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*Four thousand five hundred fifty years ago.* The vision continues in Tanavast's voice. *I, the god Honor, walked a battlefield full of burning corpses. This time, I did not weep. I could not afford to weep.* The arms race with Rayse has run for millennia — Fused answered by Heralds, Unmade answered by Radiants which were not his conscious creation but spilled out of pieces of him acting independently. The orders' oaths he tuned per Kor's contract and Ishar's advice; that one understood the ways of gods as few mortals ever had.

He calculates the casualties as he walks. Rayse's Unmade grow stronger — hidden in their creation from him, unnerving — and his own Radiants cannot quite match them because his oaths bind them tighter than Rayse's bind the Fused. He notes, privately and unwillingly, that the Heralds have lately been drawing on the power of Roshar itself, not only on his Surges — and he refuses to admit it openly for fear of seeming weak. He flies to the worst of the fighting, at Natanatan — a barren expanse of stone marked with dark lumps that used to be people. *At least my people survive,* part of him thinks. *It is not as bad as Ashyn.*

Rayse appears with his golden scepter and his beard in the wind. *So. This was fun, even if you did win.* *This is no victory.* They trade old taunts — the Braize hellscape his Heralds keep Rayse's warriors locked into, the *accommodation* Rayse signed when he was too new to his power and cannot now break. *Twenty-five hundred years I have protected the cosmere with the blood and lives of my followers,* Tanavast thinks; the other Shards have looked away the whole time. *You make it as bad as you can each time, don't you?* he whispers. *You want to break me.* *Would you like to know what breaking you could look like, Tanner?* Rayse muses. *I barely attack the children. I could order them to slaughter, instead of to war. I'm toying with it.*

He screams, loses control, and throws himself bodily at his opposite. A thunderclap; everything axonic is pushed away. Their souls — too intimately — meld. In the space of nothing where two divinities touch, *tiny pieces of something discordant are born.* The counter to his essence. He names it on the spot: anti-Light. Dangerous even to a god. Worse, the shockwave reaches the strange land beneath the city, and he glimpses what is buried there — splinters of *a fourth moon,* watchers shrouded from him, something far stranger than mere aluminum. The ground liquefies in patterns shaped by the tone of the place. They vaporise one of the grandest cities on the planet in seconds. He pulls back, horrified. *Shall we fight again?* Rayse asks, laughing. He withdraws further.

*I will push you,* Rayse says. *Let us renegotiate.* He kneels and tries to recover. So many dead. These were *his* people. But Kor had whispered to him a weakness in Rayse — the power that he holds *loathes* being trapped, just as her own power hates stagnancy. There is something to exploit. *Since I refused to fight him,* Rayse sweeps off in a tempest. He leaves a shadow behind — as Kor had said he might. Tanavast stands tall, waiting.

The shadow approaches and whispers. *What if we want peace?* It is one of the enemy's Unmade. *I cannot make peace with you,* he declares, *so long as he fights.* *Would you make peace with me?* the shadow asks. *If you could, and he did not stop you?* The shadow has a name: Ba-Ado-Mishram. *Yes,* he says. She withdraws timidly, like a fain animal seeing the colourful world for the first time. Kor was right. But the opening will take many years to mature, and he cannot wait that long.

And so he decides to push the Heralds harder. To let them access his powers more fully, and those of Roshar itself. So long as he is bound by oaths, they will not be able to destroy the land. So it will be well. *I had declared it would be.*