POV: navani
Summary
On the first full day of the occupation, Navani dresses precisely — clean braid, pressed havah, makeup done — and is marched down to her own library, where Raboniel is sitting at her desk leafing through her notes. She bows just low enough for *obedience* and not for *subservience*, agrees to organise her scholars and continue their research under observation, and braces herself to give up the secret of the flying platform — too many of her people know it, too many of the new conjoined fabrials are already in plain view around the tower, for it to remain secret long. She tells Raboniel she keeps no schematics on paper and, given the reed, sketches a conjoined fabrial and the array of them embedded in the platform.
The exchange is sharper than she expects. Raboniel presses on horizontal motion — *you can't tell me there's a ground machine moving in exact coordination* — and remarks, almost in passing, that her own people have always found it hard to coax Voidspren into manifesting as devices the way spren of Honor and Cultivation used to. A dozen loose threads in Navani's mind snap together: Soulcasters are not gem-and-spren housings, they are spren themselves, manifested in the Physical Realm as metal — the same way a Shardblade does. *Awespren burst around her in a ring of blue smoke.* She sketches the ralkalest wire arrangement; Raboniel names ralkalest by its Alethi name, aluminum, and calls its interference with Connection ingenious.
Underneath the technical talk runs a slower negotiation. Raboniel frames this as *how we end the war* — by sharing knowledge — and assumes the singers ruling Roshar; Navani notes silently that the only reason information is moving is because she has been threatened with death, and that Raboniel is free to give away any secret she chooses, because she can simply kill Navani once she has what she wants.
Raboniel walks her to the second library room. Most of her best are sitting on the floor under guard, blankets spread where they were made to sleep. Rushu and Falilar are unharmed; the casualties Navani picks out by absence — Neshan, Inabar, both of Neshan's wards, Ardent Vevanara, and a handful of soldiers, all killed in the crystal-pillar room. Rushu confirms there is no trace of Stormlight or Voidlight in the wreckage; whatever strange sphere caused the earlier explosion is gone too. Navani passes the word — cooperate, for now — and pushes back when Raboniel is within earshot: *you didn't need to kill my scholars.* Raboniel coldly demands her title from now on. Navani swallows that and asks for work that will preserve morale; Raboniel says to have them keep doing whatever they were before — design sketches, written-up experiments — and promises their new theories can still be tested. Navani tucks that promise away too: there is, then, a way to make fabrials work inside the tower.
Many floors above, Kaladin is awakened by rain on his face. He stands in a frozen landscape of paused lightning and falling water that shapes itself into figures — phantoms that attack him with spears. He drops three of them in trained reflex, then sees them resolve into three young messengers in Amaram's colours, Tien among them. The dreamscape splits open into the Shattered Plains in a sea of blood, where men in blue uniforms cut each other down — Lopen killing Rock, Teft killing Lopen, Bisig killing Teft — and Sigzil bleeding in his arms asking *why didn't you let us sleep.* He stumbles to the edge of the chasm where he nearly died years ago. Moash is waiting, eyes black pits, naming the void *the emptiness* that lets you kill a king without regret, and steps over the edge.
He wakes in pitch dark in the hidden sanctuary, every joint aching, Teft still breathing beside him but soiled — dehydration and rotspren now serious worries. He calls for Syl and panics when she does not answer; she returns through a vent, having scouted the corridors. Guards are posted at stairwells but not actively hunting; the floors are too large to search one man down. Syl tells him what little the older spren remember: there were once three Bondsmiths — the Stormfather, the Nightwatcher, and a third spren simply called the Sibling, who stayed in this tower and never showed themselves; the rest had thought them long dead.
He finds the gemstone embedded in the inner wall, much more prominent on this side than the corridor side. He touches it; despite his own empty reserves a pinprick of white light kindles deep in the gem and grows into a small burst of Stormlight, and the door splits silently open again. He sends Syl to memorise the route back so they can return for Teft, and accepts that the larger questions — the captive Radiants, his family, the tower itself — will have to wait. First he needs water, food, Stormlight, and a better weapon than a scalpel.