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November 17, 2020 - January 3, 2021
“Drink. It’s for science.”
“In the corner. I think this is right.” “Mmm …” he said. “A few degrees off, so technically acute.”
“Will you return? If you can, after?” Rock shook his head. “This thing I have done here with all of you, he is the end. When we meet again, I suspect it shall not be in this world. This life.”
“You want to know what I am? Well, I’m a lot of things. Tired, mostly. But I’m also a Type Two Invested entity. Used to call myself a Type One, but I had to throw the whole scale out, once I learned more.
“That’s because Wit is an asshole,”
“Imagine it this way. You know how you can make an imprint in crem, then let it dry, and fill the imprint with wax to create a copy of your original object? Well, that happened to my soul. When I died, I was drenched in power. So when my soul escaped, it left a duplicate. A kind of … fossil of a soul.”
“She’s what I now call a Type One Invested entity. I decided that had to be the proper way to refer to them. Power that came alive on its own.”
And if you let a man die with too Invested a soul—or Invest him right as he’s dying—he’ll leave behind a shadow you can nail back onto a body.
“Is there a … way to kill something like you? Permanently?” “Lots of ways. For the weaker ones, just kill the body again, make sure no one Invests the soul with more strength, and they’ll slip away in a few minutes. For stronger ones … well, you might be able to starve them. A lot of Type Twos feed on power. Keeps them going.
“These enemies of yours though, I think they’re too strong for that. They’ve lasted thousands of years already, and seem Connected to Odium to feed directly on his power. You’ll have to find a way to disrupt their souls. You can’t just rip them apart; you need a weapon so strong, it unravels the soul.” He squinted, looking off into the distance. “I know through sorry experience those kinds of weapons are very dangerous to make, and never seem to work right.”
That’s why she takes our memories. She knows we aren’t the actual people who died, but something else given a corpse to inhabit…
“Your abilities are what made the original Oathpact,” she said. “And they existed—and were named—long before the Knights Radiant were founded. A Bondsmith Connected the Heralds to Braize, made them immortal, and locked our enemies away. A Bondsmith bound other Surges and brought humans to Roshar, fleeing their dying world. A Bondsmith created—or at least discovered—the Nahel bond: the ability of spren and humans to join together into something better. You Connect things, Dalinar. Realms. Ideas. People.”
“I will not question.” However, she felt a surging to the power that moved within him. The mind did not like being questioned, but the power … It liked questions. It liked arguments. It was passion. There was a weakness here. In the division between the Vessel and the Shard.
“But Syl has told me that while they don’t trust Cryptics, honorspren don’t hate them like they do inkspren or highspren.
Endowment at least responded to my overtures, though I have not been able to locate Invention again following our initial contact.
the Ghostbloods were obsessed with a specific spren named Ba-Ado-Mishram. That was a name from myth, one of the Unmade. It had been this spren who had taken over for Odium following the Final Desolation; she had granted the singers forms of power. By capturing Ba-Ado-Mishram—locking her in a gemstone—humankind had stolen the minds of the singers in ancient times.
Whimsy was not terribly useful, and Mercy worries me. I do think that Valor is reasonable, and suggest you approach her again. It has been too long, in her estimation, since your last conversation.
“It wouldn’t be, you know,” Kaladin said. “Better for everyone, if you vanished. Your niece loves you. Your return would make her life better.” “I can’t feel that way,” Noril said. “I know. That’s why you need someone to tell it to you. You need someone to talk to, Noril, when the darkness is strong. Someone to remind you the world hasn’t always been this way; that it won’t always be this way.” “How do you … know this?” Noril asked. “I’ve felt it,” Kaladin said. “Feel it most days.”
The deaths of both Devotion and Dominion trouble me greatly, as I had not realized this immense power we held was something that could be broken in such a way. On my world, the power always gathered and sought a new Vessel.
That said, the most worrying thing I discovered in this was the wound upon the Spiritual Realm where Ambition, Mercy, and Odium clashed—and Ambition was destroyed. The effects on the planet Threnody have been … disturbing.
Other Shards I cannot identify, and are hidden to me. I fear that their influence encroaches upon my world, yet I am locked into a strange inability because of the opposed powers I hold.
I have begun searching for a pathway out of this conundrum by seeking the ideal person to act on my behalf. Someone who embodies both Preservation and Ruin. A … sword, you might say, who can both protect and kill.
I do not share their attitude. If you can, as you suppose, maintain Odium’s prison for now, it would give us necessary time to plan. This is a threat beyond the capacity of one Shard to face.
“The innate forces by which all life, all reality, are connected. Gravitation. Transportation. Transformation. But … I thought there were ten?” “That is human talk,” Raboniel said to Derision. “They claim a tenth, of Honor alone. Adhesion is not a true Surge, but a lie that was presented to us as one. True Surges are of both Honor and Cultivation—Cultivation for life, Honor to make the Surge into natural law. Things must fall to the ground, so they created Surges to make it happen.”
We must assume that Odium has realized this, and is seeking a singular, terrible goal: the destruction—and somehow Splintering or otherwise making impotent—of all Shards other than him.
To combine powers would change and distort who Odium is. So instead of absorbing others, he destroys them. Since we are all essentially infinite, he needs no more power. Destroying and Splintering the other Shards would leave Odium as the sole god, unchanged and uncorrupted by other influences.
However, though you think not as a mortal, you are their kin. The power of Odium’s Shard is more dangerous than the mind behind it. Particularly since any Investiture seems to gain a will of its own when not controlled.
My instincts say that the power of Odium is not being controlled well. The Vessel will be adapted to the power’s will. And after this long, if Odium is still seeking to destroy, then it is because of the power.
In truth, it would be a combination of a Vessel’s craftiness and the power’s Intent that we should fear most.
