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*Two thousand years ago.* The final flashback in the vision the Stormfather is showing Dalinar opens in Tanavast's voice: *I, Tanner, betrayed the demigod Mishram.* The trap he designed with Rayse's consent goes off perfectly — Melishi pulls Ba-Ado-Mishram into a gemstone — and the power of oaths inside him trembles and pleads with him not to do it. *One will suffer, yet a world will live,* he tells himself. He believes — wrongly — that capturing her gives him leverage, that he can threaten to release her later.

He has not anticipated the aftereffect on the singers. The Rosharan tones had aligned with her; ripping her away has a devastating effect across every singer on the planet. His foreknowledge missed it. And in the same moment, the Shard of Honor he holds — already strained — turns on him. He resists, cajoles, orders, *insists* that there is a difference between doing good and being honourable. The power disagrees, because what he has done is neither. The part of him that is still Tanner agrees with the power.

He hears Rayse laughing through the bond. Rayse saw it too — the same weakness he had once spotted in his rival is now in him. If the power abandons him, the unchecked Radiants and Heralds will destroy the world; the Honorblades alone could. Rayse will get what he wants: global annihilation, the elimination of his rival, perhaps the chance to escape Roshar. He may have planned this all along. Tanavast has hours, at most.

In his agony he reaches for Kor through the bonds, and finds only revulsion and hate — not just from her, but echoing back through every bond made in his name. Every Radiant is corrupted by what he has done. Every promise he made is flawed.

Then he does the thing that haunts him most. Radiants who had touched him in the hollow of stone where the trap was sprung sense his collapse; he projects his vision into them. He shows them *all* of it — and forgets, in his terror, to explain that what they are seeing is one *possible* future, not the only one. They see the world destroyed at their own hands, perfectly clear, as fact. Horrified at himself, he flees.

He tries to fly to Kor to beg forgiveness. The power is already separating from him in midair. He reverts to a human body and crashes through a forest of trees with limbs that pull away from him, until he is left lying in the underbrush — a fallen god — beneath a perfect column of moonlight. The moonlight darkens. Rayse is standing next to him. *Idiot.* He reaches with trembling hands for what is no longer his. *What an embarrassing mix you are, Tanner. Strong enough to hold the power, but not strong enough to bend it. Smart enough to try to trick me, but stupid enough to be tricked.*

Rayse seizes him in a hand trailing shadows and stars and prepares to launch himself out of Roshar and into the cosmere to scout the next world he will conquer — and finds tethers holding him down. Tanavast laughs through his pain. *You think if I am defeated, our agreements don't hold? You made a deal with the divine sense of honor and duty. It will not let you go as easily as another might.* Rayse snaps that the deal is nothing without a vessel: *I just need to crush you, Tanner.* Tanavast knows otherwise — his power is the power of bonds, and the accommodation will bind Rayse to this system even after the vessel dies.

Then the power takes pity on him one last time. It offers to *fight* — Honor hates Odium for wanting to discard oaths so flagrantly, and a sliver of it understands that he had been trying. It will Invest him again if he agrees to fight back, which their accommodation permits since Rayse would be attacking first. He understands, at last, the depth of what they ruined when they shattered Adonalsium: the divine sense of love and compassion went to Aona, among the best of them, and so Rayse killed her first. The remaining Shards cannot feel what she carried. The power of Honor knows only one good: keeping oaths. He knows other goods. He has promised to protect Roshar. Fighting Rayse now would destroy it. So — for once in his life — he refuses, in a moment when he could have been truly strong.

*But still I did not want to die. Protect me,* he begs. *A piece of you,* the power answers. It takes a portion of his soul, including his memories, and flees. Odium destroys the rest with glee, killing his rival at long last. But the Shard has given that piece of Tanavast to the spren-avatar he had crafted as a true part of himself in the storm. He dies — and lives on.

He is now more spren than man. He does not feel as keenly as Tanavast did; storms only blow. But he carries a greater truth no other spren can: he was there, in one form. The corpse of a child held in his arms. Dead cities. Thousands of years of war fed to one promise. A betrayal of all he stood for, ending in the imprisonment of a spren who had asked for peace. Wounded, weeping tears of rage with every passing year, he rides the storm. *For I, the Stormfather, remembered.*

And the unattached power whispers to him. It wants a Vessel; it loathes being free; but it has learned to be more cautious. The two of them resolve a plan together. Tanavast had been too weak. There must be someone who could hold the Shard without being him — honourable but merciful, a warrior but a leader, who has not asked for the power and who has proven themselves *without* knowing the reward. the Stormfather would find a champion: someone who would defeat Rayse in the contest Tanavast had bought. If that champion saved Roshar, the Shard would Invest them. They could become his successor.