POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan spends the day after the encounter with the Midnight Mother alone in her room at Urithiru, sketching and trying to think. She is supposed to be recovering from her ordeal — though as she reminds herself, the bridgemen did the actual fighting and all she did was grope an eldritch spren. Her drawings have lately drifted away from analytic observation and into pages of twisted images; reminding herself that she was trained as a scholar, she resolves to write down everything she remembers about the Unmade she faced. Adolin, Palona, even Dalinar and Navani visit; she sits politely through their concern and returns to her sketchpad. But under every line she draws is the one fact she cannot get past: Jasnah is alive.
Eventually she cannot stand the room any longer. Navani has mentioned that Jasnah is planning to visit her in the evening, but Shallan dresses, slings her satchel over her shoulder, and goes hunting her former mistress instead. As she walks the corridors of Urithiru she finds her irritation building. Jasnah has always claimed to look at things from a logical perspective, but she has a flair for the dramatic to rival any storyteller — Shallan remembers the night in Kharbranth when Jasnah lured thieves in and dealt with them in brutally pointed fashion. Why hadn't she written ahead by spanreed and told them she had survived?
A few questions take her back to the spiraling stair down into the bowels of the tower. She is surprised at herself: the formless dread she has felt since arriving at Urithiru has evaporated entirely. The Unmade she chased away had been the source of that oppressive aura; with it gone, the whole tower feels different. Guards at the foot of the stair bow and address her as *Brightness Radiant.* She walks the muraled hallway past the empty library rooms to the chamber with the crystal pillar, and gets her first proper look at the place without its writhing covering of darkness.
The pillar is staggering — not a single gemstone but ten varieties of polestone fused into a thick column twenty feet tall, all of them currently dun. A barricade of guards stands at the tunnel mouth where the Unmade fled. Jasnah rounds the pillar, hand resting on the crystal, dressed in red with her dark hair run through with swordlike rubied hairspikes — perfect, the way she had been the first time Shallan ever saw her, when Shallan had also felt envious and overwhelmed. Without preamble, Jasnah launches into a fabrial lecture. Shallan thinks: this is how the reunion goes? A lecture? Fitting.
Jasnah explains the principle behind fabrials — capture a spren, imprison it in a gemstone made for the purpose, and use specific stimuli to evoke its nature: metal pressed against a ruby with a flamespren trapped inside, to vary heat on command. Shallan reacts with horror — they're imprisoning spren — and Jasnah dismisses the objection: an airy reminder that some kinds of spren are very different from others. Pattern hums softly from Shallan's skirts in agreement with her, and Jasnah casually instructs Shallan to draw the pillar for her — proportions and colors right, please. The careless command stings; Shallan reminds herself that she is, after all, Jasnah's ward, and takes out her sketchpad.
Jasnah apologizes for the disaster aboard Wind's Pleasure — her lack of foresight cost lives and caused Shallan hardship — and praises what Shallan has accomplished since. She warns that the Ghostbloods, whom she is certain ordered the attack, will start targeting Shallan now that she is progressing toward her final Ideals. Asked how she survived a knife through the chest, she answers simply that she is an Elsecaller. All Radiants have an attachment to Shadesmar because their spren originate there, but her order has special control over moving between realms; she shifted to Shadesmar to escape, and the wound responded to Stormlight as such wounds do. Her real trouble was returning — leaving for Shadesmar is downhill; coming back is uphill, requiring a rare transfer point where the realms touch.
The lecture trails off as Jasnah grows uncharacteristically quiet. She has been at the forefront of all of this for years, she tells Shallan softly, and one short stumble has left her scrambling to keep up — the visions her uncle is now having, the refounding of the Radiants without her, this new Windrunner she has only met once. So much, so quickly. After years in the shadows, everything is finally surfacing, and despite all her study she understands very little of it. Shallan keeps drawing the pillar and decides it is nice, for once, to be reminded that she and Jasnah have something in common — even if the thing they share is ignorance, and even if she still has no idea how she is supposed to explain her own dealings with the Ghostbloods to a woman who will almost certainly demand a full accounting.