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The vision opens ten thousand years ago, in Tanavast's own voice. He finds Roshar unmanaged — a blue globe against a black sky, one of Adonalsium's most recent works — and the world sings its name to him in tones and rhythm. He tells it his. *Tanavast. Almighty. Heir to Honor.* He counts the Honor shard as inheritance from a being he and his peers slew for his own good; here, in a world built out of equations as a celebration of the kinship between song, numbers, and art, there is, he feels, Honor enough already in the soil.

He invests the land and restores godhood to it. He notices the small things his predecessor left behind — *stewards*, fragments of the slain god's voice charged to protect, to shroud, to nurture, three of them powerful enough to still carry that voice and many smaller ones embodying corners of the world's nature. One steward in particular sings to him, and he, surprised at the choice, sings back. *Wind, invisible Wind, so flighty and immaterial …* she does not condemn him. That, more than anything, settles him.

He casts his attention through the system. Another world here holds humans; he leaves it alone for now. A third world catches him by surprise — a small cold rock further out, barely able to support life, with a core of an unfamiliar metal whose Investiture pulls at his soul. He is fascinated. He lets it sit. He keeps his songs on Roshar instead.

Then she comes. Out of the dark between worlds the one he had always loved in secret — forbidden in their mortal lives — arrives behind him and folds him in arms he compares to the sky. Koravellium Avast. He calls her Kor. She is the Cultivation shard now, but to him still the *beautiful dragon heretic of Yolen* he knew before everything. *You,* he whispers, *should not have come.* *We agreed that I would,* she answers. *I'm glad you did. But …* He cannot finish the sentence because the other godly powers had insisted she keep her distance, and he feels the Honor shard inside him rear at the broken promise like a tempest. *I am God,* he tells it. *You obey me.* It writhes, and waits. He decides the promise was the kind a god can choose to set aside.

He turns within the unbounded sweep of his new self toward something more familiar: he shapes a kind of avatar of his power, attached to the infinite, but compact enough that he can rest his head on her arm and breathe with her rhythm in the way mortals do. Kor looks at him in her human form — a brown-skinned woman with full features — and reminds him they had agreed to find a place uninhabited. *We cannot abandon them,* he answers, gesturing at the people on Roshar below. Hunter-gatherers with carapace skin and song-thick hearts. They sing into the sky and the ground and the night, waiting for their maker to return. *We orphaned them, Kor.*

She does not want to be a god. She left her own people because they wanted her to take their prayers, she tells him; she will hold the power because someone must, but she has no taste for worship. She wishes the two of them could go somewhere fresh and make things that were of them, not of the being they betrayed. She still calls it that — a betrayal. In the far distance something happens — somewhere, gods are dying — and they both feel it. She tells him to leave it alone. To let it pass. To let them be alone together.

Others breaking their promises makes him quieter about having broken his. He turns from her to the Rosharans below, and his heart trembles for them. *Stay here with me,* he asks, taking her hands. *I will watch over them. You can hide and not interfere. This can be ours.* She listens to the night Roshar makes, and admits it sings to her. He smiles. She smiles back, a glow like sunrise. And so it was. Until Rayse arrived.