This is my reaction blog for Wind and Truth. Beware of spoilers! Index post here.

It’s Day Two! And holy POV explosion, Batman! We’ve got a ridiculous number of people listed as viewpoint characters at the beginning of this section. That whole trade-back-and-forth-between-different-core-groups idea is going out the window, apparently. This looks like an answer to my question at the beginning of how a strict chronology was going to change the format and structure of the book. 

Expected viewpoints, if slightly more numerous than usual for a non-climax section of the book: Szeth, Dalinar, Navani, Shallan, Kaladin, Lift.

Extra viewpoints I wasn’t expecting but aren’t exactly a surprise: Jasnah, Adolin. (And Lopen, since he got some screen time in Dawnshard, but I’m listing him below with the rest of the Bridge Four team.)

Viewpoints I definitely wasn’t counting on being included fall into two groups. Group 1 is Bridge Four, which is spread between Renarin (Brandon’s been hoarding those secrets, and I honestly thought we wouldn’t get much of anything from him until book 6), Rlain (basically the same boat as Renarin), Lopen, and Sigzil. Not a huge surprise that Sig and Lopen are showing up with a large battle on the way, but I’d mostly expect that to be relayed via Dalinar and Jasnah at this stage of the book. Not complaining obviously. 
Group 2 is the world leaders Fen (Thaylenah) and Yanagawn (Azimir).

If each person listed there got their own chapter that would be 14, essentially matching the length of Day One. Likely they will share chapters, but presumably none of them will be one-off appearances and we’ll return to them a few times, which amounts to the same thing. That’s a pretty serious split of page count. I wonder if the order they are listed in is order of appearance or wordcount or something else.

Anyway, on to the main event.

Chapter 14
Title: Not Asleep
Either that’s the Sibling being awake and better able to influence things, or it’s Dalinar and company losing sleep as the army approaches.

Icons: Vev and Jester 
Edgedancers and Worldhoppers, most likely, so Lift and Wit are the top predictions. Zahel, ghostbloods, and a smattering of other foreigners could fill in for Wit, and Lift isn’t the only Edgedancer either.

Epigraph: We’re back with the Way of Kings. Appropriate given that Syl will be reading it to Kaladin, and I suspect Dalinar is still relying on his favorite book.

Well, title drop in the first line. It’s Dalinar not sleeping, stressing about the coming contest of champions.

How much better would all of this have gone if Dalinar had died in his brother’s place that fateful night?
Not better at all. Gavilar was a disaster waiting to happen, as the readers are well aware by this point. I mean, theoretically he could have changed the way Dalinar has, but it seems highly unlikely. Point is, Dalinar retains a very rosy view of his brother, and I’m slightly surprised the Stormfather hasn’t told him more about that mess by now.

I feel like the significance of the belt wrapping around a takama was explained at some point, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it would have been. Not sure why grandpa Kholin’s double-wrapped belt being displayed is important. You know, this is bugging me. I may check the coppermind. Alright, thanks to the Time Machine feature on the Coppermind (shoutout to all you arcanists out there!) I was able to look that up spoiler free. It’s a reference to the story Dalinar told in Oathbringer, where his swordmaster had inherited a three-wraps tradition from his own teacher. It started practical, since that teacher was super skinny, but became dogmatic as “three times is better than two” for tradition’s sake. 

Cool that his instincts as a military commander are warning him that something is about to go wrong, just before the report comes in. 

Pabolon the door guard. That’s a new name. 

Jasnah’s not sleeping either. Probably a running theme, then, with the title. Also, it’s looking like the PoVs are order-of-appearance. We’ll go with that assumption until contradicted.

Jasnah’s demiromantic relationship with Wit still feels odd to me. I kind of expected them to share a room but not a bed, now that they aren’t out on campaign, even if they remained physically involved. 

The thing that feels most off about this is Jasnah getting the bed “because she’d read that relationships were about compromise.” She’s not so incapable in relationships as that, and she’s much more self-determined than to do something just because a self-help book said to. She thinks deeply about philosophy and game theory and people, so she would have a better reason than that for anything she did. 
Jasnah hating the softness of the mattress fits, though.

Wit would be so proud that he inspires irritationspren even in his sleep.

Wit supposedly travels to other places in his sleep? I wonder how that works. He’s obviously still physically present on Roshar. He managed to infiltrate Kaladin’s nightmare when Odium tried to break him on Braize, so there’s some sort of sleep-mediated astral projection as a thing that happens in the cosmere, even beyond visions like the ones the Stormfather sent Dalinar. We haven’t seen evidence of that in any other series, though, so there’s no clues about what it is or isn’t capable of.

See, here is Jasnah’s emotional intelligence on display. She can’t trust Wit because he lies to her, even beyond the secrets he keeps. And she sees him doing what he thinks is best rather than respecting other people’s wishes, which betrays that he doesn’t think of people as true peers. An actual romantic relationship requires some degree of parity between the parties.

It’s also not working because she’s mostly ace, but needs more emotional connection which he’s not supplying. 

The mattress is actual down, because Wit’s not Rosharan and thinks that’s what chicken feathers are for. Weird off-worlder.

More emotional intelligence: relationships require sacrifice, but shouldn’t be built on a foundation of sacrifice. You go, Jasnah! See, that whole “I read it in a book” thing at the beginning was stupid. I’m headcanoning that line out of the story.

She’s obviously invested in the relationship, though, for her to be worrying about it like this.

Good points about the different reactions to Dalinar and Jasnah’s iconoclasm. Dalinar is (eventually) praised and followed, while the woman doing things differently is persecuted and despised. Lots of factors to complicate that conclusion, but it does boil down to something close to that in the end.

Oh storms. She hates the soft bed because it reminds her of the time she got locked in a padded room for months as a child. I totally forgot that had happened until she brought it up, but no wonder a feather mattress isn’t restful. 

Wit woke up realizing something’s wrong. Is it the army? Has he found the hole in his memories?

I really can’t tell what he’s doing. Writing a table of investiture interactions, bringing out sand from Taldain, and steelpushing to test something? It’s not enough to go on yet. Now he’s awakening his clothes and the sand is floating, which i don’t recognize as a particular magic system. And he’s attracting shockspren and fearspren, so this is something serious. He didn’t know the answer right away so it’s not like Cultivation told him about Vargo’s ascension, which means this must be the memory loss and his reduction in Breaths.

Yes. He deducted that he’s missing 3 and a half minutes, specifically from the time of his conversation with Odium.

Jasnah asked to be included on Wit’s dealings with Odium, and Wit says, “well, I’m including you now, aren’t I.” Jasnah sees that red flag the same way I do. There’s no trust, no partnership here. You need to dump this guy.

Anxietyspren: twisting black crosses. I suspect we’ve seen them before, but that’s not a description I remember.

Wit is very concerned about what he’s missing, and at Jasnah’s encouragement is going to reach out for advice from an expert in godly contracts. Time to contact an “old friend…” Wild guess that it’s going to be Frost, but really we have no clue.

Yup, Navani’s having her own restless night. Except she’s on an adventure exploring the crawlspaces of the tower. It’s very cool that she, an artifabrian, can intimately sense the workings of all the fabrials in the tower. It’s gotta be weird having an entire city grafted onto your soul, but also very cool.

Human’s can’t hold towerlight, because they’re too leaky. That’s bizarre, because I thought the different flavors of investiture were essentially interchangeable in that raw form, and as long as the magic user in question has the correct spiritual key to access it, they can use it for their own purposes. But this is saying that the physical properties are different enough that they can’t be held in the same container. 

Also cool for Navani is that her bond gives her access to the rhythms. I don’t understand why the Sibling’s bond would grant that when other nahel spren or even Bondsmith spren don’t, but Navani definitely deserves it after all the effort she put into hearing them for her research with Raboniel. 

Her bond to the Sibling is much closer than the others with their spren. She can feel the planet’s rhythms, the mechanisms of the tower, and the songs that spren sing to the Sibling. They’ve become linked in a cognitive and spiritual way that has them sharing thoughts and sensations, which hasn’t been the case in other bonds we’ve seen.

Hm. The bond also appears to be location-locked. She can’t leave the tower for more than ~10 days at a time, at most. On reflection, though, we don’t know that it’s different for anyone else. Their spren are able to follow them around through either the physical or cognitive realms, so they wouldn’t be away from their bonded partner for any length of time. Even the stormfather circles the planet regularly enough that the bond could be renewed before it started to degrade much. In fact, back in WoK Syl went looking for the poisonous leaves and almost forgot herself, suggesting that distance really does cause degradation of the bond. The only difference here is that the Sibling is strictly immobile, forcing Navani to remain with them.

A keenspren? I don’t really know what that corresponds to. We don’t use keenness in normal conversation, and nothing about Navani’s current reflection feels like how I would use that word. 

Navani is learning about willing spren fabrials, rather than the captured version, but says they are less efficient. Tell me more! Where are the inefficiencies? I mean, morally I can only support using an inefficient system that doesn’t include slavery, but I’m eager to get to work on the sprengineering.

Too bad the war is coming to interrupt that thought.

And here’s Queen Fen. Also awake, and in Thaylenah on the royal yacht. But in a hammock, because she and the prince consort snuck away from their guards. 
I didn’t realize she was in her late sixties. I thought she was slightly younger than that. (Also recall that Rosharan years are 10% longer than Earth’s.)

The lieutenant is flustered at catching them. She’s naked but puts a glove on her safehand.

Quote

“There. Does that help?”
“No! It really, really doesn’t!”

Along with word of the army approaching Azimir through Shadesmar, she simultaneously receives news about an offensive breaching the blockade of Jah Keved. They lost to the air support of the Skybreakers, which proceeded to sink half the armada and are escorting an assault fleet to Thaylen City.

Gawx isn’t sleeping either. Oh, wait, I read that wrong. He is asleep. Um, nope. Nevermind. He’s only “sleeping” because that’s what the schedule says, and he’s Azish so the paperwork is right despite the reality of things. 

The emperor’s position is very much a figurehead, but I thought that in Rhythm and in Oathbringer he had achieved some measure of respect and influence in his role. Doesn’t sound like it at the moment.

Interesting that most Shards directly reporting to the Azish empire (as opposed to vassal states) are involved in public works in the way that Dalinar experimented on back in Way of Kings. Building roads and cutting trenches is a very productive non-martial application of those supernatural weapons. 

Quote

“Yaezir, god above, in the Halls pristine.”

This isn’t really a new swear, since we’ve had all those elements separately, but it’s the first new-ish one in the book so far and it’s nicely flowery. Onto the list it goes!

That’s the end of the first chapter in Day Two, and we’ve already hit five of our fourteen viewpoints. I still feel like that’s a lot to include if we’re going back to each of them throughout.