He looked down at his unbuttoned jacket, his white shirt stained with dirt and drink. Um …
A voice drifted through the closed door. Was that Adolin inside? Dalinar started, then focused. Storms, he’d come to the wrong door.
Another voice. Was that Gavilar? Dalinar leaned in.
“I’m worried about him, Uncle,” Adolin’s voice said.
“Your father never adjusted to being alone, Adolin,” the king replied. “He misses your mother.”
Idiots, Dalinar thought. He didn’t miss Evi. He wanted to be rid of her.
Though … he did ache now that she was gone. Was that why she wept for him so often?
“He’s down with the beggars again,” another voice said from inside. Elhokar? That little boy? Why did he sound like a man? He was only … how old? “He tried the serving room again first. Seems he forgot he drank that all last time. Honestly, if there’s a bottle hidden in this palace anywhere, that drunken fool will find it.”
“My father is not a fool!” Adolin said. “He’s a great man, and you owe him your—”
“Peace, Adolin,” Gavilar said. “Both of you, hold your tongues. Dalinar is a soldier. He’ll fight through this. Perhaps if we go on a trip we can distract him from his loss. Maybe Azir?”
Their voices … He had just rid himself of Evi’s weeping, but hearing this dragged her back. Dalinar gritted his teeth and stumbled to the proper door. Inside, he found the nearest couch and collapsed.
A Portion of the Sea of Lost Lights
89. Damnation
My research into the Unmade has convinced me that these things were not simply “spirits of the void” or “nine shadows who moved in the night.” They were each a specific kind of spren, endowed with vast powers.
Adolin had never bothered imagining what Damnation might look like.
Theology was for women and scribes. Adolin figured he’d try to follow his Calling, becoming the best swordsman he could. The ardents told him that was enough, that he didn’t need to worry about things like Damnation.
Yet here he was, kneeling on a white marble platform with a black sky overhead, a cold sun—if it could even be called that—hanging at the end of a roadway of clouds. An ocean of shifting glass beads, clattering against one another. Tens of thousands of flames, like the tips of oil lamps, hovering above that ocean.
And the spren. Terrible, awful spren swarmed in the ocean of beads, bearing a multitude of nightmare forms. They twisted and writhed, howling with inhuman voices. He didn’t recognize any of the varieties.
“I’m dead,” Adolin whispered. “We’re dead, and this is Damnation.”
But what of the pretty, blue-white spren girl? The creature with the stiff robe and a mesmerizing, impossible symbol instead of a head? What of the woman with the scratched-out eyes? And those two enormous spren standing overhead, with spears and—
Light exploded to Adolin’s left. Kaladin Stormblessed, pulling in power, floated into the air. Beads rattled, and every monster in the writhing throng turned—as if one—to fixate upon Kaladin.
“Kaladin!” the spren girl shouted. “Kaladin, they feed on Stormlight! You’ll draw their attention. Everything’s attention.”
“Drehy and Skar…” Kaladin said. “Our soldiers. Where are they?”
“They’re still on the other side,” Shallan said, standing up beside Adolin. The creature with the twisted head took her arm, steadying her. “Storms, they might be safer than we are. We’re in Shadesmar.”
Some of the lights nearby vanished. Candles’ flames being snuffed out.
Many spren swam toward the platform, joining an increasingly large group that churned around it, causing a ruckus in the beads. The majority of them were long eel-like things, with ridges along their backs and purple antennae that squirmed like tongues and seemed to be made of thick liquid.
Beneath them, deep in the beads, something enormous shifted, causing beads to roll off one another in piles.
“Kaladin!” the blue girl shouted. “Please!”
He looked at her, and seemed to see her for the first time. The Light vanished from him, and he dropped—hard—to the platform.
Azure held her thin Shardblade, gaze fixed on the things swimming through the beads around their platform. The only one who didn’t seem frightened was the strange spren woman with the scratched-out eyes and the skin made of rough cloth. Her eyes … they weren’t empty sockets. Instead she was like a portrait where the eyes had been scraped off.
Adolin shivered. “So…” he said. “Any idea what is happening?”
“We’re not dead,” Azure growled. “They call this place Shadesmar. It’s the realm of thought.”
“I peek into this place when I Soulcast,” Shallan said. “Shadesmar overlaps the real world, but many things are inverted here.”
“I passed through it when I first came to your land about a year ago,” Azure added. “I had guides then, and I tried to avoid looking at too much crazy stuff.”
“Smart,” Adolin said. He put his hand to the side to summon his own Shardblade.
The woman with the scratched eyes stretched her head toward him in an unnatural way, then screeched with a loud, piercing howl.
Adolin stumbled away, nearly colliding with Shallan and her … her spren? Was that Pattern?
“That is your sword,” Pattern said in a perky voice. He had no mouth that Adolin could see. “Hmmm. She is quite dead. I don’t think you can summon her here.” He cocked his bizarre head, looking at Azure’s Blade. “Yours is different. Very curious.”
The thing deep beneath their platform shifted again.
“That is probably bad,” Pattern noted. “Hmmm … yes. Those spren above us are the souls of the Oathgate, and that one deep beneath us is likely one of the Unmade. It must be very large on this side.”
“So what do we do?” Shallan asked.
Pattern looked in one direction, then the other. “No boat. Hmmm. Yes, that is a problem, isn’t it?”
Adolin spun around. Some of the eel-like spren climbed onto the platform, using stumpy legs that Adolin had missed earlier. Those long purple antennae stretched toward him, wiggling.…
Fearspren, he realized. Fearspren were little globs of purple goo that looked exactly like the tips of those antennae.
“We need to get off this platform,” Shallan said. “Everything else is secondary. Kaladin…” She trailed off as she glanced toward him.
The bridgeman knelt on the stone, head bowed, shoulders slumped. Storms … Adolin had been forced to carry him away from the battle, numb and broken. Looked like that emotion had caught up to him again.
Kaladin’s spren—Adolin could only guess that was the identity of the pretty girl in blue—stood beside him, one hand resting protectively on his back. “Kaladin’s not well,” she said.
“I have to be well,” Kaladin said, his voice hoarse as he climbed back to his feet. His long hair fell across his face, obscuring his eyes. Storms. Even surrounded by monsters, the bridgeman could look intimidating. “How do we get to safety? I can’t fly us without attracting attention.”