Tress of the Emerald Sea

by Brandon Sanderson

“I’m glad I’m not in a story, Charlie. I’d end up captured for certain.” “And I would probably die quickly,” he said. “I’m a coward, Tress. It’s the truth.”

Please don’t let that be foreshadowing

This young man was around the same age as Charlie, but he was six and a half feet tall and had a jaw so straight it made other men question if they were.

lol

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

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.

The phenomenon is possible on any world, including your own. Fluidization, it’s called. Pump air up underneath a box of sand, and you’ll see something similar to what Tress was watching.

Sanderson has a video of this on YouTube

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.

“My gums sure do like a lickin’!” he said to her, then walked away with a bowlegged gait that made him wobble like a drunk penguin. Yes, that’s me. No, I don’t want to talk about it.

🤣🤣🤣

I’m not going to ask you to remember them all. Mostly because I don’t remember them all. Therefore, for ease of both narrative and our collective sanity, I’m going to name only the more important members of the Crow’s Song. The rest, regardless of gender, I’ll call “Doug.”

“Doug” is the naming equivalent to convergent evolution. And once it arrives, it stays. A linguistic Great Filter; a wakeup call. Once a society reaches peak Doug, it’s time for it to go sit in the corner and think about what it has done.

That “wizard” from the stars wasn’t me, by the way. I’ve always wondered who traded the device to Fort. That’s Nalthian tech, with Awakened predictive Connection circuits.

She took my other sense of taste. The important one. And with it went my sense of humor, my sense of decorum, my sense of purpose, and my sense of self.

If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.

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.

The more meteorologically inclined among you might be wondering about the planet’s weather patterns and water cycle. If you’re one of those to whom these things are extremely important, you have my sympathies. It’s never too late to develop a personality. Maybe go to a party. But try to avoid topics like weather patterns and water cycles. Unless of course you can do it like me.

Or as coming up with a rhyme for “bulb.” (No really. Try it.)

Lulled

You can’t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.

It is one of the most bitter ironies I’ve ever had to accept: there are, unquestionably, musical geniuses of incomparable talent who died as street sweepers because they never had the chance to pick up an instrument.

It’s called the transitive property of ineptitude, and is the explanation for anything you’ve seen me do wrong ever.

Men, what you want to find is a woman who looks at you like Ann looked at that cannon. Because if such a woman exists, you’ll want to move to a completely different kingdom, inform the authorities, and watch the post for packages containing random disembodied fingers.

What, other than a person, could you build up merely by caring?

I think about this a great deal, for it is my job to sell legends.

Enjoy memories, yes, but don’t be a slave to who you wish you once had been. Those memories aren’t alive. You are.

But for humans at large, knowledge usually equates to empathy, and empathy leads to understanding.

In her defense, she’d assumed him safe in her cabin—though the knowledge that Crow had ransacked the place should have raised if not a red flag, at least a fuchsia streamer.

“Huck owes me no debt,” Tress said. “He wouldn’t be on this ship except for me.” Which means he’d be on the bottom of the Verdant Sea. I doubt he’d have made it to the bottom. Rats are rather low in body mass. He’d almost certainly have ended up wrapped in a vine ball, drifting through the middle depths of the ocean until he decomposed. But as no one in the room was versed in spore depth density and relative fluidized viscosity, they took Fort’s words as fact.

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.

He thought the way he acted was normal, because that was how he’d always been treated. In the land where everyone screams, everyone is also slightly deaf.

Oh yes. I’ve said those words. I said them with sixteen other people, in fact.

I’ll have you know I owned those briefs before the curse, and I stand by the purchase.

And she should have known better. She might not have been asking a stupid question, but asking a question of stupid is nearly as futile.

With a few tips, he wasn’t so boring after all. Secretly, I’ll tell you that you aren’t either. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to lower your value. Don’t trust them. They know they can’t afford you otherwise.

Turns out that abandoning your only son to certain doom is not a path to a healthy marriage.)