Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.

Chapter 54 (The Future Become Dust)
Icons: Palah and Chach, truthtelling and destruction. Matches the title well.
Epigraph: Combining Voidlight and Stormlight, and realizing they aren’t antitheses of one another… I want to say that this feels too scientific/scholarly for Venli, but the previous flashback just reminded us that was precisely her position before she set off the listener apocalypse, so it would be stupid to rule her out on that gut feeling. In fact, it hasn’t been demonstrated yet but I’m suddenly concerned about the path she might find herself walking as the de facto apprentice to the Lady of Wishes.

Aww, poor little Gavinor. “Evil people… like Mommy?”  Oh, my heartstrings.
Obviously you don’t tell a kid this, but from what little we know of her, the answer may well be a simple “yes” not this nuanced “Odium made her do it” excuse that Dalinar responds with. 

No, Dalinar. Gav isn’t weird. I’ll have you know that plenty of young children want to go to bed. I won’t say it’s the majority, and it’s certainly not the stereotype, but it absolutely happens. It’s a sign of a healthy sleep schedule, and not uncommon.

Nice to see Dalinar’s elitism shining through. No degradation of former nobility for him, no sir. Jasnah can stick her egalitarianism down with the darkeyed plebs where it belongs.

Multiple orders of Azish scribe. I can’t say I’m surprised, but how do you functionally distinguish such tasks? More bureaucracy minutia, please!

Hmm. The communal Windrunner stewpots attract “whichever soldiers felt most out of place.” It’s interesting that Dalinar has the insight to recognize this, and I wonder what he would do with this knowledge. It also strikes me as a bit of overlap with the Edgedancer credo of finding the forgotten, but again communal rather than individual, which gives it a Windrunner bent.

Renarin’s interactions with Dalinar are very wholesome. We needed more of this. Dalinar reminding himself that Renarin is strong and was a strength to him when Dalinar was weak is particularly great.

Oooo, we get to experience one of Renarin’s visions? Yes! I was expecting to be teased again with sparse descriptions. Also noteworthy that he can call them up again at will after they accost him.

Oh, wait. He can’t do that to all the visions--only the ones that Glys manages to capture when they happen. How hard is that? How many can Glys hold onto?

Too bad, I thought he was going to show the vision to Dalinar, but that’s not the case. He gets to see it again himself, but not bring others into it (yet).

Hm, that’s a thought. I’m not sure if this is where Renarin is going with it, but the cycle of desolations is broken and the Fused can no longer be locked away. Possible outcomes: one side annihilates the other, the oathpact is reforged with new terms and new heralds, or they learn to coexist. Now obviously that last one is what would be ideal, but until now I’d been interpreting that as “everyone coexists...except for the insane Fused, who get exterminated by some means similar to what was done to Jezrien.” But Leshwi is our example of a reasonable Fused with whom a rapport is possible. Is it in the cards to remove some of Odium’s taint from the other Fused and deal with them as people rather than monsters?

A blackness infecting both Dalinar and Odium? If someone else were seeing this I would have thought it was Renarin being a blindspot, but this seems more likely to be Sja-Anat’s influence. Which, now that I think about it, may be gaining entry via Glys and Renarin, so it could be him after all. Then again, it’s not at all clear yet.

Huh. Guess I didn’t need to speculate. Renarin outright says it’s him. Interesting that he has deduced his own status as a blindspot, though. I expected that to be a mystery until Taravangian revealed it to them. For all that Renarin describes it in the same way as atium interference in Allomancy, I feel like it has to be more than that because Odium’s status as a shard should give him far more power to bring to bear on future sight, enough to overwhelm the interference from a single spren with precog abilities.

More wholesome Dadlinar time. Very nice.

They’re looking for more Radiant potentials to bond Sja-Anat’s children. That will obviously be a crucial point of leverage against Odium, but I’m unconvinced that they will be “like Renarin” in his blindspot ability or really anything else. Lots of unique individuals coming up. 

And yay! They can only be talking about Rlain as the next candidate. He does seem like the right kind of misfit for Renarin’s crew. I’m seeing a theme-within-a-theme here for liminal spaces in society being valued for their otherness.