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Wit sits alone on a rock at night in a country with no people in it — rolling hills furrowed by runoff, valleys grown over in a strange briar, a small permanent river gurgling somewhere nearby, real forest only on the western slopes. He has no audience to philosophize at, which strikes him as a waste of the hour. He tries the local fauna: a small crustacean on the next rock over that clicks its claw once and then scuttles off in apparent disgust, and a pair of songlings making their rattling percussion in the briars. He takes out his pipes and tries to imitate them; the songlings answer in alternation, which he decides counts as conversation. He notes idly that he has been surprised on this world before — by the Ryshadium, for one — and that he is glad some things on Roshar can still surprise him.

Settled in, he delivers a lecture on art to the songlings. Art, he says, pretends to be eternal and independent and Truth-with-a-capital-T, and yet it depends entirely on what its audience came in expecting. He tells the parable of the farmer at the festival who, finding a great painting near the privy, puts it to the obvious privy use, while the lighteyes upstairs stand reverently around the empty frame admiring the masterwork. The point, he tells the songlings: expectation is the whole substance of art. Surprise someone who came expecting nothing and they will worship you for life; underdeliver by a margin to someone who came expecting greatness and they will declare themselves cheated. Best audience in the world is one that came to be entertained and brought no opinions with them. He stands, brushes off his coat, and asks for a little music — someone is coming, and he wants the staging right. The obliging songling resumes.

The air in front of him heats in a low ring and a streak of light spins up into a brief glowing wall before fading like an afterimage, and in the middle of it stands Jasnah Kholin. Her dress is hemmed at the knees and patched into a leather bandolier, a pack across her shoulders, her hair in a single utilitarian braid, her face burn-marked. She groans, sees Wit, and in less than a heartbeat snaps her hand out and pulls a long, thin Shardblade — Ivory — to his neck. *How did you find me?* she demands. Wit reports that she has been making a considerable disturbance on the other side; it has been a very long time, he says, since the spren had to deal with someone alive, especially someone as demanding as she is. She presses the point in. He calmly reports that he once spent the better part of a year inside a stomach being digested, and suggests her threats want specificity. She holds his eye for a moment, then dissolves the Blade to mist.

Then she briefs him, in the cracked-out shorthand of someone who has been gone too long: a storm is coming, terrible, the Voidbringers — *Already here.* They need to find Urithiru — *Already found.* The Knights — *Refounded,* he tells her, in part by her apprentice, who polls seventy-seven percent more agreeable than Jasnah does, by Wit's own informal canvass of one lizard-crab and one songling. She presses past the joke. He confirms the substantive parts: the storm will reach Shinovar tonight and travel from there, and he believes it is the storm itself that will transform the parshmen this time — not the older pattern she has read about. Jasnah stops walking. *That is not how it happened before.* He agrees. *It is different this time.* She works through the implications aloud: if the past has shifted, then the highspren she spoke with may be wrong, the records she sought may be useless; if the Almighty is a fabrication and the past is no longer a map, where is anyone supposed to look for help?

*You're awfully certain there is no God,* Wit says. She begins to bring up the Almighty; he waves it off. He didn't mean *that*. Tanavast was a perfectly decent person — the two of them had even shared a drink, once — but Tanavast was not God. He sympathises with her skepticism; he simply thinks she has been looking in the wrong places. Where, then? *In the same place you'll find salvation from this mess. Inside the hearts of men.* Jasnah allows, dryly, that she can actually agree with that, though probably for different reasons than he intends, and perhaps the walk will be less tedious than she had feared. They set off together — a week from civilization, with Wit strolling along beside her — and he looks up at the stars and remarks that at least the world has chosen a pleasant night on which to end.