Axies the Collector
POV: axies
Summary
Axies the Collector — Aimian scholar, blue-toenailed and tattooed wrist to shoulder in field-notes about spren he has seen — wakes naked among rotting tubers in a beggar's alleyway in Kasitor, the great Iriali bay-city. He cannot quite reconstruct the night that led him here. The beggar in the doorway has arranged the vegetables around him into a miniature city, complete with a small turnip cathedral, and accuses him (gravely, with great offense) of having destroyed a temple of the northern god by sleeping with his head in it. Axies reshapes his own body to put the hangover and the smell of cabbage away, talks the beggar out of a coarse blanket by claiming to be a Voidbringer banishable only by sacred cloth, and walks politely out into the morning.
He makes the dockside in time. At precisely 7:46 the bay-water below the southern quay heaves up and Cusicesh the Protector rises — a hundred-foot, sea-blue, neckless spren of the city, sprouting long arms onto the golden pedestals the Iriali keep polished along the shore for it. Its stump-necked head turns eastward to face the Origin, and where the face should be a blur of dozens of distinct human faces cycles too fast for any one of them to be named. The phenomenon lasts a clean ten minutes, by Axies's pocket clock, and then Cusicesh sinks again into the bay without a ripple. Axies inks his notes into his forearm with a quick stylus. Cusicesh is one of the very few spren on Roshar of which only a single specimen exists.
A pack of street urchins yanks his blanket away as he is finishing the entry. Four Iriali municipal guards stalk over with the air of men who have done this before. Axies makes one last notation as a guard's hand closes on his shoulder: another chance to look for the elusive captivityspren, which he is beginning to consider mythological. Two new types of spren observed in as many days. He whistles cheerfully as the guards march him toward the dungeons.