Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

Inside, like a glowing treasure, were Jasnah’s books and notes, carefully packed away, protected in their waterproof enclosure.

Jasnah might not have survived, but her life’s work had.

* * *

Shallan knelt down by her improvised firepit. A grouping of rocks, filled with sticks she’d gathered from this little stand of trees. Night was almost upon her.

With it came the shocking cold, as bad as the worst winter back home. Here in the Frostlands, this would be common. Her clothing, which in this humidity hadn’t completely dried despite the hours walking, felt like ice.

She did not know how to build a fire, but perhaps she could make one in another way. She fought through her weariness—storms, but she was exhausted—and took out a glowing sphere, one of many she’d found in Jasnah’s trunk.

“All right,” she whispered. “Let’s do this.” Shadesmar.

“Mmm…” Pattern said. She was learning to interpret his humming. This seemed anxious. “Dangerous.”

“Why?”

“What is land here is sea there.”

Shallan nodded dully. Wait. Think.

That was growing hard, but she forced herself to go over Pattern’s words again. When they’d sailed the ocean, and she’d visited Shadesmar, she’d found obsidian ground beneath her. But in Kharbranth, she’d dropped into that ocean of spheres.

“So what do we do?” Shallan asked.

“Go slowly.”

Shallan took a deep, cold breath, then nodded. She tried as she had before. Slowly, carefully. It was like… like opening her eyes in the morning.

Awareness of another place consumed her. The nearby trees popped like bubbles, beads forming in their place and dropping toward a shifting sea of them below. Shallan felt herself falling.

She gasped, then blinked back that awareness, closing her metaphoric eyes. That place vanished, and in a moment, she was back in the stand of trees.

Pattern hummed nervously.

Shallan set her jaw and tried again. More slowly this time, slipping into that place with its strange sky and not-sun. For a moment, she hovered between the worlds, Shadesmar overlaying the world around her like a shadowy afterimage. Holding between the two was difficult.

Use the Light, Pattern said. Bring them.

Shallan hesitantly drew the Light into herself. The spheres in the ocean below moved like a school of fish, surging toward her, clinking together. In her exhaustion, Shallan could barely maintain her double state, and she grew woozy, looking down.

She held on, somehow.

Pattern stood beside her, in his form with the stiff clothing and a head made of impossible lines, arms clasped behind his back, and hovering as if in the air. He was tall and imposing on this side, and she absently noticed that he cast a shadow the wrong way, toward the distant, cold-seeming sun instead of away from it.

“Good,” he said, his voice a deeper hum here. “Good.” He cocked his head, and though he had no eyes, turned around as if regarding the place. “I am from here, yet I remember so little…”

Shallan had a sense that her time was limited. Kneeling, she reached down and felt at the sticks she’d piled to form the place for her fire. She could feel the sticks—but as she looked into this strange realm, her fingers also found one of the glass beads that had surged up beneath her.

As she touched it, she noticed something sweeping through the air above her. She cringed, looking up to find large, birdlike creatures circling around her in Shadesmar. They were a dark grey and seemed to have no specific shape, their forms blurry.

“What…”

“Spren,” Pattern said. “Drawn by you. Your… tiredness?”

“Exhaustionspren?” she asked, shocked by their size here.

“Yes.”

She shivered, then looked down at the sphere beneath her hand. She was dangerously close to falling into Shadesmar completely, and could barely see the impressions of the physical realm around her. Only those beads. She felt as if she would tumble into their sea at any moment.

“Please,” Shallan said to the sphere. “I need you to become fire.”

Pattern buzzed, speaking with a new voice, interpreting the sphere’s words. “I am a stick,” he said. He sounded satisfied.

“You could be fire,” Shallan said.

“I am a stick.”

The stick was not particularly eloquent. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised.

“Why don’t you become fire instead?”

“I am a stick.”

“How do I make it change?” Shallan asked of Pattern.

“Mm… I do not know. You must persuade it. Offer it truths, I think?” He sounded agitated. “This place is dangerous for you. For us. Please. Speed.”

She looked back at the stick.

“You want to burn.”

“I am a stick.”

“Think how much fun it would be?”

“I am a stick.”

“Stormlight,” Shallan said. “You could have it! All that I’m holding.”

A pause. Finally, “I am a stick.”

“Sticks need Stormlight. For… things…” Shallan blinked away tears of fatigue.

“I am—”

“—a stick,” Shallan said. She gripped the sphere, feeling both it and the stick in the physical realm, trying to think through another argument. For a moment, she hadn’t felt quite so tired, but it was returning—crashing back upon her. Why…

Her Stormlight was running out.

It was gone in a moment, drained from her, and she exhaled, slipping into Shadesmar with a sigh, feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

She fell into the sea of spheres. That awful blackness, millions of moving bits, consuming her.

She threw herself from Shadesmar.

The spheres expanded outward, growing into sticks and rocks and trees, restoring the world as she knew it. She collapsed into her small stand of trees, heart pounding.

All grew normal around her. No more distant sun, no more sea of spheres. Just frigid cold, a night sky, and biting wind that blew between the trees. The single sphere she’d drained slipped from her fingers, clicking against the stone ground. She leaned back against Jasnah’s trunk. Her arms still ached from dragging that up the beach to the trees.

She huddled there, frightened. “Do you know how to make fire?” she asked Pattern. Her teeth chattered. Stormfather. She didn’t feel cold anymore, but her teeth were chattering, and her breath was visible as vapor in the starlight.

She found herself growing drowsy. Maybe she should just sleep, then try to deal with it all in the morning.

“Change?” Pattern asked. “Offer the change.”

“I tried.”

“I know.” His vibrations sounded depressed.

Shallan stared at that pile of sticks, feeling utterly useless. What was it Jasnah had said? Control is the basis of all true power? Authority and strength are matters of perception? Well, this was a direct refutation of that. Shallan could imagine herself as grand, could act like a queen, but that didn’t change a thing out here in the wilderness.

Well, Shallan thought, I’m not going to sit here and freeze to death. I’ll at least freeze to death trying to find help.

She didn’t move, though. Moving was hard. At least here, huddled by the trunk, she didn’t have to feel the wind so much. Just lying here until morning…