An epigraph notes there are likely nine Unmade, with potential confusion among their legends.

Kaladin remembers Tarah, an assistant quartermaster’s daughter who loved outfitting soldiers and wore old-fashioned Thaylen clothing. When Tarah accepts a scribe position in Mourn’s Vault to help her aging father, Kaladin considers transferring but cannot abandon his mission. She leaves, telling him, “be there for the living.” He later receives letters but never replies, recognizing his youthful stubbornness.

In Shadesmar, Kaladin shoulders a harpoon and leads Adolin, Shallan, Syl, and Pattern through a vast, eerily quiet forest of red, crystalline trees across obsidian hills. They conserve scarce Stormlight and hike for two days; Shallan lags from exhaustion but remains crucial for navigation. Syl remarks on the unsettling lack of predators. Kaladin presses the pace, driven by fear of repeating Kholinar’s failure and by Tarah’s admonition.

Cresting a hill, they overlook a sea of souls marking Thaylen City. Two towering Oathgate sentry spren—one multicolored, one oily black—stand uncorrupted by the device. However, the sweeping white bridge to the shore is defended by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enemy spren, revealing that access to the Oathgate will be fiercely contested.