With the highstorm raging outside, Kaladin confronts the Pursuer before a vast audience. Using Navani’s Lashing device, Kaladin slams the Pursuer into the window and exhausts his Voidlight. Stripped of healing and mystique, the Pursuer retreats through his own lines as humans chant Stormblessed, and Kaladin regains the device.

Kaladin turns toward the opened infirmary, only for Teft’s corpse to fall before him, eyes burned out. Moash lands nearby, forbids interference, and relies on Kaladin’s grief to immobilize him, calculating that despair will render Kaladin useless.

Moash enters the infirmary, studies the tower model, and destroys the tiny fabrial marking the final node, dropping the tower’s last defense. He checks the bound, unconscious Lift, then drags Lirin into the atrium and orders the Pursuer to hold Kaladin’s father as leverage, forbidding any attack on Kaladin to avoid provoking vengeance. Satisfied, Moash departs to kill a queen.

Meanwhile, Navani sees the barrier around the crystal pillar vanish and realizes the Sibling is exposed and nearly corrupted. She arms a painrial trap with a magnet, then approaches as Raboniel arrives alone to finish her work.

Raboniel urges Navani to flee to satisfy a covenant with Vyre, but Navani refuses to abandon the Sibling. She proposes waiting together and offers her anti-Voidlight dagger as a seeming compromise. Raboniel accepts the dagger and heads back toward Navani’s quarters—only to step directly into the painrial trap Navani set.