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Shallan crosses on a borrowed bridge to a deserted, higher plateau at the heart of Stormseat and finds it ringed by the crem-mounded outlines of an ancient skyline — columns turning into stalagmites, buildings buried in stone like logs under snow. *This city hid beneath time's own illusion.* She names the plateau itself for what it is: the entire surface is the raised dais on which the Oathgate sat. The other plateaus are jagged, broken; this one is not, because it was already a pedestal when the Plains shattered around it, and the break ran the edge. Renarin grasps the logic in Shardplate; Inadara, for the first time, no longer dismisses her. Pattern warns that the bonded stormspren are crafting a storm, and that another — a highstorm coming the wrong way — is winding in from the west. Renarin turns into the wrong wind and names what only he is reading: *the Everstorm. It's actually real.* He admits to Shallan — quietly, hands on the Shardplate he should not be wearing — that he should be with his father, that he is useless. She tells him to use what he is and find the portal with her. At the centre mound she feels a ripple in the back wall and asks Renarin to slay the rock for her.

On the southern plateau, a thousand of Adolin's heavy infantry are filing through the dusty inside of a great rock outcropping he has cut his way into with the Shardblade — *a clever woman once asked him to attack a boulder for him* — and pushing through old rooms long-sealed by crem. They reach the back wall on the second floor. The singers are right outside, humming through the wall. Adolin hacks a hole, the rain returns in force, and his men spill out into the Parshendi reserves at their backs. The killing is shockingly easy and shockingly grotesque — the new-form Parshendi come out of their trance disoriented; many wake to find a full Shardbearer standing over them. The Thrill Adolin expected to carry him through is not there. He drops his Blade in disgust amid the smoke of burned-out eyes. Then a Shardblade cracks his breastplate from behind, and he turns to find a familiar Shardbearer in the rain. Eshonai. *Thank you,* he thinks — an honest fight he can do — and the Blade rises again from mist in his hand.

Dalinar rides Gallant back across the chasm with a spear wound in his shoulder and admits to himself, sliding from the saddle, that he is an old man now by the soldier's yardstick. A surgeon stitches him under one of Navani's pavilions — its attractor pulling a shimmering globe of water out of the air and shedding it off two metal rods to the plateau's edge — and remarks on the field of old scars under his shirt. Navani comes to him not in anger but in fear and asks why she can read defeat on his face when their lines are still even. Because, he tells her, an even match is a loss; if the Parshendi finish that song, that is the end. Roion bursts in soaked, grabs his wounded arm, and tells him aloud they are dead. Dalinar hauls him out into the rain and snarls at him to control himself. Then he turns up to the sky and demands the voice answer him.

This time it does. The voice tells him it is not the Almighty, it is not a Herald, it is both spren and god. *I am that which brings light and darkness.* The Stormfather. It tells him the Parshendi are calling His opposite — a deadly storm — and that He cannot stop it; He brings only a highstorm of cleansing to carry away the corpses. Dalinar refuses. *You aren't my god. You were never my god! You are a shadow, a lie!* Thunder rumbles. The Stormfather tells him He is being called — *a daughter disobeys* — and bids him farewell. No more visions, child of Honor. *This is the end.* Dalinar is left with Roion and the others staring at him in the rain.

Back in the palace corridor, bleeding heavily into his boot above Elhokar's unconscious body, Kaladin tells Moash he is choosing the option that lets him sleep at night. Graves insists he is lying; Moash insists he is trustworthy. The argument turns to the moral one. Moash calls Elhokar the sorry excuse for a man who murdered the only family he ever had. Kaladin answers that it was not Elhokar's fault — and that he would be standing here even if it had been. He offers Moash a different path: come to Dalinar with him, and he will see Moash gets justice from the right man, Roshone, the city lord truly behind his grandparents' deaths. *We're not going to be this kind of men,* Kaladin tells him. *Murders in dark corridors, killing a drunk man because we find him distasteful, telling ourselves it's for the good of the kingdom.* If Kaladin kills a man, he will do it in the sunlight, and only because there is no other way. Moash hesitates against the words. Then he shakes his head — *too late* — and slams his faceplate down.