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

Title: The Conflux of All Darkness and Sorrow
Just gonna say that sounds a little melodramatic as a title. We’ve got some emo or chuuni influences here. Lots of edginess in that superlative. It is ominous with regard to what their Spiritual Realm journey might have connected them to, but if it really matches the description of the title, that feels like a bit too fast of an escalation to me.

Icons: Ishar and Jester. 
We got bondsmith shenanigans and worldhopping, especially if the vision of Ashynn’s exodus is still on the itinerary.

Epigraph: “May you have the courage someday to walk away.” This feels like it should have thematically gone with a Kaladin/Szeth chapter, but maybe it will tie in to Dalinar’s probable rejection of divinity by the end of the book? 

Lift. I forgot she was hiding in the vents. Did she get sucked into the vortex? 

The perpendicularity shows her an alternate self who didn’t lose her mom and isn’t afraid of growing up. Sounds like a version that couldn’t have existed with the war and everything, but teasing her with seeing her mom again is fairly cruel.
I’m suddenly wondering what pieces we’re still missing about Lift’s encounter with Cultivation. Are there more portions of herself that are payment for what she received at the goddess’ hand? I remember this being debated some in the fandom, but I’m pretty sure there’s still room for secrets and reveals.

Hm. Lift recognizes that the vision is a reflection of her desires, not of an actual lost possibility. And what?! Her mom’s not dead? What the heck? So she’s been lying to herself and everyone else, and mom just left rather than succumbing to a wasting disease like we thought. Is this more secret society stuff? Because good grief we’ve got so many complicated intersecting plots already. Not to say that I’m opposed to more complications, but it feels like it would be more fair to Lift’s emotional journey if she has to confront a mundane abandonment or dead-beat mom rather than a dramatic tie-in to cosmere-spanning schemes.

But my heart! Lift’s fear of aging is tied to wanting to be recognized if her mom ever does come back. ;o;

And now Gav is following her around in the air vents. Great. Looks like the babysitting adventure is taking a detour by way of dimensional displacement.

Lift recognizes a sleepless watching her (and everyone else) in the vent, and still has the audacity to wonder what it tastes like. And she’s been low-key trying to catch one and find out ever since meeting what’s-his-name during Edgedancer. That is based.

The whirlpool of the collapsing singularity sweeps them up… and Lift loses her grip on Gav. I need to adjust my expectations here, because this babysitting trip just became substantially different than the duo adventure I thought we were about to get.

Wit saves the day! “You both owe me” so he grabbed her and Gav, right? Right? Nooo! He was talking about Lift and Wyndle, so Gav is lost in space the spiritual realm. The rescue mission keeps gaining extra steps!

The sleepless didn’t get pulled in, even in part. Nor did the Malwish corpse from Shadesmar. Did it lose its investiture upon death enough that the vortex had no hold on it? Curious.

Lift stealing off-world curses is perfect for her. 

Quote

“The best words are the ones people don’t understand.”
“That is literally the opposite of how language should function.”

Also, literally the opposite of all her Edgedancer listening jazz.
Plus, she calls him out right after. Wit is not in any position to criticize someone for confusing other people.

They’re going to lie about Dalinar disappearing, and Wit immediately starts glowing? Really demanding disguise coming up. Wit trying to impersonate Dalinar legitimately rather than as a caricature is interesting, and Lift and Wit working together to run the country has a whole lot of potential hilarity.

{NOTE: This is the point where I’m now picking the book back up again after. <checks> 8 months? I’m not even sure if I can call myself a Sanderfan at this point. This is a pathetic pace. I’ll probably ramble about this off and on going forward, but I don’t really have a good excuse for taking so long aside from the process of notetaking feeling more daunting than just reading something else. Apologies to anyone who is actually following this.}

Kaladin being terrible at cooking is somehow super funny to me. His whole spiraling depression after that, not so much, and I know I shouldn’t be but I’m rather annoyed at Syl’s pick-me-up speech here. It simultaneously trivializes things and misses the point. I dunno, maybe I’m falling into the melodrama trap because it’s been so very long since I read the lead-up sections and now the emotional beats just aren’t landing for me. But for him to feel like he’s completely lost talking to Szeth, and Syl respond by prompting him with “how about you be a therapist full time? That could be your calling, right?” It doesn’t seem like Kal should respond super positively to that suggestion. 

It could be that I’m just not invested in the Kal/Szeth plotline right now? It wasn’t the reason by any stretch, but it definitely was a contributing factor to me not feeling motivated to continue the liveblog project when I was choosing between reading more Wind and Truth versus something else on my list.

Regardless, kicking the stupid non-moving grass because it won’t get out of his way is a good image and really conveys his thought process well.

Quote

“I want to help my people. That is more important to me than the quest, though that makes me a bad Skybreaker.”

Very illuminating thing for Szeth to admit here, both in that his audience is a Windrunner who can’t imagine not helping people, and because of what it says about Szeth’s progression towards the Skybreaker ideals. (I wonder if Nightblood is even paying attention.)

Also super critical of me, but it feels like maybe music shouldn’t really call to the super-ancient spren. It humanizes it too much, for something that has basically ignored humanity for four books and however long before that. Sure, woodwind instruments have that association, but there’s a pretty big divide between natural gusts of wind and a person’s breath.

Oh, well, I guess Wind is about to just trash my whole argument:

Quote

“Odium changes. His goals change. I can speak now when it was so hard for years. …His attention is not on me. The Stones have always had the capacity to speak, but only now started doing so.”

So I guess it’s Mr. T’s ascension that makes the difference here, and it’s not just Wind that’s being affected but a whole class of spren. Sure, I’ll accept that reasoning. Nice that Wind is trying to warn them about Odium having a new vessel, even if Kaladin doesn’t understand.

Wind saying that it’s up to them and Kal to somehow preserve a shred of Honor hits harder when just a few pages ago Wit predicted that Dalinar failing to appear for the cage match with Odium would destroy the rest of Honor that Dalinar is standing in for. 

Okay, that cliffhanger cutting off with Ishar’s sudden appearance is pretty steep. Well done.

—
Lopen’s spren Rua is a shortie? Huh. Can’t say I expected physical differences that extreme. Oh, he looks like a kid? That’s even less expected. 
Nice to see that Lopen is being competent.
Oh! And now Rua turned one arm crystalline, to match Lopen’s thought process. That’s way more physical mutability than I expected on this side. I figured the physical realm was fair game, but that in the cognitive realm their forms were pretty fixed.

Okay, it looks like I misremembered something. I had thought that Navani got pulled through the perpendicularity too, but apparently not. She’s still running the tower. Wait, no. That’s definitely Wit in disguise! Love it. I thought he’d be impersonating Dalinar, but it makes sense he’d be able to pull off an administrator better than a warlord. (And enjoy the outfits more.)

—
This description of Ishar as the prototype for the ardentia is spot on, except apparently I forgot that they aren’t drab brown. He’s wearing blue robes with gold trim? I’ll have to go back and read other descriptions from earlier books, but my imagination of ardents seems to have been infected with fantasy depictions of ascetic monks.

Ishar thought Kaladin was insignificant after the events of the first four books? How? I guess that confirms at least that he isn’t in contact with the sleepless cabal, since they’ve been watching our main characters this whole time.

He considers Szeth his servant? Hm. That’s a thinker. An important piece, probably. Interesting that his moment of lucidity at the end of the last book apparently killed the Tezim persona permanently. But also worrisome that he still thinks he’s ascended to the Almighty.

Even more concerning? His claim to take the other heralds’ pain is disturbingly similar to Odium’s relationship with his Fused and Vyre. That kind of parallelism could be a useful contrast, but is more likely to be a weakness.
Also, jerk move to help the rest of the heralds but not share Taln’s pain when the dude has been suffering for you ever since you tried to break the oathpact. Not cool, Ishar.

However, Kaladin’s repeated “Let’s talk about your feelings” feels incredibly inept. Surely you don’t just walk up to someone and say “I know you’re cray-cray, can I try to invent therapy on you now?” Some sort of small talk wouldn’t go amiss, you know?
 

And that's the end of Day 2. Time for some interludes to see how everything is about to get worse. El and Odium? Sweet!