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Kaladin stares at the Shardblade Shallan has summoned for him in the fissure: faintly etched with glowing garnet lines, beaded with the dew of its summoning. He turns his head and the side of the blade touches his cheek. No scream comes — not the one he had heard the first time he held one, the one tied somehow to his bond with Syl. He takes that silence as a bad sign. He grips the hilt. He has refused these things before, but this is not the practice grounds: this is to save a life. He decides on the spot that Shallan is therefore not a Surgebinder — otherwise she would loathe the Blade as much as he does. He tells her she is not supposed to lend a Shardblade to anyone but the king and the highprinces. She begs him not to report her; she does not, she says, think she is supposed to have it.

He revises the plan. He had meant to draw the beast deeper into the chasms so she could run east; she insists he draw it the other way so she can recover the satchel with the map. He agrees. She counts three. He leaps out.

The chasmfiend lurks like an enormous, eel-like shadow above the floor of the chasm, legs bracing the walls. He throws himself flat, scrapes by underneath, and comes up swinging. His first wild cut takes a chip from the wall. The beast curls back on itself and lashes at him. He dodges, drops the Blade so as not to slice himself rolling, scoops it up again. He hacks the tip from a claw. It is the equivalent of nicking a man's toe. The creature's body fills the chasm so completely that its claws cannot pull back for a real swing — that is why he is still alive. He bolts down the corridor, then stops short and sprints back beneath the beast, ramming the Blade up into its underside. It rears off the sword, then snaps down on his leg.

Pain. The world spins. He hits the rock. The Blade has flown away into the dim light by the spheres he tossed. His leg is bloodied to the boot and numb from shock. He crawls toward the weapon and his leg gives. Then there is shouting — Shallan, somehow on the wrong side of the beast, waving her arms and screaming at it. The chasmfiend turns from him to her and smashes the ground where she stood. He pulls the Blade from the rock and turns back, expecting a corpse, finding none.

The head. The only chance is the head. He hauls himself up and lurches forward. The beast trumps and surges at him. He drops to one knee, slips into a pool, snatches a sphere out of the water — and prays. *Please.* He hears, faint, what might be weeping. No Stormlight enters him. Yet beside him, somehow, a him taller than him stands with sword raised, and shatters into a puff of Light as the chasmfiend smashes down on it. He does not understand. He charges. The chasmfiend rears for the bite. He drives the Blade up through the roof of the mouth and into the brain.

The POV slips. Shallan watches from behind a boulder, her skin and clothing turned deep black, illusions cast from a sketch of herself and one of him. The carcass falls on Kaladin. She drops the paper, dismisses her cover, and scrambles across the dead legs and over a claw to find the lower half of him sticking from the closed maw. He is alive, complaining about the smell. She cuts the mandibles away with her Shardblade — violet ichor everywhere — and wiggles him out. His leg is wrecked. She thinks, with a chill, of Balat. She cuts the skirt of her dress off at the knee and a sleeve from her safehand and binds him. He insists, weakly, that he has had worse.

Two hours, maybe, until the storm. She looks at the carcass and thinks of climbing it and scaling the chasm wall; he points out the highstorm would scour them off the top. Then he sees it: *you can cut stone.* They can carve a cubby in the wall above the flood line and ride it out, like the chrysalis scouts do.

She climbs the chasmfiend's back, then the wall, summoning the Blade to cut a series of long handhold strips, working her way up to just above the water line. The Blade is awkwardly long in close quarters; the Blade, asked silently, shortens itself to knife length in her grip. She hacks out a shallow alcove, dropping rock onto the carapace below. It takes more than an hour. The cubby is not deep enough; it will have to do.

She climbs back down, eyes him, and tells him he is coming up. He says he is not sure he can walk. She tells him he is going if she has to carry him — for perfectly selfish reasons. She refuses to be his dying view — herself half-dressed, soaked in chasmfiend ichor. She cuts a vine for him to climb by — twice; the first cut severs the soul of the vine; only then dead can it be physically cut. He pulls himself up to the carcass by arm-strength alone, then up the ladder of handholds slot by slot. Below, water trickles, then gushes. The plants pull in. The wind starts its long, hollow moan through the chasms. He reaches for her hand at the top. The stormwall hits.