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Taravangian sits in his vast new selfhood and finds he is not at peace with it. His plots are running well — Kharbranth, Jah Keved, Alethkar already his — and yet some part of him keeps questioning. His attention strays this morning to Shinovar, where his former assassin Szeth is loose and where the careful pieces he had moved into place are sliding out of true. The land of grasses and dead echoes should have been the easy one. It is not. He frames its difficulty for himself as practice: if he cannot dominate a single small kingdom of Roshar, he will not dominate every world in the cosmere when the time comes.

Cultivation is suddenly behind him, sitting in counsel on the mountaintop. *You have tried as I asked?* she asks. He has. Both halves of him — the lightning mind he carried as a man, the crushing emotion he wears as a god — reject her proposed limits. The mind needs conquest; the heart needs it; they merely want it for different reasons. *And you?* she asks. *You are neither mind nor heart, but the combination.*

Only then does Taravangian see her full play. She has spent every conversation since his Ascension working to keep his two halves separate — because separately, the brilliant mortal and the unbounded passion could be counselled. Together they become the thing he was always going to be. He has been, Cultivation reminds him, one of the very few men in history to taste divinity *yet never at the same time as his sharpened mind.* Until now.

For a moment he wavers. His clearest reasons to question are still Jasnah and Dalinar — the two on this planet whom, even as a god, he respects almost as equals. He has come to understand that a thinker whose peers all disagree should reconsider. He focuses on those who oppose him and feels their passion, their ingenuity, and a wry affection for them.

Then, with the kind of cold honesty even gods rarely manage, he looks inward and admits what he has been lying about. *Yes*, the cosmere may benefit from a single god. *Yes*, he loves his people. Those are real reasons. They are not why he is doing this. He is doing this because someday someone is going to do it, and he wants it to be him. He has carried the king's burden of impossible choices for too many years, and he intends finally to enjoy the rewards — to find out what *Taravangian, greatest of men and now divine,* can do unhindered.

The power loves the revelation; it is pure feeling acknowledged. The mind respects it; it is truth seen. The two became one. He hangs on the precipice one last instant — *what would Dalinar do?* — and sees two versions of himself walk away along two infinite roads. He chooses. Dalinar is wrong. Someone needs to prove it.

A new Odium is born. He composes himself as a radiant figure in gilded vestments with a small cane to one side, both halves of his soul vibrating in the same pure tone, and opens eyes that burn with sunlight. Cultivation trembles. *So be it,* she says, and her rhythms carry her ruin. She withdraws. The new Odium, at last aligned, sets to work in earnest. There are, after all, two mortals he still respects who need teaching.