POV: navani
Summary
Navani, alone in her small borrowed library inside the tower, lays her hand on the garnet vein in the wall and apologises to the Sibling for what her experiments have wrought. The crystalline filament — that strange common thread in the strata she has been looking at for months — is, she now understands, the body of the tower's soul. She gets only the faintest answering stir, no words. She returns to her desk past the silent, vacant-eyed Fused femalen Raboniel always leaves at the door, writes out makework instructions for her scholars, and stops trying to pretend that any of it interests her.
Raboniel eventually arrives, dressed in a tailored Alethi havah that she wears as if it had been designed for her, and sets out a Shin wine and two cups. She has read Navani's journals and knows her vintage. As Navani refuses to drink, Raboniel talks — about grapes and Shinovar, about her grandmother's memory of humans arriving on Roshar with smoke-scorched faces, about the burnt livestock that came across with them and the unrestrained Surgebinding of those first arrivals. Navani realises with a chill that this Fused lived in the shadowdays before recorded history. Seven thousand years, Raboniel says, of a war she is tired of, as all of them are — even the Heralds.
Navani offers, again, to end it: withdraw from the tower and she will broker talks with Dalinar. Raboniel dismisses it; talks have always been tried and always fail. Instead she presses Navani to keep going on the Stormlight–Voidlight question. She had expected the two Lights to annihilate each other when forced together; if they don't, much of what she has planned collapses, and she'd rather be proven wrong by a human than carry her assumptions another century. Navani admits the obstacle: she can stream both Lights into the same gemstone and watch them swirl around it like smoke in a draft, but they refuse to mix. They behave as inert substances — and yet Towerlight proves a hybrid Light is possible, so the failure must lie in her method.
She thinks of Lifelight — agricultural lore that crops grow faster when struck by particular rhythms — and asks why Light responds to sound at all. Raboniel has a theory: the Lights obey because sound resembles the voices of the Shards that command them. To Raboniel, some things simply are. Navani refuses that. Even gravity has a mechanism. Everything has one.
Raboniel, for the first time, describes what she hears in a sphere: each Light carries a tone of Roshar — pure, soft — and within the tone, a rhythm. Honor's is stately, Cultivation's is staccato and building, Odium's is chaos with a strange interior logic. Towerlight has two tones at once, changed so they are in harmony, and they share a single rhythm. Humans, Raboniel says with some kindness, cannot hold tone or rhythm well enough to do this work; she has Navani try, singing Honor's tone against the chaotic rhythm, and Navani loses the note within seconds. Her single failure, Raboniel concludes, proves the rule.
It does not. Navani crosses to her things and tears the inside out of one of her fabrial arm sheaths — a dead device in the tower now, but still built to hold a long line of large gemstones flat against the wearer's skin. She fits it with Stormlight-charged stones, straps it on her forearm, and resets the experiment: two streams of Light meeting around an empty gemstone in the centre. *Sing it again, Ancient One.* Raboniel does, and Navani closes her eyes. With the gemstones humming against her skin she finds she can hear, faintly, what Raboniel hears. The infused stones become a stronger singer beside her: she can match her voice to theirs and they give her a beat. She holds Honor's tone clean, with its rhythm.
Raboniel cuts off in startled delight. Navani asks for Odium's rhythm next, holding her tone. The shock of the chaotic beat almost knocks her loose; she sings louder; Raboniel sings louder. *No,* Navani thinks. *No, we can't fight.* She takes Raboniel's hand and softens her voice. Raboniel softens hers. Tone by tone they step toward one another until — abruptly — they snap into harmony, chaos bounded by an orderly pulse. Heartbeats and signals together. Navani puts their joined hands over the empty gemstone in the centre of the apparatus and they hold the chord. When they let go, the stone is glowing a deep, impossible black-blue.
Raboniel picks it out, trembling, and names what she has just heard: the Rhythm of War — Honor and Odium mixed. Each rhythm carries its meaning inside it, she says, and she recognises this one as surely as her own name. The two Lights did not annihilate; Navani was right. The hybrid is not Szeth's violet sphere, but blue, undistorted — and it is, Navani suspects, exactly what Raboniel has been after.
Navani presses: why had Raboniel hoped the Lights would annihilate? Raboniel answers with a question of her own. Does Navani know how Honor was killed? Neither of them does, but Raboniel has been told some opposite was used to tear his power apart, and she had set out to find that opposite Light. If she could, she would hold a way to end the gods themselves, and so end the war.
The pieces lock together for Navani in silence. The strange sphere Gavilar had given Szeth to give to her, the Voidlight gemstone, the fabrial that detonated when the two were combined — her husband had been hunting the same opposite. He had been planning, in his arrogance, to find a way to kill a god. She knows something Raboniel does not: that the true opposite of Voidlight is neither Stormlight nor this new mixed Light. It is the substance Gavilar sent her through Szeth, and she has held it in her hand.
Raboniel, oblivious, pockets the new sphere and reassesses. The contrast of Odium's and Honor's powers, she announces, was not the mechanism after all; she has been wrong; she must turn back to her real duty, the securing of the tower. Navani reminds her of her promise to withdraw from the tower in exchange. Raboniel is sorry; next time, Navani should be less trusting. She offers Navani freedom to continue any research she likes, or a simple tower job if she prefers, and the rare debt of a Fused to a human. *In the end,* Navani whispers, *you are his, and I am Honor's.* *Unfortunately.* Raboniel leaves. Navani downs the rest of her wine, her head full of implications.