POV: taravangian
Summary
Taravangian, freshly resolved on the contest and the conquest he means to follow it with, turns his attention from Sja-anat and her scurrying rats in the Spiritual Realm and back to Dalinar. Underneath the day's work he carries his own grief at what he has just done to Kharbranth — proof, he reminds himself, must be given of a conviction or it is no conviction at all. The destruction of the one city he had bargained all his mortal life to protect will stand as the greatest sacrifice on his record; it will be evidence to himself, and to anyone watching, of how serious he is about every step that follows. First Roshar, he repeats to himself. Then the cosmere.
Cultivation is no longer arguing with him. She made her plays at Kharbranth and they failed; she has gone quiet, and he reads her silence as concession rather than as further maneuvering. What stands in his way now is a single stubborn man. He notes, with the dispassion of a god looking at a chess piece, that Dalinar's short-term future reads cloudy to him — the choices opaque, the next moves unreadable. Interaction with someone touched by another future-sighted power blurs his vision in exactly the way that allowed Cultivation's hostage gambit to surprise him until it was already in motion. He accepts the obstruction and does not let it pull him off plan.
As Dalinar huddles trembling and isolated within the Spiritual Realm — exactly where the work of these last days has put him — Odium recognizes something almost tender in his own intention. The work he is about to do here will, on its own terms, be a kindness, a service to a worthy man whom no other influence will pry loose from his self-conception. It will be a way for Dalinar to obtain his potential at last, to become the man he could be if he stopped resisting and allowed himself to be remade. The contest itself is already won; either outcome serves the Shard, and the new Vessel has already played both branches through in his head. But the outcome Odium truly needs is the one in which his old friend acknowledges, freely, that his way has been the right way all along — and to get Dalinar there, he must first remake him.
The method is no mystery. To get Dalinar to acknowledge anything, he must first be broken down so that he can be rebuilt — the precise project the vision-work already in motion is the first stroke of. He has the time and he has the leverage. He has, above all, the experience: long experience with this particular project, both the hurting of Dalinar himself and the subsequent labor of bearing the pain of having been forced to hurt him. The first he has done in mortal life; the second is the harder half, and the one a smaller man might balk at. Fortunately, with enough practice, he reflects with a soft, terrible candor, one becomes quite expert at both.