Far from Roshar, Wit awakens in a preserved body that regrew after Odium vaporized him. Ulaam confirms the experiment worked, but also explains that Roshar is now inside a severe time-dilation effect caused by the Shards’ clash and Retribution’s formation. Hoid realizes that returning immediately would trap him while wider cosmere threats, especially to Scadrial, advance, so he despairs over abandoning Roshar. After consulting the ancient dead through a dragon meditation, Hoid reaches a startling conclusion: Dalinar’s final choice may have been far wiser than it first appeared.

About a month and a half after Dalinar’s fall, Adolin gathers the Unoathed in Azimir and shares Maya’s report from Urithiru. Dalinar is dead, Odium has effectively won Roshar outside Azir, Urithiru is sealed in a strange glasslike isolation, and Radiants beyond the tower cannot use their powers. At the same time, Adolin learns that Renarin’s freeing of Ba-Ado-Mishram is healing deadeyes, and that the Unoathed can still summon functional Plate and Blades without Stormlight. While Adolin grieves both Dalinar’s death and Shallan’s uncertain fate in Shadesmar, the endless rain over Azir suddenly stops.

Adolin and the others go outside to see sunlight breaking through for the first time in weeks. He carries Oathbringer, the book he has started reading to better understand his father, and feels an unexpected warmth as he salutes the returning sun. In the weeks that follow, Azir proves to be the only part of Roshar still under sunlight, while the rest of the continent remains in darkness and flooding further isolates the nation. The result is stark: Azir becomes a small but untouchable refuge, a last light on Roshar.

In Shadesmar, Shallan visits the vanished site of Cultivation’s Perpendicularity and finally accepts that she may be trapped there indefinitely. She forces herself to focus on survival, possible routes back to the Physical Realm, and the practical reality that Fused powers and other perpendicularities might still offer hope. She then confronts Felt and uses a Ghostblood seon to speak with Thaidakar, learning that Roshar’s time bubble makes communication massively delayed and offworld travel dangerous because years could pass elsewhere while only months pass on Roshar. Shallan secures a truce, claims the seon Ala as compensation, and immediately turns that victory toward a personal goal: using seon communication to reach Adolin in Azimir.

Elsewhere in Shadesmar, Sigzil continues his long journey while bearing the Dawnshard Wit hid in him. The power sustains him but is also changing him, and he presses on in the hope of protecting it and finding some form of redemption. He joins an Iriali offworld caravan and meets Szeth’s rejected highspren, who offers news of Kaladin and companionship. Finally, Taravangian, now Retribution, briefly checks Roshar and reveals his own secret shame: before Kharbranth’s destruction, he secretly saved its people into a Spiritual Realm replica of the city, preserving a private haven of love and peace. Holding his grandchildren there, he is forced to confront the truth he hates most—that Dalinar had been right.