Words of Radiance

The climax converges at the Shattered Plains as Dalinar's alliance assaults the Parshendi stronghold of Narak just as the Parshendi, led by the newly transformed Eshonai, summon the Everstorm. In the chaos, Adolin's forces defeat Eshonai's warriors and Adolin pushes her into a chasm during the fighting. Meanwhile Kaladin, still recovering from his injuries and torn over whether to save King Elhokar, is cornered by his former friend Moash and the conspirator Graves. Moash, unwilling to abandon his vendetta against the king, betrays and mortally wounds Kaladin. Refusing to die, Kaladin speaks the Third Ideal of the Windrunners; Syl defies the Stormfather to return to him, manifesting as a living, shapeshifting Shardblade, and Kaladin's Surgebinding is restored.

Elsewhere, Szeth catches up to Dalinar and, after overpowering Adolin, duels and defeats him, lashing him into the sky to fall to his death. Kaladin arrives in a burst of Stormlight and saves Dalinar, then battles Szeth amid the raging Everstorm. During the fight Szeth comes to accept that Kaladin is a genuine Knight Radiant and that his own years of assassination were built on a lie he was never bound to obey. He severs his bond with his Honorblade and falls, apparently to his death, into the storm. Dalinar and his army retreat into Narak to escape the Everstorm's destruction.

At the same time, Shallan and a group of scholars locate the ancient Oathgate at the heart of Narak. Using her Surgebinding abilities and her Shardblade, she activates it, teleporting Dalinar's forces to the legendary lost city of Urithiru. In the aftermath, long-buried truth about Shallan's past surfaces: as a child she killed her abusive mother in self-defense after her mother tried to kill her because of her burgeoning powers, and her father took the blame, a trauma that eventually drove him mad. The secretive Ghostbloods learn her true identity and invite her into their organization. Dalinar, confronting the being he has been hearing in visions, learns it is the spren called the Stormfather, who bonds with him and makes him a Radiant of the Bondsmith order. Renarin then reveals that he too is a Radiant, a Truthwatcher, and had likely been the one leaving cryptic warning messages in Dalinar's chambers. Adolin, having discovered Sadeas's repeated treachery, kills him in a confrontation and casts aside his father's ancestral Shardblade, Oathbringer, in disgust. Kaladin, his body healed by his restored bond with Syl, departs for his hometown of Hearthstone to check on his family. It is confirmed that the Everstorm will now permanently circle Roshar alongside the highstorms, and that any parshmen caught within it will be transformed into the aggressive Stormform, as Eshonai and her people were.

Szeth, though he fell into the storm, survives and awakens healed. He is met by Nale, the Herald of Justice and leader of an order called the Skybreakers, who gives him a new sentient Shardblade named Nightblood and recruits him as a Radiant bound to a very different code of justice. In the epilogue, Jasnah Kholin, long believed dead after the assassination attempt on the ship, is revealed to have survived by escaping into the parallel realm of Shadesmar. There she is found by the mysterious wanderer Hoid, who offers her an alliance as the book closes.