At the top, he left out an offering of fruit for Kelek, the Herald who lived in the storm. Then he pulled his wagon into the room on the bottom floor. Defiance wasn’t a tall lighthouse. He’d seen paintings of the sleek, fashionable ones down along Longbrow’s Straits. Lighthouses for rich folks who sailed ships that didn’t catch fish. Defiance was only two stories tall, and built squat like a bunker. But she had good stonework, and a buffer of crem on the outside kept her from leaking.
She’d stood for over a hundred years, and Kelek hadn’t decided to knock her down. The Stormfather knew how important she was. Puuli carried a load of wet stormwood and broken boards up to the top of the lighthouse, where he set them out beside the fire—which burned low during the day—to dry. He dusted off his hands, then stepped up to the rim of the lighthouse. At night, the mirrors would shine the light right out through this hole.
He looked over the cliffs, to the east. His family was a lot like the lighthouse themselves. Squat, short, but powerful. And enduring.
They’ll come with Light in their pockets, Grandfather had said. They’ll come to destroy, but you should watch for them anyway. Because they’ll come from the Origin. The sailors lost on an infinite sea. You keep that fire high at night, Puuli. You burn it bright until the day they come.
They’ll arrive when the night is darkest.
Surely that was now, with a new storm. Darkest nights. A tragedy.
And a sign.
The Jokasha Monastery was ordinarily a very quiet place. Nestled in the forests on the western slopes of the Horneater Peaks, the monastery felt only rain at the passing of a highstorm. Furious rain, yes, but none of the terrible violence known in most parts of the world.
Ellista reminded herself every passing storm how lucky she was. Some ardents had fought half their lives to be transferred to Jokasha. Away from politics, storms, and other annoyances, at Jokasha you could simply think.
Usually.
“Are you looking at these numbers? Are your eyes disconnected from your brain?”
“We can’t judge yet. Three instances are not enough!”
“Two data points to make a coincidence, three to make a sequence. The Everstorm travels at a consistent speed, unlike the highstorm.”
“You can’t possibly say that! One of your data points, so highly touted, is from the original passing of the storm, which happened as an uncommon event.”
Ellista slammed her book closed and stuffed it into her satchel. She burst from her reading nook and gave a glare to the two ardents arguing in the hall outside, both wearing the caps of master scholars. They were so involved in their shouting match that they didn’t even respond to the glare, though it had been one of her best.
She bustled from the library, entering a long hallway with sides open to the elements. Peaceful trees. A quiet brook. Humid air and mossy vines that popped and stretched as they lay out for the evening. Well, yes, a large swath of trees out there had been flattened by the new storm. But that was no reason for everyone to get upset! The rest of the world could worry. Here, at the central home of the Devotary of the Mind, she was supposed to be able to just read.
She set her things out at a reading desk near an open window. The humidity wasn’t good for books, but weak storms went hand-in-hand with fecundity. You simply had to accept that. Hopefully those new fabrials to draw water from the air would—
“… Telling you, we’re going to have to move!” a new voice echoed through the hallway. “Look, the storm is going to ravage those woods. Before long, this slope will be barren, and the storm will be hitting us full force.”
“The new storm doesn’t have that strong a wind factor, Bettam. It’s not going to blow down the trees. Have you looked at my measurements?”
“I’ve disputed those measurements.”
“But—”
Ellista rubbed her temples. She wore her head shaved, like the other ardents. Her parents still joked that she’d joined the ardentia simply because she hated bothering with her hair. She tried earplugs, but could hear the arguing through them, so she packed up her things again.
Maybe the low building? She took the long set of steps outside, traveling down the slope along a forested path. Before arriving at the monastery for the first time, she’d had illusions about what it would be like to live among scholars. No bickering. No politicking. She hadn’t found that to be true—but generally people left her alone. And so she was lucky to be here. She told herself that again as she entered the lower building.
It was basically a zoo. Dozens of people gathering information from spanreeds, talking to one another, buzzing with talk of this or that highprince or king. She stopped in the doorway, took it all in for a moment, then turned on her heel and stalked back out.
Now what? She started back up the steps, but slowed. It’s probably the only route to peace … she thought, looking out into the forest.
Trying not to think about the dirt, the cremlings, and the fact that something might drip on her head, she strode off into the forest. She didn’t want to go too far, as who knew what might be out here? She chose a stump without too much moss on it and settled down among bobbing lifespren, book across her lap.
She could still hear ardents arguing, but they were distant. She opened her book, intent on finally getting something done today.
Wema spun away from Brightlord Sterling’s forward advances, tucking her safehand to her breast and lowering her gaze from his comely locks. Such affection as to excite the unsavory mind could surely not satisfy her for an extended period, as though his attentions had at one time been fanciful delights to entertain her leisure hours, they now seemed to manifest his utmost impudence and greatest faults of character.
“What!” Ellista exclaimed, reading. “No, you silly girl! He’s finally pronounced his affection for you. Don’t you dare turn away now.”
How could she accept this wanton justification of her once single-minded desires? Should she not, instead, select the more prudent choice, as advocated by the undeviating will of her uncle? Brightlord Vadam had an endowment of land upon the highprince’s grace, and would have means to provide far beyond the satisfactions available to a simple officer, no matter how well regarded or what winds had graced his temperament, features, and gentle touch.
Ellista gasped. “Brightlord Vadam? You little whore! Have you forgotten how he locked away your father?”
“Wema,” Brightlord Sterling intoned, “it seems I have gravely misjudged your attentions. In this, I find myself deposited deep within an embarrassment of folly. I shall be away, to the Shattered Plains, and you shall not again suffer the torment of my presence.”
He bowed a true gentleman’s bow, possessed of all proper refinement and deference. It was a supplication beyond what even a monarch could rightly demand, and in it Wema ascertained the true nature of Brightlord Sterling’s regard. Simple, yet passionate. Respectful in deed. It lent great context to his earlier advance, which now appeared all at once to be a righteous division in otherwise sure armor, a window of vulnerability, rather than a model of avarice.
As he lifted the door’s latch to forever make his exodus from her life, Wema surged with unrivaled shame and longing, twisted together not unlike two threads winding in a loom to construct a grand tapestry of desire.
“Wait!” Wema cried. “Dear Sterling, wait upon my words.”
“Storms right you’d better wait, Sterling.” Ellista leaned closer to the book, flipping the page.
Decorum seemed a vain thing to her now, lost upon the sea that was her need to feel Sterling’s touch. She rushed to him, and upon his arm pressed her ensleeved hand, which then she lifted to caress his sturdy jaw.
It was so warm out here in the forest. Practically sweltering. Ellista put her hand to her lips, reading with wide eyes, trembling.
Would that the window through that statuesque armor could still be located, and that a similar wound within herself might be found, to press against his own and offer passage dee
p within her soul. If only—
“Ellista?” a voice asked.
“Yip!” she said, bolting upright, snapping the book closed, and spun toward the sound. “Um. Oh! Ardent Urv.” The young Siln ardent was tall, gangly, and obnoxiously loud at times. Except, apparently, when sneaking up on colleagues in the forest.
“What was that you were studying?” he asked.
“Important works,” Ellista said, then sat on the book. “Nothing to mind yourself with. What is it you want?”
“Um…” He looked down at her satchel. “You were the last one to check out the transcriptions from Bendthel’s collected Dawnchant? The old versions? I just wanted to check on your progress.”
Dawnchant. Right. They’d been working on that before this storm came, and everyone got distracted. Old Navani Kholin, in Alethkar, had somehow cracked the Dawnchant. Her story about visions was nonsense—the Kholin family was known for opaque politics—but her key was authentic, and had let them slowly work through the old texts.
Ellista started digging in her satchel. She came up with three musty codices and a sheaf of papers, the latter being the work she’d done so far.
Annoyingly, Urv settled on the ground beside her stump, taking the papers as she offered them. He laid his satchel across his lap and began reading.
“Incredible,” he said a few moments later. “You’ve made more progress than I have.”
“Everyone else is too busy worrying about that storm.”
“Well, it is threatening to wipe out civilization.”
“An overreaction. Everyone always overreacts to every little gust of wind.”
He flipped through her pages. “What’s this section? Why take such care for where each text was found? Fiksin concluded that these Dawnchant books had all spread from a central location, and so there’s nothing to learn by where they ended up.”
“Fiksin was a boot-licker, not a scholar,” Ellista said. “Look, there’s easy proof here that the same writing system was once used all across Roshar. I have references in Makabakam, Sela Tales, Alethela … Not a diaspora of texts, but real evidence they wrote naturally in the Dawnchant.”
“Do you suppose they all spoke the same language?”
“Hardly.”
“But Jasnah Kholin’s Relic and Monument?”
“Doesn’t claim everyone spoke the same language, only that they wrote it. It’s foolish to assume that everyone used the same language across hundreds of years and dozens of nations. It makes more sense that there was a codified written language, the language of scholarship, just like you’ll find many undertexts written in Alethi now.”
“Ah…” he said. “And then a Desolation hit.…”
Ellista nodded, showing him a later page in her sheaf of notes. “This in-between, weird language is where people started using the Dawnchant script to phonetically transcribe their language. It didn’t work so well.” She flipped two more pages. “In this scrap we have one of the earliest emergences of the proto-Thaylo-Vorin glyphic radicals, and here is one showing a more intermediate Thaylen form.
“We’ve always wondered what happened to the Dawnchant. How could people forget how to read their own language? Well, it seems clear now. By the point this happened, the language had been moribund for millennia. They weren’t speaking it, and hadn’t been for generations.”
“Brilliant,” Urv said. He wasn’t so bad, for a Siln. “I’ve been translating what I can, but got stuck on the Covad Fragment. If what you’ve been doing here is correct, it might be because Covad isn’t true Dawnchant, but a phonetic transcription of another ancient language.…”
He glanced to the side, then cocked his head. Was he looking at her—
Oh, no. It was just the book, which she was still sitting on.
“An Accountability of Virtue.” He grunted. “Good book.”
“You’ve read it?”
“I have a fondness for Alethi epics,” he said absently, flipping through her pages. “She really should have picked Vadam though. Sterling was a flatterer and a cadger.”
“Sterling is a noble and upright officer!” She narrowed her eyes. “And you are just trying to get a rise out of me, Ardent Urv.”
“Maybe.” He flipped through her pages, studying a diagram she’d made of various Dawnchant grammars. “I have a copy of the sequel.”
“There’s a sequel?”
“About her sister.”
“The mousy one?”
“She is elevated to courtly attention and has to choose between a strapping naval officer, a Thaylen banker, and the King’s Wit.”
“Wait. There are three different men this time?”
“Sequels always have to be bigger,” he said, then offered her the stack of pages back. “I’ll lend it to you.”
“Oh you will, will you? And what is the cost for this magnanimous gesture, Brightlord Urv?”
“Your help translating a stubborn section of Dawnchant. A particular patron of mine has a strict deadline upon its delivery.”
Venli attuned the Rhythm of Craving as she climbed down into the chasm. This wondrous new form, stormform, gave her hands a powerful grip, allowing her to hang hundreds of feet in the air, yet never fear that she would fall.
The chitin plating under her skin was far less bulky than that of the old warform, but at the same time nearly as effective. During the summoning of the Everstorm, a human soldier had struck her directly across the face. His spear had cut her cheek and across the bridge of her nose, but the mask of chitin armor underneath had deflected the weapon.
She continued to climb down the wall of stone, followed by Demid, her once-mate, and a group of her loyal friends. In her mind she attuned the Rhythm of Command—a similar, yet more powerful version of the Rhythm of Appreciation. Every one of her people could hear the rhythms—beats with some tones attached—yet she no longer heard the old, common ones. Only these new, superior rhythms.
Beneath her the chasm opened, where water from highstorms had carved a bulge. She eventually reached the bottom, and the others dropped around her, each landing with a thumping crunch. Ulim moved down the stone wall; the spren usually took the form of rolling lightning, moving across surfaces.
At the bottom, he formed from lightning into a human shape with odd eyes. Ulim settled on a patch of broken branches, arms folded, his long hair rippling in an unseen wind. She wasn’t certain why a spren sent by Odium himself would look human.
“Around here somewhere,” Ulim said, pointing. “Spread out and search.”
Venli set her jaw, humming to the Rhythm of Fury. Lines of power rippled up her arms. “Why should I continue to obey your orders, spren? You should obey me.”
The spren ignored her, which further stoked her anger. Demid, however, placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed, humming to the Rhythm of Satisfaction. “Come, look with me this way.”
She curtailed her humming and turned south, joining Demid, picking her way through debris. Crem buildup had smoothed the floor of the chasm, but the storm had left a great deal of refuse.
She attuned the Rhythm of Craving. A quick, violent rhythm. “I should be in charge, Demid. Not that spren.”
“You are in charge.”
“Then why haven’t we been told anything? Our gods have returned, yet we’ve barely seen them. We sacrificed greatly for these forms, and to create the glorious true storm. We … we lost how many?”
Sometimes she thought about that, in strange moments when the new rhythms seemed to retreat. All of her work, meeting with Ulim in secret, guiding her people toward stormform. It had been about saving her people, hadn’t it? Yet of the tens of thousands of listeners who had fought to summon the storm, only a fraction remained.
Demid and she had been scholars. Yet even scholars had gone to battle. She felt at the wound on her face.
“Our sacrifice was worthwhile,” Demid told her to the Rhythm of Derision. “Yes, we have lost many, but humans sought our extinction. At least this way some of o
ur people survived, and now we have great power!”
He was right. And, if she was being honest, a form of power was what she had always wanted. And she’d achieved one, capturing a spren in the storm within herself. That hadn’t been one of Ulim’s species, of course—lesser spren were used for changing forms. She could occasionally feel the pulsing, deep within, of the one she’d bonded.
In any case, this transformation had given her great power. The good of her people had always been secondary to Venli; now was a late time to be having a bout of conscience.
She resumed humming to Craving. Demid smiled and gripped her shoulder again. They’d shared something once, during their days in mateform. Those silly, distracting passions were not ones they currently felt, nor were they something that any sane listener would desire. But the memories of them did create a bond.
They picked through the refuse, passing several fresh human corpses, smashed into a cleft in the rock. Good to see those. Good to remember that her people had killed many, despite their losses.
“Venli!” Demid said. “Look!” He scrambled over a log from a large wooden bridge that was wedged in the center of the chasm. She followed, pleased by her strength. She would probably always remember Demid as the gangly scholar he had been before this change, but she doubted either of them would ever willingly return. Forms of power were simply too intoxicating.
Once across the log, she could see what Demid had spotted: a figure slumped by the wall of the chasm, helmeted head bowed. A Shardblade—shaped like frozen flames—rose from the ground beside her, rammed into the stone floor.
“Eshonai! Finally!” Venli leaped from the top of the log, landing near Demid.
Eshonai looked exhausted. In fact, she wasn’t moving.
“Eshonai?” Venli said, kneeling beside her sister. “Are you well? Eshonai?” She gripped the Plated figure by the shoulders and lightly shook it.
The head rolled on its neck, limp.
Venli felt cold. Demid solemnly lifted Eshonai’s faceplate, revealing dead eyes set in an ashen face.