POV: taravangian
Summary
Taravangian, newly ascended as the Vessel of Odium, stands on a mountain above Shinovar and tries to balance the two halves of himself. The Shard's passions want the kingdoms he already holds — Kharbranth, Jah Keved, Alethkar — and resent being made to focus on a distant land where his former assassin Szeth now stirs unrest. The mind sees Shinovar as exactly the discipline he needs: if he cannot fix his will on a single foreign country, he will not govern the whole cosmere when his ambitions reach it. He has eyes only by avatar; his actual gaze is the Shard's, and from it Shinovar reads as a warning, not a prize.
Cultivation arrives behind him, voiceless on the wind, and asks whether he has tried what she asked of him. Both halves of him — the mind that can think at superhuman speed, the emotions of the prior Vessel that still crush whatever they touch — refuse her premise, he tells her: each, by itself, wants conquest, if for different reasons. She presses him past mind and heart to the man between them. He does look, and sees her real ploy at last. She had not only chosen him because she believed he could survive the Ascension, but because she believed she could steer the combined being afterward.
For the first time since his Ascension, Taravangian genuinely wavers. The two people on Roshar he respects almost as equals — Dalinar Kholin and Jasnah Kholin — oppose him, and one of the few honest precepts left in him is that disagreement from such people is worth reconsidering. He examines his stated reasons — one god for the cosmere, protection for his own people — and admits, to no one, that they are both true and neither is why he is doing this.
The truth is simpler than either. Someday someone will rule the cosmere. He wants it to be him. He has spent a long life making the difficult choices a king must make, and he wants the rewards of those choices: room, scope, no more denial. Conquest is not a need but a want, and he is done denying himself the things he wants. The Shard's power loves the admission — pure unfettered emotion. The mind respects it — truth acknowledged. For one final moment he lets himself ask what Dalinar would do, and two versions of himself seem to walk into infinite time. Then he answers, plainly, that Dalinar is wrong, and that someone has to prove it. Questions die.
On the mountaintop Taravangian-as-Odium is fully born. He coalesces a public avatar in shining gold vestments, sets a small cane at his side, and opens eyes that beam like the sun, both portions of his soul vibrating on a single tone. Cultivation trembles, accepts that her gambit has failed, and leaves on a rhythm of profound disappointment. Odium — now fully aligned — turns at once to the two old friends he has determined need lessons in why they are wrong.