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Shallan drops the spent dagger and sags to her knees beside Mraize's body, exhausted in a way that does not feel like triumph. The trick had worked — misdirection inside misdirection — and lucky he had not noticed, at the very last moment, that the anti-Stormlight tip had begun to burn through her Lightweaving. Pattern bounces over, still wearing the too-tall illusion of her body. Then Radiant is kneeling across the corpse — blond, calm, the part of Shallan that had killed her mother and her father and borne her violence after Tyn died — and tells her, gently, *you did it all on your own. You killed him yourself. You don't need me to do that anymore, do you?* *No,* Shallan whispers. *Thank you.* Radiant reaches across, squeezes her shoulder, and the two become one. The hurt is real, Shallan says — not for what she did, but for Mraize's decisions. She is not responsible for his bad choices or their consequences. Pattern asks, in her voice, if she is *healed*. It is disorienting enough that she dismisses his Lightweaving. *That's not how it works,* she tells him. She will always have to fight her mind's inclinations. It is not that she is healed, or that Radiant is gone completely. She is, however, better than she was.

Mraize's body begins to glow; the skin ripples. She reaches in and helps Pattern pull free a bone-white Cryptic whose head pattern is all wrong — loose loops, scribbles instead of geometry, the left side burned away to a hole where arm and shoulder should be. *I am sorry,* the Cryptic says. *But I hate you. It is a strong hate.* *You will have to deal with that,* Shallan says, inspecting the wound. *Is there a way to heal you?* He does not know. She burned away the part of him that was Stormlight but not the part that is Voidlight. He feels sad and hurt and does not want to talk to her. She does not blame him. Perhaps Sja-anat could help. With Pattern's help she gets him onto his feet and starts toward the room with the prison — which in the fight she had almost forgotten. Drawing near, she can barely make out something horrifying inside: Renarin and Rlain with the gemstone of Mishram's prison raised high, poised to shatter it. *Oh, storms.*

On the stone field of Shinovar, Nale — called Nalan'Elin — huddles on the ground and tries to stop existing. It is not that this darkness is new to him; he has been able to hide from it for centuries, and Ishar has stripped his hiding place away. Every murder he has committed for *the law* surges back at once. He knows, eyes squeezed shut and weeping, that he will never escape this.

Syl tries to claw her way toward Kaladin and finds it impossible. She has felt something like this before, trying to empathise with him on his worst days, but experiencing it like *this* — *know my pain,* Ishar is saying somewhere, *as you feel it, let me have peace to think* — is so, so different. It makes her feel completely alone. So alone. What had she ever done that mattered? Something squeezes inside her, rearranging her, until what she wants is *not to be.* It is not pain. It is the opposite of pain. It is a deep, terrible nothing. It terrifies her more than anything ever has.

Szeth is exhausted. How long is he expected to keep going? Each new thought is of how he failed: the eyes of someone he killed, whispers in the darkness. Why does any of it matter? Why has he tried so hard? Could he not just sleep for once? Yet sleep seems too easy an escape for one like him. *Szeth?* the sword calls. He ignores it. *Szeth, what is wrong?* Everything is wrong. It always will be. He squeezes his eyes shut, curls up, and trembles.

Kaladin lies there grappling. *I made a fool's choice, didn't I?* Ishar is musing somewhere above him. *To think that any mortal could ever deserve to be a Herald. I must move forward with another plan. Dissolve the Oathpact. Bring the spren through to this realm, and make them my army.* Thoughts stab in like spears — everyone Kaladin lost, everyone he failed. He hates this part. But there is nothing to do about it, so he raises his head and looks up. So often it begins with looking up. Through tears he sees, faintly, someone standing in front of him: Kaladin himself. Young Kaladin who volunteered to follow his brother into the army. Squadleader Kaladin sheltering recruits on a battlefield. Bridgeman Kaladin making his friends carry a bridge on its side. Captain Kaladin standing for Elhokar against a friend. Radiant Kaladin battling Szeth in the sky. He looks at the dead men he has been and realises: he admires them. Each shared the same single trait — the willingness to protect and help those around them. *That is me,* he thinks. *That is who I want to be.*

Wit had told him to find out who he was when he was not in the middle of a crisis. *This* was who. The darkness inside him answered that he would only end up in the same circles as before; in that darkness he can feel the burden of the nine remaining Heralds, the people who had sacrificed so much they had lost themselves. Was that a warning? Should he not try? He fought the feeling off, because he had a new tool: helping Szeth had taught him. He had boundaries now. He refused to take Szeth's failings on himself, refused to let failure crush him. The change to become this newest version of himself was not about abandoning what he admired about himself. It was only about finding a healthy way to handle it. And so, in the face of the most awful darkness he had ever felt, Kaladin took a deep breath. Then stood up.