Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
The bridgemen hastened into the hallway in front of Shallan, between her and Renarin. At a barked order from Teft, they made a formation spanning from one side of the main hallway to the other: a line of men holding spears low, with a second line behind holding more spears higher in an overhand grip.
Adolin burst out of the second library room, then gaped at the undulating shape in the distance. A living darkness.
That darkness seeped down the hallway. It wasn’t fast, but there was an inevitability about the way it coated everything, flowing up the sides of the walls, onto the ceiling. On the ground, shapes split from the main mass, becoming figures that stepped as if from the surf. Creatures that had two feet and soon grew faces, with clothing that rippled into existence.
“She’s here,” Renarin whispered. “One of the Unmade. Re-Shephir … the Midnight Mother.”
“Run, Shallan!” Adolin shouted. “Men, start back up the hall.”
Then—of course—he charged at the flood of things.
The figures … they look like us, Shallan thought, stepping back, farther from the line of bridgemen. There was one midnight creature that looked like Teft, and another that was a copy of Lopen. Two larger shapes seemed to be wearing Shardplate. Except they were made of shiny tar, their features blobby, imperfect.
The mouths opened, sprouting spiny teeth.
“Make a careful retreat, like the prince ordered!” Teft called. “Don’t get boxed in, men! Hold the line! Renarin!”
Renarin still stood out in front, holding forth his Shardblade: long and thin, with a waving pattern to the metal. Adolin reached his brother, then grabbed his arm and tried to tow him back.
He resisted. He seemed mesmerized by that line of forming monsters.
“Renarin! Attention!” Teft shouted. “To the line!”
The boy’s head snapped up at the command and he scrambled—as if he weren’t the cousin of the king—to obey his sergeant’s order. Adolin retreated with him, and the two fell into formation with the bridgemen. Together, they pulled backward through the main hall.
Shallan backed up, staying roughly twenty feet behind the formation. Suddenly, the enemy moved with a burst of speed. Shallan cried out, and the bridgemen cursed, turning spears as the main mass of darkness swept up along the sides of the corridor, covering the beautiful murals.
The midnight figures dashed forward, charging the line. An explosive, frantic clash followed, bridgemen holding formation and striking at creatures who suddenly began forming on the right and left, coming out of the blackness on the walls. The things bled vapor when struck, a darkness that hissed from them and dissipated into the air.
Like smoke, Shallan thought.
The tar swept down from the walls, surrounding the bridgemen, who circled to keep themselves from being attacked at the rear. Adolin and Renarin fought at the very front, hacking with Blades, leaving dark figures to hiss and gush smoke in pieces.
Shallan found herself separated from the soldiers, an inky blackness between them. There didn’t seem to be a duplicate for her.
The midnight faces bristled with teeth. Though they thrust with spears, they did so awkwardly. They struck true now and then, wounding a bridgeman, who would pull back into the center of the formation to be hastily bandaged by Lyn or Lopen. Renarin fell into the center and started to glow with Stormlight, healing those who were hurt.
Shallan watched all this, feeling a numbing trance settle over her. “I … know you,” she whispered to the blackness, realizing it was true. “I know what you’re doing.”
Men grunted and stabbed. Adolin swept before himself, Shardblade trailing black smoke from the creatures’ wounds. He chopped apart dozens of the things, but new ones continued forming, wearing familiar shapes. Dalinar. Teshav. Highprinces and scouts, soldiers and scribes.
“You try to imitate us,” Shallan said. “But you fail. You’re a spren. You don’t quite understand.”
She stepped toward the surrounded bridgemen.
“Shallan!” Adolin called, grunting as he cleaved three figures before him. “Escape! Run!”
She ignored him, stepping up to the darkness. In front of her—at the closest point of the ring—Drehy stabbed a figure straight through the head, sending it stumbling back. Shallan seized its shoulders, spinning it toward her. It was Navani, a gaping hole in her face, black smoke escaping with a hiss. Even ignoring that, the features were off. The nose too big, one eye a little higher than the other.
It dropped to the floor, writhing as it deflated like a punctured wineskin.
Shallan strode right up to the formation. The things fled her, shying to the sides. Shallan had the distinct and terrifying impression that these things could have swept the bridgemen away at will—overwhelming them in a terrible black tide. But the Midnight Mother wanted to learn; she wanted to fight with spears.
If that was so, however, she was growing impatient. The newer figures forming up were increasingly distorted, more bestial, spiny teeth spilling from their mouths.
“Your imitation is pathetic,” Shallan whispered. “Here. Let me show you how it’s done.”
Shallan drew in her Stormlight, going alight like a beacon. Things screamed, pulling away from her. As she stepped around the formation of worried bridgemen—wading into the blackness at their left flank—figures extended from her, shapes growing from light. The people from her recently rebuilt collection.
Palona. Soldiers from the hallways. A group of Soulcasters she’d passed two days ago. Men and women from the markets. Highprinces and scribes. The man who had tried to pick up Veil at the tavern. The Horneater she’d stabbed in the hand. Soldiers. Cobblers. Scouts. Washwomen. Even a few kings.
A glowing, radiant force.
Her figures spread out to surround the beleaguered bridgemen like sentries. This new, glowing force drove the enemy monsters back, and the tar withdrew along the sides of the hall, until the path of retreat was open. The Midnight Mother dominated the darkness at the end of the hall, the direction they had not yet explored. It waited there, and did not recede farther.
The bridgemen relaxed, Renarin muttering as he healed the last few who had been hurt. Shallan’s cohort of glowing figures moved forward and formed a line with her, between darkness and bridgemen.
The creatures formed again from the blackness ahead, growing more ferocious, like beasts. Featureless blobs with teeth sprouting from slit mouths.
“How are you doing this?” Adolin asked, voice ringing from within his helm. “Why are they afraid?”
“Has someone with a knife—not knowing who you were—ever tried to threaten you?”
“Yeah. I just summoned my Shardblade.”
“It’s a little like that.” Shallan stepped forward, and Adolin joined her. Renarin summoned his Blade and took a few quick steps to reach them, his Plate clicking.
The darkness pulled back, revealing that the hallway opened up into a room ahead. As she approached, Shallan’s Stormlight illuminated a bowl-like chamber. The center was dominated by a heaving black mass that undulated and pulsed, stretching from floor to ceiling some twenty feet above.
The midnight beasts tested forward against her light, no longer seeming as intimidated.
“We have to choose,” Shallan said to Adolin and Renarin. “Retreat or attack?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. This creature … she’s been watching me. She’s changed how I see the tower. I feel like I understand her, a connection I cannot explain. That can’t be a good thing, right? Can we even trust what I think?”
Adolin raised his faceplate and smiled at her. Storms, that smile. “Highmarshal Halad always said that to beat someone, you must first know them. It’s become one of the rules we follow in warfare.”
“And … what did he say about retreat?”
“ ‘Plan every battle as if you will inevitably retreat, but fight every battle like there is no backing down.’ ”
The main mass in the cham
The murals, the intricate art, the fallen troves of information … This place was important.
Shallan clasped her hands before herself, and the Patternblade formed in her palms. She twisted it in a sweaty grip, falling into the dueling stance Adolin had been teaching her.
Holding it immediately brought pain. Not the screaming of a dead spren. Pain inside. The pain of an Ideal sworn, but not yet overcome.
“Bridgemen,” Adolin called. “You willing to give it another go?”
“We’ll last longer than you will, gancho! Even with your fancy armor.”
Adolin grinned and slammed his faceplate down. “At your word, Radiant.”
She sent her illusions in, but the darkness didn’t shy before them as it had previously. Black figures attacked her illusions, testing to find that they weren’t real. Dozens of these midnight men clogged the way forward.
“Clear the way for me to the thing in the center,” she said, trying to sound more certain than she felt. “I need to get close enough to touch her.”
“Renarin, can you guard my back?” Adolin asked.
Renarin nodded.
Adolin took a deep breath, then charged into the room, bursting right through the middle of an illusion of his father. He struck at the first midnight man, chopping it down, then began sweeping around him in a frenzy.
Bridge Four shouted, rushing in behind him. Together, they began to form a path for Shallan, slaying the creatures between her and the pillar.
She walked through the bridgemen, a rank of them forming a spear line to either side of her. Ahead, Adolin pushed toward the pillar, Renarin at his back preventing him from being surrounded, bridgemen in turn pushing up along the sides to keep Renarin from being overwhelmed.
The monsters no longer bore even a semblance of humanity. They struck Adolin, too-real claws and teeth scraping his armor. Others clung to him, trying to weigh him down or find chinks in the Shardplate.
They know how to face men like him, Shallan thought, still holding her Shardblade in one hand. Why then do they fear me?
Shallan wove Light, and a version of Radiant appeared near Renarin. The creatures attacked it, leaving Renarin for a moment—unfortunately, most of her illusions had fallen, collapsing into Stormlight as they were disrupted again and again. She could have kept them going, she thought, with more practice.
Instead, she wove versions of herself. Young and old, confident and frightened. A dozen different Shallans. With a shock, she realized that several were pictures she’d lost, self-portraits she’d practiced with a mirror, as Dandos the Oilsworn had insisted was vital for an aspiring artist.
Some of her selves cowered; others fought. For a moment Shallan lost herself, and she even let Veil appear among them. She was those women, those girls, every one of them. And none of them were her. They were things she used, manipulated. Illusions.
“Shallan!” Adolin shouted, voice straining as Renarin grunted and ripped midnight men off him. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now!”
She’d stepped up to the front of the column the soldiers had won for her, right near Adolin. She tore her gaze away from a child Shallan dancing among the midnight men. Before her, the main mass—coating the pillar in the center of the room—bubbled with faces that stretched against the surface, mouths opening to scream, then submerged like men drowning in tar.
“Shallan!” Adolin said again.
That pulsing mass, so terrible, but so captivating.
The image of the pit. The twisting lines of the corridors. The tower that couldn’t be completely seen. This was why she’d come.
Shallan strode forward, arm out, and let the illusory sleeve covering her hand vanish. She pulled off her glove, stepped right up to the mass of tar and voiceless screams.
Then pressed her safehand against it.
Listen to the words of a fool.
—From Oathbringer, preface
Shallan was open to this thing. Laid bare, her skin split, her soul gaping wide. It could get in.
It was also open to her.
She felt its confused fascination with humankind. It remembered men—an innate understanding, much as newborn mink kits innately knew to fear the skyeel. This spren was not completely aware, not completely cognizant. She was a creation of instinct and alien curiosity, drawn to violence and pain like scavengers to the scent of blood.
Shallan knew Re-Shephir at the same time as the thing came to know her. The spren tugged and prodded at Shallan’s bond with Pattern, seeking to rip it free and insert herself instead. Pattern clung to Shallan, and she to him, holding on for dear life.
She fears us, Pattern’s voice buzzed in her head. Why does she fear us?
In her mind’s eye, Shallan envisioned herself holding tightly to Pattern in his humanoid form, the two of them huddled down before the spren’s attack. That image was all she could see at the moment, for the room—and everything in it—had dissolved to black.
This thing was ancient. Created long ago as a splinter of the soul of something even more terrible, Re-Shephir had been ordered to sow chaos, spawning horrors to confuse and destroy men. Over time, slowly, she’d become increasingly intrigued by the things she murdered.
Her creations had come to imitate what she saw in the world, but lacking love or affection. Like stones come alive, content to be killed or to kill with no attachment or enjoyment. No emotions beyond an overpowering curiosity, and that ephemeral attraction to violence.
Almighty above … it’s like a creationspren. Only so, so wrong.
Pattern whimpered, huddled against Shallan in his shape of a man with a stiff robe and a moving pattern for a head. She tried to shield him from the onslaught.
Fight every battle … as if there is … no backing down.
Shallan looked into the depths of the swirling void, the dark spinning soul of Re-Shephir, the Midnight Mother. Then, growling, Shallan struck.
She didn’t attack like the prim, excitable girl who had been trained by cautious Vorin society. She attacked like the frenzied child who had murdered her mother. The cornered woman who had stabbed Tyn through the chest. She drew upon the part of her that hated the way everyone assumed she was so nice, so sweet. The part of her that hated being described as diverting or clever.
She drew upon the Stormlight within, and pushed herself farther into Re-Shephir’s essence. She couldn’t tell if it was actually happening—if she was pushing her physical body farther into the creature’s tar—or if this was all a representation of someplace else. A place beyond this room in the tower, beyond even Shadesmar.
The creature trembled, and Shallan finally saw the reason for its fear. It had been trapped. The event had happened recently in the spren’s reckoning, though Shallan had the impression that in fact centuries upon centuries had passed.
Re-Shephir was terrified of it happening again. The imprisonment had been unexpected, presumed impossible. And it had been done by a Lightweaver like Shallan, who had understood this creature.
It feared her like an axehound might fear someone with a voice similar to that of its harsh master.
Shallan hung on, pressing herself against the enemy, but realization washed over her—the understanding that this thing was going to know her completely, discover each and every one of her secrets.
Her ferocity and determination wavered; her commitment began to seep away.
So she lied. She insisted that she wasn’t afraid. She was committed. She’d always been that way. She would continue that way forever.
Power could be an illusion of perception. Even within yourself.
Re-Shephir broke. It screeched, a sound that vibrated through Shallan. A screech that remembered its imprisonment and feared something worse.
Shallan dropped backwa
When she forced her eyes open, she found the room clean of the darkness. The corpses of the midnight creatures had dissolved. Renarin quickly knelt next to a bridgeman who had been hurt, removing his gauntlet and infusing the man with healing Stormlight.
Adolin helped Shallan sit up, and she tucked her exposed safehand under her other arm. Storms … she’d somehow kept up the illusion of the havah.
Even after all of that, she didn’t want Adolin to know of Veil. She couldn’t.
“Where?” she asked him, exhausted. “Where did it go?”
Adolin pointed toward the other side of the room, where a tunnel extended farther down into the depths of the mountain. “It fled in that direction, like moving smoke.”
“So … should we chase it down?” Eth asked, making his way carefully toward the tunnel. His lantern revealed steps cut into the stone. “This goes down a long ways.”
Shallan could feel a change in the air. The tower was … different. “Don’t give chase,” she said, remembering the terror of that conflict. She was more than happy to let the thing run. “We can post guards in this chamber, but I don’t think she’ll return.”
“Yeah,” Teft said, leaning on his spear and wiping sweat from his face. “Guards seem like a very, very good idea.”
Shallan frowned at the tone of his voice, then followed his gaze, to look at the thing Re-Shephir had been hiding. The pillar in the exact center of the room.
It was set with thousands upon thousands of cut gemstones, most larger than Shallan’s fist. Together, they were a treasure worth more than most kingdoms.
If they cannot make you less foolish, at least let them give you hope.
—From Oathbringer, preface
Throughout his youth, Kaladin had dreamed of joining the military and leaving quiet little Hearthstone. Everyone knew that soldiers traveled extensively and saw the world.