POV: taravangian
Summary
Odium returns to the long work of breaking Dalinar and leans, as he always does, on the expertise he has already accumulated in this particular project. The visions he is using have multiple purposes layered into them — everything a god does must, the work is too expensive otherwise — but the immediate purpose here is pain, applied without distraction. When Dalinar manages, briefly, to wrest control of a vision and try to step aside from his own agony, Odium isolates him within it and starts overpowering him with painful truth — not to dispute him, but to break him so completely that whatever is left can be rebuilt to acknowledge his old friend's path. The Shard's power loves the emotion the work produces in him; it presses for more.
Everything is in hand. The vision is shaped, the truth is bearing down, the breaking is starting. And then Dalinar simply vanishes.
The Shard's power does not love that. Odium takes the surprise itself with a kind of accepting reverence; it is genuine and total — a sensation he has not properly felt since his Ascension, when his mortal mind first met the full weight of the Shard and could only catalogue the shock as something new. He scans the Spiritual Realm for Dalinar and cannot find him anywhere he can see. He weighs whether it is even possible for a mortal to hide from him this completely, and concludes that it is — but only if a Shard is hiding him. The conclusion sits poorly: the visions themselves seem to be sheltering Dalinar now. The visions had always been malleable here because Honor's residual power, longing for a Vessel, was easy to mold into the shape of memories. That is, indeed, why visions in this region of the Spiritual Realm have always been so unusually stable — but it is not the kind of malleability that is supposed to fight back.
Yet the power had been agreeing with him up to this moment. As much as it could, at any rate; without a Vessel of its own, the power does not properly have volition. It has only the pull of its Intent — or so the rule has always run for him, both as a mortal scholar of these things and now as a god experiencing the rule from inside one of the powers. The Shard's whole pattern of accommodation with him had been built on that assumption.
He investigates, furious at having his prey stolen out from under him in the very theater he should be the master of, and finds something he had not expected at all. The power of Honor has been too long without a host. It is becoming dangerous. It is, in some genuine sense, starting to come alive of its own — not as a Vessel would awaken it, but as something stranger and less predictable. He stops, on the brink of his next move, and considers the new question now standing squarely in front of him: should he destroy it?