Navani’s journal reflects on grief after Jasnah’s unexpected death. On the Shattered Plains, Dalinar joins a plateau run not to fight but to shepherd new cooperation. He lets Adolin command the battle, arrives without Shardplate, and notes this is the first run under his order to share assaults. Aladar answers the summons; Roion does not.

At Aladar’s command post, Dalinar confronts resistance. Aladar argues shared victories cut his earnings and expose him to predatory rivals. Dalinar invokes the king’s authority and even the fate of Yenev, while Aladar counters that Gavilar unified Alethkar with ruthless force, not lofty ideals—testing Dalinar’s resolve to persuade rather than coerce.

As the battle crests, Dalinar reads the field and predicts a sudden Parshendi withdrawal to finish harvesting the chrysalis. Aladar adopts the advice, sending a strike team. Adolin, in gleaming Plate, breaks through, reaches the chrysalis, and secures the gemheart, turning the Parshendi pullback into a rout.

Dalinar then spies a Parshendi Shardbearer watching from a nearby plateau, notably uninvolved, suggesting altered enemy tactics. Aladar grudgingly credits Dalinar’s counsel, but refuses broader allegiance, citing mistrust of other highprinces after Sadeas’s betrayal and fear of being exposed.

Returning to camp, Dalinar broods over his failure to win Aladar and the ominous sixty-two-day countdown he believes he wrote, despite the taboo against prophecy. Navani reads him a newly arrived letter from an old friend who plans to come to the Shattered Plains, offering a possible solution to Dalinar’s mounting political crisis.