Tress of the Emerald Sea

by Brandon Sanderson

It was delivered by Hoid the cabin boy. (Yes, that’s me. What tipped you off? Was it perhaps the name?)

She felt less like a mere human being, and more like a human who was merely being.

First though, Tress went to talk to her parents. (Something more people in stories such as this should do.)

Well, parents have to say things like that. They’re required to see the best in their children, otherwise living with the little sociopaths would drive a person mad.

“It is. But a terrible idea executed brilliantly has to be better than a brilliant idea executed terribly. I mean, look at pelicans.” “True,” Tress’s mother said. “But are we capable of either kind of brilliance?” “No,” Tress said. “But maybe we can take a whole lot of little steps that, when looked at together, might seem brilliant to somebody who doesn’t know us.”

In those cases, well, Lem might have been poor in the kind of currency that paid taxes. But he was downright wealthy when it came to the kind of currency that mattered.

It might seem that the person who can feel for others is doomed in life. Isn’t one person’s pain enough? Why must a person like Tress feel for two, or more? Yet I’ve found that the people who are the happiest are the ones who learn best how to feel. It takes practice, you know. Effort. And those who (late in life) have been feeling for two, three, or a thousand different people…well, turns out they’ve had a leg up on everyone else all along. Empathy is an emotional loss leader. It pays for itself eventually.

One of the great tragedies of life is knowing how many people in the world are made to soar, paint, sing, or steer—except they never get the chance to find out.

“Yes, well, most terrible mass murderers like Crow do tend to be well acquainted with tragedy. It makes you wonder who the true monster is: the killer, or the society that created them?”

Worry has weight, and is an infinitely renewable resource. One might say worries are the only things you can make heavier simply by thinking about them.

People are like stomachs, you know. They can process some of what you feed them, but stuff in too much too fast, and eventually it’s going to come right back up.

Tress smiled. A simple act, but only moments ago it had seemed as impossible as flying. Or as coming up with a rhyme for “bulb.” (No really. Try it.)

“I don’t think things were really better though,” Tress said softly, still staring at the ceiling. “We just remember it that way because it’s comforting.” “And because we couldn’t see the troubles,” Huck agreed. “Maybe we didn’t want to see them. When you’re young, there’s always someone else to deal with the problems.”

Tress nodded. Beyond that, memories have a way of changing on us. Souring or sweetening over time—like a brew we drink, then recreate later by taste, only getting the ingredients mostly right. You can’t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.

Nothing motivates quite like a deadline.

Uncertain, she popped out the first of her test cakes, sliced off a corner, and offered it to him. Fort picked it up between the sides of his hands. He inspected it. Sniffed it. Tried it. Then cried. This type of response will send any artist into a panic. Tears wash away the middle ground—all the infinite permutations of mediocre are eliminated, and two options remain: one sublime, the other catastrophic. For a moment, both interpretations existed in a kind of quantum state for Tress. And people wonder why artists so often abuse drink.

Moments like these bring wind and rain to life. We need purpose; it’s the spiritual conjunction that glues together human existence and human volition. Purpose is so integral to us that we see it everywhere.

A very strange, very desperate idea occurred to her. Probably nothing. Probably a useless whim. Notably, strange desperation is exactly the state that often leads to genius.

If you gather together stories of heroes—those who have risked their lives for others, those who have stood against overwhelming odds, those who have barreled heedlessly into danger with the aplomb of a champion diver leaping from the highest platform—you find patterns. Two of them, in fact. The first is that heroes can be trained. Not by a government or a military, but by the people themselves. Heroes are the ones who have thought about what they’re going to do, and who have trained to do it. Heroism is often the seemingly spontaneous result of a lifetime of preparation. But if you ask these heroes why they risked their lives, don’t do it on a stand in front of a crowd while you give them their medal. Because the truth is, they likely didn’t do it for their country. Or even for their ideals. Consistently, across cultures, eras, and ideologies, war heroes report the same simple motivation. They did it for their friends.

If you want to create heroes, don’t give them something to fight for. Give them someone to fight for.

They’d gone from certainly dead to very much alive, and that kind of existential whiplash requires a few heartbeats—thumping in your ears to tell you yes, this was real—to recover from.

People want to imagine that time is consistent, steady, stable. They define the day, create tools to measure it, chop it up into hours, minutes, seconds. They pretend each one is equal to the others—when in fact some are clearly prime cuts, and others are full of gristle.

Curiously though, there is a feature of collaboration that is often misunderstood. Two heads are not necessarily better than one

However, when someone tries, it makes others more willing to try. And when you taste a little success—even vicariously—it can act as a mental laxative.

“Besides,” another added, “it’s worth continuing. After this, we’re gonna be the only pirates who ever robbed the Sorceress herself!”

Irony is a curious concept. Specifically, I mean the classical definition: that of a choice leading to an opposite outcome from what is intended. Many grammarians bemoan the word’s near-constant misuse—second only in dictional assassination to the way some people use the word “literally.” (Their use of which is ironic.)

Change has an illusory aspect to it. We pretend that big changes hang on single decisions, single moments. And they do. But single decisions and single moments, in turn, have a mountain of smaller decisions behind them. You can’t have an avalanche without a mountain of snow, even if it begins with one bit starting to tumble.

As Tress fumbled to catch her cups, the door slid shut. Locking her inside and leaving her with only one choice. To proceed. And meet her destiny.

There’s an opposite force in life to the avalanche Tress was feeling. There’s always an opposition, you see. A Push for every Pull, an old adversary of mine always says. Sometimes the moments in our life pile up and become an unstoppable force that makes us change. But at other times they become a mountain impossible to surmount. Everyone misses shots now and then. But if you become known as the person who misses—if you internalize it—well, suddenly every miss becomes another rock in that pile. While every hit gets ignored. Eventually you become Ann: arm shaking, sweat pouring down your face, clutched by the invisible but very real claws of self-fulfilling determination. Then you start missing not because your aim is bad, or your eyesight is poor, but because your arm is shaking and sweat is pouring down your face. And because missing is what you do.

“The part the stories leave out,” Tress said as the Sorceress’s runes formed into a vibrant wall, “is everything that comes before. You see, I’ve discovered that it’s all right to need help. So long as you’ve lived your life as the kind of person who deserves to be rescued.”