POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan is curled under blankets on a sofa in Sebarial's sitting room at Urithiru — a strangely shaped stone chamber with a musicians' loft and a shallow floor cavity Sebarial keeps threatening to fill with water and fish, currently boarded over and warned about. The rest of the room is hung with monastery tapestries and lit with golden lamps, all of it part of the ongoing low-grade extravagance Sebarial uses to needle Dalinar. Palona brings her a cup of steaming citrus tea and settles nearby with one of her own. Shallan has not been able to shake the chill that has been on her since she touched the Midnight Mother a few hours back. Adolin had wanted her to sleep, but the last thing she wants is to be alone, and he left her in Palona's care to stay with Dalinar and Navani for the rest of the debrief.
Palona asks the question they cannot let lie: *what was it like?* Shallan thinks about Re-Shephir as the songs and paintings have her — a dark, beautiful figure in black robes with red eyes and a sultry gaze — and tells Palona that the lore got nothing right. Re-Shephir is a spren, vast and terrible, who *wants so desperately to understand us. So she kills us, imitating our violence.* Beneath that, Shallan glimpsed something further: not just a thing studying humankind from outside but something searching for something it had lost. *Had this creature — in distant, distant time beyond memory — once been human?* They do not know. Navani has set her scholars looking, but the books at Urithiru are still few, and even with the Palanaeum Jasnah spent years on this question and what she had found had been mostly unreliable. Too many years.
Palona says they should at least find where the *others* of the Midnight Mother's kind are held, so they don't get out. Shallan tells her — quietly — that she does not think the others were ever captured at all. She had felt Re-Shephir's isolation in their contact, a sense of being torn away while the rest escaped. Re-Shephir herself had been a captive — held by someone centuries ago, escaped since, and waiting beneath the tower ever since. The others, Shallan says, are out there, and always have been — and humans would not have noticed, because *they'll just be normal to us. The way things have always been.* Palona does not seem to know what to do with that.
Palona's questions degenerate into kind, dozing praise — much like Adolin earlier, and like a Dalinar downright nice rather than his usual stern self. Shallan does not tell her how close she had come to breaking, or how badly she fears meeting the Midnight Mother again. But she lets herself feel — for the first time since the day she watched Jah Keved fade behind her on a ship, a child sent to save her family — that she might actually have a handle on her life. She is *kind of an adult,* and she is increasingly confident that between Shallan, Veil, and Radiant she can deal with anything life can throw at her — even being seen safehand-bare by an entire troop of bridgemen.
A polite commotion outside the room interrupts her. Adolin steps in, uniform still rumpled from having worn Plate over it, bows properly to Palona, and jogs over. *Don't panic. It's a good thing.* Shallan is immediately alarmed. Sebarial has already passed the news that the bridgeboy is back, she says — but that is not what Adolin has come about. Voices approach and several more people step in. At their head is Jasnah Kholin. *THE END OF Part One.*