POV: taravangian
Summary
Taravangian walks unseen through Kholinar — capital, now, of the growing singer civilisation his armies have built around the old city. He can survey the entire land and read it. The new rulers are no worse and no better than the humans they replaced; many of their policies are more egalitarian, but this is also a people that was enslaved and is still working out what to do with the freedom. He feels the complicated knot of feelings on every street — the will to be better than the slavers who built them, the rage that has not yet emptied out. That rage is his greatest resource. He holds his hands out at his sides as he walks, palms open to the rhythms moving past him, and lets the city flow through him.
The two halves of him argue under it. The heart of him wants peace. It would be content to pull back the singers to Jah Keved and settle there. The mind objects: Jah Keved has almost no armies, and the cosmere cannot be brought to heel from a country without them. He has to hold Alethkar. The singers earned it. He cannot abandon them to the people they were enslaved by. The arguments crash against one another and produce no movement at all. He wonders, again, whether Cultivation cultivated him precisely so that a god worth fearing would also have a brake on his throttle — a vessel partly disabled by its own internal war.
He thinks of her, and she appears beside him, both of them unseen in the middle of the thoroughfare. Palanquins pass them. Laborers and tradesmen shout around them. She offers to show him something. Wisdom — even his — says to look at a gift before refusing it, so he does. She lifts his sight to the cosmere and walks him through it Shard by Shard, showing him a vision of how she thinks it ought to be: each god in his or her realm of influence, separate problems answered with separate solutions. *It does not have to be one god*, she tells him. *One solution will never work for all.* *Let them be, Odium.*
He sees what he wants to see instead. The other gods fear his predecessor's killing sprees and have learned to leave Roshar alone. Only one of them holds two Shards, and is hobbled by the combination — his predecessor never took a second precisely because of that. Two Shards are missing entirely from his view; one he can puzzle out with effort, the other is Valor, hidden even from him. *These can be defeated*, he thinks behind a wall he keeps up against her. *They will regret ignoring me.* He counts the Shards he might one day strike at, and asks himself again where Valor could be.
They drop the view back down to Roshar and stand together on the Kholinar street. *You worry me, Taravangian*, she tells him. *You always have. If there were not something to fear about the person I chose, they could not have taken up Odium.* But, she insists, there is a real chance — a solid one — that he will do what is right. She would not have spent millennia on this otherwise. *A part of you knows this path you have started on is a terrible one. Listen to that part. Give it a chance.*
Despite himself, the half of him that loved his daughter and grandchildren, that grieved while manipulating Dalinar, that as a young man wished only for the *capacity* to stop the calamity coming for Kharbranth — that half stirs. For a moment he is the man he was. *Very well*, he says. Not in shame; in compromise. *I will try.* And he decides on the test: a god divided will let each half of himself rule in turn for a short time, and see which holds.