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*Four thousand five hundred years ago.* The vision continues in Tanavast's voice. *I, Honor, was winning.* Battlefield after battlefield, the unchained Heralds and the growing Knights Radiant hold the line; the cycle of Desolations grinds humankind down each time, but the enemy suffers more. He tells himself the Heralds will help mortals rebuild after annihilation; he reminds himself that Kor forced the agreement which makes him the inhibitor on Odium, and so it is *fine.* The quiet voice inside him — the part that is still *Tanner,* the man he had been before all of this — keeps asking how he can be happy with any of this. He cannot silence it. It is not the power. It is *him.*

He walks unseen through carnage, past a soldier weeping over a friend's corpse with one of Nohadon's books in his lap, and counts his Heralds: nine survived this round, only Taln died. He prepares, as always, to send them back to Braize to act as locks on the Fused. He finds Ishar sitting alone by the corpse of a thunderclast and tells him *we come closer to complete victory each time.* Ishar asks what *complete victory* means. *Defeat of our foes,* he answers. *We defeat them each time,* Ishar replies, *and if we lose our nerve first, Lord?* The futures stir uneasily and he knows he should ask Kor; he has not held her in centuries — four, possibly. His power dislikes her, dislikes how she refuses to fight outright, and that distance keeps growing.

*We break, Lord. Your Heralds break. I do not think we can go back this time.* He insists they must. Ishar finally looks up — *but maybe … I have an idea.* As he lays out the plan to stop returning to Braize at all, Tanavast searches the permutations and sees — to his horror — a frightening number of futures in which the Heralds simply stop fighting. He has not noticed what immortality plus his own power is doing to his nine dearest friends. He sees them clearly for the first time: Chana falling apart, Nale grown rigid, Jezrien self-loathing, Vedel indifferent, Battar cruel. Ishar hides it best, under a sharpening need to control. *Is this a deific plan?* Ishar asks — *to isolate the one, yes, but save the world?* *Yes,* he whispers, because it is precisely what he himself has been doing. The power inside him reviles the request and hates the Heralds for growing weak — but he does not speak, does not forbid. He withdraws, becomes the storm, and flees from the hurt across the world.

Finally he admits something inside him has been unraveling for a long time, that the ailment striking the Heralds is partly his, and that the sixteen of them had done something terrible on Yolen. He returns to Shinovar — the place humans first arrived — and lies in an uncultivated grass field pretending he is a boy on Yolen again. *Adonalsium?* he whispers to a breeze. *Not entirely,* the Wind answers. *Can you help me?* *No.* *What do I do?* *Listen.* He hauls himself up, infuses the land, lets his soul align with old rhythms, and for the first time in his divine existence stops trying to lead. He listens — to a woman milking her hogs and singing into the wind, a child playing with her axehounds, a scholar untangling his sayings, a wanderer walking unwittingly the same road Nohadon once took.

Millennia pass that way. Their wars continue, of their own making, but there are no Desolations. *They are better off without me?* *Without what you have become,* the Wind replies. *Having no god is far preferable to having a heartless one.* *And a god who cares?* *You killed that god.* He pondered it. Eventually pain trembled through the land — clashes, echoes — and he understood that Taln had broken at last. He braced to fly, then refused. *No.*

The image cuts. Taln had not broken; Tanavast had only lost track of time. He flies to Urithiru and finds a single Bondsmith — Melishi — who gasps and falls to his knees and begs for help against *parsh rabble pretending* at a Desolation. *War never unites,* Tanavast snaps, *men might align briefly out of terror, but nothing more,* and sweeps away to confront his rival.

On the familiar mountaintop where Rayse had first formed, Tanavast finds him more dangerous than ever — the Shard of Odium hovering far behind him, pulled toward Braize, aching for release. *Your tantrum is finally over?* Rayse sneers. He pulls his power tight and bellows that one of them must destroy the other — *the powers require it* — fight him, free him, *I will NOT BE HELD HERE ANY LONGER.* Tanavast remembers Ashyn and Natanatan and refuses. He pleads instead for *champions* — let them decide; the god of the victor rules Roshar, the loser withdraws. Rayse laughs. *I am my own champion. Why would I agree?*

But Tanavast has been watching the permutations. Ba-Ado-Mishram has already begun threading her way into Rayse's power, exploiting a moment of inattention, and Rayse's power refuses to act against her. Tanavast presses the wound: *what is it like, Rayse, to know for the first time in your existence what it is to be powerless?* Rayse's avatar surges red and gold. *A deal,* he growls — *what would a deal look like?* Two points: a contest of champions to be specified later, and a ban on either god directly attacking the other, with the careful asymmetry that the *first* attack is forbidden but counter-attack is not. No more increasing gifts of power to their followers. And in exchange — *can you deal with this spren of mine? Remove her?* His power ratifies it grudgingly, asking whether he has not promised Mishram otherwise. *This is for the best,* he assures it. It simmers. *Kor knows of a way,* he whispers to Rayse. *A method to capture and hold a powerful spren. I will teach this method to the Bondsmith …*