I-12. Lhan

Brother Lhan, a dissolute senior ardent, is assigned to mentor Pai, a young ardent with strict ascetic practices and deep moral convictions about the queen's wasteful excess. Lhan attempts to convince her to stay complicit within the system rather than challenge it, but Pai ultimately commits a radical act of defiance that triggers severe consequences.

Lhan escorts the newly assigned Pai through the monastery and palace, revealing his role is to ensure ardents remain silent enablers of Queen Aesudan's lavish lifestyle. Pai immediately expresses her moral objections to the queen's feasts, waste, and cancellation of the Beggars' Feasts while people outside Kholinar starve. Lhan attempts to seduce her with luxuries and warns that challenging the queen will result in exile, but Pai resists, noting broader spiritual corruption in Alethi society—the silence of the Heralds, the failure of leaders to genuinely reform, and the disconnect between the promised riches from the Shattered Plains and the actual suffering of common people. Lhan offers a compromise: stay and be a good example rather than be cast out. Pai agrees, but that night she secretly paints ten large glyphs on the floor of the People's Hall, each listing the ten foolish attributes and explaining how Queen Aesudan embodies each one. This act is discovered the next morning, causing horror among the ardents. Pai is executed the following day, and riots break out that evening in Kholinar.