(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Dalinar comes to himself mid-stride in another of his visions, legs lifting high in a parade-march gait through warm, knee-deep water. A dozen men in archaic bronze breastplates and leather skirts run beside him; he names the place aloud for Navani to transcribe back in the real world, guessing the Purelake, and recognising that the uniforms are too pure for any modern revival because there is no steel mixed in with the antique gear. Ahead, what he first takes for a rock mound resolves into a peaked, fin-walled fortress of jet-black obsidian standing straight out of the lake — no record he knows of mentions it. The group forms up around a Knight Radiant whose Plate glows a deep red at the joints and looks startlingly like Adolin's armor — though pulled in at the waist; female, he decides when she gives orders through a closed visor. They are searching, a fellow soldier explains, for a spren that does not act the way it should — once Sja-anat touches one, it begins behaving wrongly — and Dalinar dutifully repeats every word under his breath for the scribe waiting beyond the vision.

He spots one such spren in the water — a small shadowy face with red eyes — and gives chase as the others fall in behind. A larger figure joins it, perhaps six feet, human-shaped and swimming. Then both spren plunge into the rock and the lakebed begins to crack. Rope-thin arms of stone slam down to brace, and a thunderclast tears itself out of the lake floor like a corpse rising from sand, leaving a body-shaped hole beneath the water and an evil molten-eyed face thirty feet above it. The Radiant draws an enormous Shardblade, starts to glow a calm white that Dalinar now recognises as Stormlight, and walks through the lake as if the water has no purchase on her at all; the men around her glow more faintly with the same light as they ready their hammers. Beside Dalinar, the long-faced Selay soldier who helped him up turns into the voice that comes at the end of every vision — the posthumous Almighty. The Almighty tells him the Radiants were a thing the spren themselves invented, in imitation of the gift he had given men through his Heralds — ten orders meant to help humanity fight and rebuild through the Desolations — and charges Dalinar to refound them. Unite the highprinces. Build a fortress that can weather the storm. Vex Odium into accepting a champion's contest he can be made to believe he might lose, because Odium has been beaten so often that he will take the bargain rather than risk another defeat. Dalinar dutifully repeats every word and then presses for more — if you could be killed, your enemy probably can be too — but the Almighty is a recorded message, not a god, and cannot improvise an answer.

The vision dims. Dalinar wakes in a small stone chamber in his complex, rain pelting the closed shutters as the highstorm outside spends itself. Navani kneels beside him in a red dress, her braid threaded with rubies, finishing her transcript through the cloth of her sleeve. He had switched languages at the end, she tells him — into an ancient form of Selay she will need her translators to make sense of — and he needs to speak more slowly when he does. She is the only person he will let watch him in such a state; Renarin and Adolin wait the storm out in another room under Captain Kaladin and his bridgemen. They sit at the hearth — one of the few he has not converted to one of Navani's heating fabrials — and he recounts what he saw so she can match it to the transcript: the obsidian fortress, the body-shaped hole the thunderclast left in the lakebed, his soldier's suspicion that the Shardblades were really designed to fight beasts like that. Navani tells him, smiling, that he is endearingly a soldier. She also presses again to move her things into his quarters now that the kingdom will not let them marry; he refuses, again, on the only grounds he has left after admitting the Almighty is dead — a thing is either right or wrong, and the Almighty doesn't come into it. She kisses him hard, not demurely, and reminds him she is not a patient woman, then leaves under Kaladin's escort. He sits down by the dying hearth to think.

He wakes some unknown time later in the dark, embarrassed at having dozed in the middle of the day. Stark white glyphs have appeared on the wall of his closed room since he closed his eyes — Sixty-two days. Death follows. — scratched into the stone with a chunk of white rock pried from the ornamental row around the window. Kaladin returns furious at his own lapse, swearing he should have posted guards at every interior door; Dalinar tells him to be more watchful but otherwise dismisses the matter, and Kaladin retreats reluctantly. Navani fetches the ardent Rushu — gifted at handwriting, oblivious to almost everything else — who notes that the lines are sloppy, that the second glyph almost spelled "broken" instead of "death," and that the hand was not practiced. Navani sends her out. Adolin hefts the chunk of window-stone and asks whether the message is some obscure threat. Dalinar tells him no: it is information. The Everstorm comes in sixty-two days. The proclamation that has been sitting with the highprinces in private for a week will go to the warcamps within the next few — before they can lean on Elhokar to retract it — and Navani is to arrange a meeting they will, after that, very much want.