The War of Reckoning is the prolonged Alethi–Parshendi conflict fought across the Shattered Plains after the murder of Gavilar Kholin. It is both a siege and a political system: Alethkar’s armies seek revenge and attempt to reduce Parshendi strength, yet their highprinces compete for gemhearts, loot, and distinction so intensely that the original purpose of the campaign nearly disappears. By the later stages of the war, Dalinar Kholin recognizes that victory requires more than killing enemies; it requires transforming ten autonomous armies into a coordinated force under the authority of the throne.

Causes and Strategic Background

The war has lasted nearly six years when the narrative examines its structure. Dalinar Kholin originally recommended a siege rather than a direct assault on the Parshendi base. Advancing into the Shattered Plains would expose Alethi armies to highstorms, force them to depend on fragile bridges, and risk trapping them without a route back to fortified positions. The terrain itself favors defense: the eastern and southern edges are broken into impassable spires, mountains border the region, and chasmfiends prowl the chasms between plateaus.

The Shattered Plains therefore make movement a military problem before it becomes a question of courage. Bridges are essential to crossing the gaps, but the bridge crews are sent into battle with inadequate protection. Dalinar invokes the Alethi Codes of War against Torol Sadeas’s practice, arguing that a general should not demand what he would refuse to do himself and asking whether Sadeas would enter combat without Shardplate. Sadeas answers that his bridges are faster than wheeled alternatives, but the exchange exposes the human cost hidden inside the army’s efficiency: speed is purchased through the lives of darkeyed bridge crews.

The war is also shaped by the scarcity of Parshendi reinforcements. Because the Parshendi cannot replenish their numbers from a homeland in the same way the Alethi can, fighting them over chasmfiends appears strategically rational. The contest for a greatshell is not merely a hunt for wealth. It can reduce the enemy’s forces, deny the Parshendi a resource they urgently desire, and provide the victor with a gemheart whose value can sustain an army.

The Gemheart Economy and the Transformation of War

Chasmfiend hunts turn the siege into a recurring race. When a greatshell enters its chrysalis, scouts watch from towers and cross the chasms with jumping poles. Once a creature is found, Alethi and Parshendi forces rush toward the plateau. The objective is to seize and hold the site long enough to break open the chrysalis and remove the gemheart, attacking the opposing force if it arrives first. The event is therefore simultaneously reconnaissance, competition, assault, and extraction.

Gemhearts sustain the political economy of the campaign. A single stone can cover a highprince’s expenses for months, and larger stones are more durable when used by Soulcasters. Their potential is consequently almost limitless from the perspective of the armies that depend on them. Every highprince has an incentive to race ahead of the others, claim the next chrysalis, and convert battlefield success into financial independence and military power.

The highprinces could theoretically cooperate by taking turns, but Alethi doctrine makes that solution feel dishonorable. Vorinism teaches that the finest warriors will earn the holy privilege of joining the Heralds after death and fighting to reclaim the Tranquiline Halls from the Voidbringers. Within that ideology, competition appears not as a corruption of war but as evidence of excellence. The highprinces are allies against the Parshendi and rivals against one another; surrendering a gemheart to another lord feels worse than risking a contest. The campaign thus changes from a war of vengeance into deadly sport, with the danger itself treated as part of the prize.

Dalinar Kholin sees the contradiction more clearly than the system’s beneficiaries. Alethkar has killed a substantial portion of the Parshendi—perhaps a quarter of the original estimate—yet the siege can continue for another six years. The Parshendi appear to have anticipated the campaign, preparing supply dumps and relocating their population into terrain that functions as a network of moats and fortifications. Alethi progress is real but strategically inconclusive: the army spends lives and resources without recovering the purpose that brought it to the Plains.

Armies, Hierarchy, and the Human Cost

The military camps display the organization and inequality of Alethi society. A vast encampment is arranged in circular formations by company rank, with camp followers on the outskirts, mercenaries inside them, citizen soldiers nearer the center, and lighteyed officers at the core. Ten enormous troop masses occupy jagged, craterlike rock formations across miles of the Plains. Thousands of banners mark the competing family glyphpairs, while stone barracks reveal the presence of Soulcasters and the logistical scale of the campaign.

The war’s apparent order conceals a sharp division between those who command and those exposed to danger. Kaladin Stormblessed’s early military experience shows how poorly trained many ordinary soldiers are and how quickly formations can collapse when officers cannot maintain discipline. Dallet explains that the best fighters are sent to the Shattered Plains, while most remaining men have little more training than Cenn. His practical instruction is to stay with the more capable soldiers and run when the line breaks, a survival tactic that contradicts the formal ideal of marching in formation.

The conflict also places military service inside broader systems of coercion. In Hearthstone, Amaram explains that volunteers will be taken first but that the army must be replenished, allowing Roshone, as citylord, to decide which men are sent. The language of duty and honor masks compulsory selection. Kaladin’s life is redirected toward the army through this authority, while Lirin protests the process as the list of recruits is prepared.

The same structure becomes most violently visible in Amaram’s betrayal of Kaladin’s squad. After Kaladin kills a Shardbearer, Amaram says the surviving witnesses cannot be allowed to tell what they saw. He plans to claim that Kaladin’s squad helped kill the Shardbearer, then take the Shards for himself, presenting personal acquisition as service to Alethkar. The incident reveals how the war rewards the appropriation of honor as much as actual courage: the soldier who wins the decisive fight can be stripped of credit, freedom, and future, while the officer converts the victory into rank and equipment.

Dalinar Kholin’s Attempt at Unification

The war becomes the setting for Dalinar Kholin’s political project. Haunted by the imperative to unite the Alethi, he recalls the older system in which each of Alethkar’s ten highprinces held a specialized responsibility for governing the kingdom. Gavilar Kholin had admired that arrangement because it once forced the highprinces to submit to one another’s authority and cooperate, even though the system had long since vanished as Alethkar fragmented into ten autonomous princedoms.

Dalinar proposes to restore coordination through the war itself. Once Elhokar Kholin names him Highprince of War, Dalinar intends to enforce the Codes in all ten camps and direct the campaign, deciding which armies attack which plateaus. Gemhearts will be won for the throne and distributed by Elhokar as spoils rather than privately claimed by whichever highprince arrives first. The aim is to change the campaign from a competition into a real war and to change its commanders from rival proprietors into soldiers serving a common authority.

This plan carries a direct political risk. Elhokar fears that the highprinces will revolt and that he will not survive the attempt. Dalinar nevertheless refuses to treat Sadeas as uniquely evil. Sadeas’s betrayal is, in Dalinar’s judgment, only a sharper example of a general Alethi habit: any highprince might betray his fellows if he could do so without endangering himself. The problem is therefore institutional rather than personal. Punishing one rival cannot repair a system that rewards every rival for acting the same way.

Dalinar’s intervention includes a deliberate surrender of personal power. He has already given away his Shardblade to fulfill one promise and intends to give his Shardplate to Renarin Kholin to fulfill another. By relinquishing the symbols that make him individually formidable, he tries to make authority procedural, collective, and royal rather than dependent on the prestige of a single Shardbearer. His proposed reform is consequently both military administration and a moral rejection of the war’s existing logic.

Wider Political and Cultural Context

The War of Reckoning unfolds within a world of competing political orders, and the surrounding accounts sharpen the contrast with Alethkar. In Shinovar, warriors are treated as the lowest social group, almost like slaves, while farmers receive respect and a landowner works the fields. Babatharnam offers another alternative: authority is assigned by age, with the elderly receiving office and the oldest ruler called the Most Ancient. These examples make Alethi rule by eye color and aristocratic military prestige appear historically contingent rather than natural.

Trade and information also connect the war to distant societies. At a negotiation involving Vstim and Thresh, imported scrap metal is presented as valuable merchandise despite resembling refuse. Sesemalex Dar is described as a city built in giant troughs whose raised lips and drainage cracks protect it from highstorms and flooding, while its legal customs treat respectful foreigners as visiting relatives. Such details place the Shattered Plains within a larger network of commerce, migration, technology, and different responses to environmental danger.

The war’s importance finally exceeds its immediate military objective. Its camps contain the wealth, hierarchy, religious ideals, coerced labor, and political fragmentation of Alethkar in concentrated form. Even the king’s security reflects divided loyalties: Dalinar can order his own guards not to enter Elhokar’s chambers, and they obey him because he trained and placed them there. The campaign therefore exposes a kingdom whose nominal sovereignty is undermined by personal allegiance. Dalinar’s proposed unification seeks to resolve precisely that fracture, but the need for such an effort shows why the war has become so long, wasteful, and unstable.