Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5)

by Brandon Sanderson

Chana lowered her hands. “How could I, and the horrible thing I’ve become, create something so wonderful in you? Hug your brothers for me, Shallan. Tell them I love them, even if I can never, ever see them again. Lest I hurt them too.” The heat settled. Maybe her mother didn’t deserve forgiveness—there was no excuse for what she’d done, no matter her mental state. Still, it was important for Shallan to make some kind of reconciliation, if only in this playacting way.

Odium didn’t know him. Dalinar. Who he had become deep down; Odium couldn’t see that man. For that man … he could not be broken by the truth. Truth was the weapon once used to bloody him, pulled from his own flesh afterward, and now held up as his finest blade.

The eyes of the Blackthorn, cutting through it all. Red like blood. The eyes of a man who, after years of restraint, had finally given in and become the thing everyone said he was. The thing his brother wanted him to be. A destroyer. But Dalinar was not afraid. He no longer feared the past, and Odium had made a mistake in bringing him here. Dalinar strode through the fire, and it could not touch him, for he was the thing shadows and flames feared. He was a man who did not care what they revealed.

“It’s never too late,” Dalinar said, “to try to be a better man.

The question is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.”

“All men have the same ultimate destination, Dalinar. But we are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet. Your callused feet. Our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels. Your back strong from carrying the weight of your travels. Our eyes open. Your. Eyes. Open. You kept the pain, Dalinar. Remember that. For the substance of our existence is not in the achievement, but in the method…”

Maybe emotions don’t make us weak. Maybe they teach us. Like the pain of touching a hot stove. They show us what we should do, and remind us what we should not.”

“You should pray. I will wish. Together we will hope that the man we have all chosen as our champion can resist whoever Odium chooses to be his. Because whatever happens tomorrow, I think that secretly, Dalinar Kholin is both champions.”

You couldn’t stay ahead of the wind forever. Not even someone like him. He’d given Herdaz his all, but how many times could your heart break for a kingdom before your soul bled out?

there was nothing to do about it. So Kaladin raised his head and looked up. So often, it began with just looking up. That was the first step in clawing free of this darkness.

“This horrible darkness,” Kaladin said. “That’s what you feel?” “Every day.” “It’s awful, isn’t it?” Ishar nodded. “I will not lie,” Kaladin said, “and promise you that all future days will be warm. But Ishar, you will be warm again. And that is another thing entirely to promise.”

“No hero dies alone,” Renarin read, written in halting words by his own hand, “for he carries with him the dreams of everyone who continues to live. Those dreams will keep my father company in the Beyond, where he taught us we go when we die. No continual war. No more killing. My father is finally at peace. And we live because of his sacrifice.”