Words of Radiance

by Brandon Sanderson

  But if she was wrong, they wouldn’t know where they were at all. Which option was worse?

  He got a short distance down the chasm before freezing. The walls here were scraped free of moss, the debris on the floor pushed around and scratched. Storms, this was fresh. Since the last highstorm at least. The chasmfiend had come this way.

  Maybe . . . maybe it had gone past on its way farther out into the chasms.

  Shallan, distracted and muttering to herself, appeared around the other side of the plateau. She walked, still staring at the sky, muttering to herself. “. . . I know I said that I saw these patterns, but this is too grand a scale for me to know instinctively. You should have said something. I—”

  She cut off abruptly, jumping as she saw Kaladin. He found himself narrowing his eyes. That had sounded like . . .

  Don’t be silly. She’s no warrior. The Knights Radiant had been soldiers, hadn’t they? He didn’t really know much about them.

  Still, Syl had seen several strange spren about.

  Shallan gave a glance to the wall of the chasm and the scrapes. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Delightful. Here, give me that paper.”

  He handed it back and she slipped a pencil out of her sleeve. He gave her the satchel, which she set on the floor, using the stiff side as a place to sketch. She filled in the two plateaus closest to them, the ones she’d walked around to get a full view.

  “So is your drawing off or not?” Kaladin asked.

  “It’s accurate,” Shallan said as she drew, “it’s just strange. From my memory of the maps, this set of plateaus nearest to us should be farther to the north. There is another group of them up there that are exactly the same shape, only mirrored.”

  “You can remember the maps that well?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t press further. From what he’d seen, maybe she could do just that.

  She shook her head. “What are the chances that a series of plateaus would take the exact same shape as those on another part of the Plains? Not just one, but an entire sequence . . .”

  “The Plains are symmetrical,” Kaladin said.

  She froze. “How do you know that?”

  “I . . . it was a dream. I saw the plateaus arrayed in a wide symmetrical formation.”

  She looked back at her map, then gasped. She began scribbling notes on the side. “Cymatics.”

  “What?”

  “I know where the Parshendi are.” Her eyes widened. “And the Oathgate. The center of the Shattered Plains. I can see it all—I can map almost the entire thing.”

  He shivered. “You . . . what?”

  She looked up sharply, meeting his eyes. “We have to get back.”

  “Yes, I know. The highstorm.”

  “More than that,” she said, standing. “I know too much now to die out here. The Shattered Plains are a pattern. This isn’t a natural rock formation.” Her eyes widened further. “At the center of these Plains was a city. Something broke it apart. A weapon . . . Vibrations? Like sand on a plate? An earthquake that could break rock . . . Stone became sand, and at the blowing of the highstorms, the cracks full of sand were hollowed out.”

  Her eyes seemed eerily distant, and Kaladin didn’t understand half of what she’d said.

  “We need to reach the center,” Shallan said. “I can find it, the heart of these Plains, by following the pattern. And there will be . . . things there . . .”

  “The secret you’re searching for,” Kaladin said. What had she said just earlier? “Oathgate?”

  She blushed deeply. “Let’s keep moving. Didn’t you mention how little time we had? Honestly, if one of us weren’t chatting away all the time and distracting everyone, I’m half certain we’d be back already.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her, and she grinned, then pointed the direction for them to go. “I’m leading now, by the way.”

  “Probably for the best.”

  “Though,” she said, “as I consider, it might be better to let you lead. That way, we might find our way to the center by accident. Assuming we don’t end up in Azir.”

  He gave her a chuckle at that because it seemed the right thing to do. Inside, however, it ripped him apart. He’d failed.

  The next few hours were excruciating. After walking the length of two plateaus, Shallan had to stop and update her map. It was correct to do so—they couldn’t risk getting off track again.

  It just took so much time. Even moving as quickly as they could between drawing sessions, practically running the entire way, their progress was too slow.

  Kaladin shuffled from foot to foot, watching the sky as Shallan filled in her map again. She cursed and grumbled, and he noticed her brushing away a drop of sweat that had fallen from her brow onto the increasingly crumpled paper.

  Maybe four hours left until the storm, Kaladin thought. We aren’t going to make it.

  “I’ll try for scouts again,” he said.

  Shallan nodded. They had entered the territory where Dalinar’s pole-wielding scouts watched for new chrysalises. Shouting to them was a slim hope—even if they were lucky enough to find one of those groups, he doubted they had enough rope handy to reach to the bottom of the chasm.

  But it was a chance. So he moved away—so as to not disturb her drawing—cupped his mouth, and began shouting. “Hello! Please reply! We’re trapped in the chasms! Please reply!”

  He walked for a time, shouting, then stopped to listen. Nothing came back. No questioning shouts echoing down from above, no signs of life.

  They’ve probably all withdrawn into their cubbies by now, Kaladin thought. They’ve broken down their watchposts and are waiting for the highstorm.

  He stared up with frustration at that slot of attenuated sky. So distant. He remembered this feeling, being down here with Teft and the others, longing to climb out and escape the horrible life of a bridgeman.

  For the hundredth time, he tried drawing in the Stormlight of those spheres. He clutched the sphere until his hand and the glass were sweaty, but the Stormlight—the power within—did not flow to him. He couldn’t feel the Light anymore.

  “Syl!” he yelled, tucking away the sphere, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Syl! Please! Are you there, anywhere . . . ?” He trailed off. “I still don’t know,” he said more softly. “Is this a punishment? Or is it something more? What is wrong?”

  No reply. Surely if she were watching him, she wouldn’t let him die down here. Assuming she could think to notice. He had a horrible image of her riding the winds, mingling with the windspren, having forgotten herself and him—becoming terribly, blissfully ignorant of what she truly was.

  She’d feared that. She’d been terrified of it.

  Shallan’s boots scratched the ground as she walked up. “No luck?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, onward, then.” She took a deep breath. “Through soreness and exhaustion we go. You wouldn’t be willing to carry me a little ways . . .”

  He glared at her.

  She shrugged with a smile. “Think how grand it would be! I could even get a reed to whip you with. You’d be able to go back and tell all the other guards what an awful person I am. It’ll be a wonderful opportunity for griping. No? Well, all right then. Off we go.”

  “You’re a strange woman.”

  “Thank you.”

  He fell into step beside her.

  “My,” she noted, “you’ve brewed another storm over your head, I see.”

  “I’ve killed us,” he whispered. “I took the lead, and I got us lost.”

  “Well, I didn’t notice we were going the wrong way either. I wouldn’t have done any better.”

  “I should have thought to have you map our progress from the start today. I was too confident.”

  “It’s done,” she said. “If I’d been more clear with you about how well I could draw these plateaus, then you’d probably have made better use of my maps. I didn�
�t, and you didn’t know, so here we are. You can’t blame yourself for everything, right?”

  He walked in silence.

  “Uh, right?”

  “It’s my fault.”

  She rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. “You are really intent on beating yourself up, aren’t you?”

  His father had said the same thing time and time again. It was who Kaladin was. Did they expect him to change?

  “We’ll be fine,” Shallan said. “You’ll see.”

  That darkened his mood further.

  “You still think I’m too optimistic, don’t you?” Shallan said.

  “It’s not your fault,” Kaladin said. “I’d rather be like you. I’d rather not have lived the life I have. I would that the world was only full of people like you, Shallan Davar.”

  “People who don’t understand pain.”

  “Oh, all people understand pain,” Kaladin said. “That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s . . .”

  “The sorrow,” Shallan said softly, “of watching a life crumble? Of struggling to grab it and hold on, but feeling hope become stringy sinew and blood beneath your fingers as everything collapses?”

  “Yes.”

  “The sensation—it’s not sorrow, but something deeper—of being broken. Of being crushed so often, and so hatefully, that emotion becomes something you can only wish for. If only you could cry, because then you’d feel something. Instead, you feel nothing. Just . . . haze and smoke inside. Like you’re already dead.”

  He stopped in the chasm.

  She turned and looked to him. “The crushing guilt,” she said, “of being powerless. Of wishing they’d hurt you instead of those around you. Of screaming and scrambling and hating as those you love are ruined, popped like a boil. And you have to watch their joy seeping away while you can’t do anything. They break the ones you love, and not you. And you plead. Can’t you just beat me instead?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  Shallan nodded, holding his eyes. “Yes. It would be nice if nobody in the world knew of those things, Kaladin Stormblessed. I agree. With everything I have.”

  He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.

  Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.

  It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.

  “How?” he asked.

  She shrugged lightly. “Helps if you’re crazy. Come on. I do believe we’re under a slight time constraint . . .”

  She started down the chasm. He stood behind, feeling drained. And oddly brightened.

  He should feel like a fool. He’d done it again—he’d been telling her how easy her life was, while she’d had that hiding inside of her all along. This time, though, he didn’t feel like an idiot. He felt like he understood. Something. He didn’t know what. The chasm just seemed a little brighter.

  Tien always did that to me . . . he thought. Even on the darkest day.

  He stood still long enough that frillblooms opened around him, their wide, fanlike fronds displaying veined patterns of orange, red, and violet. He eventually jogged after Shallan, shocking the plants closed.

  “I think,” she said, “we need to focus on the positive side of being down here in this terrible chasm.”

  She eyed him. He didn’t say anything.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “I . . . have the sense that it would be better not to encourage you.”

  “What’s the fun in that?”

  “Well, we are about to get hit by a highstorm’s flood.”

  “So our clothing will get washed,” she said with a grin. “See! Positive.”

  He snorted.

  “Ah, that bridgeman grunt dialect again,” she noted.

  “That grunt meant,” he said, “that at least if the waters come, it will wash away some of your stench.”

  “Ha! Mildly amusing, but no points to you. I already established that you’re the malodorous one. Reuse of jokes is strictly forbidden on pain of getting dunked in a highstorm.”

  “All right then,” he said. “It’s a good thing we’re down here because I had guard duty tonight. Now I’m going to miss it. That is practically like getting the day off.”

  “To go swimming, no less!”

  He smiled.

  “I,” she proclaimed, “am glad we are down here because the sun is far too bright up above, and it tends to give me a sunburn unless I wear a hat. It is much better to be down in the dank, dark, smelly, moldy, potentially life-threatening depths. No sunburns. Just monsters.”

  “I’m glad to be down here,” he said, “because at least it was me, and not one of my men, who fell.”

  She hopped over a puddle, then eyed him. “You’re not very good at this.”

  “Sorry. I meant that I’m glad to be down here because when we get out, everyone will cheer me for being a hero for rescuing you.”

  “Better,” Shallan said. “Except for the fact that I do believe that I am the one rescuing you.”

  He glanced at her map. “Point.”

  “I,” she said, “am glad to be down here because I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a chunk of meat traveling through a digestive system, and these chasms remind me of the intestines.”

  “I hope you’re not serious.”

  “What?” She looked shocked. “Of course I’m not. Ew.”

  “You really do try too hard.”

  “It’s what keeps me insane.”

  He scrambled up a large pile of debris, then offered a hand to help her. “I,” he said, “am happy to be here because it reminds me of how lucky I am to be free of Sadeas’s army.”

  “Ah,” she said, stepping up to the top with him.

  “His lighteyes sent us down here to gather,” Kaladin said, sliding down the other side. “And didn’t pay us much at all for the effort.”

  “Tragic.”

  “You could say,” he told her as she stepped down off the pile, “that we were given only a pittance.”

  He grinned at her.

  She cocked her head.

  “Pit-tance,” he said, gesturing toward the depth of the hole they were in. “You know. We’re in a pit . . .”

  “Oh, storms,” she said. “You don’t actually expect that to count. That was terrible!”

  “I know. I’m sorry. My mother would be disappointed.”

  “She didn’t like wordplay?”

  “No, she loved it. She’d just be mad I tried to do it when she wasn’t around to laugh at me.”

  Shallan smiled, and they continued on, keeping a brisk pace. “I am glad we’re down here,” she said, “because by now, Adolin will be worried sick about me—so when we get back, he’ll be ecstatic. He might even let me kiss him in public.”

  Adolin. Right. That dampened his mood.

  “We probably need to stop so I can draw out our map,” Shallan said, frowning at the sky. “And so that you can yell some more for our potential salvation.”

  “I suppose,” he said as she settled down to get out her map. He cupped his hands. “Hey, up there? Anyone? We’re down here, and we’re making bad puns. Please save us from ourselves!”

  Shallan chuckled.

  Kaladin smiled, then started as he actually heard something echoing back. Was that a voice? Or . . . Wait . . .

  A trumping sound—like a horn’s call, but overlapping itself. It grew louder, washing over them.

  Then an enormous, skittering mass of carapace and claws crashed around the corner.

  Chasmfiend.

  Kaladin’s mind panicked, but his body simply moved. He snatched Shallan by the arm, hauling her to her feet and pulling her into a run. She shouted, dropping her satchel.

  Kaladin pulled her after him and did not look back. He could feel the thing, too close, the walls of the chasm shaking from its pursuit. Bones, twigs, shell, and plants cracked and snapped.


  The monster trumped again, a deafening sound.

  It was almost upon them. Storms, but it could move. He’d never have imagined something so large being so quick. There was no distracting it this time. It was almost upon them; he could feel it right behind . . .

  There.

  He whipped Shallan in front of him and thrust her into a fissure in the wall. As a shadow loomed over him, he threw himself into the fissure, shoving Shallan backward. She grunted as he pressed her against some of the refuse of twigs and leaves that had been packed into this crack by floodwaters.

  The chasm fell silent. Kaladin could hear only Shallan’s panting and his own heartbeat. They’d left most of their spheres on the ground, where Shallan had been preparing to draw. He still had his spear, his improvised lantern.

  Slowly, Kaladin twisted about, putting his back to Shallan. She held him from behind, and he could feel her tremble. Stormfather. He trembled himself. He twisted his spear to give light, peering out at the chasm. This fissure was shallow, and only a few feet stood between him and the opening.

  The frail, washed-out light of his diamond spheres twinkled off the wet floor. It illuminated broken frillblooms on the walls and several writhing vines on the ground, severed from their plants. They twisted and flopped, like men arching their backs. The chasmfiend . . . Where was it?

  Shallan gasped, arms tightening around his waist. He looked up. There, higher up the crack, a large, inhuman eye watched them. He couldn’t see the bulk of the chasmfiend’s head; just part of the face and jaw, with that terrible glassy green eye. A large claw slammed against the side of the hole, trying to force its way in, but the crack was too small.

  The claw dug at the hole, and then the head withdrew. Scraping rock and chitin sounded in the chasm, but the thing didn’t go far before stopping.

  Silence. A steady drip somewhere fell into a pool. But otherwise, silence.

  “It’s waiting,” Shallan whispered, head near his shoulder.

  “You sound proud of it!” Kaladin snapped.

  “A little.” She paused. “How long, do you suppose, until . . .”

  He looked upward, but couldn’t see the sky. The crack didn’t run all the way up the side of the chasm, and was barely ten or fifteen feet tall. He leaned forward to look at the slot high above, not extending all the way out of the crack, just getting a little closer to the lip so he could see the sky. It was getting dark. Not sunset yet, but getting close.