Adolin spends the midday lull moving through Azimir’s subcamps, talking with ordinary soldiers by name, listening to complaints, and telling embarrassing stories to keep spirits up. The siege is only a few days old, but the constant rotations, steady losses, and lack of decisive progress are already exhausting the army. Adolin reflects that while his father would tell men to fight for ideals, soldiers in the middle of battle usually fight for one another, so Adolin focuses on personal loyalty and human connection to keep them holding on for the promised reinforcements in five days.

Adolin then joins Colot at a recruitment staging ground to find replacements for the dead and wounded. Because the Azish military normally uses strict exams and excludes outsiders, many desperate volunteers are unfit for front-line combat, and Adolin must reject most of them despite needing bodies. He selects sturdier recruits with useful skills, including Sarqqin, a blacksmith who has legal papers to live as a man; Adolin accepts him and notes that his smithing experience should be put to use in the right platoon.

One rejected volunteer, Zabra, angrily challenges Adolin after being assigned to messenger duty. Assuming Adolin is excluding her because she is a girl, Zabra insists she can fight, but Adolin demonstrates with shields that she cannot physically hold a line against even an average untrained man, let alone a warform singer. He tells Zabra that putting her in the shield wall would get other soldiers killed, but offers her a real role as a messenger and gives her his knife for the last-ditch defense if the city falls; when she accepts responsibility, he sends her to May Aladar and promises possible archery training later. Before Adolin can continue his work, warning bells announce another enemy assault, and he runs for the dome.

Elsewhere, during a highstorm near Narak, Venli shelters with the listeners beneath a ring of chasmfiends and is struck by the creatures’ harmonic singing and their connection to the stones. Guided by the stone itself and encouraged by Timbre, Venli uses Stormlight to let vibration shape rock into a pattern that resembles the Shattered Plains. As she presses deeper, the stones show her that the Plains were once an ancient human city, built with enormous power to include a tenth Oathgate, at roughly the same era as Urithiru and Nohadon. The stones explain that before Radiants, both singers and humans could use Surges more directly, but dangerous "new gods" and alien stone from a fallen fourth moon caused catastrophe; Honor then shattered the city into the symmetrical corpse now called the Shattered Plains. When Venli asks what else happened around that time, the stones show nine figures with swords, linking the destruction to Aharietiam, then urge her to come to the center at Narak. Realizing a crucial secret remains hidden there, Venli calls for an immediate expedition through the chasms despite the active war.