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Adolin tries to sleep in the saferoom under the Azimir hospital and cannot. He has nearly died and survived; there should be meaning in it, but at the end what he felt was not honour, it was fatalism, and that terrifies him. Maya — closer now, voice steadier — disagrees with his self-pity. *You have always had a purpose. Good — because if you could do it all yourself, you wouldn't need a sword at your side.* He thinks *storm you;* she answers *storm you* back. *Nothing matters.* *You brought me back, Adolin, because I mattered. Should I return to being fully dead?* That, he admits, is unfair.

The saferoom door cracks open. Everyone tenses until Notum zips down ahead of a small cloaked group. *Skar? Drehy?* The two Windrunners are followed by five squires. The accounting is grim: enemy threw everything at the Shattered Plains, Everstorm included; Sigzil is alive but without his spren; Leyten and Deti are dead; the Mink never reached Herdaz in time. *Brightness Jasnah was right,* Skar says. *That excursion was of the ten fools.* Drehy suspects the entire defence was. *Unless my father wins,* Adolin says. They nod grimly.

And, for the first time in a long dark year, Adolin finds something like hope in Dalinar — not as paragon, not as villain, but as a man. The night had stripped him bare, and what he is rebuilding from leans, of all things, on his father. *Take the next step,* he whispers. Skar reminds him of Navani's orders to evacuate him and the emperor; they can take a few more if not too encumbered. Yanagawn stands. *I'm not going.* The empire is no more, he says, *but Azir remains, and I am its leader.* From the wall, Adolin murmurs *as long as the emperor is on his throne …* and Yanagawn picks it up — *Azir stands.* He invokes the fifth-dynasty *troubles,* when two rival emperors fought for the city, and the precedent that whoever physically holds the throne room has legitimacy. Noura objects that the palace will be a troop concentration. Then Yanagawn muses, *if only we had someone who had experience sneaking into the palace.* Something sparks. Adolin blinks — Gawx the thief had once snuck into this very palace with Lift. *This is why you are here. We're going to sneak in and take back the throne room and save this storming city.*

Light gathers and Dalinar arrives in his rooms in Urithiru. Home — though he wonders if he will ever again trust anything he sees. *Right on time,* Wit says from behind him, sitting in his favourite chair with a book and one leg crossed. Dalinar looks at him long enough to be sure: this is the real Wit, not one of the visions' broken copies. Wit cracks a joke about his stepdaughter; Dalinar tells him no jokes; Wit notes Navani had a similar air around him on returning. Dalinar tells him: the Stormfather held Tanavast's memories. *A kind of off-white, half-finished version of his Cognitive Shadow,* Wit says — an avatar that took on its own will. *With his memories. It's like he is Tanavast, more than we thought.* *Huh.* *You didn't know?* *Dalinar, I only pretend to know everything.*

Wit mentions Navani is waiting upstairs and there is around two hours left. But Dalinar stalls. *I saw it all — the origin of humankind on Roshar, the creation of the Heralds, the Recreance — and I don't know how to defeat Odium. I learned so much my head spins.* Wit waves him over. *Walk with me. And listen.* They start down the corridors, walls glowing with strata. *Long ago,* Wit begins, *on a planet where half the trees are white, a child was born to a lumberman.* A curious, whimsical child who wanted every answer. *The king of that land was a good man, for all his faults. One day he started pondering the nature of nobility. He listened to the wrong philosophers — the kind who speak of innate equality — and bet a baron he could take any lowborn child and raise him as nobly as any highborn. So the lumberman's son was brought to the palace.* *Were you that boy?* Dalinar asks. *No. But I was young then, frightfully so. I'd somehow found a weapon destined to kill a god, and was carrying it un-wittingly.*

Oddly, no one in the corridor makes way for Dalinar. *Just a little Lightweaving,* Wit says. *We don't have time for you to be mobbed. Besides — I want you to enjoy it.* A wind blows softly at Dalinar's back — *listen,* the Wind whispers, *listen.* He starts to sense souls: a woman with her clothes basket, a potter with his clay bucket, a running child and chasing guard, dreams spinning. He feels the Stormfather in the back of his head. He feels the cords binding humankind into one family. Today, he is their dream; he is their champion. *What happened to the lumberman's son?* he asks. *He failed,* Wit answers softly. *I wasn't able to stop him from doing so, and it haunts me to this day.*

Back in the saferoom, Noura tries one more time to keep her emperor behind. He draws himself up and speaks with a voice not wholly his own: *I am emperor. I will lead them.* She breaks, weeping — not a bureaucrat's resistance but a mother's — *I don't want to lose you. Please.* He cannot stay safe; his people need more than that. *You're with me?* he asks Adolin. *To the end, Your Majesty.* The band assembles. Kushkam judges the singers' checkpoints aren't all up; Colot agrees they can move part of the way as scared citizens; May points out that the Windrunners got in. Zabra scrambles up from among the scribes — *anyone?* *Find yourself a blade.* Drehy and Skar override Gezamal's objection about their evacuation orders — *orders last until the situation changes* — and offer to feint a whole arriving Windrunner force to draw off the roughly thirty Heavenly Ones outside. Yanagawn dumps the finery on the floor and stands in an undershift, suddenly an ordinary youth. *My people don't need an emperor right now,* he says. *They need a thief.*