There are unmarked spoilers below.
- After being away from home for six years, when Kaladin meets Roshone again, he immediately punches him in the face.Kaladin: That was for my friend Moash.
- What makes it even more awesome is that Kaladin realizes that he shouldn't have punched Roshone, apologizes, and then proceeds to order around the guards before even summoning his Blade. Roshone tries to have him arrested, but the guards awkwardly say that it would be best for everyone if they just forget about it.
- Dalinar getting the Stormfather to officiate his wedding when the ardents won't.
- Veil tries her hand at intimidation in a bar by placing her hand on the hand of a thug, and stabbing both of their hands, pinning them to the table."You’re crazy!" the Horneater said, recovering his feet, holding his bleeding hand. “You’re ana’ kai crazy."
- Shallan fighting off Re-Shephir, one of the Unmade and one of Odium's strongest creatures, with an army created by Lightweaving.Shallan: Your imitation is pathetic. Here. Let me show you how it's done.
- The flashbacks showing how Dalinar helped united the princedoms shows his final battle with a rival highprince in Shardplate atop the crumbling ruins of a wind-worn rock formation. It's a short bout, but also one of the more epic and cinematic scenes in the entire book.
- The flashbacks show us the much mentioned Blackthorn. He is half this, half a nightmare. Before he got his Shards, Sadeas mentions Dalinar must get Shardplate, because the feats he is achieving without it put all the other warriors to shame. Then we see him winning first the Plate, then the Blade, in combat. After that, when the Thrill kicks in, he becomes an embodiment of destruction.
- Kaladin does a You Shall Not Pass! moment... on a highstorm, by calling down hundreds of windspren to help him split the stormwall apart long enough for refugees to get to safety.
- Dalinar sends Queen Fen the same vision he experienced in The Way of Kings, where he played a farmer in the middle of a Midnight Essence attack, but when he went through it he was only able to save the farmer's wife and daughter. When Queen Fen goes through the same vision, she mobilizes the entire town against the Midnight Essence, successfully holding them off to the point that the Knight Radiant praises her ability to lead and command.
- Lift's appearance in a vision is half this, half funny.
- Lift manages to hide from Odium himself!
- If Sja-Anat is to be believed, Shallan's managed to fool even Odium into thinking that she's an Elsecaller.
- Jasnah verbally ripping Amaram apart when he comes to her to try and rekindle their old courtship.Jasnah: From what I understand, [your mother] spent the seven months she was with child entertaining each and every military man she could find, in hopes that something of them would stick to you.
Amaram: You godless whore. If you weren't a woman—
Jasnah: If I weren't a woman, I suspect we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unless I were a pig. Then you'd be doubly interested.
(Amaram begins summoning his Shardblade)
Jasnah: (summons Stormlight to her hand) Oh, please do, Meridas. Give me an excuse. I dare you. - The Stormfather holding back Odium from Dalinar's vision. Sure he fails, but against such odds the fact that he even tried is impressive. Remember this is the spren who spent the last two and a half books grumbling about how humanity has no honor, there's no hope of defeating Odium, the world is doomed, and so on. And he still manages to hold a full Shard back for several minutes, because his Radiant asked.
- Rysn killing the Fused thief before he can escape with the King's Drop. While she would have certainly died if Chiri-Chiri hadn't eaten his Voidlight, she still managed to arm and shoot a stirrup loading crossbow using a rope, a chair, and some steps.
- Honor's Perpendicularity, and all that follows afterwards. Dalinar, in speaking the Third Ideal and accepting his actions in the past, pulls together the Physical, Cognitive, and Spirtiual Realms in one point, creating Honor's Perpendicularity, flooding the entire area with Stormlight, and bringing Kaladin, Adolin, and Shallan all back to the Physical Realm. It's so powerful that even Odium is left screaming in rage and horror.Odium: No! No, we killed you! WE KILLED YOU!
- It's implied from Odium's use of "we" that, for a moment, he mistook Dalinar's power for a revived Adonalsium.
- Jasnah's casual and horribly effective battle Soulcasting.Jasnah raised an absent hand without looking, forming a wall of black pitch. A Fused crashed through it, and Jasnah Soulcast a flick of fire, sending the thing screaming and flailing, burning with a terrible smoke.
- Kaladin verbally tearing Amaram apart, especially when Amaram claims to be the one who forged him into a Knight Radiant.Kaladin: Ten spears go to battle, and nine shatter. Did that war forge the one that remained? No, Amaram. All the war did was identify the spear that would not break.
- Even more awesome is that this quote essentially sums up the entire story of the Heralds. Much like Kaladin, Taln was the one Herald who did not break.
- As for Kaladin’s battle with Amaram itself, the only reason it wasn’t an outright Curb-Stomp Battle was because Kaladin had to divide his attention between fighting Amaram and protecting Dalinar from the Fused, taking out multiple Fused in the process. The only reason he runs out of Stormlight is because Amaram and multiple Fused are forced to gang up on him.
- Adolin, with no Plate or any Surgebinding, fighting a thunderclast. For that matter, Renarin coming to his brother's rescue and finishing the thing off.
- Szeth, after struggling with the ideals and trying to find what law he must follow as a Skybreaker, finally deciding which Ideal and whose law to swear to: Dalinar himself.Szeth: Our master has given us a task. We shall see it completed.
- Szeth and Lift retrieving the perfect ruby the King's Drop from the Fused. Bonus points for Szeth (mostly) doing it without Nightblood, and instead simply using his advanced training with all ten Surges to outmaneuver a Fused who thought he didn't understand her Abrasion powers.
- Rock saves Kaladin by using Amaram's Shardbow. Keep in mind that these things are designed to be used by someone wearing Plate; Rock shouldn't even have been able to draw it at all. He did have Stormlight at the time, but Kaladin notes, and Word of God confirms that would not be enough, normally.
- While fighting a battle in Shadesmar, Mayalaran, the spren of Adolin's Shardblade, viciously attacks a Fused about to cut down Adolin. She does this despite being, as far as the spren are concerned, dead.
- Adolin, in a moment of desperation, manages to summon his Shardblade Maya in seven heartbeats. Despite her being a deadeye, their bond is strong enough to give her some life. She also manages to communicate with him several times during the battle, including telling him her name and expressing resigned agreement when he is too injured to continue fighting and needs to loan her to somebody else.
- Venli bonding with Timbre to become the first Listener Radiant, the spren keeping her Voidspren contained, allowing her to work against Odium from within the enemy camp.
- Renarin facing off against a dozen Fused, and then smiling, as he receives another vision of the future, followed by a full division of Kholin troops emerging through the Oathgate.Then, like a Herald from lore, a man rose into the air above them. Glowing white with Stormlight, the bearded man carried a long silver Shardspear with a strange crossguard shape behind the tip.Teft.Knight Radiant.
- At the end, Adolin and Dalinar argue about who should be king until Elkohar's heir is of age, with both believing themselves unfit. Shallan comes up with a third option - Jasnah Kholin. This is a CMOA on multiple levels:
- One for Alethkar finally having a queen.
- One for Jasnah going from an atheist scholar whose work was ignored or derided because of Vorin stubbornness and Alethi resentment of challenging the status quo to the ruler of Alethkar.
- One for Dalinar and the Kholin family in general in that after putting up with so much flak from the Vorin Church throughout the book and even being excommunicated, they now respond with a flaming middle finger by putting the single more notorious heretic than Dalinar on the throne.
- Dalinar marching back into his army's camp after his apparent death in a crevasse outside the Rift, massive Shardblade in tow, and Dalinar's subsequent conference with Sadeas and the commanders of his army.They must bleed. I want them to suffer for this. Men, women, children. They must know the punishment for broken oaths. Immediately.
- Here we get more information on the nature of the Oathpact and the Heralds. When only one of them died they realised that he was the only one of them who had never broken, and chose to leave him to bear the relentless torture alone. It's mentioned that by this point, it would only be a matter of years before one of the Heralds broke, and even the first time, when they were at their strongest, they only made it a few centuries. All by himself, with no-one to help share his suffering, Talenel held out for four and a half thousand years.
- We also find out that the others basically tricked him by not coming back once they found out that, somehow, only he died (some are implied to have done so on purpose). His reaction when one of his former companions reveals to him what happened? He thanks them, because in doing so they gave humans time to not only rebuild, but develop. It's also listed under the heartwarming moments, but that level of selflessness deserves a mention here.
- Some of the things Ulim says in Rhythm of War imply that Talenel never actually broke. Instead, the Voidbringers eventually managed to figure out how to take advantage of the weakened Oathpact and work around him.
- Szeth's trials to join the Skybreakers start with him joining a group of prospective Skybreakers in hunting down a group of escaped convicts. While Szeth tracks down one (the only one smart enough to hide instead of flee from the flying Radiant squires), he then returns, because he has noticed several clues in the prison break. He then promptly deduces that the prison break happened because the local magistrate was criminally underfunding the prison, resulting in the guard's murder and the subsequent escape. When he points this out to his mentors, they reveal that they knew about this and had already gotten a signed writ of execution for the magistrate responsible and were waiting for one of the students to recognize this. Szeth then uses Nightblood to deal with the one responsible as everyone else watches in horror.Szeth: I've killed the worst criminal.
- In another trial, Szeth and other Skybreaker squires are sparring by throwing sacks of colored powder at each other, and whoever has the least stains from the powders at the end of the match wins. The sacks are atop poles in the Purelake, which contains knee-to-waist-high water as far as the eye can see. Szeth, after getting hit hard and running low on Stormlight, drops into the lake and washes off all the powder he's accumulated, which the Skybreakers admit is a perfectly valid interpretation of the rules.
- It's mentioned a few times through the book that the wristwatch fabrials Navani made for herself and Dalinar also include a pain-suppressing fabrial. During the battle of Thaylen City Navani and a few others are taken captive, so she quietly flips a switch that changes the painrial from absorbing pain to inducing it and takes down three soldiers in a few seconds.
