The Sunlit Man

by Brandon Sanderson

Those prospectors were large machines for doing something as simple as sensing Investiture, but not everyone was lucky enough to have a Seeker on staff.

it wasn’t when life

was utterly terrible that people rebelled. It instead happened when life improved to the point that people had time to think, time to wonder. The capacity to imagine.

“These power sources used to be people?”

“This one here,”

“was my mother. Two weeks ago. We left her for the sun, then recovered her sunheart on the next rotation. Her body vaporized by the heat...

Nomad hadn’t been to Nalthis—the place sounded nice, and nice places tended to be easy for the

Night Brigade to find—but they bought, sold, and traded chunks of people’s souls like they were gemstones. BEUs as a measurement were based on this system—though at least there, the transaction left you alive.

A power cell. One of which he’d consumed to make his Connection to this planet.

“What is being drawn from you is something we call Investiture. A different state of energy, and the removal of it cools you in the process. That’s a side effect, though. Because of your heritage, your people have an interesting type of Investiture—as do I, though mine is of a different variety.”

“Investiture is finicky,”

“Usually requires specific things—Intent, Commands, familiarity—to manipulate. It’s likely that

the bracers were brutal enough to force through my protections, b...

“If you touch, you start draining Investiture from one another?”

That included his Torment. There was a physical component. A mental component. But the real shackles were spiritual—Investiture.