Opening
Lift bolts from the Azish palace and heads for the trench-city of Yeddaw, determined not to be “gobbled up” by adults who want to make her proper. With her cultivationspren Wyndle at her side and the Skybreaker she calls Darkness (Nale) somewhere ahead, she careens between mischief and mercy, testing powers that burn through every scrap of food she can steal.
In these first five chapters, Lift’s flippant bravado collides with a city of refugees, a stern Azish officer, and her own oath to those the world forgets.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Drop-Deads
Lift sprints away from the palace in Azimir, ignoring Wyndle’s pleas to return to comfort and safety. She practices Abrasion, trying to slide like the man who once hunted her—Darkness—crashing again and again until, for an instant, she reaches perfect, frictionless motion and slices through the world like a blade. She admits to Wyndle that she fled because the palace tried to change her—tutors, fancy clothes, even reading lessons—after she saved the new Prime Aqasix, Gawx. She feels it as a kind of devouring.
Using her powers eats through her food, and hunger gnaws. Lift compares herself to the “drop-dead” trees that topple in storms and pop back up, refusing to tangle their roots with others. She vows to remain untwined and alone, even as her path tugs her toward Coming of Age and Accepting Responsibility.
Chapter 2: Yeddaw
Lift and Wyndle reach Yeddaw, a city carved into deep, interlocking canyons. Lift boasts that Shardblades made it and wants a blade of her own; Wyndle squirms, hinting at forbidden knowledge about the weapons. At the gate, a line of hollow-eyed people—spren of hunger and exhaustion clustering around them—introduces the city’s crisis and the pull of Compassion for the Overlooked.
Wyndle frets about a new storm coming from the wrong direction and insists they should have stayed in Azir. Lift reveals her real quarry: Darkness is in Yeddaw. Wyndle is horrified. Lift shrugs and vows to sample the city’s famed pancakes instead, disguising purpose behind appetite and jokes—a sign of her struggle with Finding Purpose and Identity. Too hungry for lines and too broke for honesty—she’s already tossed the coins Gawx gave her—she decides to sneak in and feed herself at the guards’ expense.
Chapter 3: A Humble Farmer
The perspective shifts to Hauka, an Azish officer managing a city gate amid the Tashikki bureaucracy and a flood of refugees from Emul and Tukar. She spots a grain merchant she suspects of smuggling and, when she searches his cart, discovers a girl in the grain, munching raw kernels like a mouse: Lift.
The chase that follows breaks every rule Hauka knows. Lift slides on dry wood, slithers through a slot too narrow for any normal body, sprints over Hauka’s shoulders, and snatches pancakes from the guards’ plates. Then she returns to the seized cart, unhitches it, kicks open the tailgate, and Slicks the grain until it pours like water over a ledge—down into the immigrant quarter below. She leaps after it and vanishes. Hauka remains with a shrieking smuggler, stunned guards, and no sensible way to report what she’s just seen.
Chapter 4: The Immigrant Quarter
Lift slows her fall using Wyndle’s vine-body as a rope and lands in the shadowed trench district she just fed. Homes are carved into rock; shacks on stilts huddle against floodwaters. The quarter seethes with people from across Roshar. Wyndle praises her generosity; Lift claims she only wanted a soft landing, masking instinctive kindness with a thief’s alibi.
The pancakes that powered her escape are already spent. Wyndle laments that he could have been bonded to a quiet cobbler; instead he’s dragged into danger. Lift reveals a stolen guard logbook she hopes to trade for food. Wyndle says it’s worthless. Irritated, Lift tosses it—bonking a passerby—and a guard shouts. She and Wyndle vanish into Yeddaw’s maze again.
Chapter 5: The Person You Actually Are
Perched on a tarp above a shanty, Lift overhears a family rejoicing over the “miracle” of rain-grain from the sky. Their gratitude forces her to face her oath: I will remember those who have been forgotten. The scale of need crushes her—too many people for one girl to remember.
Pressed by Wyndle about her mysterious past and the Reshi Isles, Lift finally admits why she ran from Azir: staying lets people see you, know you, expect things of you. She fears their expectations will erase whoever she actually is—and she no longer knows who that person might be. Her stomach interrupts the crisis. Next step: find the local urchins and eat.
Character Development
Lift’s voice stays irreverent, but her actions betray a widening circle of care. She denies heroism even as she commits it, hiding fear of change behind jokes and hunger.
- Lift: Torn between independence and duty, she flees expectations yet can’t ignore suffering. She wants to be a carefree thief; her oath keeps making her a protector.
- Wyndle: Anxious, rule-bound, and utterly out of his element, he serves as Lift’s conscience and commentator—forever horrified, forever loyal.
- Hauka: A steady, by-the-book officer whose grounded perspective reframes Lift’s antics as the impossible. Through her eyes, Lift looks mythic.
Themes & Symbols
Compassion for the overlooked saturates the trenches of Yeddaw: shivering lines at the gate, hunger-spren crowding the desperate, and a rain of grain that turns Lift’s “theft” into a communal feast. Her oath refuses to let her pretend indifference is freedom. When Lift claims she only wanted a soft landing, the lie exposes the truth—her instincts serve the forgotten long before she admits it.
Finding purpose and identity threads through every choice. Lift sees “properness” as a monster waiting to devour her, like a palace that wants to polish the wild right off her. She likens herself to a drop-dead tree standing alone after storms, but that image cracks in Chapter 5: she isn’t just avoiding others—she’s avoiding a self she can’t name. Yeddaw itself, carved downward for shelter, mirrors her desire to hide from oncoming storms of responsibility, yet its trenches funnel her toward the very people her oath binds her to remember.
Key Quotes
“That?” Lift said. “I just wanted something soft to land on if you were snoozing.”
Lift shrugs off Wyndle’s praise with a joke, reframing a city-sized act of charity as self-preservation. The deflection protects her fragile independence while revealing the pattern of her arc: compassion first, confession later.
“I will remember those who have been forgotten.”
Lift’s oath crystallizes her conflict. It defines her Radiant calling and makes denial impossible; every hungry face in Yeddaw becomes a personal summons, turning survival into responsibility.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapters 1–5 launch the novella’s engine: a headlong heroine, a city carved for refuge, and a hunter in the wings. By uprooting Lift from Azimir’s gilded expectations and dropping her into Yeddaw’s trenches, the story externalizes her internal struggle—stay small and unseen, or grow into someone who answers need. Hauka’s viewpoint grounds the impossible, framing Lift not as a mischievous child but as a force who bends the rules of the world. And with Darkness on the move, Lift’s evasions can’t last; her identity, oath, and purpose are about to collide.