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Outside her office in the vision of the Kholinar palace, Navani listens to the building shake with the assault Adolin once described to her — Aesudan's Unmade-corrupted loyalists, Elhokar's incursion, and invading singers, knotted into a confused storm of killing below. The upper floors are quiet. *I'm early,* she thinks. She forces herself to plan instead of running for Gav alone. Even with him rescued, three people trapped inside the Spiritual Realm are not three people saved. She needs a way *out.*

She reaches for the Sibling and finds a discordant cacophony — the *tones of possible futures*, untuned until they snap into reality. She knows these from her time with Raboniel; she sorts to the true tones of Roshar and gets the Sibling's voice through. There is less than a day until the deadline. She has tried to open a perpendicularity in here and failed. *You can't,* the Sibling tells her — they only flow inward, like a slope only sliding downhill. To get out you use a *point of transition* — the way Wit and others leave. The cacophony swallows their connection. Points of transition, she thinks. Could a vision be tricked into giving her one?

Then Elhokar erupts up the stair with Kaladin at his side and fifty men behind him, Aesudan's defenders breaking past her into the corridor. Seeing her son like this — proud, glowing, the rescuing king at the brightest moment of his life — hurts less than she had feared; it almost comforts her. She steps out and tells him Aesudan has left Gav to the torment of spren. Elhokar takes her face in his hands as if testing whether she is real. They march together past statues of Heralds to Aesudan's chambers, where the queen is heard singing in the next room. Elhokar halts, cocks his head, then looks at her with a hint of a smile. Something behind his face has changed.

She does not have time for what plays out between him and Aesudan — it is not real. She pushes through the cluttered chamber, finds the real Gav behind a dressing screen, a year older than the vision around him, and pulls him close. *Gram*, he says, *is that you?* He clings to her, and asks why Grampa in the visions is so busy killing, so terrible, so full of hate. She tells him that wasn't him; it was a terrible vision. Dalinar loves him. *Daddy said*, Gav whispers, *Daddy said I should try to be strong, like him.* He has been hearing his father all through the visions.

She looks back into the room. Elhokar is alone at its centre, half in shadow, smiling at her with expressions she has never seen on her son. *What now?* *Now,* she whispers, holding Gav close, *I am afraid you will make me watch the man I love in pain.* *Odium*, she names it. *And more,* he says. He is wearing her son's face like a mask warped by what stands behind it. She tries to Connect to Dalinar; he waves his hand and the vision stays solid. Here, he is a bonfire, and her will is a candle. She makes a desperate decision: leave Dalinar for now, get Gav out, find another way to reach her husband from outside.

She insists the vision continue — and as Odium-wearing-Elhokar trails her downstairs amused at her *passion that will inspire*, she rejoins Kaladin and the soldiers and barrels through the singer breach toward the Sunwalk and the city's Oathgate. She refuses to look back at the play of her son's death. She remembers him as he was at the top of the stair. *Mother. Mother, help me,* Odium calls in Elhokar's voice from the Sunwalk. *Life before death*, she answers herself. Gav is alive. Behind her is only death.

At the Oathgate she rounds on the vision-Kaladin beside her. *Activate it.* He hesitates — *Elhokar is wounded, he's coming.* *He is not real,* she tells him. *We are. If there is anything of the real Stormblessed inside you, summon it. Please.* Something steels in him. He runs for the control building. Odium hisses behind her that yes, that might work — but will she abandon the man she loves as she did her son? *Dalinar is strong enough to fight you,* she answers. *I trust him.* The Oathgate flashes. She reaches again for the tones of Roshar; the Sibling latches on. *I have you. Connect to me.* She has always been good at holding what she loves; she has only recently learned when to let go. She holds, and steps out of the light into her own rooms in Urithiru with Gav in her arm.

On the Shattered Plains, cloaked and stooped under her envoyform height, Venli walks the human camp under guard. Narak has changed in the year since she lived here — the listener huts are gone, replaced with stone bunkers and a Stoneward-thickened wall. Even that wall is cracking; she can hear the stone pleading. She passes the dead in rows under solemn rainspren, blood running like rainwater. A Radiant crouches weeping with a hollow stare, whispering about a new pain; Rlain had warned her that spren could be killed. A new era has come.

She is taken to a building at the centre of the plateau and into a bright room of maps. The Azish Windrunner inside looks her over: *the singer Radiant.* He would not have believed it if her people had not emerged out of the stone near his patrols. (She has stretched her Willshaper practice further than ever before; her body is sunk into stone under a cloak back at the wall, while she walks in envoyform.) *Welcome,* he says, exhaustionspren buzzing. *I'm glad for your offer, but I don't think you'll be able to help in the way you want.* *You're right,* she tells him, plain. The enemy will wipe him off this plateau within hours; her listeners are too few to change that. But he had a different proposal. He outlines it — also doomed, by her reading. But what if she took some of his and added some of hers? *Where is Jasnah?* she asks. *At Thaylen City,* he answers, frowning. *Why?* *I think your idea will work, with some revisions. But it will need to involve her …*