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Six years before the main story, eleven-year-old Shallan Davar stands very small in a room of her father's manor and tells herself, in the chapter's first sentence, that the world has ended and that she is to blame. The room is shaking, then she understands the room is steady and the shaking is her own body; she cannot make herself blink, her eyes fixed open, her sense of being a child and of eleven not being old enough collapsing in on itself together. Two figures lie on the floor beside her: a man bled out, and the woman in white beside him — Shallan's mother — face down, so that the eyes Shallan is most afraid of cannot find her. The carpet that had been white is red now. The man has done most of that bleeding.

Her father kneels in front of her and, very quietly, tells her to pretend none of it ever happened. He wipes something wet from her cheek with his thumb, and when his thumb comes away red he promises her, in the same small whisper, that he will protect her. Then he gathers her up into his arms — and the gesture is unbearable, because Shallan understands, with a cold clarity, that a monster who has done what she has done is not the kind of thing a father is supposed to hold like this. She is unable to move. She cannot get her arms to push him away or her body to recoil.

He sings to her as he carries her. The lullaby is one she knows, the one he has always used to soothe her — *Now go to sleep in chasms deep, with darkness all around you...* — and for a single bearable second she lets herself half-believe what the song is supposed to mean: that it is night, that she has woken from a nightmare, and that her father is putting her back to sleep. Then he steps over the body of the woman in white, finishing the next verse, and the imagination fails. The corpses are not the dream. The lullaby is.

He carries her across the room with her face against his shoulder, and they pass the strongbox set into the wall. The strongbox is not dark. Light is bleeding out from around its closed door in seams bright enough that Shallan sees them through the dim of the room. Whatever is in there, Shallan thinks in the numb part of herself, is also a monster. Her father reaches the verse about the crystals fine and the sleeping baby dear. He carries her past the strongbox, past the dead, through the door, and closes the door on what is inside.