POV: dalinar
Summary
Dalinar remembers almost everything now. The meeting with the Nightwatcher is still missing, but the rest is back as a fresh wound. There had been more holes in his mind than he realised; for years he had thought himself mostly whole, and now the Nightwatcher's quilt of stitched memories has come apart. He tries to set it aside as Taravangian's scribes tour him through Vedenar — famed for gardens but mostly broken by the Veden civil war and the Everstorm that followed. Scorched buildings, piles of rubble, black scars on the fields outside where the dead were burned in heaps. He cannot help thinking of what he did to Rathalas. Evi's tears walk with him. *Hypocrite, murderer, destroyer.*
The wife of a new Veden highprince leads Navani off to inspect paintings; Dalinar is steered into a smaller garden square where Veden lighteyes drink wine. He excuses himself up to a raised gazebo to *survey the city,* his guards remaining at the foot of the steps. From up there he can see the ruined palace, the burned terraces, the cliffs and the sea. He can smell smoke. He has not coped well with smoke since Evi. He tries to retreat into the stated purpose of the trip — surveying Veden martial capacity, which is barracked in storm-bunkers inside the walls. Then Taravangian shuffles up the gazebo steps in his orange robes carrying an enormous diamond-shaped half-shard kite shield.
The old king is having a good day, which is dangerous — he becomes prone to thinking about mistakes he has made. He hands Dalinar the shield to inspect; a gemstone in a steel box on its inner face holds a spren. He remarks that spren cannot be enslaved any more than a chull can. The Stormfather rumbles uneasily. Taravangian does not stop: that gemstone imprisons something that at another time might have blessed a Knight Radiant. Then he turns sideways: *would you, Dalinar, snap your fingers and let the Sunmaker live long enough to unite all of Roshar — at the cost of millions slaughtered into Azir and Iri — if it would have left you today in command of a unified people to meet the Voidbringer invasion?* No, of course not. *Those people are long dead. Morality and law are built upon the bodies of the slain.* He returns to fabrials: you lure a spren with something it loves, give it something familiar, and in that moment it becomes your slave. Dalinar excuses himself.
He does not look for Navani. He visits the troops instead, and at last finds something resembling calm among the bivouacs by the city wall — *the peace of soldiers at work.* The generals welcome him; he speaks their language now, courtesy of his Bondsmith ability. In a breezy tent he meets a line of wounded soldiers whose platoons were destroyed around them. The last is an elderly veteran with a missing arm and a clean uniform: Geved. He fought against Dalinar's armies at Slickrock under Brightlord Nalanar's second infantry and salutes a *storming fine battle.* Dalinar asks softly what the war here was like. *A nightmare,* Geved says — not because Vedens fought Vedens, but because *nobody would stop. Even when it should have been done. They just kept right on fighting. Killing because they felt like killing.* Another man across the tent, eyepatched, says it more plainly: *that river inside you, pulling your blood up into your head, making you love each swing.* Dalinar knows the name without being told.
The Thrill starts to glow inside him. So familiar, so warm, so terrible — *like a favourite axehound, surprised to hear its master's voice after so long.* He has not felt it in what seems an eternity. The realisation lands: it had not been weakening on the Shattered Plains because he was overcoming it. It had left, to come here.
He flees the tent and climbs the city wall. Dalinar thinks of himself as having been four people — the bloodlusty youth, the general who feigned distinguished civility while longing for the battlefield, the broken man who paid for both, and the false fourth who gave up his memories to pretend he was something better. The Thrill nips at him. A Veden soldier challenges him; he grits his teeth and bolts down a tight stairwell, Rial and the others piling out after him. Rial holds out a canteen smelling strongly of liquor — *I know you said I shouldn't carry this. You might need it.* Dalinar stares at it. *Blood of my fathers. Please. No.* He spins away.
The voice in his head — half the Thrill, half Evi — speaks his old logic back to him: *if you become that first man again, it will stop hurting. In your youth you did what needed to be done. You were stronger then.* He bellows at the sky and charges through the streets to the Oathgate.
On the platform, Navani is already there with the Kholin guards and a delegation of scribes. Several of those *scribes,* he realises, wear short ardent beards but blue robes — curates from the Holy Enclave at Valath, gemstone-wound staves more ornate than he would have expected after the Hierocracy's fall. One steps forward and pronounces, loudly enough for the watching crowd: *Dalinar Kholin, the council of curates declares you a heretic. We cannot tolerate your insistence that the Almighty is not God. You are hereby proclaimed excommunicate and anathema.* The man begins to recite Dalinar's heresies one by one and step closer. The Thrill stirs and sniffs blood. *I'm going to kill him,* Dalinar thinks plainly. *I have to run now, or I will kill this man.* So he runs.
He scrambles up the Oathgate control building to the keyhole and only then remembers he has no Shardblade to work it. The Stormfather rumbles, alarmed: *something is wrong, hidden to me.* — *I have to get away.* — *I will not be a sword to you. We spoke of this.* Dalinar reaches past him into the power itself and pulls. Something bright white manifests in his hand. He rams it into the keyhole, flips the dial to transport only the small building, and shoves the keyhole round its track using the power as a handhold. The Stormfather groans like thunder. He stumbles out onto the Urithiru platform. The Stormfather does not break the bond but withdraws his favour, and the Thrill floods in to replace it. *You can't escape yourself, Dalinar,* Evi says in his mind. *This is who you are. Accept it.*
In his rooms he pulls down a hogshide-bound copy of The Way of Kings and holds it like a talisman. It does nothing. Once it had saved him; now he cannot even read its words. He drops it. No conscious thought leads him to Adolin's chambers; he ransacks them and finds what he was hoping for — a violet wine kept for a special occasion, prepared at strength. The third man he had been wore wine like this; shame and frustration and haze. *But storms, it was either this or start killing again.* He raises the bottle to his lips.