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*I am my own. Not his.* The mantra runs in Venli's head, and at times she hears it in her dead sister's voice. The listeners, the Fused still loyal to her people, and the chasmfiends have spent a sleepless night with Odium's offer hanging over them. She walks back through the dark to where the Five argue in the flattened plateau where the Everstorm's first arrival levelled everything, and joins Leshwi at the rim of their circle. Beyond the chasm they can hear the humans shouting on the walls — the warforms guarding them sound increasingly sure the Shattered Plains will fall today.

Estel suggests that Odium cannot host a Fused inside any listener without that listener's specific consent — so perhaps a narrowed accommodation could keep the spirit of who they are. Kivor admits relief that the question is finally on the table; Thude insists rejecting him is the whole of their identity. Bila turns to Leshwi and asks what she hears on the rhythms. *Sorrow,* she answers, eyes closed, *anger. He demands my return.* Venli places a hand on her shoulder — once heresy, now possible — and offers what she has learned: that she no longer needs to be afraid. Leshwi hums to Resolve. But Bila points out that any listener army joining the assault will be spent at the front as fodder. Leshwi counters: if it buys peace for the rest, is it not a worthy sacrifice? She speaks with the cadence of antiquity, and it is hard not to be carried with her.

Then Venli hears the rest of the oath she has already sworn — to seek freedom, to help those in bondage — and a counterpoint to her old surrender drops into place. Timbre thrums, excited. *Five, if I may speak?* The chapter cuts there.

Navani is in a nightmare. She is eleven, kneeling at a low table in Shulin while better-dressed city scribes laugh at her hand-script — a backwater yokel come up with her father to settle the kevah-ranch accounts because the family scribes are busy and her mother left them years ago. The laughter sharpens to taunts: ignorant, incapable, idiot. *Lies,* the adult Navani says aloud, looking up. *Repackage them as you wish. I know them now for what they are.* This seed buried itself deep in her, grew a weed her dead husband would later water, and she has pulled it. The vision loses its teeth.

She crouches in the chaos that follows and starts thinking like a scholar. She has been adrift longer than the Bondsmiths' test was supposed to last; she has no clock; she cannot see the Connection lines anymore. But she can see a pattern. Since the Mishram vision, the visions have been deliberately escalating, deliberately painful. Something is steering them, and steering them at her. *I am a scholar,* she decides. *I will test hypotheses.*

She predicts the next vision will be one of the late fights with Gavilar, and it is — her study in the palace of Kholinar, a study that no longer exists outside this place. She trails her hand along the bookshelf — her battered copies of Chanosha's *Light and Gemstones* and Britt the Good's six-volume *Artifabrication* from her young scholar years, Elhokar's wooden skyeel from when he first got a whittling knife, the small scrapbook of girlhood adventure tales by Jasnah she has always hidden from her daughter because she will not pass on the shame she was taught. She notes, scientifically, that the vision lets her settle into a quiet moment before striking — and she predicts almost to the second when Gavilar will burst in.

He bursts in. The argument is the one over Elhokar's match with Aesudan; the Gavilar simulacrum demands to know why she undermined him with their son. She watches herself rather than him: was she too hard on Aesudan? Maybe. He moves to slap her — and *he never hit me,* she notes calmly, and the hand stops mid-arc. The vision can be steered. She runs the test: makes the simulacrum repeat his lines, then corrects his delivery — *the real Gavilar never came in spewing them; pins, not daggers; cold refusal as if you weren't worth the time.* *A master of precision abuse.* He paces helplessly across the room. Like Dalinar's visions of the past, this one had instructions but no oversight.

She knows what to do next. *I need to find Gav.* If a child is trapped in a vision like these, she can guess which. *Strength before weakness,* she has said the words, she needs to mean them. She makes the request as raw as it must be to register as sincere: *show me what happened to Elhokar at the end.* The study dusts over. Gavilar puffs away. The palace becomes the one Aesudan ruled under the thrall of multiple Unmade. Navani opens the door, hears shouts down the corridor, and walks out into the day her son was killed.