Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,138

to another. I do not know if it applies to you.”

Syl looked upward, along the tower’s pointing finger, raised toward the sky. “I … had another knight once. We came here to the tower, when it was alive—though I don’t fully remember what that meant. I lost memories during the … pain.”

“What pain?” Dalinar asked. “What pain does a spren feel?”

“He died. My knight, Relador. He went to fight, despite his age. He shouldn’t have, and when he was killed, it hurt. I felt alone. So alone that I started to drift…”

Dalinar nodded. “I suspect that Kaladin feels something similar, though from what I’ve been told about his ailment, it doesn’t have a specific cause. He will sometimes start to … drift, as you put it.”

“The dark brain,” she said.

“An apt designation.”

Maybe I can already understand Kaladin, she thought. I had a dark brain of my own, for a while.

She had to remember what that had been like. She realized that her responsible brain and her child’s brain aligned in trying hard to forget that part of her life. But Syl was in control, not either of those brains. And maybe, if she remembered how she’d felt during those old dark days, she could help Kaladin with his current dark days.

“Thank you,” she said to Dalinar as a group of windspren passed. She regarded them, and for once didn’t particularly feel like giving chase. “I think you have helped.”

Sja-anat had been named Taker of Secrets long ago by a scholar no one remembered. She liked the name. It implied action. She didn’t simply hear secrets; she took them. She made them hers.

And she kept them.

From the other Unmade.

From the Fused.

From Odium himself.

She flowed through the Kholinar palace, existing between the Physical and Cognitive Realms. Like many of the Unmade, she belonged to neither one fully. Odium trapped them in a halfway existence. Some would manifest in various forms if they resided too long in one place, or if they were pulled through by strong emotions.

Not her.

Sometimes Fused, or even common singers, would notice her. They’d grow stiff, look over their shoulders. They’d glimpse a shadow, a brief darkness, quickly missed. Actually seeing her required reflected light.

It was similar in Shadesmar. She experienced that realm at the same time as she experienced the Physical Realm, though both were shadowy to her. She dreamed that somewhere a place existed that was completely right for her and her children.

For now, she would live here.

She flowed up steps in one realm, but barely moved in the other. Space was not entirely equal between the realms—it wasn’t that she had a foot in each realm; more, she was like two entities that shared a mind. In Shadesmar, she floated above the ocean of beads, her essence rippling. In the Physical Realm, she passed among singers who worked in the palace.

Sja-anat did not consider herself the most clever of the Unmade. Certainly she was one of the more intelligent, but that was not the same. Some of the Unmade—such as Nergaoul, sometimes called the Thrill—were practically mindless, more like emotion spren. Others—such as Ba-Ado-Mishram, who had granted forms to the singers during the False Desolation—were crafty and conniving.

Sja-anat was a little like both. During the long millennia before this Return, she’d mostly slumbered. Without her bond to Odium she had trouble thinking. The Everstorm appearing in Shadesmar—long before it had emerged into the Physical Realm—had revitalized her. Had let her begin planning again. But she knew she was not as smart as Odium was. She could keep only a few secrets from him, and she had to choose carefully, clouding them behind other secrets that she gave away.

You sacrificed some of your children so others could live. It was a law of nature. Humans didn’t understand it. But she did. She …

He was coming.

God of passion.

God of hatred.

God of all adopted spren.

Sja-anat flowed into the hallway of the palace and met with two of her children, touched windspren. Humans called them “corrupted,” but she hated this term. She did not corrupt. She Enlightened them, showing them that a different path was possible. Did not the humans revere Transformation—the ability of all beings to become someone new, someone better—as a core ideal of their religion? Yet they grew angry when she let spren change?

Her children darted away to do her bidding, then one of her greater children manifested. A glowing and shimmering light, constantly changing. One of her most precious creations.

I will go, Mother, he said. To