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Nine and a half years before the present, Szeth finds the Bondsmith monastery easily — every Shin child knows the lore of it. A sheltered alcove ringed by rock formations the First Spren raised before he bid his creation farewell. So much stone underfoot that a man with Szeth's scruples could find scarcely a speck of soil to step on. Only the very profane — or the extremely holy — could walk here.

He lands at the centre and kneels at the Sheathing of Swords, reverencing each stone divot in turn — and counts only nine. He nearly catches himself thinking there were ten. He has not forgotten the lesson; there were never ten sheaths kept. He kisses the bare patch of rock where Talmut's Blade would have lain — the first time his lips have ever touched stone — and prays to the Herald who chose to stay behind in Damnation so the other nine might escape. The story is so dramatic, so inspiring, that he cannot understand why it sits so quietly in the shamans' teaching.

*What now?* he asks. *Now, Truth,* the Voice answers from inside his head, and offers, in the cool voice of a thing accustomed to being obeyed, to send the other Honorbearers to prepare him for what he is about to see. Szeth refuses. He does not trust them anymore. He suspects, plainly now, that he has been used to remove an inconvenient member of their order. *And you trust me?* the Voice asks. *I have to. If I don't, what is left?*

She is pleased with the answer and tells him she has come *in person* this time. She walks him along a path between the rock formations, then off the natural water-cut wash onto a narrow shelf above it — *here, turn here* — to the mouth of a cavern set into the cliff. He stops short of the entrance and asks about Tuko; the Voice answers, mildly, that he *had been promising, but ultimately proved too weak to do what was needed.* The shadow at the cavern mouth is wrong: a smothering on a cloudless day, a darkness only visible when he is not looking at it. The Voice tells him senses are not to be trusted and to come forward. *Are you ready,* she asks, *to meet your God, Szeth?*

He steps into the tunnel. A single ruby lights it. The walls bear cuts of a Shardblade and the fingerprints of a Stoneward or Willshaper — the marks of a sacred place dug, not raised. Then he reaches the inner chamber and gasps. The walls of a room ten feet wide are studded with spren of every kind, each driven through with a crystal spike: a windspren in a small woman's shape shrieking and trying to push the spike out of her chest, a flamespren whimpering like a guttering candle, a gloryspren bulbous and motionless, a translucent arrowhead-shape thrashing like a snake — and others he can scarcely name. *Stones Unhallowed,* he hisses. He can hear them screaming.

*I leave them up on purpose,* the Voice says, softer, the gender of the voice still impossible to settle. *They have to learn their true master.* She means to remake them, she tells him, into better versions of themselves — the kind that match her and what she needs them to do. Something shifts in the deeper tunnel. A man-shaped darkness coming for him.

Szeth *knows* her at last. From the holy texts of his childhood: one of the most terrible enemies of humankind, a creature of shadows who could take spren and twist them to her will, and — he realises now, with a colder grief — could do the same to people. He has been listening, since his first kill, not to a god and not to a spren. *I have to make a decision, don't I?* he asks. *The decision is made,* the Voice answers. *You are here.*

He hears his father's voice from years ago: *Son. I trust you to decide.* Szeth had been too afraid then, and had feared all his life that he would be too afraid if a moment like this came again. He is not. As the shadow calls him forward to worship, Szeth turns and runs.