POV: venli
Summary
A snatch of song drifts out of a balcony as Venli is shoving past humans through one of Urithiru's hallways, and for a heartbeat the voice sounds so much like her mother's that she has to stop and look. The femalen who is weaving a mat by the balustrade is not Jaxlim — wrong skin pattern, wrong length of hairstrands — and when she sees Venli loom in the doorway, wild-looking even for a Regal, her song cuts off and she hums to Anxiety. Venli walks away attuning Disappointment. She tells Timbre that lately she keeps hearing Jaxlim's songs in the voices of strangers, and remembering when the two of them had sung together; that her mother had not had much sense left by the time of Venli's betrayal, which she has come to think a mercy; that the floodwater on the Plains had drowned Jaxlim in the chasms after the family fled there, and that her mother is dead by her hand as surely as if she had used a knife. Timbre pulses something forgiving — Venli's mind had been on Odium's forms when she chose what she chose — and Venli accepts the consolation without quite accepting the exoneration. She remembers, with the kind of unease that should be attuned to Joy but cannot be, that even after she released Ulim she had remained more herself under stormform than Eshonai had under her own; she had been spared something. She had also given the orders. She thanks Timbre, again, for what the little spren keeps doing for her, and turns to the day's other business.
Today is the day. Raboniel is buried in working on Navani and clearly enjoying it, which leaves Venli a few quiet hours. She has palmed a small sack of mixed Stormlight and Voidlight spheres, and she has scouted a corner of the eighth floor that the Pursuer's people have already searched and that sits well away from the populated parts of the tower. The hallway up there is silent, and reminds her — strangely — of the chasms of the Shattered Plains: same hush, same reluctance of the sun, same beautiful stone. She runs her fingers along the wall expecting to feel the bumps of the strata and finds it smooth instead. Her mother died in those chasms, she thinks, and attunes the Lost.
She tries Stormlight first. She breathes it in and finds it does what the listeners' lore says: it does not pool in her gemheart but fills her whole body, raging, an odd feeling rather than a painful one. But when she presses her hand to the wall — the way she and Timbre once did, months ago, before secretspren chased them off — there is a kind of invisible wall between her and her own power. Stormlight will not pass the tower's defences. She cannot even store the Light in her gemheart, because the Voidspren that lives there as part of her Regal form occupies the space. She lets the Light burn off through her skin and turns to a Voidlight sphere. She does not want to sing the Song of Prayer and draw Voidlight herself — that is the kind of work that draws Odium's attention, and Odium has been ignoring her lately, which she does not wish to change. Timbre is pragmatic about it — they use a little of it every day to power Venli's translation gift — and Venli concedes.
Voidlight goes straight into her gemheart. It does not push her to move or act the way Stormlight had; instead it enflames her emotions and tips them, today, toward paranoia. She checks Shadesmar — nothing visible to worry about — and presses her hand to the stone, trying to feel the wall not with her fingers but with her soul.
The wall stirs. She does not hear so much as feel a voice — many voices at once, the walls and the ceiling and the floor speaking in chorus — greeting her drawn-out and slow. *Hello.* *You are familiar.* She tells them she is Venli, of the listeners. The stones tremble: Radiant. They have missed her touch. They notice the strange undertone in her — Voidlight, child of the ancient ones — and ask if she has come to sing their song again. Venli asks what song; the stone beneath her hand ripples like a pond, and a long ancient rhythm set to a single pure tone surges up through her, sonorous as the core of Roshar. The walls join, then the ceiling, then the floor, until her whole body is humming with the rhythm. Timbre joins in, ecstatic. Venli gasps and presses her other hand into the stone too, aching to feel the song through her skin. Everything she has done with Timbre until now, she realises, has had the feel of a momentum she fell into. This does not. This feels like she belongs here.
She belongs here.
The stones tell her to remember, and the floor in front of her hands stops rippling and forms little shapes: stone houses with figures beside them, humming as they work. Dawnsingers. They dip wood into the stone and lift it out as axes; they shape bowls with their fingers; the stone sings while they work. *Feel me, shaper. Create from me. We are one. The stone shapes your life as you shape the stone. Welcome home, child of the ancients.* Venli asks how — Radiants did not exist then, spren did not bond singers — and the stones answer that new things are made from old things, that old peoples birth new ones, that old stones remember.
The vibrations quiet, sink to ripples, then stillness. The houses and the figures melt back into the floor. Where the strata around her hand were smooth before, they are now subtly changed, echoing what she has just done. She kneels there for a few minutes, breathing in gasps, and realises she has emptied almost the whole sack of Voidlight at once — only a single mark is left.
She draws that mark in too, then hesitantly puts her hand to the wall again. The stone is willing and pliable beneath her palm, calling her shaper. She draws the Voidlight out into her hand until it glows violet-on-black, and presses her thumb to the wall: the rock takes the print. She pulls a piece off and rolls it in her fingers like crem clay; when she holds it up and imagines it spreading, it melts into a puddle and drops to the ground with a click, hard but printed by her fingerprints. She picks it up, presses it back into the wall, and watches the seam vanish as though the piece had never been removed. She has the Surge. She wipes her eyes and tells Timbre she wants this, that she needs it. Timbre thrums.
Lights bob into view at the end of the hall. Venli attunes Anxiety and reaches for cover, then sees they are spren — three of them, the same comet-and-rings shape as Timbre. She hisses at Timbre about the danger; the Fused might destroy them, lock them away, leave them in a jar. Timbre is unbothered — spren cut by Shardblades reform, spren trapped fade back into Shadesmar and are free — but Venli is not so confident. She asks the obvious question: how can these little ones be aware here, if spren of their kind need a bond to an anchor in the Physical Realm? Timbre admits, slightly ashamed, that the three have already bonded Venli's listener friends as squires, and have been using Venli's own bond as an anchor.
Venli nods, controls her panic, and tells Timbre to send them out of the tower until she can find a way to extricate everyone. If her friends start lighting up with Radiant powers, and stones start singing in places others can see, all of this comes apart. Timbre asks for how long. Until I find a way out of this mess, Venli says, and presses her hand back to the wall to feel the soft contented humming of the stone. She is a baby taking her first steps, she tells Timbre, but this may be the answer they need. If she can shape a way through the collapsed tunnels in the lower levels, she should be able to slip her people out — perhaps even make it look like another cave-in killed them, and cover their escape entirely. Timbre pulses encouragingly. Slowly, this time, Venli says. Carefully. She had rushed for new forms and it had been a disaster. This time, she will do it the right way.