Dalinar raised an eyebrow and languidly began turning his head approximately thirteen-point-three seconds before his gaze settled on Navani next to him. He felt he had to move deliberately in order to lend the moment with the appropriate gravitas, for he felt the Almighty had cast him as the lead in some sort of epic fantasy, and to move too quickly would rob the proceedings of their forced importance.
They were at the top of the tallest tower in Urithiru. Once, this had boasted the best view in all of Roshar. But now, with the Heralds' return, and the return of the Voidbringers with them, the oldest of the Makabaki kingdoms (for who could say what truly was and wasn’t Makabaki?), and the center of the Cymatic patterns formed by some divine hand, yielded a much less impressive view. Of course, this was only if one were to judge it on non-Shadesmarian standards, staying strictly within the physical realm with all of its Surges and the Orders of the Knights Radiant that they were bound to. In the cognitive realm, as is obvious even to schoolchildren, it would simply be an ocean of spheres.
"Let's begin our discussion, Navani," Dalinar said slowly, raising an eyebrow and setting the stage for their dialogue. For a second it felt as if he flashed, blinking in and out of existence, but he dismissed this as a figment of his imagination, and not as any kind of foreshadowing.
He and Navani were to have a philosophical discussion on the ethics of using spren in fabrials. Normally, many would be criticizing them for ignoring more pressing matters such as the Everstorm or the Voidbringer threat that had now arrived in Roshar. However, earlier that day Navani had fabricated a new kind of fabrial capable of freezing the plot, keeping all threats at bay, which would allow the two of them to have their extended conversation without having to worry about any pressing stakes. It was this fabrial and the spren trapped within that Dalinar wished to discuss with Navani, and why he had called the meeting.
“Yes, Dalinar, let us begin,” Navani said, eyeing him cautiously. Her caution wasn’t because the man in front of her, who had murdered his wife, was now showing interest in her. Instead, it was because she knew that Dalinar was going to ask about the ethics of fabrials, a sensitive topic that she didn’t particularly enjoy discussing. But storms, now the time had come to storming discuss it.
“I’ll begin the discussion with the first point,” Dalinar said, raising an eyebrow. “There’s been much talk that we are committing genocide against the spren by trapping them in fabrials. What are your thoughts on this?”
Navani did not answer immediately, carefully considering her reply. Dalinar took this opportunity to lugubriously turn his head down to one of the plateaus on the Shattered Plains far below. There, Adolin was wielding full Blade and Plate as he sliced through hordes of Parshendi. There was nothing like the feeling of wearing Plate. It felt so good. It made his knees so weak that he would have collapsed were he not bolstered by the Plate. With each step he let out a moan, and his Blade, several feet long, sliced effortlessly through the Parshendi’s bodies, which left no trace of having been cut, except that the eyes of anyone whose spinal cord had been sliced by the Blade burned out into hollow voids.
He made his way up the forty-three-point-seven-degree incline of the plateau, silkily spinning with his blade, which he set down and let vanish, meaning that he was simply dismissing it and not abandoning it. A Shardblade that its owner was abandoning wouldn’t dissolve into mist and vanish, thus Adolin doing this meant that he planned to hold onto his Shardblade. It was the smart thing to do, surrounded by Parshendi as he was, but there were many more intelligent men who had made worse decisions in the heat of battle.
Turning smoothly behind him, Adolin bound himself to the bottom of the ridge with a three-sixteenths Lashing, which allowed forty-two-forty-eighths of his body weight to be pulled towards the point that he Lashed. In the same move, he smoothly turned to the top of the ridge and Lashed it with a seven-twenty-sevenths Lashing, making himself effectively fifty-eight-hundreths weightless. He held out his hand and counted ten heartbeats, summoning his Blade. Normally, waiting in the middle of a battle for ten heartbeats to pass like this would be a death sentence. However, this time it wasn’t a problem. The Parshendi stood around him all the while, allowing ample time for the ten heartbeats to pass and his Blade to reappear from mist. Adolin assumed that the Parshendi were simply too preoccupied with doing the calculations on his Lashings to see if the math on them was sound. However in reality it was Navani’s plot freezing fabrial that kept them in place, ensuring there was no danger to him or anyone he cared about for the time being, allowing for the ensuing moments to be completely tensionless. Of course, Adolin wasn’t aware that Navani’s plot-freezing fabrial was active. He simply chalked it up to his math reasoning and welcomed the window of opportunity to mow down hordes of Parshendi, the Thrill pulsing through him. Although it was true that the Thrill itself had been banished from the world, Navani had managed to concoct yet another fabrial that could approximate the feeling of the Thrill, allowing Adolin to tamp down the disgust of murdering thousands, and allowing the battle to proceed unimpeded. The battle itself was a training battle, as this wasn’t a formal plateau run. Those had been paused since Torol was no longer participating in them, for obvious reasons.
Torol, Adolin thought to himself. Though everyone else referred to Torol Sadeas as just Sadeas, he did not feel compelled to give Torol the proper respect and address Torol by his surname. Once, on a plateau raid, Torol had, in true Torol fashion, betrayed Dalinar, Adolin’s father, and left him to die. From that moment onwards, Adolin vowed that he would never forgive Torol for what Torol had done, and that additionally he would repay Torol for what Torol had done in kind. Until then, he wouldn’t honor Torol with even the smallest of gestures, including addressing Torol by the name that everyone used to refer to Torol.
“A snake like him doesn’t even deserve a name,” Adolin muttered to himself, slicing cleanly through the neck of a stationary Parshendi.
As he watched the Parshendi’s eyes burn out in their sockets, he thought over the moral implications of what he was doing. But the Thrill fabrial swiftly quelled these thoughts. He needed the training against motionless bodies in order to keep his skills sharp, lest another Torol come out of the woodwork to threaten his family. Their family was the most moral and just family in all of Roshar, and all of society would fall apart without them. That was why he needed to continue mowing down the thousands of Parshendi in front of him.
Dalinar raised an eyebrow, taking in a deep breath as he watched Adolin pile up bodies behind him. Navani still had yet to answer, so he gave her more time and slowly rotated his head towards the warcamps at the edge of the Shattered Plains. He spotted Shallan there in one of the war camps. Or was it Veil? Or Radiant? Dalinar didn’t have the time or energy to sort out her identities, so he continued turning his head slowly until he saw Kaladin training with Bridge Four, the bridge crew that he had formed while enslaved in Sadeas’s army.
Kaladin didn’t have it in him to keep going. He had lost all morale. Tien, Cenn, and the rest... He had failed everyone who had ever counted on him. And he would continue failing anyone else who counted on him. There wasn’t even any point to continuing to fight. It would only end in failure. Part of him thought that he should just give up right there. But he couldn’t when Bridge Four was counting on him.
Counting on him... That was exactly what Tien, and Cenn, and the rest had done, and he’d failed them. He would continue to fail anyone else who counted on him. Was there even a point to continuing to fight? There was only one way it could end: failure. Maybe he should just give up right then and there. But he knew Bridge Four was counting on him.
“Kaladin?” Teft asked, raising an eyebrow. “What are we working on today?”
Training... He had tried to train Tien, and Cenn, and the rest, and they’d all fallen because he failed to protect them. He would fail to protect anyone who relied on him. Why even bother? Kaladin wasn’t meant to protect anyone, only to lead them to ruin. The best thing he could do to protect everyone was to give up. But deep down, he knew he couldn’t. Bridge Four was counting on him.
Suddenly, the ground shook. It felt like the entirety of the Shattered Plains was shaking.
“What’s going on?” asked Earless Jaks, raising an eyebrow. No matter how many times people asked, he wouldn’t explain how he had lost his ears. Some say he died earlier, but that was a false rumor. He was alive and well, being earless.
Kaladin looked off into the distance and saw what looked like an enormous cloud of dust hurtling towards them. No, it wasn’t dust...
“An avalanche... of sand...” Kaladin said, raising an eyebrow. “Some kind of sand avalanche.”
“Sanderlanche you say?” Rock asked, guffawing. “Must be we are nearing end of this thing!”
Kaladin turned, and came face-to-face with a greasy man with stringy black hair, who was flashing a very wide, toothy grin at him. Quite literally face-to-face, in fact, for the tips of their noses were touching. The man must have been standing just a few inches behind Kaladin, though with how close he was Kaladin should have been able to feel his breath on the back of his neck.
“Pardon me,” said the man, still grinning, his breath brushing Kaladin’s lips. Kaladin scrambled back, putting a normal amount of space between them.
“Apologies if I insulted you,” the man said. “Some people spend time on insults, and some people spend their time in-sluts.”
Kaladin raised an eyebrow, processing what the man had just said. If it was meant as a joke it was, quite frankly, the worst joke Kaladin had ever heard in his life. But he didn’t voice this. What would have been the point? Pointing out the weakness of the joke wouldn’t bring back Tien, or Cenn, or the rest... But Bridge Four was counting on him. He had to find out who this man was.
“Some call me Hoid,” the man said, almost as if reading Kaladin’s mind. “And you might say my job is the small task of holding together the entire Cosmere.”
Kaladin checked on the sand avalanche, which was nearing the war camps. He turned back to Hoid. “Hoid, is it? Does stopping that sand avalanche fall under the category of holding this ‘Cosmere’ together?”
Hoid raised an eyebrow, smirking. “One sand avalanche is minuscule in the grand scheme of the Cosmere. So you could say the answer to your question is ‘no.’ However, what kind of world-hopper would I be if I left you all in this dire situation? Come with me.”
Kaladin raised an eyebrow, but his instincts told him to trust this man. He gestured for Bridge Four to follow him.
As they set off across the camp, everything happened at once: Adolin, who had been riding the storm in from the plateau, locked eyes on the war camp. Dalinar, who had been watching him, felt himself flash and disappear from where he was standing, appearing next to Adolin in the midst of the storm.
“Father?” Adolin asked, raising an eyebrow. “Where did you come from?”
“It can’t be...” Dalinar said, looking at his hands. “Storms, I can teleport. I flashed for a brief second earlier, but I chalked it up to just being a figment of my imagination. However, it must have been a brief glimpse of my teleportation powers, which were there all along, but which only those who paid close attention would have noticed a hint of. This will help to save all the people in the path of this storm.”
Adolin couldn’t wrap his head around this, but had no time to think through the implications before the sand avalanche hit the war camp. Immediately, Dalinar furiously teleported through the camp, moving one person after another out of the path of the storm and directly behind where it had already passed. When he arrived at Kaladin, he held out a hand.
“Captain Kaladin!” Dalinar yelled, holding out a hand. “Let’s go!”
But Kaladin was frozen in place. What was the point? He had failed everyone he’d ever protected. Tien, Cenn, and the rest... There was no point in trying to save himself. He would only end up failing more people in the end.
“Sir, what’s the point?” Kaladin said as he staggered in the storm, knocked around by one piece of debris after another. “I’ve failed everyone I’ve ever protected. Tien, Cenn, and the rest... There’s no point saving me. I’ll only end up failing more people in the end.”
Dalinar’s face took on a grim countenance, and he slowly leveled his gaze at Kaladin, locking eyes with him as best he could as they were both knocked about by the storm winds.
“Kaladin,” Dalinar said. “I chose you as my captain because you care for others. You’re not like the others. You have the soul of a Knight Radiant.”
Kaladin raised an eyebrow. “The soul of a Knight Radiant?”
Dalinar nodded. Kaladin began to tear up.
And then he said the words: “‘I will cure my depression by simply cheering up.’”
Suddenly, Kaladin began glowing bright, so bright that Dalinar had to shut his eyes and turn away.
“The sixth ideal?” Dalinar said, shocked. “Impossible.”
Kaladin felt the power of the entire world flowing through him. He felt he could do anything, including stopping the storm.
He raised a hand. “‘I will cure my depression by simply cheering up!’” he yelled, and the storm vanished in an instant, revealing all the bodies of those who Dalinar neglected to teleport to safety while trying to cheer up Kaladin. Luckily, however, their losses would have no impact on the refounding of the Knights Radiant or the political machinations of the Alethi, so Kaladin and Dalinar paid them little mind.
“Sir,” Kaladin said, “thank you for saving me.”
Dalinar raised an eyebrow, then smiled and shook his head. “You saved yourself, lad. I was simply the conduit.”
A short distance away, Hoid watched, still wearing the same grin.
“What is art?” he asked, stepping carefully around the mass of corpses strewn about the ground. “Can one say that something is art if it placates? What about if it agitates? What role should art play? Are people art? Am I art? Are you art?”
At this last sentence his foot caught one of the corpses, and he fell straight on his face on an empty patch of stone, smashing his nose and instantly soaking the vicinity in blood. His shriek split the air as he rolled onto his back and clutched his nose, sucking in several quick breaths to try and calm himself down. After several minutes of softly crying to himself, he took a few deep breaths and regained his composure.
“The severity of a nosebleed is judged by the quantity, not the quality, of blood you lose,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “I posit that art is the same. And I believe we are now at 2,500 words.”
He passed out from the blood loss.