POV: lift
Summary
A week's travel north-east of Azimir, Lift sprints across a brown-grass field in northern Tashikk, with Wyndle streaming along the ground beside her in vine and crystal, still pleading with her to please, please go back. She has bolted from the Bronze Palace after roughly three months as Gawx's honoured guest, and is happy to be back on stone with no shoes. She Slicks the soles of her feet and skids — the grass yanking down into its burrows in a wave before her, a windspren falling in like a white ribbon — and then her foot snags a moss-anchored rock and she goes over face-first. The face is awesome enough to keep right on going, so she skids on her cheek into a tree, which dutifully plays dead and topples over.
She sits up and itemises Wyndle: dark green vine ribbon studded with rude crystal toenails, a face he grows out of a coiled tower of his own length. He begs again for Azimir. She lays out the case against the palace as she sees it: too much food and softness for one rescue, robes you could get lost in, viziers pressing tutors on her, an "I" being slowly nibbled out of her shape and a new girl set in her place. She means to leave before the gobbling is done. Whatever the palace really wanted with her, she is certain it was eventually to eat her — and she trusts her gut, even when her gut is wrong, because her gut is the only thing she has not let anyone redecorate.
She tries her awesomeness again across the open field. Slick only at the soles, she skids three feet and tumbles into the grass: the air itself is pushing her back. She hisses, glows her whole skin with power, and runs. This time the air can't find her either; sunlight seems to slide off her; the grass has no time to retract before she is past it. She sluices down a small hill in smoky white light, laughing — and runs face-first into another tree, which falls, and so do the two trees beside it, for company. A single gloryspren orbits her grin where she lies in the leaves. Wyndle finds her there and tells her, again, that she had been happy in the palace; she had been. She does not answer.
The remembered words of Darkness sit under everything she does today: that Edgedancers could ride the thinnest rope, dance across rooftops, move like ribbons on the wind. He had been about to kill her at the time, but he had not been bragging on the order's behalf. Why lie? Lift sets her jaw, picks herself up, and runs again, jumping at the crest of the next rise to test the lashing-power version of the trick. She does it. She also runs out of food doing it. Her stomach reminds her that she eats food, not stormlight in the abstract, and that an entire pack's worth this morning was the last of it. She digs in her pockets, finds only a crumbed handkerchief, and starts chewing on it for the breadcrumbs.
Walking now to save her empty stomach, she lets Wyndle catalogue what he has lost on her behalf. He was not a gardener of plants in Shadesmar — he was a gardener of *chairs*, the souls of human furniture crystallised into deliberately curated collections: Winstels, a Shober, several spoonbacks, even a throne or two. He had an entire exhibition of sofas planned when the Ring assigned him to her. Lift, mouth full of handkerchief, makes him huff at her own gibberish and then admits she only wanted to see how he'd respond. She muses, charitably, that he is probably a vegetarian Voidbringer.
They cross through a small wood — a corpse of trees, she thinks, with no actual corpses in it. Unlike the springy drop-deads she has seen scattered alone in the fields, these grow twisted together, branches intertwined to brace each other against the storm. That, she decides, is everyone else's solution. Hers is to be a drop-dead: don't tangle, don't get caught up in anyone, go your own way. That has to be why she had to leave. You cannot let people start to see the same you every morning, or they begin to expect things, and one step from expectation is being gobbled.
She stops on a maintained path through the wood, shades her eyes, and looks north toward Azimir one more time. Wyndle asks, hopefully, whether they are going back. They are not. The wrong things are changing — the world keeps moving and she is supposed to be the still point at the centre of it; that is what she asked for at the Old Magic, wasn't it? — and she is starting to wonder whether she was lied to. She turns her back on the city, shoves her hands in her pockets, and walks on through the trees.