The woman with the scratched eyes stretched her head toward him in an unnatural way, then screeched with a loud, piercing howl.
Adolin stumbled away, nearly colliding with Shallan and her … her spren? Was that Pattern?
“That is your sword,” Pattern said in a perky voice. He had no mouth that Adolin could see. “Hmmm. She is quite dead. I don’t think you can summon her here.” He cocked his bizarre head, looking at Azure’s Blade. “Yours is different. Very curious.”
The thing deep beneath their platform shifted again.
“That is probably bad,” Pattern noted. “Hmmm … yes. Those spren above us are the souls of the Oathgate, and that one deep beneath us is likely one of the Unmade. It must be very large on this side.”
“So what do we do?” Shallan asked.
Pattern looked in one direction, then the other. “No boat. Hmmm. Yes, that is a problem, isn’t it?”
Adolin spun around. Some of the eel-like spren climbed onto the platform, using stumpy legs that Adolin had missed earlier. Those long purple antennae stretched toward him, wiggling.…
Fearspren, he realized. Fearspren were little globs of purple goo that looked exactly like the tips of those antennae.
“We need to get off this platform,” Shallan said. “Everything else is secondary. Kaladin…” She trailed off as she glanced toward him.
The bridgeman knelt on the stone, head bowed, shoulders slumped. Storms … Adolin had been forced to carry him away from the battle, numb and broken. Looked like that emotion had caught up to him again.
Kaladin’s spren—Adolin could only guess that was the identity of the pretty girl in blue—stood beside him, one hand resting protectively on his back. “Kaladin’s not well,” she said.
“I have to be well,” Kaladin said, his voice hoarse as he climbed back to his feet. His long hair fell across his face, obscuring his eyes. Storms. Even surrounded by monsters, the bridgeman could look intimidating. “How do we get to safety? I can’t fly us without attracting attention.”
“This place is the inverse of your world,” Azure said. She stepped back from a long antenna exploring in her direction. “Where there are larger bodies of water on Roshar, we will have land here, correct?”
“Mmm,” Pattern said, nodding.
“The river?” Adolin asked. He tried to orient himself, looking past the thousands of floating lights. “There.” He pointed at a lump he could barely spot in the distance. Like a long island.
Kaladin stared at it, frowning. “Can we swim in these beads?”
“No,” Adolin said, remembering what it had felt like to fall into this ocean. “I…”
The beads rattled and clacked against one another as the large thing surged beneath. In the near distance, a single spire of rock broke the surface, tall and black. It emerged like a mountain peak slowly lifting from the sea, beads rattling in waves around it. As it grew to the height of a building, a joint appeared. Storms. It wasn’t a spire or a mountain … it was a claw.
More emerged in other directions. An enormous hand was reaching slowly upward through the glass beads. Deep beneath them a heartbeat began sounding, rattling the beads.
Adolin stumbled back, horrified, and nearly slipped into the bead ocean. He kept his balance, barely, and found himself face-to-face with the woman with scratches for eyes. She stared at him, completely emotionless, as if waiting for him to try to summon his Shardblade so she could scream again.
Damnation. No matter what Azure said, he was certainly in Damnation.
* * *
“What do I do?” Shallan whispered. She knelt on the white stone of the platform, searching among the beads. Each gave her an impression of an object in the Physical Realm. A dropped shield. A vase from the palace. A scarf.
Nearby, hundreds of little spren—like little orange or green people, only a few inches tall—were climbing among the spheres. She ignored those, searching for the soul of something that would help.
“Shallan,” Pattern said, kneeling. “I don’t think … I don’t think Soulcasting will accomplish anything? It will change an object in the other realm, but not here.”
“What can I do here?” Those spines or claws or whatever rose around them, inevitable, deadly.
Pattern hummed, hands clasped before him. His fingers were too smooth, as if they were chiseled of obsidian. His head shifted and changed, going through its sequence—the spherical mass was never the same, yet somehow still always felt like him.
“My memory…” he said. “I don’t remember.”
Stormlight, Shallan thought. Jasnah had told her to never enter Shadesmar without Stormlight. Shallan pulled a sphere from her pocket—she still wore Veil’s outfit. The beads nearby reacted, trembling and rolling toward her.
“Mmmm…” Pattern said. “Dangerous.”
“I doubt staying here will be better,” Shallan said. She sucked in a little Stormlight, only one mark’s worth. As before, the spren didn’t seem to notice her use of Stormlight as much as they had Kaladin’s. She rested her freehand against the surface of the ocean. Beads stopped rolling and instead clicked together beneath her hand. When she pushed down, they resisted.
Good first step, she thought, drawing in more Stormlight. The beads pressed around her hand, gathering, rolling onto one another. She cursed, worried that she’d soon just have a big pile of beads.
“Shallan,” Pattern said, poking at one of the beads. “Perhaps this?”
It was the soul of the shield she’d felt earlier. She moved the sphere to her gloved safehand, then pressed her other hand to the ocean. She used that bead’s soul as a guide—much like she used a Memory as a guide for doing a sketch—and the other beads obediently rolled together and locked into place, forming an imitation of the shield.
Pattern stepped out onto it, then jumped up and down happily. Her shield held him without sinking, though he seemed as heavy as an ordinary person. Good enough. Now she just needed something big enough to hold them all. Preferably, as she considered, two somethings.
“You, sword lady!” Shallan said, pointing at Azure. “Help me over here. Adolin, you too. Kaladin, see if you can brood this place into submission.”
Azure and Adolin hurried over.
Kaladin turned, frowning. “What?”
Don’t think about that haunted look in his eyes, Shallan thought. Don’t think about what you’ve done in bringing us here, or how it happened. Don’t think, Shallan.
Her mind went blank, like it did in preparation for drawing, then locked on to her task.
Find a way out.
“Everybody,” she said, “those flames are the souls of people, while these spheres represent the souls of objects. Yes, there are huge philosophical implications in that. Let’s try to ignore them, shall we? When you touch a bead, you should be able to sense what it represents.”
Azure sheathed her Shardblade and knelt, feeling at the spheres. “I can … Yes, there’s an impression to each one.”
“We need the soul of something long and flat.” Shallan plunged her hands into the spheres, eyes closed, letting the impressions wash over her.
“I can’t sense anything,” Adolin said. “What am I doing wrong?” He sounded overwhelmed, but don’t think about that.