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Adolin rotates and rotates through ranks in the pike block at the breach in the Azimir dome — pike, spear, shield, water, blood — and never gets a chance to draw the longsword Shallan gave him for their wedding. Men and women die at his feet. Their replacements are increasingly untrained townspeople. His peg slips in their blood. Friends are dragged whimpering to the surgeons when possible, screamed past when not. The night refuses to end.

On rest rotations he lies and stares up at the second moon, numb to time, finally letting himself acknowledge the doctrine of Vorinism he has always quietly hated: that the honoured dead spend eternity getting shoved back into the line, split open again and again. He pictures it now with the texture of real war — entrails to step on, wails to push through — and realises this is part of why he hates his father. In the book Dalinar wrote, the Blackthorn offered something better — a God who is a sense of warmth, who makes things right eventually. *How dare* Dalinar Kholin of all men claim that pedestal. How dare the man who burned his mother alive judge him for killing Sadeas in defence of family. Nothing makes sense; the world has gone insane and only he can see it and *he* is the one called spoiled for saying so.

The rotation call comes again. *Hadn't he just done this?* He yearns to lie there — he is a highprince, he could have been a king — but lying there is exactly the betrayal of his men he had sworn he had not committed at Kholinar. So he hauls himself up. The thing that finally moves him is unexpected: Kaladin survived worse than this as a bridgeman. He has heard the stories from Lopen and Rock, Sigzil and Skar over drinks. At least he can fight back. He files into the queue, takes shield and spear, and is smiling as he goes. *Stupid bridgeboy. Where does he get off being so inspiring?*

In the little Thaylen temple, Jasnah kneels alone. Fen has gone. Odium has evaporated. The deal is signed: Thaylenah will serve him regardless of the contest of champions. Sculpted images of Talenelat on the temple walls feel like a mockery — she has spent her life spurning deity and just been bested by one. She slides to the wall, tries to apply scholar's discipline to the failure, and identifies two roots: first, she got so engaged in the argument that she proved Taravangian's point to Fen by arguing it as the prisoner's dilemma; second, the Philosophy of Aspiration she has lived by has failed her. *The greater good at any cost* either is lip service or makes her Taravangian. She tries to fall back on histories, but the histories warned about bargaining with Voidbringers and she ignored them. She tries to fall back on her own reason, and remembers the day her family had to lock her away from her own mind.

The room darkens, then a golden glow rises in its centre — the mocking doppelganger of the sunlight she once cried for as a child. Taravangian forms a chair from black smoke and props his slender golden scepter beside him. *I thought you went with Fen,* she says, wiping her eyes. *I can do both. I am God.* *There is no God.* He invites her to test it. *Speak the number I am thinking.* She thinks negative one point eight seven three nine, and he merely nods — confirming her suspicion that he cannot read her mind. *There may not be a God,* she allows, *but there are gods — as Wit defines them: immense, immortal, terrible. It is no shame to be bested by one of those.*

*Ah,* he says softly, *but was it my power that bested you, Jasnah?* He waves a hand, and a dozen Deepest Ones rise from the temple floor — eyes too large, bodies too spindly, knife-like fingernails — poised to murder the Thaylen Council if his negotiation failed. The aluminum-lined hidden chamber was real, but his agents on the council had removed the panels from one section, and the Fused-detection fabrials the council relies on were a lie marketed by artifabrians who serve him. Even her uncle's careful coalition had ignored the elected council and focused only on Fen — exactly the kind of oversight he counted on. He'd had four loyalist councillors ready to remove Fen for overreach as soon as the rest were dead.

He stands and seems to swell, the walls fading, until Jasnah stands alone with him on an endless dark plain. *I always had this city in hand. They will be ruled better if they join me willingly. I have them now. More — I have you, Jasnah. Finally admitting the truth.* What truth? *That you have always been my servant.* Every assassin she has ever hired, every Kharbranthi murder, every time she made Dalinar reconsider his pedestal — she has served him. *I will need someone to rule this planet,* he whispers, *as my attention shifts to the greater cosmere. There are three habitable planets in this system. If you knew the things I could do with them.* He will make her Fused, and immortal. *Never,* she hisses. *Never? Still lying, I see.* What is the greater good, after all — dying in obscurity, or working centuries to make him kinder? She cannot bring herself to lie to herself, and so she cannot rule it out. He has broken her a second time in one day.

Within the hour the Thaylen Central Council ratifies, near-unanimously, the vassalage agreement; Fen signs. A sealed copy of the contract is brought to Jasnah as a memento of her failure.