Tower plateau

Tower plateau, known to the Alethi simply as the Tower, is the most formidable named battlefield on the Shattered Plains. Its unusual size, position near the Parshendi side, and commanding slope make it both a coveted objective and a graveyard for Alethi assaults. The plateau becomes decisive not merely because armies fight there, but because its capture could alter the entire balance of the war.

Geography and Strategic Position

Tower plateau is unusually massive and oddly shaped, standing defiantly near the Parshendi side of the Shattered Plains. Chasmfiends are particularly fond of using it as a place to pupate, tying the plateau’s military importance to the dangerous ecology of the Plains. Its scale determines how many troops can be deployed, allowing a force far larger than those suitable for smaller contested plateaus.

The Tower’s position gives the Parshendi a persistent logistical advantage. They can reach it first, form up on its slope, and use the higher ground against any Alethi assault. The Alethi have been repulsed there twenty-seven times, and no Alethi force has ever won a skirmish on the plateau. Dalinar Kholin has personally been turned back twice, making the Tower a concrete measure of the limits imposed by distance, terrain, and enemy preparation.

The Objective of the Assault

The plateau’s value is connected to the gemheart held within a chasmfiend chrysalis. When Dalinar Kholin studies the war map, he recognizes that trapping the Parshendi at the Tower with a sufficiently large army could allow the Alethi to kill an enormous number of enemy troops—possibly enough to damage their ability to continue waging war on the Shattered Plains. The objective therefore exceeds the seizure of a single gemheart: the Tower offers the possibility of a strategic breakthrough.

That possibility leads Dalinar Kholin to order Adolin Kholin to mobilize the Fourth through Eighth Divisions. The march is difficult and unusually long because the army is advancing as far eastward as Alethi forces have ever attempted to strike. Beyond this point, plateaus are considered impossible to hold: the Parshendi can arrive so quickly that they sometimes remove the gemheart before the Alethi reach the battlefield. Even the Tower can be lost in that way.

The Battle and Betrayal

When Dalinar Kholin and Torol Sadeas finally reach a rock formation overlooking the Tower, Dalinar sees that the Parshendi have not yet extracted the gemheart. A ring of Parshendi warriors is pounding on the chrysalis, whose thick, stone-like shell is still intact. The sight confirms that the Alethi have arrived in time to contest the objective, but it also places the armies in the precise situation that makes the Tower so dangerous: the enemy is already concentrated on favorable ground, while the Alethi must coordinate an attack across the chasms.

The battle turns when a new Parshendi force pours onto the Tower. Dalinar Kholin’s army, fighting on the upper middle slope of the wedge, becomes surrounded as the newcomers flood the sections that Torol Sadeas had supposedly held to protect Dalinar’s retreat. Kaladin Stormblessed realizes that the withdrawal is not a failed defense but a deliberate abandonment. Torol Sadeas is leaving Dalinar Kholin and his soldiers to be destroyed, transforming the Tower from a difficult military objective into the scene of a betrayal on a grand scale.

The physical arrangement of the plateau makes the treachery possible. The bridges that connect the battlefields are routes of escape as well as avenues of attack, and the retreating bridge crews expose the movement of Sadeas’s forces. Torol Sadeas’s Shardplate and honor guard remain unharmed when he reaches the chasm, while Dalinar Kholin’s force is left encircled on the slope. The contrast reveals that the apparent joint assault was structured to preserve one army while sacrificing the other.

Political Consequences

The betrayal at Tower plateau exposes the weakness of the Alethi war effort. The ten highprinces are nominally allies, yet the gemheart campaign has made them competitors whose armies can be redirected by private advantage. Dalinar Kholin concludes that Torol Sadeas is neither uniquely wicked nor uniquely honorable: any highprince might betray another if the opportunity arose without personal risk. The Tower thus becomes evidence of a systemic failure rather than an isolated act of treason.

In response, Dalinar Kholin plans to become Highprince of War and enforce the Codes in all ten warcamps. He intends to coordinate which armies attack which plateaus, place all gemhearts under the Throne, and distribute them as spoils through Elhokar Kholin rather than allowing each highprince to treat the war as a private contest. His aim is to turn the ten armies and their leaders into a real unified military force. The Tower’s battlefield lesson therefore produces a proposed reorganization of Alethkar’s entire war structure.

Dalinar Kholin also connects this political transformation to personal sacrifice. He plans to give his Shardplate to Renarin Kholin to fulfill one promise and has already given away his Shardblade to fulfill another. The Tower’s significance is consequently measured not only in lost soldiers and unrealized victories, but in the price Dalinar is willing to pay to prevent the same pattern of mutual betrayal from recurring.

Narrative Significance

Tower plateau concentrates the central contradiction of the Alethi campaign. The kingdom claims to be pursuing vengeance against the Parshendi, but its highprinces compete over gemhearts and prestige, allowing the stated war purpose to be undermined by private rivalry. The plateau’s repeated resistance mirrors this political fragmentation: the Alethi possess numbers and ambition, yet cannot convert them into coordinated strength.

Its strategic promise and catastrophic outcome also give the Tower a powerful reversal structure. Before the battle, the plateau appears to offer the chance to break the Parshendi war effort. During the assault, it becomes the setting in which an ally abandons another army. Afterward, its deepest consequence is not territorial possession but recognition: Dalinar Kholin understands that victory requires uniting the Alethi beyond a merely nominal alliance. Tower plateau therefore functions simultaneously as a place, a military test, and the landscape in which the need for political unity becomes unmistakable.