POV: venli
Summary
Venli kneels on the floor of a quiet hallway on the fifteenth floor of the tower. The stones whisper to her that the place was once called Ur — *original* in the Dawnchant — and that they remember being the mountain that stood here before the tower was carved into them. Their voice reaches her as impressions rather than words, like the press of a hand in crem. She sinks her own hands into the eager stone and asks it to make her remember.
What she remembers is her childhood: sitting at her mother's feet listening to the songs, growing up alongside Eshonai (a year older but who had always seemed huge to her), holding her father's finger as he sang. She remembers love and family. And she sees how thoroughly Odium's rhythms have worn that side of her away in favour of the side that wanted only her own goals. He claims to be of all Passions, but where is the love she once felt, even for Demid?
She is using his Light to practise her Surgebinding, and the stones tell her that this is permitted — Odium and his tone have become part of Roshar as much as Cultivation and Honor have. What Venli is searching for is something underneath all of that: the tone of Cultivation her people owned long before the enemy came. While she reaches for it, she sings her mother's chant of the listeners walking away from the old gods and the old war to live free with their families.
The tone clicks into place, and Odium and Cultivation braid into a single rhythm in her. Power moves through her into the stone. The floor and walls in front of her ripple liquid and form a small frieze of figures walking away from war — her ancestors stepping out toward freedom, in miniature. The power fades. She doesn't need Timbre's reassurance to keep her spirits up. She has the sculpture, and she has the songs, and her mother's diligent teaching means the songs have outlived the listeners themselves.
An hour later, on a lower floor, Venli meets Leshwi as she nearly always does — apparently by chance, in Raboniel's full knowledge, but in secret all the same, because that is how the politics of the Fused are played. Venli reports that the Pursuer has stationed two nightform Regals at the Radiant infirmary — Urialin and Nistar, *light* and *mystery* — and that the choice is a signal. Leshwi suspects Raboniel is the one who picked those particular names; for now Leshwi's authority is enough to protect the Windrunner's parents, and Venli should watch for more such signs.
They reach the atrium. Heavenly Ones glide up and down its open air with supplies the lifts could carry just as easily, by Raboniel's design — busywork that has driven many of them back to Kholinar but which Leshwi performs as asked. Venli asks what they are watching Raboniel for, if not to spoil her advantage. They watch, Leshwi says floating down to eye level, because they are frightened. To Raboniel the games of men and singers are petty things — but so are their lives. They watch because they want a world left when she is done with her plots. The line pulls Venli sharply out of her morning's optimism.
She decides to check on Rlain and Lirin's family. She slips into the curtained corner of the infirmary Hesina is watching today and walks into a furious argument: Rlain is humming to Betrayal, Lirin is angrily packing surgical tools, and a slurred-voiced human she does not recognise stands beside them with his eyes down. Lirin is saying his son is long dead — the man who took his name is a killer and an agitator who endangered every human in the tower for a grudge. Rlain cannot believe it. Hesina explains to Venli quietly: their son is alive but in a coma, his powers not healing him, slowly dying of either infection or internal bleeding. The argument is whether Lirin will treat him only to hand him over for execution afterward — and whether Rlain and the unfamiliar human will tell them where he is. The unfamiliar human — Dabbid — quietly says, in his slurred speech, that Kaladin would rather die. Hesina picks up the bag herself.
Timbre vibrates so loudly inside Venli she is certain the others must hear it. *It's time. It's time. It's time.* When Venli speaks, it almost feels as if Timbre is the one saying it: *What if I knew about an Edgedancer whose powers still seem to work? One who I think we can rescue?*
The plan does not take long to explain. Venli has been thinking about it for days. The Edgedancer is in the same cell Rlain was held in, and Venli is now sure enough of her own powers to cut through that wall — the hard part is pulling the rescue off without implicating herself. The human goes a separate route. As Venli and Rlain walk, he asks softly how she got hold of a Shardblade. The truthful answer she swallows in private — that she tricked Eshonai into taking a Voidspren, that her sister fell in a chasm and drowned, that Venli desecrated the body to steal her Shards under a Voidspren's direction. The answer she gives Rlain is shorter: a dead human, on the way to Kholinar, before the Fused took the rest of them — leaving only her, because the enemy wanted a listener travelling around to inspire the awakened singers.
They split at the intersection. As Dabbid walks in to the guards with their lunch, Venli presses her hand to the wall of the cell, pushes Voidlight into it, and works the stone like crem until she has cut a hole through. Lift looks through from the other side. Venli makes her swear to tell no one about the powers — *they think I'm cutting you out with a Shardblade* — and the stone hardens around the hole as Lift hops through. Lift almost bolts; she stays once Venli tells her whose life they are saving.
Back in a safe side room, Venli sketches her situation as honestly as she can — powers like Radiant powers but from the Fused, a friend of Rlain — and answers Lift's question of whether she is a traitor: *I don't know what I am. Other than someone who didn't want to see a child kept in a cage.* Rlain and Dabbid arrive. Dabbid and Lift reunite; Lift is delighted Dabbid can talk. Rlain goes with them to Kaladin; Venli cannot, because she has to attend Raboniel. Rlain lingers to call her a hero; she does not feel like one. Walking down to the scholar rooms, she asks Timbre if she can say the words now. The pulse answers no. *When?* — *You'll know.*