POV: taravangian
Summary
The new Odium kneels in Tu Bayla — a country outsiders use as a battleground, ignored even by its neighbours Azir and Jah Keved — holding a dying child while a famine kills more around him. The Everstorm wrecked the harvest. The war shut the trade routes between Azir and Jah Keved. The government collapsed in the chaos, and warlords now hoard what little food remains and use it to rule what is left of the country. The people here sing in more instruments than any other nation on Roshar; their daughters are named for stars and their sons for flowers; their mink hunting dogs lie down beside them when they die. He has never thought of them, before, as anything but a footnote on a campaign map. *That was not my name*, he reminds himself. *I cannot lose myself in godhood.*
Cultivation appears behind him in clothing the colour of woodland — green and vibrant brown, hair in tight dark curls. He grieves aloud at the infinite capacity to see and feel that comes with the Shard. *I had thought this wonderful*, he tells her. *Infinite capacity to see. Infinite capacity to feel. Infinite capacity for agony.* She agrees. Then she reminds him of the binding: the pact his predecessor sealed forbids him from acting directly against anyone not fully given to him. Break it, and the powers will leave him open to attack from outside Roshar.
He works through it himself, sliding between the divided halves of his mind. The compassionate side wants to wave the boy back to health. The logical side sees the trap: heal one child and another will starve in three weeks while the systems that starved this one stay in place; abolish violence and you also abolish mercy; supernaturally muzzle warlords and you stifle scientists and artists with them. The boy dies in his arms. The soul departs to a place beyond his touch. *We change the systems instead*, he admits — incentives, teachings, governments — *we steer, but we do not dominate*.
Then he turns on her. He blames her — not for the boy's death, but for eight thousand years of failure to fix any of this. She replies that her so-called *meddling* and Honor's *touch* are the only reasons societies grow at all; people must be allowed choice the way gravity is allowed in physics, as foundation. He brushes the answer aside. The other gods are *cowards*, he tells her — afraid of one another since she and her companions killed her father, consolidating power so that no one can kill them in turn. The power in him is the very substance of passion; he feels every suffering soul anywhere in the galaxy as if it were happening to him; he knows their anger and he cannot soothe it. *Not until there is but one god*, he tells her. And when she warns him off that path — *it destroyed your predecessor* — he admits, cold, *I destroyed my predecessor*.
Cultivation leaves him in Tu Bayla knowing she will now work against him — and knowing she has, in fact, been pulling threads for millennia to position him as Vessel because the old Odium was becoming too violent to leave on the loose. She had no other plausible choice. He kneels alone after she vanishes and lets the divided one in him feel. He is not the Shard. He holds it. He will not let it rule.
He is Taravangian — and he has a mission older than this godhood. The mission he gave himself the day he traded for the boon and saw the threat coming for Kharbranth. He is the one who can both see the danger and bear to do what stopping it requires. He can save them. All of them.