POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan's bare safehand on the Midnight Mother opens them to each other at the same instant. The room dissolves to black around her. In her mind she huddles small, holding Pattern in his humanoid robed form against her, both of them clutching their bond as the spren gropes at it — trying to tear him loose and slot herself in his place.
She feels Re-Shephir's confused fascination with humankind: an innate knowledge of men, the way newborn mink kits know to fear skyeels, not awareness so much as instinct. The spren is ancient. She was created long ago as a splinter of something even more terrible and ordered to sow chaos by spawning horrors against men. Over centuries the horrors became *imitations*, hollow stone-like figures with no love or fear of their own — only an overpowering curiosity and a thin attraction to violence. *Almighty above,* Shallan thinks. *It's like a creationspren. Only so, so wrong.*
Re-Shephir trembles. Shallan finds the reason for her fear: she has been trapped before — recently, in her sense of time, though in fact centuries ago — by a Lightweaver who had understood her. She fears it happening again, fears Shallan the way an axehound might fear a voice that sounds like a harsher master's. *Pattern,* Shallan thinks at him. *She fears us. Why does she fear us?*
She also feels the rest of it: this thing is about to know her completely, every secret she has buried in her own head. Her ferocity wavers. Her commitment slips.
So she *lies*. Not in words — she insists, into the dark, that she is not afraid, that she has always been committed, that she will always be so. She does it deliberately. *Power could be an illusion of perception. Even within yourself.* And she presses forward as the part of herself that murdered her mother and the part that stabbed Tyn through the chest — the part that hates being called *diverting* or *clever* — drawing on it as if she meant it.
Re-Shephir breaks. She screeches through Shallan in a vibration that remembers her imprisonment and fears something worse, and she flees.
Shallan drops back out into the bowl-chamber and Adolin catches her in a steel grip with a crack of Plate on stone. The dark is gone. The midnight figures have dissolved. Renarin is already kneeling beside a wounded bridgeman, gauntlet off, healing him. Somehow Shallan has kept the illusion of her havah on through all of it, hiding Veil from Adolin even now. She still cannot let him see. *Where?* Adolin points at a tunnel on the far side of the chamber, with steps cut down into the depths of the mountain. *Like moving smoke,* he says. Eth picks his way to the threshold and asks if they should chase it. Shallan feels the tower itself somehow *changed*, and tells them to post guards and leave the thing to run. Teft heartily agrees — *guards seem like a very, very good idea.*
Then Shallan frowns at Teft's tone and follows his gaze to the center of the room — to what the Midnight Mother had been covering. A pillar runs floor to ceiling, set with thousands upon thousands of cut gemstones, most larger than Shallan's fist. Together they are a treasure worth more than most kingdoms.