POV: venli
Summary
A YEAR AND A HALF AGO. Venli watches a listener warband return from another raid against the humans, attuned to Confidence. Eshonai delivers a large gemheart to Denshil, the people's head of farming; her soldiers come back bloodied, weapons sagging, more than a few warpairs incomplete. To Venli the sight is a quiet victory. Every brave listener who dies on the front line is one fewer who will resist her when she finally has stormform to offer them. She has stopped pretending her work is only about saving her people. What she truly wants is true freedom — power enough that no one, listener or spren, will ever stand above her again.
She cuts through a side street to intercept Denshil with the gemheart. He is jittery — they have been embezzling a slice off every stone, cutting them smaller than the humans' technique demands, hiding the offcuts. He has saved several hundred gemstones already. Venli insists on more — one for every listener in Narak — leans on his fear for his daughter when he hesitates, and reminds him their case to the Five will look proper because she and he are only preparing the ground.
A red light glowing inside an abandoned building catches her eye. Ulim — the little voidspren only she can see when he chooses — steps out onto the windowsill and tells her that the storm on the other side is *nearly* here. He cannot see into Shadesmar, but he knows that Odium has slowly inched his own storm across the landscape to this place; that storm carries thousands of mindless stormspren for them to capture and seed stormform across the people. Venli demands his service and makes him promise it again. Ulim is still bitter that the listeners killed King Gavilar for exactly the reason he wanted, but for the wrong reason. As to *how* to capture the first stormspren — he does not know; she suggests, as a gloryspren appears when one feels glorious, that perhaps a storm itself might draw the storm-spren in.
She is heading toward her scholars when Eshonai — in Shardplate that fits her supernaturally well — catches up to her. *It's Mother.* They go to Jaxlim's little outbuilding. Their mother lies on a cot, head bandaged. Mikaim the scholar-surgeon explains she was found wandering one of the outer plateaus, did not respond to her own name for a time, and only after they brought her in could she answer questions about her childhood; the wound is minor, the fear far worse. The two sisters hum the Rhythm of the Lost together over the cot — a rare moment when they share a rhythm.
They talk about confining her. Venli refuses; Eshonai agrees they will find her a servant instead. Eshonai sits, exhausted, the Plate holding her up against the wall, humming Peace too loudly. Venli remembers her sister as a child — vibrant, always running for the next hill — and finds herself saying so out loud. *Would that we could return to that joy*, Eshonai says to the Lost. *Innocence is a more false god than the ones in our songs*, Venli answers. Eshonai whispers an apology for everything she has brought down on the listeners; Venli asks her again about Gavilar's dark sphere, and offers — carefully — that perhaps the listeners should be the ones to seek their old gods. Eshonai silences her sharply, and asks her to sing the old song with her instead.
What follows is the Song of Mornings — a teaching song meant to drill rhythms into young children. They hum from Reconciliation through Longing into Joy, and Venli sings. Her voice has not held the songs for years; she has long since stopped thinking of herself as the apprentice keeper. But the simple song carries, and dusk falls outside — the perfectly wrong time for the Song of Mornings — and she loves that they have sung it anyway. Eshonai thanks her — for warform, for everything — and quietly asks whether Venli might find her a form that would let her speak more clearly. She wants to find Dalinar Kholin and explain to him what happened. Venli promises she will see the world someday, every color, every wind, every land and people. The Rhythm of Pleading sounds in her ears, and she did not attune it.
*I have been doing things you might not like*, Venli whispers — meaning to confess, knowing the older sister of her memory would have explained why she was wrong, *and you are always right*. But Eshonai has already drifted off in the Plate, propped upright by it, breathing softly. Venli climbs to her feet and leaves. That night she goes out into the storm to hunt stormspren for the first time.