POV: szeth
Summary
Nine and a half years before the present, Szeth takes the long way to his appointment with the Voice. He has been summoned — at the end of his second pilgrimage, with Tuko's Blade now his — to fly to Ayabiza and present himself at the holy grotto beyond. He delays. He climbs, instead, into the sky.
The wind he loves takes him. It needs no Stormlight to blow; it is its own Surge, a kingdom whose ruler grants him only visitor's privileges. There is a peculiar liberation in being small. He reverses his Lashing so the sky is down for him and lets himself drop upward, weightless as a falling stone, into the upper air. Through the cloud layer. Into the dark blue of the heights, into the chill where the air gives out and there is little left to breathe — though by now he no longer has to. He hangs for a moment with the world a thin white veil far below him, kept company by a sun that has not seemed so distant since he was a boy.
He cancels the Lashing. He has nearly waited too long, and his momentum bleeds away more slowly than he expected. He falls back into the world. The wind builds around him until it roars, glad of his return; this time he does not Lash to soften it, letting it shout at him all the way down.
Ayabiza resolves out of the haze beneath him — *the place of landing,* an old word with new meaning today. He slows himself at the last and crashes down in the central market in a gust of expanding Stormlight, wooden paving boards rattling underfoot, marketgoers scattering and then bowing. It is the oldest city on Roshar, built by people who touch stone and people who do not, both kinds needed like shepherd and sheep. Clay buildings reinforced with timber, painted in bright slashes of colour; murals on every wall; an ancient sewer system attributed to one of the Heralds; hanging gardens trailing vines down each face so the land can add its own splash to the painted ones. Szeth has always wanted to see it. The Bondsmith monastery sits out beyond the city, in the rocky highlands a half-day's walk away, and was never part of the Honorbearers' pilgrimage — no Honorbearer fought or trained against the Bondsmith, so he has never had cause to come here.
He strolls the boarded walkway nodding to bowing locals, in no particular hurry. He knows that once he climbs the path up out of the city his life will change again, as it has changed each time the Voice has put a hand on it — first taking the grasslands from him, then his innocence, then ascending him to master of wind and Truth. He cannot guess what the next step will be.
The city is more than he had imagined. Worth fighting for. For this, he reminds himself, he is preparing for the coming of the End of All Things. He trades a clutch of empty gemstones with a foreign merchant for full ones and rises into the sky again. It is time.