Note: This story contains major spoilers for both Mistborn Era 1 and the Stormlight Archive. It may contain minor spoilers for Mistborn Era 2. Do not read unless you are up to date with both series.
A sudden gust of wind. A cloud passed rightward, drenching the secluded study in moonlight. It had been weeks since the last Highstorm. The night was calm and clear.
Jasnah Kholin looked up from the papers on her desk. Usually meticulously organized, they lay in disarray. It was very late, and very quiet. Urithru had retired for the night.
Jasnah wore a thick, finely crafted night dress. Dyed the color of red wine, it was looser and duller than the havahs she would wear in public, but not as simple or as light as a nightgown. The buttoned sleeve on the safehand attested to the public nature of the dress. Casual though it may be, this was still a gown for the highest-ranked woman in Roshar. Her long black hair, however, was loose, her makeup removed. Jasnah did not expect interruptions that night.
From his perch on the windowsill, Ivory shot her a pointed glance.
She stood to draw the curtains, and the room returned to darkness, save for light of the fabrial, the glow of the spheres, and Ivory's pearly illumination.
Call her paranoid. With the Windrunners and now the Skybreaker surging off into the sky, not to mention the assassins she knew trailed her, doubled in number after her coronation, Jasnah didn't disclose her study's location to anyone, not even her own mother. However, Navani had convinced her to keep two rooms. Jasnah preferred to keep her research close at hand, a bodily reassurance to the nearness of her life's work. Yet as she had seen when Shallan had retrieved the chests from the wreck of the Wind's Pleasure, if she and her research were to be parted, others would continue the work she had started.
Shallan. The past few weeks had been a time of relative upheaval for her young ward. The causal to Adolin had been the success Jasnah had hoped for, and two now seemed appropriately mired in newlywed bliss. While Shallan seemed less erratic, Jasnah still worried. She suspected her ward nursed psychological wounds none of them had yet addressed. Moreover, Shallan's brothers had arrived, and they were much as Jasnah had expected. A lying, secretive handful.
She set down her pen. "I'm distracted," she said aloud. "Perhaps it is late enough."
Ivory did not answer. He stood there at the sill with his head cocked to the side, like an axehound who had just heard a peculiar noise.
Jasnah breathed in Stormlight, and the study darkened again, this time more dramatically than before. She was suddenly very glad for Ivory's presence, and her mother's fabrial on the desk.
Jasnah hadn't liked the dark since she was a child. It made her uneasy, and made her think of things from her past she'd rather not dwell upon.
"A rip is," said Ivory. "A junction…is? But more."
Despite their many years together, Jasnah had never mastered Ivory's odd word constructions. Sometimes his meaning was as alien to her as he was.
Then the world turned upside-down.
She was choking in a sea of bright beads and black water. She kicked out through her heavy skirts, treading through endless beads. As her hands touched the spheres, she experienced a barrage of sensations as she touched spheres that corresponded to objects in the Physical Realm. Her books, her papers, a guard whose soul-sphere repelled her, the study, Urithru itself –
Eelike purple fearspren burst forth, wriggling and crashing around her.
She broke through to the surface, coughing out orbs and water. She cursed Rosharian fashion: her dress pulled her further down to the watery depths.
The sky was obsidian.
Shadesmar, again.
She sucked in Stormlight from the gemstones sewed in the hem of her dress. If only dun spheres weighed less than full ones!
"Jasnah!" said Ivory. In Shadesmar, he was much larger than she was, and his usually sharp suit and haircut actually looked wet and disheveled as he too tried to swim through the beads. He reached out one mother-of-pearl-like arm and yanked her forward. "Land is near!"
Shadesmar was the inverse of the Physical Realm. Since Urithru wasn't far from Purelake, solid ground was mere miles away.
She wouldn't make that distance swimming.
Jasnah coughed up more beads from her mouth. The objects' identities hit her in a rapid fusillade she had to ignore. A potted plant. A heat-fabrial. A goblet full of wine. She tried to paddle forward, even as she knew that swimming alone would lead her only to the bottom of the Shadesmar ocean. She had read Shallan's report of her jaunt in Shadesmar. Although Soulcasting was useless in the Spiritual Realm, she could still make copies of the objects she touched within Shadesmar. From there, she could progress her way to land. First things first, she had to find a suitable object.
Jasnah clutched the first bead that touched her safehand. It corresponded to stone flooring – useless. An oath ring, never worn. A single slipper. She reached out again and again until finally –
Her desk! Jasnah infused the desk-bead with Stormlight until an exact replica made entirely of beads materialized before her. She clamored atop of it, only to be joined by Ivory a moment later.
She could not mute the part of her that was a scholar any less than she could mute the way she moved for her life. In the report, Shallan hadn't mentioned the way the beads making up the Stormlight-copies slid under her fingers. In any case, Jasnah had to move relatively quickly or the reconstruction would eventually decompose into the sea of water and beads.
The reconstructed table would not sail like a raft in the sea. It stood there still, the beads slowly unmaking its form as they rolled down its sides. Jasnah reached out a hand to infuse another object to move herself and Ivory forward, when there was a clap of thunder and lighting.
"Jasnah!" someone called.
She stole a glance upward, only to crouch down again. She pressed herself as flat to the table as she could and instinctively covered her head with her arms. Her unbidden scream was lost in the rage above her.
There was an all-encompassing, blinding firestorm above her head. Bright white, red, gold, and green raged in the sky like a ferocious Aurora. She pressed her body closer to the replicated table, if only to shield herself from the light.
The scholar in her urged her to look upwards. It was a simple gamble. If she perished, she perished. If she survived, her recording of these events would live on after her. She would be immortal through her research.
Body still flat to the desk of beads, Jasnah lifted up her neck to squint at the fires above her. At first the blaze was as before: an indistinguishable mass of ferocious, crashing light. She watched it eve as it pained her eyes, until she perceived that there were actually two separate, gargantuan flames . She watched, immobilized, as confused as she was enraptured. Suddenly, there was another flash of blinding light. She closed her eyes with another scream. When she reopened them, she saw the outlines of two gargantuan men above her. One in red-and-green robes, decorated with jewelry. The other was an old, white-haired man. They clashed above her. Each time they met, a behemoth of flaming sparks exploded overhead.
An explosion, a huge rush of burning light erupted. Jasnah felt the fission between Shadesmar and the Physical Realm rip open. She felt her body about to tear in two. She didn't think. She reached for Ivory and leapt through.
Jasnah crashed to the stone floor of the palace.
Dripping black water, she lifted herself slowly up to the mess of spren scattered wriggling around her. Tiny, golden globes of gloryspren circled her before vanishing. Wriggling violet, goolike fearpren, crawling small orange painspren, clear concentrationspren surrounded her.
There were even blue, smoky bursts that spread out like ripples in a pond.
She knew instinctively that she had seen what most would call gods.
Not gods, she thought to herself. Or rather, they are only slightly more godlike than the Stormfather. Natural processes. Shards, the source of Stormlight.
The awespren slowly dissipated.
She was soaked, and her hair was wild. She was glad she had already removed her makeup, or else it would have streaked across her face. Her dress, miraculously, had no rips she could see. The buttoned clasp on her safehand's sleeve had become undone, so she closed it at once.
"Ivory?" she called.
She had fallen in a stone antechamber in the left wing of the castle. A meeting room. There was a table in the center of the room, along with a handful of chairs.
"Here," he responded. She turned around to the sound of his voice. He floated in the air above her, his expression an odd mixture of pride and shock. He, of course, was not dripping wet, and looked as finely groomed as he always did in the Physical Realm. "You did very well."
"Your Highness!" someone called.
She raised herself up to her full height, only to be met by two members of Bridge Four. A man and a woman. She did not know their names.
"What happened? It was as if you three fell from the sky!"
"Three?" she repeated, puzzled and disoriented. Jasnah followed their gaze to the far right of the room.
There were two people there, eagle-spread on the floor.
There would be time to process all that had happened. Right now, she needed to be a queen.
Sucking in Stormlight from the closest spheres to her, she closed in on the figures lying on the floor.
There was a young man in an ornate white suit on the stone floor, holding hands with a young woman wearing a black shirt and trousers. The man held the woman's safehand, and their fine clothes were like nothing she had seen on Roshar before. They were as pale as Shin, but their facial structures didn't match. Foreigners. Fallen from the sky or not, eyes shut or not, they both looked crisp and elegant.
The man and the woman's eyes opened at exactly the same time. Their eyes were round and dark, and they looked straight at her.
The woman pulled herself together at once. Taking a defensive stance, brown eyes darting about the room, she moved to a half-crouch in front of the man faster than Jasnah would have expected. Her movements reminded her of a dancer – or a skilled assassin. The Shin comparison came to her again. Although thin and small in stature, the woman looked unusually strong.
Drip drip. Jasnah regretted her choice of dress that night. If they had all fallen from the same place, why weren't the newcomers as drenched as she was?
The man was slightly slower than his companion, and he used his hands to help push himself up. At his full height, he stood a hairbreadth shorter than Jasnah. He wore a thin crown, which reminded her of the lack of her own, presumably left behind in the study. He glanced about the room, clearly noting the guards, and Jasnah herself. He opened his mouth to speak.
She could not understand him.
It was not just a language Jasnah did not know, it was a language family and an accent she could not remotely identify. She pushed back her soaking wet hair in a bun. Icy rivulets of water dripped down her back nonetheless.
"Shin?" she asked, slowly. "Alethi? Veden? Reshi?" Really grasping, she said, "Makabaki? Aimian?"
The man and woman looked askance at one another. They spoke to each other in that discomfiting foreign tongue.
A theory began to form in her mind. "Squires," Jasnah said without taking her eyes off the couple. "Bring Dalinar."
Jasnah addressed the couple again. "I am Jasnah," she said, pointing repeatedly to her chest with her right index finger. Storms, she was collecting a small lake beneath her. "Pardon," she said, although they could not understand her. Without giving it much thought, she Soulcast her dress into a clean, dry gown. Her hair was still a waterlogged tangle, but there was no helping that for now. Ivory radiated approval. She returned to her task: "Jasnah. Jas-nah." Hoping pointed index fingers did not represent a rude gesture in the newcomers' culture, she pointed to each of them in turn.
The woman remained in her protective crouch and completely refused to cooperate.
The man, however, cocked his head. Jasnah was pleased when he pointed to his own chest. He said slowly, "El-end. El-end. Elend."
"Elenad?"
The man shook his head and repeated: "El-end."
Elend. Although his accent was still difficult to decipher, if Elend was indeed the man's name, it wouldn't sound so out of place among Alethi names for men of his generation. Kaladin, Adolin. Elend. The only difficulty was the n-d sound. In Alethi, vowels usually broke up consonants. Still, the two sounds, n-d, were both easily pronounceable at the roof the mouth.
Meanwhile, the woman fumbled with something in her pockets. Jasnah kept an eye on her, until she came back with a small vial, apparently filled with water. She shook it once. It swirled with brown and grey flecks.
Still facing Jasnah, the woman touched the man's arm. The two of them broke out in what sounded like a colorful argument. After some time, the woman finally shook her head. She gestured to Jasnah. She picked up her right fist and lowered it to her sternum. "Veh," she said. Her safehand still held the vial tightly. The flecks had since settled to the bottom.
Jasnah stared at her, still keeping an eye on the vial. "Vakh?"
The more she looked at the vial, the more she was drawn to the woman's exposed safehand. If Jasnah was to introduce the couple to Dalinar, the woman's indecent exposure would not do. Trousers were forgivable, but a safehand was another matter. Her uncle was uptight in the extreme when it came to matters of personal modesty and dress. Dalinar would find the blatant disregard for modesty laws jarring, and it would likely render him less effective at the job she needed him to do.
"Veh," corrected the woman.
The "eh" was almost pronounced like someone started to say her name – Jasnah – but got distracted along the way, and ended up saying a nasalized "Jah" instead.
"Vah?" she said, but even as she said it, she knew it was wrong.
The woman looked dissatisfied but nodded anyway. A hollow victory. She knew her pronunciation was off.
The foreign couple started chatting with each other again. Jasnah had no idea what they were saying, but she had a good sense they were discussing whether or not to trust her. The woman relaxed her stance somewhat, standing closer to the man, Elend. At one point Elend lay a hand on the woman's shoulder, while she rested a hand on his bicep.
"I cannot figure these two," Ivory said to her.
Nor I, she thought to herself.
Jasnah sat down at the head of the table in the center of the antechamber, and motioned for the couple to join her. They hesitated, but followed, lowering down into the cushy chairs.
Jasnah again noted the man's thin crown, and wondered what that made the woman, Veh. A bodyguard? A mistress? There was both solemnness and familiarity to the couple's actions with each other.
While the couple spoke, Jasnah picked up a stone from the ground.
You will become a glove.
I am a stone.
You will become a glove.
The stone practically melted in her hands into a glove. Jasnah offered it to the woman, and indicated she was to put it on her left hand. The woman held it as gingerly as if she had offered her a slab of rotten meat. The couple again broke out into chatter with much gesticulation. Finally, the woman put on the glove.
And not a moment too soon. Dalinar burst into the antechamber, Navani at his side, both looking suitably sleep-ruffled and slightly disgruntled. Four guards accompanied them, in addition to the squires Jasnah had sent.
The couple broke apart, instantly tense. Although they remained sitting, they both assumed defensive stances, and the woman again maneuvered herself so she was slightly in front of the man. She shook the vial. In a flash, she uncapped the vial and tipped back her head, like she was taking a shot. Jasnah stared as she offered the remainder to the man, who downed the rest before tucking the empty vial into a pocket.
"Bad," said Ivory.
"Mother. Dalinar," said Jasnah. "As you can see, I need a translator."
Dalinar eyed the two of them. "Foreigners?" He and Navani made to sit at the table opposite the couple. She watched the four of them size each other up.
"Very much so. This is Elend, and I think the woman's name is Veh, or Vin, perhaps. Her name is difficult for me. They're not from Roshar, and don't speak any language I'm familiar with."
"I'll need to touch them. We'll need to manufacture some plausible situation to do that. Jasnah, do you know what time it is?"
"I'll explain later, and hopefully, they'll be able to help. Rest assured this is of utmost importance to Urithru and possibly the entire continent." If not the world, she thought to herself.
"I don't think I'll be resting much tonight," Dalinar quipped.
"It would be easier to touch them in more hospitable surroundings," said Navani. "Soulcast wine, perhaps, and bring in food. They might be more inclined to hand-shaking and arm-bumping if they didn't fear an attack."
"That's not a bad idea," said Jasnah. "Guards, bring me a pitcher of water or wine, and light food. Warm flatbreads and grape leaf wraps." One guard nodded and left. To Navani and Dalinar she said, "I want to keep them calm. They're apparently defenseless and don't speak our language."
"How did they get in here?" Navani asked. "And why, darling, is your hair soaking wet?"
"Good question. They didn't break in," she said.
"That reveals remarkably little," said Navani. "Why are you invested in these two?"
"Mother," said Jasnah. "I don't know the full answer. I think they can help supply one. I suspect that they somehow fell in through Shadesmar. I believe a perpendicularity opened for a short time that is now closed."
Dalinar made eye contact with the couple, then raised his arms and turning his palms outwards. Slowly, he turned out the pockets of his robes, showing they were empty. Of course, communicating he was unarmed was also just for show. As a Radiant, Dalinar could summon his spren into a Shardblade. Jasnah was betting that Vin and Elend didn't know that.
The couple launched into what sounded like a true squabble. Suddenly, they surged upwards. They somehow leaped to the ceiling, and flew straight out the opened window into the night.
For one full second, the remaining occupants of the room paused in stunned silence.
Dalinar drew his Shardblade. "Guards, squires, after them!" he shouted.