POV: taravangian
Summary
Taravangian lets intellect rule for a stretch. As a mortal his clever days had let him be cold to people in ways he now recognises were not actually rational — true reason includes feeling emotion, just refusing to let it lead. He runs the war problem from the top in this mode.
Cultivation had a point that ending the contest early — going to Dalinar and the coalition, restoring Alethkar in exchange for a peace — would be safest for the Vessel. He works through the permutations a thousand different ways and rejects every one. He has decades to plan; the off-world Shards are unlikely to move on him. And there is something Cultivation cannot see: the power of Odium itself does not want peace. It wants to rage. His predecessor was furious to have been trapped into a contest where the fighting stops.
Worse, the power has a preferred alternative Vessel. Her name is Ba-Ado-Mishram. If he gives the power too little to feed on, it could leave him for her, the way it left Rayse for him. So he feeds it carefully — visions of conquests across many worlds, promises of fury and pain — and tests it. He shows it that unlimited rage would consume humankind itself and so end the supply of emotion. The power refuses to learn. It birthed the Thrill because it loves the rage of battle; love and contentment, since the Shattering, have drifted to other Shards. Anger, the power believes, is the truest fire — the one that can simmer when every other passion gives out. He logs this. The power cannot change. He can.
War, then. To survive a war of conquest he needs a command staff of long-lived, predictable people. El was the first. Now he needs another. He appears, invisibly, in Kharbranth — the city that is the proof of his thesis, the city whose hospitals will take any patient without cost and whose secret rooms once provided the Death Rattles he depended on as a mortal. He walks the Palanaeum, slowing time for himself nine thousand heartbeats to drink in the library, the human capacity at its finest.
Then he steps into the office of *Dova*, on the seventh floor down — the head shaved like an ardent's so people overlook her, writing at her desk among priceless paintings and bars of aluminum. He addresses her by name and her old title: *Battah the Herald*. She does not bother denying it. She also does not bother pretending to like him. *Hell — you're the new Odium.* The wise counsellor of seven millennia has become, in her Herald-madness, a cheerful mercenary; she would have asked for much more, she tells him, had she known how hard keeping his kingdom together would be.
He has need of her crystal-spike art — the technique by which she can restore a kind of sight that perceives Investiture rather than light. She knows perfectly well that a god could reproduce her work without her, and says so; obviously he is integrating her into his organisation. The pay will be excellent, he promises — *a planet, eventually, a small one*, and a way off Roshar to visit it. She rises from her desk to gather her things.