POV: eshonai
Summary
Fourteen months ago, in the chasms below the battle for Narak as the listeners summon the Everstorm, Eshonai hits the chasm floor in Shardplate, defeated by the human Shardbearer. She wades through Weeping water and starts clawing up a wall — and realises a second storm is coming. A highstorm meets the Everstorm overhead, the clash shakes the ground, and a surge of water rips her off the wall, fills her cracked helm, and smashes her between the chasm walls. *I'm going to die*, she thinks to the Rhythm of Destruction, *as a slave*.
No. The ember of the listener she always was — the one who insisted on leaving the camps, who let Thude and the others escape — refuses. She rejects her stormform's rhythms. She summons her Blade — its voice screaming, far away — and rams it into the chasm wall to hold against the current. Her lungs stop burning. As darkness closes in she hears one of the pure tones of Roshar, stately, joined by a second chaotic tone; the two snap together into harmony — a song for a singer who could fight and for a soldier who wanted to lay down her sword. A small comet-shaped spren appears ahead. She reaches. *My life. My death. I WILL BE FREE.*
She surfaces. To the Rhythm of War — the song of wins and losses both, the song that plays when a life is ending — she resummons her Blade, rams it into the floor, and clings until the water slows enough for her Plate's weight to hold her. She has lost the first battle. She has won the second. She slumps against the wall, bleeding from where her carapace was torn away, and cycles through the rhythms of her childhood — Awe, Confidence, Mourning, Determination, Peace — and to the Rhythm of Victory closes her eyes.
She finds herself in light. A voice like a thousand storms tells her she was so heavily Invested when she died that she persists for a short time. She had been Radiant when she died. She had been unable to speak the Words underwater, but he had taken them anyway — how else had she survived as long as she had without breath? The Rider of Storms warns this is the end — minutes, not hours — and that even he cannot see what lies past it. She asks what life meant; meaning is something mortals make, he tells her, not something storms have, and it is hers to decide what hers was. *If I decide, then I failed*, she answers. *I gave my people to the enemy.* The opposite, the Rider says: in the end she made the same choice as her ancestors. She gave away power for freedom. She knows them as few ever have.
As she begins to stretch toward something distant she thanks him, telling him the rain does not stop a battle but cleans the world after it. He answers that he did nothing — only watched her fall — and that perhaps he should have done more. It is enough, she says.
No, he says — he has one last gift for her. She is pulled into the storm and becomes it, her heartbeat its thunder. She had wanted to see beyond every hill she ever crossed; now she will see them all. For what feels like eternity she soars with him, rain bathing every hill, wind everywhere she is, lightning showing her everything it reveals — humans in infinite variety, captive parshmen and the hope of their freedom, creatures and plants and chasms and mountains and snows, the whole world. Every piece is part of the rhythms; the world *is* the rhythms; and she finally understands how it fits together. When the Rider finishes his passage, exhausted and limping into the ocean beyond Shinovar, he lets her go. She understands the rhythms as no one ever could without having seen the world. The Rider bids her farewell — calling her Radiant — and full of songs she passes into the eternities, eager to discover what lies on the other side.