Words
POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin holds the line at the bridge head alone while the Kholin infantry streams across to safety behind him. Time moves strangely. Syl is everywhere — diving past his ear as a ribbon of light, returning as a young woman seated on his shoulder, gone again. The Stormlight burns in him so brightly that he cannot tell where his breath ends and the storm begins. He kills Parshendi who outweigh him by half and who are stronger than any human soldier, and he does it without thought, the spearwork his father once disapproved of running through him as cleanly as the light.
When the last of Dalinar's wounded are across, Kaladin disengages and crosses the bridge himself. The Kholin army re-forms on the staging plateau in disbelief. Dalinar is alive. Adolin is alive. The men who should have died on the Tower have walked away, every one of them, because eight bridgemen who owed them nothing turned around. Bridge Four lays the bridge a second time so the rear guard can withdraw, and a third time so the wounded can be ferried. The Parshendi do not pursue across the chasm. They watch the Alethi go.
Kaladin stands in the dust at the chasm edge after the Kholin army has cleared, with Syl hovering at his temple. He thinks of Tien, whom he could not save. He thinks of Dallet and his old squad. He thinks of every man he refused to leave, and of every man he did. He looks at Syl. He speaks aloud, slowly, the way a man speaks to make a thing real: *Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.* The words hang in the air between them. Syl grows brilliant. She drops into his outstretched hand and becomes, for the first time, a small silvery Shardblade — the first Knight Radiant's Blade to exist in the world in over two thousand years.