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Most cities were in the Physical Realm, not in Shadesmar, but you could transfer between the two dimensions with ease—if you had a special kind of portal. They were called perpendicularities, and most major planets had them. To travel, you popped into Shadesmar on one planet, traveled easily to your destination, then popped back out.
She was finally starting to feel like she understood this crew and how to be a leader, just like Master Hoid had been trying to teach her. Before he’d vanished, of course. It was…his way. He’d be back. Until then, she had to do her best to guide the crew, and protect them from the interim captain.
looking in at a figure who wore a tight, formal uniform from a military Starling hadn’t ever been able to identify. The individual worked at a cabinet, cataloging medicines, as the captain had asked. As the figure heard Starling, it turned—revealing a face with the skin pulled back, and a network of insects beneath.
Some called them Clemaxin’s Hordes, after the first person who had discovered them. Starling used the name “Sleepless,” as that was the term they seemed to prefer. There were said to be fewer than a thousand individual Sleepless in the whole cosmere—and some estimates indicated that number was closer to two or three hundred. Though in the case of the Sleepless, “individual” was a loaded word. They were each a group intelligence, made of hundreds of hordelings: insects, like large beetles, maybe three inches from tip to tail.
The person presented for Starling was actually hundreds of insects holding together, like the proverbial three children in a long coat. This wasn’t all of Chrysalis—in fact, it might not even be the most important bits of her. The portions that held her memory and personality would be hidden safely in other places on the ship. But this was the portion she used to interact.
If she were like others of her kind, each finger in her hand would be a separate insect, bred for that look and purpose, connected to the palm—another pair of insects—to imitate a hand.
“I will move on soon. Hoid has abandoned me, as he warned me he would. I don’t know why I ever trusted him…”
The human ability to sense direction was a liar straight from Gofi, the trickster island. People grew up in familiar environs, which led them to falsely trust instincts they didn’t actually have—for memory was different from navigational sense. Without landmarks, people were helpless.
because words were stupid sometimes.
He sang the verses, appreciating that words—like people—changed over time to become something new.
Maybe Dusk couldn’t know his own emotions these days, any more than he knew the way forward. He could only keep breathing, just like he kept paddling, a lonely leaf in a currentless ocean.
He had been trained by the Father himself to survive against terrible odds.
“My homeworld,” ZeetZi said, “is home to a multitudinous array of peoples, much as yours is, Lieutenant Starling.” “Wait,” she said, and even Leonore perked up, glancing at him. “You’ve been to Yolen?”
Who else was from Yolen? Is that where Hoid went in WAT?
Anyone with a proper navigation device—or hell, even a hint of a sensory power, like Allomantic bronze—could sense the invisible waves it gave off, called the Current. So if you wanted to go to the Knell, then great, you could just follow the Current. Unfortunately, eldritch entities born of a god’s death tended to haunt the area immediately surrounding the Knell.
There are thousands of rooms, atop and around one another, all in motion, all part of the Grand Apparatus.
But there were no houses, just thousands of communal rooms, traded between people who requested them depending on their momentary needs. All part of some insane machine built before even the Shattering, they thought. Now used by the Sleepless to run tests upon mortals.
Hoid claimed to have solved a murder there, though the way he told it, she wasn’t certain his help had been in any way relevant. But…well, that was often the case with him. She was certain he was exaggerating the annoyance of the other parties involved.
infinite sky with a soup of blackness below, faintly tinged with a smoky color. The unsea, that part was called: the liquid-like nothing that formed the “ground” of the emberdark. Its presence indicated that no inhabited planet was nearby in the Physical Realm. If there were, people’s thoughts would shape Shadesmar in the region. Even places where people traveled a lot in Shadesmar itself became solid obsidian ground.
He pointed to a sensor that had started flashing red. Even Starling knew what that meant: an entity of negative Investiture. One of the things born from the same event that had killed a god, made the Current, erupted into the Knell.
a towering white mass of Investiture, translucent but not fully transparent, the size of a large building. It had a head and body, vaguely, and dozens of long, many-elbowed arms. Eerily, it didn’t move. It just…shifted. It was in one place, then a moment later it had changed to another posture—leaving the previous pose as a fading afterimage. Limbs jumped from one position to another, with no continuity of motion—like…like it existed in some other dimension, and they caught only brief blips of it. Like flashes of a strobe revealing something moving through darkness.
The eternal conundrum of the emberdark. Radio signals die, but communication via Invested sources can draw danger. So what do you do? Each option is terrible…”
The entities had basically destroyed his homeworld, and the echoes of the god killed there were what made his kind persist when killed.
The thing grew an extra hundred arms. They appeared out of its mountainous back, each hundreds of yards long, with dozens of joints and hands made up of too many twisted, broken fingers.
The list was titled “Notable Invested Beings Killed by Threnodite Entities.”
It had a glassy white, smooth head. Within the reflection on it, she saw… Eternity. Nobody knew quite what these things were, the entities that had all but destroyed the planet Threnody—then moved out into the cosmere, hunting and exterminating life. Perhaps they searched for that which had been taken from them in the death of the god they’d once been part of.
You’re not just some force of nature… You’re evil.”
She was Illistandrista. Dragon. And she did not despair.
“The dead guy is right,” Leonore said, standing. “We should be toasting. Hot choc for all!”
If only Hoid were still with them. He’d have found a way to fix this. He always did, no matter what others said.
“Hoid is immortal. Indestructible. For all of the antics he took us through, he never put himself in any real danger.
“but today, you were the one who jumped out into danger. And so now they know. When you ask them to do something dangerous, they’ll remember that you’re willing to risk yourself. That’s going to mean something, Star. It already does.”
Strange. Talking it through actually helped him formulate impressions into direct ideas. Father…was that why Vathi and everyone else talked so much? His thoughts became concrete as he wrestled them, like some nightmare beast, into a specific shape.
Silverlight was a city built above a sun. It was a full city inside Shadesmar, one of the first multicultural settlements in the cosmere, with a history going back millennia.
Named the Silverlight Nexus, it really was like a sun, colored a frosty white, giving the city its name. It hung in the void beneath the city, lighting everything from underneath with a calm, even glow. This was one of the rare portals that could transfer people in and out of the Physical Realm. They referred to the regions in Shadesmar around planets as subastrals, and those regions took on unique characteristics—influenced deeply by the thoughts of the people on said planet. Around Silverlight, the subastral had hardened into a glassy, transparent window that let you see into the infinite
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Miniature, because it was only the size of a city, though it was the largest natural perpendicularity.
Her manacles now prevented her from accessing that place, unless she found a way to break free from them—something even Master Hoid hadn’t been able to do.
“Helps,” Leonore said, “in that it keeps you nervous, you know? So you never feel too comfortable anywhere. That way, nobody can ever get the jump on you—and stress doesn’t bother you, because you’re already stressed out of your rusting gears.” She tried to laugh it off, but that died out.
“That’s different,” Ed said. “He is nice. Plus, he’s the only known living Shard who has performed the—”
Some arcanists laugh at the idea, because there can’t be a perpendicularity on that planet, right? Because there’s no known Shard Investing it.
Scadrians are wild about the planet, and there’s rumors of the Rosharans talking about it too. We thought it was because of these accounts of the locals and their cultivated Invested birds, which can supposedly initiate a Nahel bond.
Father, he thought. You knew we’d someday need to live as Cakoban did. You made sure that some of us never grew soft from a life in the homeisles. You gave us the Aviar, but made us work for them, training, testing, preparing…
He left space for her speak first.
Missing text submitted.
What, she thought—a final shield against despair—would Master Hoid tell me to do? Own the room.
She grew so nervous she almost blurted out her offer, but her master’s training—which had often been about when to speak more than what to say—held her back just long enough.
“That’s Tumak. Once emperor of his nation. He needs a little more training in obedience before I can set him on other, more interesting tasks.”
“You owe me now for both Hoid’s debts and a hold full of unkeyed Light.
That seems a great deal of Investiture for such a minor planet—and it has to come from somewhere. There are whispers it might be another of Autonomy’s old dominions.
bring you proof that the perpendicularity is there,” she said. “I do it within the next six months. In exchange, you cancel all of our debts—everything owed you—and give me full ownership of the Dynamic Storyteller’s Incredible Conveyance.”
He’d captured a mythical beast in an ocean with no water, in a land with no sun. Even if he got them killed out here, surely Cakoban would be proud.
Progress was a wave. It first caught you in it and carried you, but the moment you slipped off the crest, you went crashing into the surf and maybe never came back up.
