Colors, many of heroism, yield envy and fear. Time passes over passing time. Fear and envy yield, Hero of Many Colors.
Sarus has been running Bridge Four longer than anyone. He has trouble remembering the world before the Plains, and doesn't bother to imagine one after. But when a new bridgeman comes and offers the crew a chance at hope and freedom, Sarus can't help but take it.
Look to the sky, Curumo. All the old prophecies are being fulfilled. The Doors of Night are open, and Odium comes.
Colors, many of heroism, yield envy and fear. Time passes over passing time. Fear and envy yield, Hero of Many Colors.
As with Ring-Maker, I've decided I want to have a chunky introduction post. But I haven't spent the time I need to figure out what I want in that post. I'm sure it'll fill up over time, like Ring-Maker's did, so I thought it best to reserve it.
To anyone coming into this story fresh, welcome! This story is set within a shared multiverse with Ring-Maker and The Seventh Coming, but reading those stories is neither required nor strongly recommended. This story is intended to work as a standalone.
As a crossover—and part of a wider series—I recognize that some readers may not be familiar with the Stormlight Archive. I do highly recommend it, but if you'd rather dive right into this story, here is a brief primer on what you should know coming into the first few chapters. For those craving a slightly deeper look at the background lore, and one without spoilers for canon, see this video.
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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Prologue
To Die
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As World was Sundered to worlds, now God shall be Shattered to gods. History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
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Rayse watched through the eyes of his voidspren agent, Ulim, as the singers took the Shin man's Oathstone. He watched as they gave the man his orders. The Connection he shared with his Splinter was not enough—yet—to let them communicate directly. For now, he could only spectate.
Ulim did not stay to watch the assassin carry out his orders. He returned to the singer Venli's gemheart, continuing his slow manipulation. It was almost impressive, watching even this tiniest Splinter of Odium's power spreading the tendrils of its influence throughout her psyche.
Rayse kept his attention on the voidspren's experiences long enough to see Venli and her sister escape Kholinar, then withdrew.
Back to Braize. Back to the cold. Back to the aching, throbbing pain in his skull.
He shivered, hands rubbing at his arms to try to bring some warmth back. He had first noticed his illness before the Heralds had abandoned the Oathpact, but it was a very, very slow thing. He'd assumed he would have plenty of time to investigate it, to fix whatever was wrong with the Odium Shard, once he had returned to Roshar and broken the seal holding him here.
Then the Heralds had abandoned Talenel—the only one of them who had never broken. The Oathpact had bound them for over two thousand years. It had only been at the very last Desolation, the one the humans called Aharietiam, that he had finally broken Jezrien. Rayse had assumed it wouldn't be much harder to break Talenel.
The notion seemed laughable now. Four and a half millennia, and Talenel had never broken. Forget breaking the man—Odium needed to kill him, permanently. If such an incredible man ever Ascended, got himself a Shard…
Rayse. Rayse squeezed his eyes shut, coughing weakly into the cold night. He was Rayse. He might go by the name Odium, but the Odium Shard was his, not the other way around. He breathed into his hands, trying to warm them. It didn't help.
He knew what would. He turned and walked down the barren hill on weak, shaky legs, then descended the stairs into the subterranean depths of Braize.
The stairs carried on for over two hundred feet, cutting a straight line down into the depths of the ice-world. They ended in an aluminum door, thick and padded with insulation, with a wheel in the center to break the vacuum seal. Even as sick as he was, Rayse was still able to turn the wheel and pull the door open.
Heat blasted him in the face. The fire raged, far below. Chains dangled from the ceiling of the cavern, ending in hooks which could be lowered into the flames to heat them. There were still, even four thousand years later, ten great stones to which a person could be chained at the base of the vast chamber.
Only one was filled now.
Rayse stepped off the high balcony and gently floated down to the bottom of the cavern. The fire was warm around him—too warm. Sweat broke out on his skin. But it was better than feeling the fever ravage him in the cold outside.
Talenel's head rose slowly, his hooded eyes staring at Rayse. He was in one of his brief recovery periods right now, short stretches when the Fused and Voidspren allowed his body to heal before resuming the torment. It did them no good to kill him, although even if they did he would simply return here again. Odium, however, had ordered them—Rayse had ordered them not to kill the Heralds if they could avoid it. He suspected that the resurrective process by which the Shadows were functionally immortal might heal some of the mental damage they were suffering. It was a guess borne out by evidence, as those few times a Herald had accidentally been killed under the tender mercies of his servants, that Herald had never been the one to break next.
The Herald of War blinked stupidly at him, eyes glazed and hazy. At this point, the Fused continued his torture out of mere spite. None of them seriously expected him to break at this point, not after resisting for so, so long—but there was something cathartic, both for Odium—Rayse—and his singer servants, in watching the man's body break again and again.
It was one of the two reasons Talenel was still alive. Rayse had had a raysium dagger ready for most of the time they'd been trapped here, affixed with a gemstone of sufficient purity to trap a Cognitive Shadow. But Talenel had refused to break.
Something he hadn't expected to be a problem when he was first trapped on this Adonalsium-forsaken world: Braize was incredibly mineral-poor, with the sole exception of aluminum, which was abundant in its crust. Gemstones were almost impossible to find, large ones even more so. Odium's servants had been scouring it for gemstones of sufficient size and purity for the past two millennia, ever since it had occurred to him that another Herald might manage to die and end up here before he managed to break Talenel. They had come up with nothing. And so, Odium had only one weapon capable of taking out a Herald permanently—a weapon which he would have to save for whichever Herald finally did break, letting them out of here.
…Rayse's servants. Rayse's weapon. Drakefire, he was getting worse.
It was possible, of course, that killing a Herald would alert the rest of the fractured Oathpact. But this chamber in Braize's heart was lined with aluminum, and hopefully that would be enough to dampen the reverberations of the snapping Connection. He knew the concept worked in principle, but it was also limited—a strong enough Connection could shunt through the Spiritual Realm without being deflected by barriers in the Physical. However, with the Oathpact in the terribly frayed state it was, he suspected it would be enough. It wouldn't be completely secure, of course—the Connection would still be broken, and if any of the Heralds, Ishar in particular, tried to trace it up, they'd find the snapped end. But with any luck they wouldn't be alerted, which might just buy Odium all the time he needed.
"Odium…?" Talenel's voice was weak.
"Rayse," Rayse corrected automatically. Wait, no. The Heralds knew him as Odium. He shook his head. "Yes. Hello, Taln."
"Odium…" Talenel's voice slurred fuzzily, the vowels lengthened almost comically. "Mmmudio. No. Muido. Odiumuido."
He often babbled like this. Odium wasn't sure whether his mind would ever recover from the strain. And yet, even as every other thread in his brain frayed and snapped, this man had never crossed that one little line that would let Odium win his final victory.
Rayse. Rayse Rayse Rayse Rayse.
"Fusedesuf," mumbled Talenel. "Symmetryrs—Symmetryte--Symmetryrtemmys. Yes." The condemned man smiled stupidly to himself.
"Are you trying to Vorinize the word symmetry?" Rayse asked.
"Vorinirov," Talenel replied.
Odium stepped towards him, looking up at his body stretched like hide on a tanner's rack. The deep wounds in his flesh were almost healed now. Soon, the torture would begin again. Fruitless torture. Pointless. Habitual.
"How do you do it?" Odium—Rayse!—asked.
"Mm?" Talenel made a questioning grunt.
"Do you have any idea how long you've been suffering here?" Rayse asked. "Your friends abandoned you. And yet you've held out for so long, all alone. How? What do you have that none of them did?"
Talenel blinked. For a moment, Rayse imagined that a spark of lucidity returned. When he opened his mouth, Odium almost expected some great, hidden wisdom to emerge—a secret to the Herald's long, terrible victory. But all he said was, "Abandonodnaba."
Rayse bared his teeth. "Babbling idiot," he spat.
"Idiotoidi."
Rayse turned away in disgust.
"Wallaw."
Rayse stopped. Wall? He hadn't said that. He turned back to see Talenel looking thoughtful. His mouth worked, as though he was working through words in his head. It took him almost a full minute before he spoke again.
"Walled a city make, rams break that wall." Talenel said. "For walls that break rams, make the city a wall."
Odium blinked. "Did you just… compose a perfect ketek in fifty-four seconds?"
Talenel blinked at him, then slumped back down, apparently done speaking for the moment.
Rayse only realized just how long he had been staring at the man when a Fused, in the ethereal, red shape they took here when they lacked bodies, approached him. "Lord?" it asked in a vaguely feminine voice. "Have we your permission to resume?"
Odium blinked at it, then looked back at Talenel. "What do you think, Taln?" he asked. "Should they start again?"
Talenel did not respond in any way. He might as well not have heard. Odium shrugged, then gave the Fused a nod. "Carry on," he said, then turned and stalked away, careful not to give away any sign of the weakness he felt in his limbs.
A brief application of Gravitation raised him back up to the balcony, and he stepped back out into the cold. As he climbed the stairs, he thought on what Talenel had said. Make the city a wall? What did that mean? Did it mean anything, or was it simply the ravings of a shattered mind?
Odium stepped out into the frigid night, shivering. He looked up at the dark sky. It was day, technically, but Braize's atmosphere was so thin, and the sun so distant, that the stars never quite went out.
He could pick out the glittering planet that was Roshar in the distance. He stared at it, feeling intimately aware of every one of the millions of miles between him and it.
Suddenly, he remembered the last time he'd been on Roshar in the flesh. During the so-called first Desolation, while he and Tanavast were still in the process of poaching humanity and the singers from one another.
They'd fought. Tanavast was skilled and powerful, but he was Odium, greatest and most terrible of Shards. Tanavast had nominally survived the encounter, but even as he and Ishar were burying Odium in his Investiture, Connecting him immutably to Braize, they had both known that the cost of the feat would, eventually, be his life.
So had Koravellium. She had been there, too, had watched Tanavast, her husband, with tears in her eyes, knowing there was nothing she could do to save him. She turned them on Rayse, and though there was hate in the inhuman, slitted gaze, there was pity there, too.
"I take comfort," she had said, "in knowing that what happens to you will be worse than what you have done to Tanavast."
"We'll see," Odium had snarled.
She shook her head, holding his gaze. "Tanavast may die," she said, "and Honor may splinter, but you? You will suffer identity-death, the real death, the end of self. You think you control Odium, but how long until he reasserts himself? How long can you hold out, Rayse, against the mind and soul of the greatest of the gods?"
Rayse had been banished to Braize before he could ask her what the hell she was talking about. He suspected, now, that she was talking about this.
How did you know? he wondered, staring up at distant Roshar, where she still lived alone. What did you know about the shards that I didn't? What didn't you tell us, that day on Yolen?
Koravellium was the only dragon among the original sixteen Shatterers. She was, in fact, one of only three dragons Odium had ever heard of. The oldest, Gostir, had died before the Shattering. The youngest, Frost, was still alive on Yolen as far as Odium knew, even all these millennia later. All three were, so far as Odium could discern, the oldest beings in the cosmere, save Adonalsium itself. Perhaps they were even older than it was, if that was what Koravellium had meant by something particularly cryptic she'd once said.
Rayse shook his head. Suddenly he realized just how far he had slipped. How long had he been calling himself Odium in his head without even noticing?
Identity-death, the real death, the end of self.
"Adonalsium," Rayse whispered. "I don't want to die."
The cosmere did not answer, for Adonalsium was dead.
Rayse let out a shuddering breath as his eyes slid closed.
It would not be Rayse who opened them again.
"Lord!" a Fused approached suddenly, blurring into being beside him in its haste. "A Herald is here—Chanarach is here! She is being brought to the chamber now!"
A slow, languid smile spread across Odium's face. He opened his eyes and looked at the Fused. "Good," he said. "Excellent. Give her our customary welcome."
"Yes, Lord!" and the Fused was gone.
Odium took a deep breath of the frigid Braize air. His smile widened. "Well, well, well," he murmured, thinking of a green dragoness who had, it seemed, been awaiting this day for many millennia. Whether with dread or anticipation, he was not yet sure. "It is good to be back. Farewell, Rayse. Your sacrifice is appreciated."
The entire Cosmere is one fragment of Arda. Cosmologically speaking, I mean.
I called this story a Stormlight Archive fic in the title and tags, but it really is a Cosmere fic. The first two parts are set quite heavily on Roshar, but I intend for Nalthis and Scadrial to both become significant around parts 3 and 4. And there's another canonical cosmere world which will be very significant to part 5.
I want to quickly go over a couple of things now that I have a free minute away from work for the morning. This story is structurally based on the Stormlight Archive in the same way that Ring-Maker was based on Worm. Just as Ring-Maker used arcs with subchapters interspersed with interludes, so Of Many Colors will have five parts with three or four interludes between them. Each chapter will have an icon associated with its primary narrator, and an epigraph derived from an in-universe document. Each part will open with a single page where I tell you who the narrators for that part will be. The prologue, as you have seen, is set on the night of King Gavilar's assassination, just like all of the prologues for the first five Stormlight novels. The five part titles are derived from a symmetrical ketek. Etc., etc.
As with the canonical Stormlight books, there are flashbacks interspersed variously throughout the current-event chapters. As with Rhythm of War, while there is one character who has the primary focus in these flashbacks, there are two who may have them in their perspective. The focus character for these flashbacks in Sarus, AKA Curumo, AKA Saruman. The secondary narrator... well, you'll see.
As with the Stormlight books, there is one character whose perspective will appear in at least one chapter in each set of interludes. In Of Many Colors, that character is Melkor.
The five parts of this story are titled thus:
Part 1: The Color of Heroism
Part 2: Yield to Envy
Part 3: Time Over Time
Part 4: Fear Yields
Part 5: Hero of Many Colors
There is one more thing that you should all be aware of up front, and it's something I'm a little nervous about.
While I was writing Ring-Maker, among the many, many criticisms I received was one that I was cleaving too close, at least up to about Arc 6, to canon. "Stations of canon" is the common phrasing. In the case if Ring-Maker, I do not think this criticism held much water. Things diverged in various ways from canon almost immediately—while, yes, certain events outside the main characters' direct control did still happen, the way those events shook out was markedly different.
Of Many Colors is a little different.
The first two whole parts of this story, according to my current outlines, are going to be surprisingly close to canon in terms of what happens when. Part 1 especially. I still intend to keep things fresh by focusing on different characters and making the story primarily about how the things I am changing are affecting the characters involved, but you should not expect things to go off the rails within the first five chapters the way they did in Ring-Maker. There is a reason for this. It is a feature, not a bug. But it is a feature that will take on the order of fifty chapters to fully materialize. I apologize for that, and I wanted to make sure you all went into it with open eyes. After part 2, of course, things will go nuts; and they will go nuts in ways that make the events of the previous two parts pay off in interesting ways. But it will require patience. A lot of patience.
My rule of thumb for canon divergence is that there are two things that can cause canon to diverge. The first is random chance. If an event is a result of the roll of the cosmic dice, I see it as well within my rights to have those dice turn up a different result. This type of divergence starts to happen immediately, but there is very little in the Cosmere that is truly random, especially on the worlds of actively-intervening Shards like Odium and Cultivation.
The other type of divergence is when a character who is changed in one way or another makes choices that were not made in canon. This type of divergence does not start to occur immediately. Again, feature. Not bug.
I thought it necessary to say all this up front because I know I generally hate stations of canon when the story follows rails for no clear reason. In this case, there is a reason. But I struggled a lot with myself before committing to these current plans.
I will post some of this information in the introduction.
There is a moment that will be with me forever. I was driving from my dad's house back to my mom's and thinking about a particular issue I was having tying the Cosmere with Arda. And then, suddenly, I hit on the idea of using a third setting to resolve that issue. I'll be sure to tell you all about it once we hit that part in this story. Although many of you will probably see it immediately.
Well, it is fortunate that I know very little about Cosmere, then, in that the story will still remain fresh in spite of the potential sticking to canon for at least a little bit.
The prologue took a bit to take a firm grasp on, due to said lack of knowledge, but it's certainly intriguing.
While no one has done so here, the responses on the other mirrors have made it clear that posting this introductory page multiple days before the following chapter was... thoughtless. I just wanted to reassure everyone that I won't do it again. Future part introductions will be posted the morning of the first chapter of that part.
While no one has done so here, the responses on the other mirrors have made it clear that posting this introductory page multiple days before the following chapter was... thoughtless. I just wanted to reassure everyone that I won't do it again. Future part introductions will be posted the morning of the first chapter of that part.
I'll say that for my part, I didn't and wouldn't mind if it was a few days out. Helps me remember that this is one of the many stories I'm reading to be excited about.
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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1
Despair
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Something is very, very wrong. Have I gotten your attention yet? No jokes. You know I wouldn't write a letter at all if things weren't dire.
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Sarus was roused by the sound of horns. He stumbled to his feet, ignoring the fearspren bubbling up around the other bridgemen. Not one of the violet marbles were clustered around him. There were only exhaustionspren stirring where he stood. Perhaps this time he would manage to die.
A new figure jogged up to Bridge Four as Sarus took his usual position at the front of the blasted thing. His hair was Alethi black, like Sarus' had been before the strain of bridge runs had started to gray it prematurely. Notably, alongside the ordinary slave brand on the stranger's brow—something many bridgemen, Sarus included, shared—he bore a shash glyph, signifying danger. Some idle process in the back of Sarus' head wondered if this poor bastard had attempted one too many slave rebellions to be sent down here to die. The rest of him didn't really care.
Gaz followed the new bridgeman to the yard, looking the crews up and down. He stopped at Bridge Four, brow furrowing, then looked at Sarus. "What happened to your bridgeleader?"
Sarus just gave Gaz a slow blink.
"Dead," said one of his teammates. "Tossed himself down the Honor Chasm last night."
Realization spread across Gaz's face as he stared at Sarus. He swore. "You were told to keep that storming mouth of yours shut. Months of silence, and now you finally say something?"
Sarus just stared at Gaz's fuzzy outline before him. His tongue felt thick and heavy behind his teeth.
Gaz cursed again. "Storming dullard. I'll run near you lot, listen for my commands. We'll find you a new bridgeleader once we see who survives." He pointed at the newly condemned man. "You, lordling. At the back. Rest of you, get moving!"
The new man gave Sarus a searching look, but then shrugged and made his way to the back of the line. Sarus noticed he didn't have shoes—his feet would be brutalized by the end of the run.
It wouldn't matter if they didn't beat the Parshendi to the plateau. Gaz had put the newcomer at the back of the line. That meant he would be at the very front for the final approach. Bruised and wounded feet would not bother a corpse, and no one survived the front row.
No one, that is, except for Sarus.
Sarus shook his head muzzily and stooped at the knees, grabbing the handles immediately front and center and heaving the bridge upwards. Men filed into two of the other places in the front row, fearspren boiling around them as they readied themselves to die.
The bridge soon started to move, and Sarus moved with it. The uneven rock of the Shattered Plains passed beneath his feet as he jogged along, Bridge Four on his shoulders. He heard the army start up behind the bridges, but it was just noise to him. He kept his eyes on the ground in front of him, stepping over rockbuds and shalebark.
The bridge's weight rubbed through the thin padding of Sarus' leather vest and ground into the calluses on his shoulders. At this point, he'd been torn open so many times there that he wasn't sure he had any blood left in that part of his body. Small mercies.
As the number of permanent bridges across the chasms had grown, so too had the length of the first part of each bridge run—the ceaseless, mind-numbing jog from the warcamp to the first chasm they'd bridge. It was over an hour, this time, before Gaz finally called a halt.
With practiced efficiency, Sarus dropped the bridge, alongside all the other dead men in his crew, then shoved it across the gap.
The other bridgemen fell to the ground, crumpling like puppets with cut strings. Sarus did not. He slowly went through a few stretches, then sat leaning against the bridge itself, watching the army pass him by. As he did, for just a moment, he thought he saw a small figure, like a four-inch-high woman covered in oil, standing on the red-brown stone beside the bridge, watching him. When he looked again, she was gone.
It wasn't the first time he had hallucinated her. It probably wouldn't be the last. Sometimes he wondered what part of his bruised and battered psyche she represented. The temptation, perhaps, to cast himself into the pit and end this cyclic purgatory?
But he hadn't seriously considered throwing himself into a chasm in months. At this point, he figured it was even odds whether he'd eventually manage to die, or if he'd survive to the end of the entire storming war. If that happened, well, he wasn't sure what he'd do. But it would be a far sight better than this.
Suddenly, the new bridgeman, with the shash brand, picked himself up and started rubbing at his muscles. His feet already resembled ground meat, and Sarus knew it would get far worse before it got better. Gaz gave the bridgeman a bewildered look, but by now the man was used to Sarus doing much the same on long runs. He'd learned from long experience that there was nothing more painful than cramping on the way back to the camp. This new bridgeman must have known the same thing.
The newcomer looked up and met his gaze. His eyes were a particularly dark brown, and with his brow furrowed his gaze bore an intensity that reminded Sarus of faraway days spent training in a well-kept courtyard under a clear, sunny sky. Sarus looked away, back towards the men marching across the gap.
The column of the army was ending. Sarus turned and looked at the column of armored lighteyes. At their center, as always, was Highprince Torol Sadeas. He pointedly ignored Sarus' eyes on him as his horse trotted past, hooves thudding resonantly on the wood of Bridge Four.
As the last lighteyes' horse stepped onto the bridge, Gaz shouted for the bridgemen to stand. The new arrival heaved a visible sigh of relief as he stood, but then his face fell at a brief word from the man beside him.
Sarus followed Gaz across the bridge, the rest of the crew beside him. They tugged the bridge across behind after them, picked it back up, and started on again.
Sarus had always found this part even more tedious than the long run across the permanent bridges. Repeatedly picking up the bridge, carrying it across a plateau that was sometimes less than a mile across, then tossing it over the chasm and waiting for the army to pass. Watch Sadeas ignore him again, then cross the bridge and do it all again. Over and over and over.
After the first few chasms, the new bridgeman started staring at Sarus during their brief respites, as if drawing the strength to continue to care for his body from his apparent stoicism. After a few more, it stopped being enough, and the new man started flopping down alongside all the others.
Sarus didn't join them, though the exhaustionspren around him were puffing up with as much vigor as ever. His body was tired, sure, but the real fatigue was mental, and wasn't born of this one bridge run.
It was born of all the ones before.
Eventually, the dreaded command came. "Switch!"
Sarus stared as the other men around him rotated positions. Men from the front went to the back, men in the back came up to the front. Gaz steered the new bridgeman up beside him. "Newcomers get to go first here, Lordship," he sneered.
The new man's brow furrowed, looking Sarus up and down. "He's been here the whole time though," he said to Gaz, gesturing in Sarus' direction.
"Never you mind this idiot," Gaz said. "You just pick up that bridge and get moving."
They started the last march. Four of the slots in the front row were filled by men now. Sarus could see the boiling fearspren and anticipationspren reappearing now—they always faded away during the middle part of the run, while men were too tired to think of the approaching danger, but they returned during this last stage. Up ahead, the last chasm approached, and on the other side…
"Agonies of Taln," whispered the man on the new bridgeman's other side, the left-front corner of the bridge. "They're already lined up. Storms, we're dead!"
The front row of Parshendi knelt, pulling back the strings of their shortbows. The row behind did the same over their shoulders.
Kill me, Sarus begged silently. For Yaezir's sake, kill me this time.
Behind him, men were screaming as they ran towards the line of nocked arrows. Beside him, the new bridgeman's eyes were wide with horror. It was some luck, Sarus thought, to die on his very first run with the bridges. Whether it was good or bad luck, he wasn't sure.
The Parshendi loosed their arrows.
The first wave killed the two men on the outside of the front row, leaving Sarus and the new bridgeman alone. The next line of projectiles missed them both, too, though Sarus heard the familiar sound of another bridge falling on its surviving crew, too few to keep it lifted.
Now, the new bridgeman was screaming. Sarus remained silent.
A third volley. Another bridge fell. Sarus didn't; nor did his new comrade. He felt an odd kinship with this man, this fellow impossibility, who seemed to suffer the same strange fate as Sarus himself—to live where other men always died.
Before the Parshendi could ready another volley, Bridge Four reached the chasm. Sarus hoisted himself out from under the bridge, but before the crew could push it across the chasm, a fourth wave of arrows came, and more men died. Still, Sarus and his new friend survived.
They shoved the bridge across the chasm, barely managing it with so many dead. As the far side of the bridge hit the other end of the chasm, the new bridgeman fell over. Sarus blinked at him, but there was no arrow in him. Mere exhaustion had felled him, and as Sarus watched, his eyes flickered shut as he yielded to unconsciousness.
Sarus shrugged, ignoring the ongoing hail of arrows as he watched the army march towards the bridges. The darkeyed front ranks broke as they crossed the bridge, turning into a tangled mass of sprinting, shouting berserkers. Alethi arrows were joining the Parshendi ones now, sailing over the chasms to hit the Parshendi rearguard.
Sarus looked across the chasm and met the eyes of a Parshendi archer even as she stowed her bow and pulled out her spear. He thought he'd seen that particular pattern of red and white marbling before. She was staring at him, and though he wasn't any sort of expert in Parshendi body language, he thought her eyes seemed sad, even pitying.
Then she turned to fight an Alethi spearman as he crossed the bridge. Sarus watched as she died, her body tumbling into the chasm.
He looked away. As his eyes passed over his new friend, he saw a single windspren, hovering around the man's slack face, looking down at him. Was that concern in its girlish face? Impossible. He must be imagining it.
Suddenly, as though sensing his eyes on it, the spren looked up, meeting his gaze. Concern gave way to surprise. It blinked at him, then giggled and transformed into a ribbon of blue-white light, orbiting once around the new bridgeman before darting upward and out of Sarus' sight.
Sarus turned his gaze back towards the army still crossing the bridge. The lighteyes were starting to cross, now—and at their head was Torol Sadeas, passing mere feet from where Sarus reclined against his bridge.
He knew the man was aware of him. It wasn't coincidence that the Highprince crossed Bridge Four every single time both he and Sarus were present on bridge runs. But as always, he gave no outward sign that he even saw Sarus there among the dust and bodies. He passed so close that Sarus could have reached up and touched the greaves of his crimson Shardplate, stroked the fur of the horse he rode. Unlike its master, the horse at least acknowledged his existence, if only to jerk its head haughtily as it passed by.
And then they were gone, wading into the battle on the other side of the chasm. Sarus sighed. Ignoring the other lighteyed officers, he slumped back against the bridge and allowed his eyes to drift shut.
He was roused when the horns sounded to call the retreat. His eyes fluttered open. Around him, the bridgemen were groaning as they stirred. Glancing over, he saw that the new bridgeman wasn't moving at all. Had he survived the run, survived the front row, only to succumb to the strain?
No. He was still breathing. Sarus could see the steady rise and fall of his chest. It was with muted surprise that he noted his own sense of relief. This poor, dead man had survived alongside him.
Wincing, he forced himself to his feet. The other bridgemen were doing the same. "Pick up that bridge, you louts!" Gaz shouted from a dozen or so feet away. "Anyone who can't stand gets left behind!"
Sarus' brow furrowed. Could the new bridgeman stand? He looked over. The windspren was back, once again in the form of a girl with blue skin and clothes. It was flitting about the new bridgeman's face.
If he hadn't been looking, he wouldn't have noticed the unmistakable sound of a girl's voice, synchronized with the movement of the spren's lips. The windspren was talking. "Kaladin!" it—she—was saying. "Get up, or they'll leave you behind! You'll die!"
The new bridgeman—Kaladin?—made an indistinct sound. The windspren struck his cheek. It didn't seem to do much, but the fact that it did anything at all was bizarre.
"Dullard!" Gaz bellowed. While Sarus had been looking at the spectacle, the man had approached him from behind. "Get to your spot!"
Sarus turned, blinking at him. Gaz glared. He didn't spare a glance for Kaladin—assuming that was his name—and his strange spren.
Part of Sarus wanted to turn and help the other bridgeman to his feet. The rest of him remembered what had happened, over and over, back when he allowed himself to care about other bridgemen. Without a word, he walked back to the front of Bridge Four. Alongside the rest of the survivors, he hoisted it onto his shoulders.
For a moment, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the ink-black woman again, seated on the handle beside him. But when he turned, all he saw was Kaladin stumbling into position there, dark eyes dull with exhaustion.
Sarus tried not to feel too relieved. So someone else had, for the first time, survived the front row with him. It hardly meant he would survive it again. And when he inevitably did die, Sarus would be alone again.
Despair was hardly comforting, but at least it didn't hurt. Not like hope did.
![Of Many Colors [Stormlight Archive/Lord of the Rings]](/data/threadmark-index-icons/l/65/65022.jpg?1661803183){kind=icon}
