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Adolin had drilled in pike formations but never manned one in battle, and the last stand at the breach in the Azimir dome wall turns out to be the most humiliating night of his life. He and May arrive carrying ten-foot pikes through the dark and are split — *two weak links beside one another is too many.* The defenders have laid rubble across the forty-foot gap Taln tore open, and hold it with a classical shield wall and two ranks of pike. Adolin is put in the back line first, in the middle of a knot of sweating, gulping soldiers ringed by fearspren, exhaustionspren and painspren — the Alethi and Azish blocks fully integrated now under a bald, scarred Azish commander.

The order comes for the rotations to swap. The retreating men flow around their replacements smoothly; Adolin's pike clatters against another's and earns a curse from a soldier who cannot see who he is. He hefts the pike up, tries to stab past the shield wall, and finds his entire world reduced to one heavy weapon, soldiers shoving against him, and the constant work of pulling his peg back from slipping on the cobbles. The lights are weak. The singer ranks coming at them through the dark are dregs themselves — most barely a year old, made into soldiers by Odium — and he tries not to think about who he is killing.

The rank captain calls a fifteen-minute relief. He drinks three ladles in a row and checks the moon — only fifteen minutes — and is then quietly informed that the next rotation puts him in the shield wall, the front rank. *Send me in,* he tells the officer, swallowing his pride. *I'll be better there. I haven't built the muscles for the pike. But don't put me beside someone weaker or untrained.* The officer admits he has less and less choice in the matter. A new batch of recruits stumbles in with pikes they barely know how to carry. Adolin takes a spear and shield, rotates in at the edge, and is fighting for his survival against a tide of darkness in minutes.

Far away in the Spiritual Realm, Shallan is no longer hiding. Odium punishes her with relentless scenes of murder: her father beating her brother, then she strangling her father while singing; her mother gasping with burned-out eyes; Testament screaming as her soul tears apart; Tyn dying on a Shardblade in the Shattered Plains tent. The night with Tyn plays again — and behind the killing, Formless stands and nods. Two personas had been budding in her then, and maybe a third *child* she has never acknowledged; the persons she would later become Veil and Radiant were already there. Then she kills Mraize, Wit, Jasnah, Sebarial and Palona, Dalinar and Navani — everyone who ever helped her. *I wouldn't,* she screams. *Don't believe.* The chorus refuses to stop. She is dangerous to anyone who loves her.

On a battlefield he has never seen, Rlain arrives among triumphant ancient singers, drinks in for a moment a city built of crem flow shaped by their hands — blacksmiths under sun, instruments under sky — and hums Awe. *I love that they had this,* a part of him thinks. The vision recoils him: *this isn't what you need to see,* Mishram whispers. *I'm sorry.* Then he is back at the battlefield, where the warriors gather around a stone elevated nine feet, and Mishram manifests on it nine times normal singer size, smoking bloodred clothing, golden eyes, slamming her staff. She hands out forms of power to her chosen — direform, stormform — and announces the other Unmade have joined her. *And Odium?* Rlain calls. *Locked away,* she answers. *I used his power to bind him for a time.*

She fixes on him. *Who are you?* *Nobody,* he says. *I choose to be nobody.* He turns and walks. First alone, then with a trickle — one here, one there. Others begin to follow. *Toathan,* one calls — a name he knows from listener song, the name of his ancestor. He realises he is occupying Toathan's body. He gathers the others, tells them what they will lose: their forms, almost all their songs. *What are we without forms?* *Free.* They go to gather their families. Mishram appears in front of him. *Why? We're winning!* *I rejected him,* he answers, *but not to replace him with another war. At what cost? I'm done.* She lets them go. *I was betrayed because of you,* she says. *Because of evil people, doing evil,* he answers, and walks away. *It is a different thing entirely to see them die when you are in command, isn't it, Mishram?* he asks. *Yes,* she answers — *I want so badly to break something, everything, for what was done to me. I will kill you if I can. What will you do, when you find me?* *I don't know yet,* he says. *Maybe I'll just listen.*

The darkest day Renarin can remember was the first day his visions struck him a year and a half ago in his warcamp room, where he sat in a hard chair in too-little light and screamed at the storm and the numbers in the air. He returns to it, forces himself to watch this time. The younger him had seen into the Spiritual Realm and been overwhelmed by possibility. He learns to organise it the way he has since: stained-glass windows, glyphs, dates. The old panes show only Odium's shadow — futures of his father falling, a coming storm, Dalinar as Odium's general. *This is your influence, isn't it?* he says aloud. He cups his hand and raises his own Light. *Everyone sees by light. Could you see better by a purer light?*

The shadows flee. The panes show a dozen Renarins — the ardent with the bad beard, the scholar in stormwarden robes, a general at an Urithiru whose Oathgate platforms have been turned to fields. He moves on, and finds the single window where he stands beside Rlain in a singer city — Kholinar — in flowing singer clothing designed to display carapace he does not have. *We change the future,* he tells Glys, *by changing today.* He shoves through the window into a present vision where Rlain is walking with several hundred singers, takes him by the face, and kisses him. *That was … nicer than I expected,* Rlain says. *Are you sure? The world is not going to take kindly to us being together.* *Will you be the one to hurt me?* *Never.* *Then I will risk it. Come on. I think I'm close to understanding what Mishram is trying to say to us.*