Words of Radiance

She sat with her back to the wall and ate, looking upward. The flatbread was from Soulcast grain—that stale taste was obvious. Clouds above prevented her from seeing the stars, but some starspren moved in front of those, forming distant patterns.

“It’s strange,” she whispered as Kaladin ate. “I’ve only been down here half a night, but it feels like so much longer. The tops of the plateaus seem so distant, don’t they?”

He grunted.

“Ah yes,” she said. “The bridgeman grunt. A language unto itself. I’ll need to go over the morphemes and tones with you; I’m not quite fluent yet.”

“You’d make a terrible bridgeman.”

“Too short?”

“Well, yes. And too female. I doubt you’d look good in the traditional short trousers and open vest. Or, rather, you’d probably look too good. It might be a little distracting for the other bridgemen.”

She smiled at that, digging into her satchel and pulling out her sketchbook and pencils. At least she had fallen with those. She started sketching, humming softly to herself and stealing one of the spheres for light. Pattern still lay on her skirts, content to be silent in Kaladin’s presence.

“Storms,” Kaladin said. “You’re not drawing a picture of you wearing one of those outfits…”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’m drawing salacious pictures of myself for you after only a few hours together in the chasm.” She scratched at a line. “You have quite the imagination, bridgeboy.”

“Well it’s what we were talking about,” he grumbled, rising and walking over to look at what she was doing. “I thought you were tired.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “So I need to relax.” Obviously. This first sketch wouldn’t be the chasmfiend. She needed a warm-up.

So she drew their path through the chasms. A map, kind of, but more a picture of the chasms as if she could see them from above. It was imaginative enough to be interesting, though she was certain she got a few of the ridges and corners wrong.

“What is that?” Kaladin asked. “A picture of the Plains?”

“Something of a map,” she said, though she grimaced. What did it say about her that she couldn’t just draw a few lines giving their location, like a regular person? She had to do it like a picture. “I don’t know the full shapes of the plateaus we walked around, just the chasm pathways we used.”

“You remember it that well?”

Stormwinds. Hadn’t she intended to keep her visual memory more secret than this? “Uh… No, not really. I’m guessing at a lot of this.”

She felt foolish for revealing her skill. Veil would have had words with her. It was too bad Veil wasn’t down here, actually. She would be better at this whole surviving-in-the-wilderness thing.

Kaladin took the picture from her fingers, standing up and using his sphere to light it. “Well, if your map is correct, we’ve been making our way southward instead of westward. I need light to navigate better.”

“Perhaps,” she said, taking out another sheet to begin her sketch of the chasmfiend.

“We’ll wait for the sun tomorrow,” he said. “That will tell me which way to go.”

She nodded, beginning her sketch as he made a place for himself and settled down, coat folded into a pillow. She wanted to turn in herself, but this sketch would not wait. She at least had to get something down.

She only lasted about a half hour—finishing perhaps a quarter of the sketch—before she had to put it away, curl up on the hard ground with the pack as a pillow, and fall asleep.

* * *

It was still dark when Kaladin nudged her awake with the butt of his spear. Shallan groaned, rolling over on the chasm floor, and drowsily tried to put her pillow over her head.

Which, of course, spilled dried chull meat onto her. Kaladin chuckled.

Sure, that got a laugh out of him. Storming man. How long had she been able to sleep? She blinked bleary eyes and focused on the open crack of the chasm far above.

Nope, not a single glimmer of light. Two, perhaps three hours of sleep, then? Or, rather, “sleep.” The definition of what she’d done was debatable. She’d probably have called it “tossing and turning on the rocky ground, occasionally waking with a start to find that she’d drooled a small puddle.” That didn’t really roll off the tongue, though. Unlike the aforementioned drool.

She sat up and stretched sore limbs, checking to make sure her sleeve hadn’t come unbuttoned in the night or anything equally embarrassing. “I need a bath,” she grumbled.

“A bath?” Kaladin asked. “You have only been away from civilization for one day.”

She sniffed. “Just because you’re accustomed to the stench of unwashed bridgeman does not mean I need to join in.”

He smirked, taking a piece of dried chull meat from her shoulder and popping it in his mouth. “In my home town growing up, bath day was once a week. I think even the local lighteyes would have found it strange that everyone out here, even the common soldiers, finds a bath more frequently.”