Nightblood chatters about Lift's vocabulary as they walk in. Szeth hands his pack of Blades to Kaladin. Nale tells him he will face only one foe today, of a different sort — elderly Gearil is gone, replaced by someone younger. Syl drops in from watching the road of spren and reports the air strangely empty above this land — only nature and emotion spren remain on this side. *I would not like your help today,* Szeth tells them, twice. Kaladin retreats to the doorway with the swords.

Inside the grand hall, Szeth summons his Blade and then drops it. *I will not fight you.* He is choosing neither Kaladin's way nor Nale's, but testing his options. Something is bigger here than this monastery. How did his people, his father included, fall to an Unmade? Why did he alone resist? *No one will tell me the truth. I'm going to find answers.* His highspren forms a rift at his ear and hisses for him to fight. The wrapped Honorbearer sets her feet alight as she comes, the Dustbringer Blade trailing fire — flash and intimidation. Szeth knows the tricks and dodges everything with small Lashings. He sees her tutor in her swings, and realises how much practical experience of death and destruction his exile has trained into him. The previous Honorbearers wanted him dead and he beat them anyway; she does not, and that is the problem he is unpicking when she snaps at him. *How did you know? You humiliate me!*

He stops, lands, looks her in the face, drops the sword again, and sits. *Do as you must.* She swings for his neck — and pulls up short, twice; she cannot strike. His spren tells him no, those previous duels were real, but that he has come to the wrong conclusion. She unwraps the cloth from her head: short brown hair, an aged scarred face, familiar. *Elid.* His sister had chosen the training after all. She is furious — *you broke our family, stories about you chased me all my life* — and orders him to fight, and cannot do it. She tells him their mother died of tumours alone with her, their father is dead too, taken by the Voice. Szeth is calm. The voices in his head are quiet. He stands and embraces her. *I'm sorry.* *I am taken by it too,* she whispers. *Why did you drop your sword like that?* *I didn't trust you wouldn't kill me. I just decided to be done.*

Then she tells him in pieces what she knows: he has to free them. *The Oathpact is broken. The circle is shattered. The Heralds degrade. They need someone new. They need you, Szeth. This pilgrimage is an audition. Jezrien is dead. And you are to take his —* She goes stiff and dissolves into dark mist. Her sword clangs to the empty floor. *I had worried about her,* Nale says behind him. *Ishar said she would be likely to kill you because of her long-building anger. She proved weaker than we'd hoped.* Szeth turns livid. *You used my sister against me?* Kaladin steps in from the doorway. Syl forms beside him and presses Nale: re-forming the Oathpact may not even work, since the Fused were brought back this time by the Everstorm and physically delivered Voidspren — he admits Taln breaking was the real trigger and the Everstorm only quickened rebirth. *We must try regardless,* he says, on Ishar's word; they need an unparalleled warrior with no attachments to this world. Syl accuses him of upholding the singers; he is baffled — *they are our enemies; we obviously want them to fail.* Kaladin quietly tells her logic will not work. *You can't persuade someone delusional with logic.* Nale turns and walks out: two monasteries left, Szeth's father at the last. *Elid said our father was dead.* *He is. So is your sister.* The Honorbearers are summoned shades. *This is an impossibility,* Szeth tells Kaladin, and starts walking. His own life has taught him he is a poor judge of what is possible.

On Narak the rain pelts a stone roof. Sigzil sits at the war-council table with Winn, Chella, the Stormwall Dami, Balivar, Habrinar, and Rust Elthal. Chella names the casualties — almost sixty Radiants and squires lost, more than the entire previous year — and reminds the room that the Bondsmiths put them in command, which means they can decide when the price is too high. Balivar asks the unspoken question; the Stormwall folds his arms. *The Bondsmith told us to hold. So we hold.* Habrinar gives his honest reading — the war is already lost, the contest a strategically incoherent ruse — and the Stormwall dismisses it as conjecture. Sigzil stands. Their job is this battlefield; they need to last two more days. The generals have no plan. Even with Jasnah's reinforcements and the Mink inbound, more bodies do not matter if Stormlight gives out.

Winn hangs back in the doorway and gives Sigzil the honest number: ten percent, with heavy casualties. *A normal siege favours the defenders. With what the enemy has, we are a candle before the storm.* Sigzil admits he might have an idea, from the fine points of the Dalinar-Odium contract that Vienta has been studying with him — and kept it back because he wanted to see if anyone had something better. Winn gives him the time. Vienta confides she keeps hearing Ethenia scream — *we aren't supposed to be able to die* — and that she does not see how the idea works.

Beneath Narak, at the end of Venli's tunnel, the stones sing as the Five step into a cavern with no other exits. Six awespren burst around them. The cavern holds a magnificent golden pool of light thirty yards wide, the liquid thicker than water and shimmering. It ripples as Thude taps it with his axe. It is the source of the tone. Bila asks what it is. Timbre pulses the answer: she has seen one before, in the mountains — the Fused called it Cultivation's Pool, a gateway to another realm, generated by the greatest of the gods the way Stormlight streams from a human. The Fused said no one knows where Odium's is — that he hides it, after an event they would not name. It has been hidden, perhaps masked through someone bonded to spren of both Odium and Honor. Her. The stones told her: *pieces of the sky, fallen here, watched over by strange people, secrets even the gods do not understand.* The chasmfiends always knew. When Everstorm and highstorm clashed, this is what fed the destruction. Odium is holding the Shattered Plains at any cost because of this. Thude reaches to touch the power; Bila stops him. Then a guard comes stumbling down the tunnel. The Heavenly Ones have been discovered — by the singers, and by some kind of extremely dangerous-looking Fused.