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Morning on the last day. Dalinar walks out of the command tent into the Weeping and refuses an umbrella; Roion and Aladar eschew theirs too when they see his. The four armies are massed on the centre plateau and the three plateaus around them are a quiet wall of glowing red eyes — gemstones in Parshendi beards dark, the Weeping's long days of light-starvation showing. Dalinar tells Aladar straight that he expected to find horrors out here, takes the highprince by the jacket when he balks, and asks him to be the champion the army needs. Aladar salutes back as crisply as any soldier and answers in the title Dalinar has always wanted reinstated: *Highprince of War*. Roion is sent to his army with a reminder that careful is the attribute Dalinar would pick today over reckless; Sebarial is sent to keep out of the way and, if he has a mind for it, to burn some prayers. Dalinar gives Teleb command of Sebarial's army with two of Adolin's newly-Sharded brightlords at his head, then climbs into Gallant's saddle and gives a speech he has never quite given before: that the Almighty himself has sent him to save the land from another Desolation. Gloryspren spin like golden spheres above him in the rain. The Parshendi start to sing — a frenetic staccato rhythm, shouted across the chasms — and unnatural cold wind drives the rain sideways. Rlain is brought up to him and names the rhythm: destruction, power. He begs Dalinar to stop the song, even if he has to kill those singing. Red lightning sparks down Parshendi arms in flickers. Dalinar decides on instinct and changes the plan: *we attack now.*

In the warcamps Kaladin limps to the dueling grounds and finds the courtyard dammed and filled — the ardents have turned it into a shallow pool, sand washing inside the dam — and goes up to the rooftop to find Zahel in a tarped hammock between two lightning rods with a bottle of lavis liquor. Zahel talks around questions like a man on vacation, eventually conceding that the Weeping is for washing the dueling sand. Asked instead how to choose between two equally distasteful options, he tells Kaladin to pick the one that lets him sleep, then admits it is what he wishes he had done. Below, Kaladin takes a real spear into the pool and tries his old forms; his leg fails him, his balance is gone, his fingers feel wrong on the haft. The rain is not his dance partner today; the wind is not blowing. He shouts at the sky that the king deserves what is coming, and the next sentence out of his mouth is not his — *it's right to remove the wounded limb* — and he hears the squadleader's voice the day Tien died, the man who threw untrained boys at the enemy *to stay alive*. The pattern falls into place whole and he falls to his knees in the pool: the king is Dalinar's Tien.

The order to attack reaches Adolin on the southern flank. He sets heavy infantry first, longspears in reserve in case of overrun, and charges across the bridge himself on Sureblood with Bridge Four guards Skar and Drehy at his run. A flash of red lightning takes the horse out from under him; he comes to skidding in his Shardplate beside the wide branching burn down Sureblood's coat. He has only a moment over the body — flashing back to the unfamiliar field where the horse first chose him — before the rest of his line begins to fragment. The new red lightning is wild: it sometimes flashes backward into its own users or arcs into the stone. But the Parshendi in this new form fight far harder than before. Adolin bellows the men back into formation and takes a direct strike on his helm — and the Shardplate hums and sheds the bolt, the helm's glass darkening over the flash, the old story confirmed in his teeth: *by the old stories, the suit he wore had been created to fight these very monsters.* The new Parshendi are slimmer and more ferocious than the old, but their eyes burn out as readily as any Shardblade-cut; from their chests, on death, small red lightning-spren wriggle free and zip up into the rain. *They can die,* the cry goes down the line.

In the scholars' tent on the centre plateau, Shallan kneels over a vast inked map she has been filling in quadrant by quadrant on the march. She has extrapolated the Shattered Plains as a fourfold radial pattern mirrored down four axes — anything she draws in one quadrant repeats in the others. Inadara presses her for an answer; Renarin stands guard in Shardplate in the corner. A scout — Lyn — brings in a sketch of the central plateau; Pattern begins to hum on the floor. Inadara suspects him of being a Voidspren until he returns the insult, naming the look of Voidbringers in the lore and suggesting she check the mirror. Outside, cracks of lightning begin. Pattern tells Shallan what is making them: stormspren, a variety of Voidspren — bonded ones, crafting a storm. *Draw faster.* A second scout staggers in, soaked, swearing at the lightning, and stops at her map. He points at a plateau she drew long and thin and corrects her: it is a perfect circle, with great gaps to east and west. *If it were that way,* she thinks, *it wouldn't match the pattern.* The Oathgate dais was already raised when the Plains shattered, and the break ran around it.

Back on the central plateau, Dalinar sends Renarin in Shardplate off with Shallan and the scholars on their search — shouting his son into obedience when the boy hesitates — and reads the field. Aladar is holding; Teleb supports a Roion whose archers cannot string in the rain. He sends reserves to Aladar and Navani's fabrials to Roion. The Parshendi are holding back half their numbers from the line — the half that is singing — because the song they are making is more deadly to him than any blade. *That terrified him. What was coming would be worse.* Then, between the gusts: *I am sorry that you have to die this way.* No one else hears it. He recognises the voice from his highstorm visions: the Almighty himself.