somehow, the story fired him up. He felt stronger, less for the words and more for how annoyed he’d grown at Wit.
A little light, a little warmth, a little fire and he felt ready to walk out into the winds again. Yet he knew the darkness would return. It always did.
“Can you tell me the real ending?” Kaladin asked, his voice small. “Before I go back out?”
Wit stood and stepped over, then put his hand on Kaladin’s back and leaned in. “That night,” he said, “the little dog snuggled into a warm bed beside the fire, hugged by the farmer’s children, his belly full. And as he did, the dog thought to himself, ‘I doubt any dragon ever had it so good anyway.’”
He smiled and met Kaladin’s eyes.
“It won’t be like that for me,” Kaladin said. “You told me it would get worse.”
“It will,” Wit said, “but then it will get better. Then it will get worse again. Then better. This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you, Kaladin: You will be warm again.”
Kaladin nodded in thanks, then turned to the hateful winds. He felt a push against his back as Wit sent him forward—then the light vanished, along with all it contained.
SEVEN YEARS AGO
Eshonai tipped her head back, feeling water stream off her carapace skullplate. Returning to warform after so long in workform felt like revisiting a familiar clearing hidden in the trees, rarely encountered but always waiting for her. She did like this form. She would not see it as a prison.
She met Thude and Rlain as they emerged from hollows in the stone where they too had returned to this form. Many of her friends had never left it. Warform was convenient for many reasons, though Eshonai didn’t like it quite as well as workform. There was something about the aggression this form provoked in her. She worried she would seek excuses to fight.
Thude stretched, humming to Joy. “Feels good,” he said. “I feel alive in this form.”
“Too alive,” Rlain said. “Do the rhythms sound louder to you?”
“Not to me,” Thude said.
Eshonai shook her head. She didn’t hear the rhythms any differently. Indeed, she’d been wondering if—upon adopting this form again—she’d hear the pure tone of Roshar as she did the first time. She hadn’t.
“Shall we?” she asked, gesturing toward the spreading plateaus. Rlain started toward one of the bridges, but Thude sang loudly to Amusement and charged the nearby chasm, leaping and soaring over it with an incredible bound.
Eshonai dashed after him to do the same. Each form brought with it a certain level of instinctual understanding. When she reached the edge, her body knew what to do. She sprang in a powerful leap, the air whistling through the grooves in her carapace and flapping the loose robe she’d worn into the storm.
She landed with a solid crunch, her feet grinding stone as she slid to a stop. The Rhythm of Confidence thrummed in her ears, and she found herself grinning. She had missed that. Rlain landed next to her, a hulking figure with black and red skin patterns forming an intricate marbling. He hummed to Confidence as well.
“Come on!” Thude shouted from nearby. He leaped another chasm.
Attuning Joy, Eshonai ran after him. Together the three of them chased and dashed, climbed and soared—spanning chasms, climbing up and over rock formations, sprinting across plateaus. The Shattered Plains felt like a playground.
This must be what islands and oceans are like, she thought as she surveyed the Plains from up high. She’d heard about them in songs, and she’d always imagined an ocean as a huge network of streams moving between sections of land.
But no, she’d seen Gavilar’s map. In that painting, the bodies of water had seemed as wide as countries. Water … with nothing to see but more water. She attuned Anxiety. And Awe. Complementary emotions, in her experience.
She dropped from the rock formation and landed on the plateau, then bounded after Thude. How far would she have to travel to find those oceans? Judging by the map, only a few weeks to the east. Once such a distance would have been daunting, but now she’d made the trek all the way to Kholinar and back. The trip to the Alethi capital had been one of the sweetest and most exhilarating experiences of her life. So many new