Words of Radiance

“Mmmm,” Pattern said, his vibrations making the wood shake. “This… is not one of the things humans like to eat, then?”

“Storms, no. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“I have,” he said with an annoyed zip of a vibration. “But it is difficult to tell! You consume some things, and turn them into other things… Very curious things that you hide. They have value? But you leave them. Why?”

“We are done with that conversation,” Shallan said, opening her fist and holding up the sphere again. Though, admittedly, something about what he said felt right. She hadn’t eaten any spheres before, but she had somehow… consumed the Light. Like drinking it.

She’d breathed it in, right? She stared at the sphere for a moment, then sucked in a sharp breath.

It worked. The Light left the sphere, quick as a heartbeat, a bright line streaming into her chest. From there it spread, filling her. The unusual sensation made her feel anxious, alert, ready. Eager to be about… something. Her muscles tensed.

“It worked,” she said, though when she spoke, Stormlight—glowing faintly—puffed out in front of her. It rose from her skin, too. She had to practice before it all left. Lightweaving… She needed to create something. She decided to go with what she’d done before, improving the look of her dress.

Again, nothing happened. She didn’t know what to do, what muscles to use, or even if muscles mattered. Frustrated, she sat there trying to find a way to make the Stormlight work, feeling inept as it escaped through her skin.

It took several minutes for it to dissipate completely. “Well, that was distinctly unimpressive,” she said, moving to get more stalks of knobweed. “Maybe I should practice Soulcasting instead.”

Pattern buzzed. “Dangerous.”

“So Jasnah told me,” Shallan said. “But I don’t have her to teach me anymore, and so far as I know, she’s the only one who could have done so. It’s either practice on my own or never learn to use the ability.” She squeezed out another few drops of knobweed sap, moved to massage it into a cut on her foot, then stopped. The wound was noticeably smaller than it had been just moments ago.

“The Stormlight is healing me,” Shallan said.

“It makes you unbreak?”

“Yes. Stormfather! I’m doing things almost by accident.”

“Can something be ‘almost’ an accident?” Pattern asked, genuinely curious. “This phrase, I do not know what it means.”

“I… Well, it’s mostly a figure of speech.” Then, before he could ask further, she continued, “And by that I mean something we say to convey an idea or a feeling, but not a literal fact.”

Pattern buzzed.

“What does that mean?” Shallan asked, massaging the knobweed in anyway. “When you buzz like that. What are you feeling?”

“Hmmm… Excited. Yes. It has been so long since anyone has learned of you and your kind.”

Shallan squeezed some more sap onto her toes. “You came to learn? Wait… you’re a scholar?”

“Of course. Hmmm. Why else would I come? I will learn so much before—”

He stopped abruptly.

“Pattern?” she asked. “Before what?”

“A figure of speech.” He said it perfectly flatly, absent of tone. He was growing better and better at speaking like a person, and at times he sounded just like one. But now all of the color had gone from his voice.

“You’re lying,” she accused him, glancing at his pattern on the wall. He had shrunk, growing as small as a fist, half his usual size.

“Yes,” he said reluctantly.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Shallan said, surprised at the realization.

“Yes.”

“But you love lies!”

“So fascinating,” he said. “You are all so fascinating.”

“Tell me what you were going to say,” Shallan ordered. “Before you stopped yourself. I’ll know if you lie.”

“Hmmmm. You sound like her. More and more like her.”

“Tell me.”

He buzzed with an annoyed sound, quick and high pitched. “I will learn what I can of you before you kill me.”

“You think… You think I’m going to kill you?”

“It happened to the others,” Pattern said, his voice softer now. “It will happen to me. It is… a pattern.”

“This has to do with the Knights Radiant,” Shallan said, raising her hands to start braiding her hair. That would be better than leaving it wild—though without a comb and brush, even braiding it was hard. Storms, she thought, I need a bath. And soap. And a dozen other things.

“Yes,” Pattern said. “The knights killed their spren.”

“How? Why?”

“Their oaths,” Pattern said. “It is all I know. My kind, those who were unbonded, we retreated, and many kept our minds. Even still, it is hard to think apart from my kind, unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless we have a person.”

“So that’s what you get out of it,” Shallan said, untangling her hair with her fingers. “Symbiosis. I get access to Surgebinding, you get thought.”

“Sapience,” Pattern said. “Thought. Life. These are of humans. We are ideas. Ideas that wish to live.”

Shallan continued working on her hair. “I’m not going to kill you,” she said firmly. “I won’t do it.”

“I don’t suppose the others intended to either,” he said. “But it is no matter.”