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*Eight thousand years ago.* The vision the Stormfather is sharing with Dalinar resumes in Tanavast's own voice. Rayse has come into the system, and the new god of Honor hates him on sight — they were rivals in mortality, and that bad blood has only soured with Ascension. He feels Rayse examine each of the three habitable planets and settle on the first, the world his predecessor Adonalsium had peopled with humans and that he himself had meant to claim before Kor distracted him with Roshar. Too late now; another god has set up over them. Kor tells him to ignore it. *He will have sensed you,* he answers. *He will know we have broken the agreement.* She is unimpressed — Rayse does not care about agreements.

The two of them are mid-creation. The deity-leak of their two powers, guided by hand, is forming small things on Roshar — fragments of self-aware power that respond both to the songs of the planet and to the thoughts of the people there. Tanavast has shown himself to the natives and taught them to sing to the stones; they have named themselves the singers for the songs of gods they now wield, and he loves them. With Kor's vibrant touch, their little creations are adapting to the planet, becoming children of it. They aren't replacing Adonalsium's work — they are continuing it. Nature is equations, and so are oaths.

They move from small things to true beings: passions, thoughts, ideas of their own; creations of light and wind and dreams that evolve through perception rather than genetics. Ten varieties, because his power loves symmetry and Kor loves him. They make seven together. The eighth is Kor's alone. The ninth, almost entirely his, are his *angels of Honor* — and for reasons even a god cannot fathom they love the wind. Kor looks at the nine and asks whether they might make a tenth that is something new, not influenced by outside perception. He tells her she alone could find that way; he will follow her lead. But his thoughts no longer fit entirely on this work. His once-mortal weakness shows. He cannot ignore Rayse.

Against Kor's wishes he diverts the bulk of his consciousness across the dark to the first world, Alaswha — curious air currents, floating stones, its own tones — and finds Rayse building an empire there. War rages in the city-states; one favored nation is conquering the others, its people imbued with a power he knows by its true name: control over the very Surges that make up creation. It reminds him of the worst powers of their homeworld. *The ability to shear axon from axon — microkinesis, in the language of gods.* Even God trembles to see it.

Lightly, he extends himself to a grand conference being held under truce in a great city. He drinks in the conversations of a thousand people at once and reads the situation: Rayse's empire has displayed its power, attacked a few small city-states, and now offers reprieve to whoever sends emissaries. The delegates have come warily. He reads it as an experiment — Rayse handing one side incredible abilities and watching what humans do with them — and begins to wonder whether the project is, more darkly still, the training of an army.

Then Rayse sees him. They both form bodies in an eyeblink. Tanavast in robes of justice and a crown of oaths; Rayse as a duplicitous, glorified version of his mortal self, in golden robes with a scepter, the man he always pretended to be. Around his waist still hangs a copy of the leather belt Tanavast's mortal hands had made him. *Ah,* he says — *so you've finally decided to come visit, Tanner.* The pet name from the old days. He corrects: *Tanavast.* Rayse grins and calls him utilitarian. Then, with a click of the tongue: *you violate our agreement.*

He looks closer and sees what he had not let himself see. Rayse's power is *wounded* — torn and fragmented in the way only a god can be wounded. He has been in a fight. *What have you done, Rayse?* *Eliminated a little competition.* And then he knows what the half-felt tremor of centuries ago had been. Rayse names it for him cheerfully — *you knew Ambition was going to be a problem; we all knew it.* He says her Vessel's name aloud, Uli Da, as if naming makes the loss real. Rayse asks for praise; he gives only horror. *I will accept that,* Rayse says.

He withdraws in revulsion. Yet he cannot stop watching. The empire delivers its ultimatum: all who wish to join are welcome, the rest will be left free. Their attacks were self-defence. He reads beneath it the move against potential rivals, and reads in the delegates the calculation that no one in the room is wise to name *liar* the bully with the largest club. He begins to draw back fully. And then his eye catches on a small group with darker skin than the rest, already walking out of the city. *What do we do, Uncle?* one of them — a young man called Nale — asks the older man at his side. *I don't believe them for a moment. They'll secure power, then crush the rest of us.* *We must make our own alliance, Nale,* the elder — his uncle Makibak — answers. *They cannot break us all.*

Their defiance, their pride, the honour with which they reject the obvious threat: it moves him. His power yearns to help. He should go home to Kor and discuss it; the agreement and her counsel both demand that. But he is a god now. Should he not already know what is right? What need is there to discuss? Later that night, in their tent, he appears to them, and he speaks the offer the visions will spend the next eight thousand years rendering: *I will give you the power to resist our shared enemy, should you desire it.*