The sleight of hand—performed hundreds of times beneath Tyn’s watch, then perfected on her own—was covered as she stumbled and brushed the shelf, disturbing the many gems and shaking their light. She was able to slip the stolen emerald into her black leather glove.
This all happened in the moment the honorspren focused on her falling notebook. Veil quickly snatched it off the ground and held it to her chest, grinning sheepishly.
“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”
“We would not have you die,” Lusintia said. “Death is a terrible thing, and we…” She trailed off, looking at the shelf and the dun emerald it now contained. “Storms alight! You ate the entire thing? Human, how…”
Another spren, an angry male in uniform, began shoving Shallan out. “That was years’ worth of stored Stormlight!” he exclaimed. “Get out! Go, before you eat anything more! If you fall again, I will have you turned away!”
Veil smothered her grin, apologizing as she stumbled out and met Pattern outside. An embarrassed Lusintia was forced to stay behind and fill out a report on the incident.
“Mmm…” Pattern said. “Thank you for letting me lie. Did it work?”
Veil nodded.
“Mmm. They are stupid.”
“Stupidity and ignorance are not the same thing,” Veil said. “They’re just unaccustomed to both humans and subterfuge. Come on. Let’s make ourselves scarce before someone thinks to search me.”
A YEAR AND A HALF AGO
A banging came on the door, and Eshonai pulled it open and stared out into a tempest. Grand lightning flashes shattered the blackness in brief emotional bouts, revealing Venli, her eyes wide, grinning and soaked, clutching something in two hands before her.
She stumbled into the room, trailing water—which caused their mother to chide her. Jaxlim was in one of her … episodes where she saw the two of them as children.
Venli—seemingly oblivious to anything other than the gemstone—wandered past their mother. She rubbed her thumb on the gemstone, which was about a third the size of her fist.
“Storms,” Eshonai said, pushing the door closed. “You did it?” She set the beam in place, then left it rattling in the wind as she stepped over to Venli.
But … no, the gemstone wasn’t glowing. Was it? Eshonai leaned closer. It was glowing, but barely.
“It worked,” Venli whispered to Awe, clutching the stone. “It finally worked. The secret is lightning, Eshonai! It pulls them through. When I drew close enough right after a strike, I found hundreds of them. I snagged this one before the others returned to the other side.…”
“The other side?” Eshonai asked.
Venli didn’t respond. She seemed like a different person lately, always exhausted from working long nights—and from her insistence on going out in each and every storm to try to capture a stormspren. And now this. Venli cradled the gemstone, ignoring the water streaming from her clothing.
“Venli?” Eshonai said. “If you want my help in bringing this to the Five, you will need to let me see what you’ve done.”
Venli stared at her, quiet, no rhythm at all. Then she stood tall and hummed to Confidence, proffering the gemstone. Eshonai attuned Curiosity and took it. Yes … it did have a spren inside, though it glowed with an odd light. Too dark, almost dusty. Smoky. It was difficult to tell its color through the green of the emerald, but it seemed shadowed, like lightning deep within the clouds.
“This spren is unlike any I’ve ever seen,” Eshonai said.
“Stormform,” Venli whispered. “Power.”
“Dangerous power. This could destroy the listeners.”
“Eshonai,” Venli said to Reprimand, “our people are already being destroyed. Don’t you think that this time, instead of making a snap decision based on songs from thousands of years ago, we should at least try a different solution?”
Rumbling thunder outside seemed to agree with Venli’s words. Eshonai handed the gemstone back, then hummed to Betrayal to indicate what she thought of Venli’s argument. But the rhythm didn’t express how deeply the words cut.
Turning her back on her sister, Eshonai walked to the door again and threw aside the bar. Ignoring both Venli and her mother as they cried objections, Eshonai stepped out into the storm.
The wind hit her hard, but in warform’s armor she barely felt the icy raindrops. She stood in the light spilling from the door until Venli pushed it closed, plunging Eshonai into darkness.
She attuned the Rhythm of Winds and started walking. Humans feared the storms. They always hid indoors. Eshonai respected the storms, and usually preferred to meet them with a stormshield. But she did not fear them.
She walked away from her mother’s house, eastward into the wind. These days, her life had constantly been against the wind. It blew so hard, she barely felt she was making progress. Maybe she’d have been better off letting it steer her.
If she hadn’t fought so much—if she hadn’t spent so much time thinking about her explorations or her dreams—would she have settled into her role as general faster? If she’d doubled down on her raids at the start, would she have been able to shove the humans out of the warcamps before they got a foothold?
Like a rockbud, humans were. Soft at first, but capable of gripping onto the stone and growing into something practically immovable. In this—despite their lack of rhythms—they belonged to Roshar better than the listeners did. If she could truly travel the world, would she find them growing in every crevice?
She neared the edge of the plateau that made up the central heart of Narak, the city of exile. She walked carefully, letting flashes of lightning guide her way. She stepped right up to the edge of the chasm, facing into the wind.
“What do you want from us?” she shouted. “Answer me, Rider! Spren of the storm! You’re a traitor like us, aren’t you? Is that why you sent Venli those little spren?”
The wind blasted her, as if to push her off balance. Debris spun and sputtered in the wind, spiraling around her—the lightning making each piece seem frozen in the moment. A quick sequence of bolts struck nearby, and the thunder vibrated and rattled her carapace. Absolute darkness followed.
At first she thought maybe the Rider of Storms had chosen to appear to her. However, this darkness was ordinary. She could still feel the wind, rain, and debris.
“What kind of choice is this?” she demanded. “Either we let the humans destroy us, or we turn away from the one thing that defines us? The one value that matters?”
Darkness. Rain. Wind. But no reply.
What had she expected? An actual answer? Was this a prayer, then? Didn’t make a lot of sense, considering that the very thing she resisted was a return to her people’s old gods.
Those gods had never deserved reverence. What was a god who only made demands? Nothing but a tyrant with a different name.
“Everything I’ve done,” she said into the wind, “has been to ensure we remain our own people. That’s all I want. I gave up my dreams. But I will not give up our minds.”
Brave words. Useless words. They would have to take Venli’s discovery to the Five, and they would have to let her test it. Eshonai knew that as well as she knew the Rhythm of Peace. They couldn’t reject a potential new form now.
She turned to go, then heard something. Rock scraping on rock? Was the plateau cracking? Though she could barely hear it, the noise must be quite loud to reach her over the din of the tempest.
Eshonai stepped backward—but her footing seemed unsteady, and she didn’t want to move without a flash of lightning to guide her. What if—
Branching light flashed in the heavens far to the east. It lit the sky white, highlighting debris, illuminating the land around her. Everything except for an enormous shadow silhouetted in front of her.
Eshonai’s breath caught. The rhythms froze in her head. That shape … sinuous, yet massive. Claws as thick as her body gripping the rim of the chasm mere feet in front of her. It couldn’t be—
Li
ghtning flashed again, and she saw its face. A chasmfiend snout, with jagged swords for teeth, head cocked to the side to watch her.
She didn’t run. If it wanted her, she was already dead. Prey ran, and the beasts were known to play with things that acted like prey, even if they weren’t hungry. Still, standing there in pitch-darkness—not daring to attune a rhythm—was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
When the lightning next flashed, the chasmfiend had lowered its incredible head toward her, its eye close enough that she could have stabbed it without needing to lunge.
Darkness fell. Then a small burst of light appeared directly ahead of her. A small spren made of white fire. It zipped forward, trailing an afterimage. Like a falling star. It moved closer, then spun around her.
By its light, she could see the chasmfiend slowly retreat into the chasm, its spikelike claws leaving scores on the stone. Her heart beating like thunder, Eshonai attuned Anxiety and hurried home. The strange little spren followed her.
Instead I think, if I were to remember my life in detail, I would become even worse. Paralyzed by my terrible actions. I should not like to remember all those I have failed.
Days passed. Navani barely noticed.
For the first time in her life, she let go completely. No worries about Dalinar or Jasnah. No worries about the tower. No thoughts about the million other things she should be doing.
This was what she should be doing.
Or so she allowed herself to believe. She let herself be free. In her little room of a laboratory, everything fit together. She’d met scholars who claimed they needed chaos to function. Perhaps that was true for some, but in her experience, good science wasn’t about sloppy inspiration. It was about meticulous incrementalization.
With no distractions, she was able to draw up precise experiments—charts, careful measurements, lines. Science was all about lines, about imposing order on chaos. Navani reveled in her careful preparations, without anyone to tease her for keeping her charts so neat or for refusing to skip any steps.
Sometimes Raboniel visited and joined in the research, writing her own musings alongside Navani’s in their notebook. Two opposing forces in harmony, focused on a single goal.
Raboniel gave her the strange black sand, explaining the difference between static and kinetic Investiture. Navani observed and measured, learning for herself. The sand slowly turned white when exposed to Stormlight or Voidlight. However, if a fabrial was using the Light, the sand changed faster.
You could wet the sand to reset it to black, though it had to be dry again before it could turn white. It was a useful way to measure how much Light a given fabrial was using. She noticed that it also changed colors in the presence of spren. This was a slow change too, but she could measure it.
Anything you could measure was useful to science. But for these few blessed days, it seemed like time was not properly measurable—for hours passed like minutes. And Navani, despite the circumstances, found herself loving the experience.
* * *
“I don’t know exactly where the sand comes from,” Raboniel said, settled on her stool beside the wall, flipping through Navani’s latest set of charts. “Offworld somewhere.”
“Offworld?” Navani asked, looking up from the fabrial she’d been housing. “As in … another … planet?”
Raboniel hummed absently. A confirmation? Navani felt she could tell what this rhythm meant.
“I wanted to go, for years,” Raboniel said. “Visit the place myself. Unfortunately, I learned it wasn’t possible. I’m trapped in this system, my soul bound to Braize—you call it Damnation—a planet farther out in orbit around the sun.”
To hear her speak of such things so casually amazed Navani. Other worlds. The best telescopes couldn’t do more than confirm the existence of other celestial bodies, but here she was, speaking to someone who had visited one of them.
We came from another, Navani reminded herself. Humans, migrating to Roshar. It was so strange for her to think about, to align the mythos of the Tranquiline Halls with an actual location.
“Could … I visit them?” Navani asked. “These other worlds?”
“Likely—though I’d stay away from Braize. You’d have to get through the storm to travel there anyway.”
“The Everstorm?”
Raboniel hummed to an amused rhythm. “No, no, Navani. You can’t travel to Braize in the Physical Realm. That would take … well, I have no idea how long. Plus there’s no air in the space between planets. We sent Heavenly Ones to try it once. No air, and worse, the strange pressures required them to carry a large supply of Voidlight for healing. Even so prepared, they died within hours.
“One instead travels to other worlds through Shadesmar. But again, stay away from Braize. Even if you could get through the barrier storm, the place is barren, devoid of life. Merely a dark sky, endless windswept crags, and a broken landscape. And a lot of souls. A lot of not particularly sane souls.”
“I’ll … remember that.”
Other worlds. It seemed too vast a concept for her to grasp right now—and that was saying something, as she was presently contemplating the death of a god. She turned to her experiment. “Ready.”
“Excellent,” Raboniel said, closing the book. “Mizthla?”
Navani’s stormform guard entered the room, seeming somewhat annoyed. Though that was common for him. “Mizthla” was his singer name; he said the Alethi had called him Dah. A simple glyph instead of a true name, because it was easier to remember. Perhaps if she had lived her entire life called something because of its utility, Navani would have shared his disposition.
She presented him with the fabrial, which was … well, not a true fabrial. The housing was a mere coil of copper wires around some gemstones. Raboniel knew a method of changing the polarity of a magnet, a process involving the lightning channeled from a stormform. Captive lightning seemed to have boundless potential applications, but Navani kept herself focused—maybe the polarity-swapping process would also work on gemstones filled with Voidlight.
Navani and Raboniel left the room, as the lightning could be unpredictable. “Remember,” Navani said on her way out, “only a tiny release of energy. Don’t melt the coils this time.”
“I’m not an idiot,” the Regal said to her. “Anymore.”
Outside, Navani glanced down the hallway—lined with boxes of equipment, some hiding her traps—toward the shield around the Sibling. It seemed darker inside than before.
She and Raboniel avoided the topic. Working closely together did not make them allies, and both recognized it. In fact, Navani had been trying to find a way to hide future discoveries from Raboniel, if she made any.
Lightning flashed in the room, then Mizthla called for them. They hurried in as he set the coiled-up fabrial on the desk. It was likely still hot to the touch, so Navani gave it a few minutes, despite wanting to rip the gemstones out immediately to inspect the result.
“I have noticed something in your journals,” Raboniel said as the two of them waited. “You often remark that you are not a scholar. Why?”
“I’ve always been too busy to engage in true scholarship, Ancient One,” Navani said. “Plus, I don’t know that I have the mind for it; I’m not the genius my daughter is. So I’ve always seen it as my duty to grant patronage to true scholars, to publicize their creations and see them properly encouraged.”
Raboniel hummed a rhythm, then picked up the fabrial with the copper coiling it. The metal burned her fingers, but she healed from it. “If you are not a scholar, Navani,” she said, “then I have never met one.”
“I admit that I have trouble accepting that, Ancient One. Though I’m pleased to have fooled you.”
“Humility,” Raboniel said. “It’s not a Passion my kind often promote. Would it help you believe if I told you that you no longer have to use titles when speaking to me? Your discoveries so far are enough to recommend you as my equal.”
This seemed an uncommon privilege. “I
t does help, Raboniel,” Navani said. “Thank you.”
“Thanks need not be provided for something self-evident,” Raboniel said, holding up the fabrial. “Are you ready?”
Navani nodded. Raboniel pulled the gemstones out from within the coil, then inspected them. “The Voidlight seems unchanged to me,” she said.
Navani hadn’t expressly told Raboniel she was hunting for anti-Voidlight. She shrouded her quest in many different kinds of experiments—like this one, where she explained she simply wanted to see if Light responded to exposure to lightning. She suspected that Raboniel suspected, however, that Navani was at least still intrigued by the idea of anti-Light.
Navani sprinkled some of the black sand on the tabletop, then placed the gemstone in the center, measuring the strength of the Investiture inside. But because the air didn’t warp around this gemstone, she secretly knew her experiment had failed. This was not anti-Voidlight. She made a note in her log. Another failed experiment.
Raboniel hummed a rhythm. A regretful one? Yes, that was what it seemed to be. “I should return to my duties,” she said, and Navani could pick out the same rhythm in her voice. “The Deepest Ones are close to finding the final node.”
“How?” Navani asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that, Navani.” Though she had spoken of leaving, she remained sitting. “I’m so tired of this war. So tired of capturing, killing, losing, dying.”
“We should end it then.”
“Not while Odium lives.”
“You’d actually kill him?” Navani asked. “If you had the chance?”
Raboniel hummed, but looked away. That humming is … embarrassment? Navani thought. She recognizes she’s lied to me, at least by implication. She doesn’t truly want to kill Odium.
“When you were hunting the opposite of Voidlight, you didn’t want to use it against him,” Navani guessed. “You teased me with the idea, but you have another purpose.”
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