Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,584

energy, its beauty. But there was something else.

Listening to the howling wind, she realized what it was. A second storm. A highstorm was coming as well.

She attuned the Rhythm of Panic.

The two storms clashed, making the very ground tremble.

Clinging to the wall within the chasm, Eshonai felt the wind howling above. The lightning made her feel like she was blinking her eyes quickly, light and darkness alternating.

Then she heard a roar. The terrible sound of water surging through the chasm, becoming an incredible wave. She braced herself, but when the water hit, it ripped her off the wall.

It was here, within these highstorm rainwaters, that Eshonai’s first battle began: the fight for survival.

She slammed into a rock, her helmet cracking. Escaping Stormlight lit the dark waters as they filled her helmet, suffocating her. She thrashed in the current and managed to grab something hard—an enormous boulder lodged into the center of the chasm.

With a heave, she pulled herself out of the water. A few precious moments later her helmet emptied, letting her gasp for air.

I’m going to die, she thought, the Rhythm of Destruction pounding in her ears. Water thundered around her, splashing her armor, and lightning spasmed in the sky above. I’m going to die … as a slave.

No.

An ember within Eshonai came alive. The part of herself she’d reserved, the part that would not be contained. The part that made her let Thude and the others escape. It was the core of who she was: a person who had insisted on leaving the camps to explore, a person who had always longed to see what was over the next hill.

A person who would not be held captive.

That was when her second battle began.

Eshonai screamed, trying to banish the Rhythm of Destruction. If she was to die here, she would die as herself! It was a highstorm. In highstorms, transformations came upon all people, listeners and humans alike. Within a highstorm, death walked hand in hand with salvation, singing a harmony.

Eshonai began summoning her Blade—but in a rumbling flash, her boulder shifted and she lost her grip. The Rhythm of Panic ruled her briefly as she was again submerged. Lightning flashing above made the water seem to glow as she was smashed into one chasm wall, then another.

Not Panic. Not your rhythms.

I reject you.

My life. My death.

I WILL BE FREE.

Sunken deep in the water, Eshonai summoned her Blade and rammed it into the chasm wall. For some reason, she thought she could hear its voice, far away. Screaming?

She clung to it anyway—holding steady before the current. She banished all rhythms, but she could not breathe. Darkness began to close in upon her. Her lungs stopped burning. As if … as if everything was going to be all right …

There. A tone. The strange, haunting one she’d heard when taking warform. It seemed … one of the pure tones of Roshar. It began a stately rhythm. Then a second tone, chaotic and angry, appeared beside it. The two drew closer, closer, then snapped together.

They melded into harmony, making a song of Honor and Odium both. A song for a singer who could fight, but also for a soldier who wanted to lay down her sword. She found this tone as, in the blackness, a small spren—shaped like a shooting star—appeared ahead of her.

Eshonai strained, reaching, clawing.

Her head came above water, and then her helm blessedly emptied. The rush of the river was slowing. She gasped sweet air, but then her hand slipped from her sword, and she slipped back under the water and was towed away—though with less force than before.

She attuned the rhythm. The Rhythm of War, the rhythm of victories and losses. The rhythm of a life at its end. To its beats, she resummoned her Blade and rammed it into the ground, holding it tightly as the waters slowed further.

She would not die. She would live. She was strong enough. Her journey was not at an end. Not. Yet.

She held on, belligerent, until the water slowed. Until the weight of her Plate was enough to resist the current without her effort, and she slumped against the bottom of the chasm, her back to the wall, water streaming over her.

She felt at her side, where the Plate had broken—as had her body. She bled from a deep gash here, her carapace ripped away. Each breath came as a ragged, sodden mess, and she tasted blood.

But in her mind, she cycled through the rhythms of her childhood. Awe. Confidence.