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Teft and Sigzil sit on rocks beside the chasm where Kaladin fell. Highstorm tonight. Sigzil — quiet, foreign, infuriating in the way he draws things out of people — has steered the conversation around to the cult Teft grew up in. Teft tells him. The Envisagers believed they could force the Knights Radiant back by putting their own members in real lethal danger; they pushed each other off cliffs, tied stones to candle-burned ropes. Teft's mother died in one such contraption, certain the powers would come for her at the end. They did not. At six he turned the cult in to his citylord, who tried and hanged them all. His father with them.

Up the path Renarin sits a little apart fiddling with his fabrial box; he has joined the vigil as just another bridgeman. Teft, who has Vorin views about who belongs where, thinks Renarin in the bridge crew is nearly as wrong as Moash cursing his betters — but the others like the lad. Dalinar comes by with attendants and Drehy and Skar in tow, on his way to inspect the eastern battalions. He has heard the bridgemen are keeping watch in shifts, and tells them so. He does not order them off; he orders them to eat their meals and stay out of the chasm during the storm. Teft, prompted, asks. Dalinar tells him plainly that Kaladin is dead, gives a hand-to-shoulder salute to the dead, and walks on. Teft settles back to his rock. The highprince will be the more surprised, then, when the lad climbs out.

The POV shifts. Far below, Kaladin feels like every one of the Ten Fools at once. His reading of which way the chasm-debris is packed has betrayed him; this far from the warcamps the waterflows must run differently. He calls for Syl in the dark and gets nothing back. While Shallan kneels on the moss and draws the map he asked for, he leans against the wall and watches her. Her sketch is not a few lines — it is the chasms as seen from above, every plateau exact. He has known she could draw. This is something else. *Who was this woman?*

Shallan rises and walks the bases of two adjacent plateaus, eyes on the slot of sky above, comparing them. The next plateau, the next. *Cymatics*, she says, and her face changes. The Plains are symmetrical, and she had not realised how exactly until now: the plateaus repeat in mirrored sets across the whole formation, like the sand patterns that jump on a struck plate at a given note. She can map almost the whole thing from her memory of Kholin maps. She knows where the Parshendi are. She knows where the centre is. There was a city there once. Something turned the stone to sand and the highstorms hollowed out the cracks. And at the centre — she blushes, then catches herself — there will be the Oathgate. Kaladin does not understand most of it, but he files the word away.

From there it is a punishing slow grind. They walk two plateaus, stop, draw, walk again. Four hours until the storm and they will not make it. He tries the chasm-scout call up at the slot of sky and gets only echoes back. The scouts have struck their poles and gone to their cubbies. He clutches a sphere through a sweaty fist and tries, once again, to draw Stormlight from it. Nothing. He calls quietly for Syl and gets nothing. He is half certain by now that she has gone — drifted off into the windspren, forgotten herself, become what she had been so afraid of becoming.

Shallan catches him up, pestering him until he half-smiles, then notices the cloud over his head. He blames himself for getting them killed. She reminds him she did not catch the error either. The argument circles around to her line about how he must have led a pampered, sunny life — and on the way she pulls out of him, by quietly naming each piece of it back to him, what *broken* actually feels like from the inside. The chasm seems brighter after. They start a game of *I am glad we are down here because* trading reasons for cheer, and he manages a terrible pun about the pittance Sadeas paid the bridgemen who scavenged this place.

Then they hear the trumping. The chasmfiend bursts around the corner. He yanks Shallan off the ground, throws her into a vertical fissure in the chasm wall, and dives in after her, pressing her against the packed flood-debris. The beast's claws clatter against the opening but cannot fit; its glassy green eye finds them; it withdraws, settles down, and waits. Two hours, perhaps, until the storm comes and floods the chasm with the dead.

Kaladin tells her his plan. She has to run; she has the map. He has the combat training. He will draw it off and try to live. *Liar*, she whispers. He yanks the spheres off his spear and tosses them out for steadier light. As he braces to charge, she reaches over his shoulder and tells him to take *this*. Then she summons a Shardblade.