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

Chapter 13 (Another Hunt)
Title: Is this a Ghostblood chapter? I want a Ghostblood chapter.

Epigraph: Did we see any flamespren in their shadesmar forms? Did they appear more divisible, either by being composed of multiple parts or by being more symmetric? I wonder what happens to spren that aren’t susceptible to splitting in this fashion. Does the attempt to do so injure them at all? Have the artifabrians left a trail of disgruntled, dismembered spren in their wake?

(EDIT: checked the coppermind. Flamespren were not described in shadesmar yet)

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The morning after the wedding party, Shallan had to deal with Veil’s alcohol abuse. 

Okay, so it’s been three or four weeks since I read the previous chapter (sorry for the delay, if there is anyone actually anticipating new posts), and I initially forgot about the context here. I thought this was referring back to Shallan’s own wedding, and while I loved the image there I was rather confused. Why would Veil be participating at Shallan’s own wedding party!? Obviously, that’s not the case here, though. Just a callback to what will have been the previous page in the published version. Moving on…

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She was wife to a highprince, and though their lands in Alethkar were under enemy control, she and Adolin had a tenth of Urithiru to tend.

Okay, the politics are interesting here. I’d forgotten that they’d parceled out Urithiru to the various highprinces, but it makes sense for an initial rough agreement. HOWEVER, it’s been over a year now, and Urithiru is hardly an Alethi-only emplacement. Are allies from Thaylenah and Azir getting regions of the tower for their embassies or colonists? Are there ambassadors and colonists on location, or do they just use the oathgates to travel for all of the meetings? In addition, we’ve heard about several assassinations of highprinces. Are there still ten functional divisions of Alethi, or have some of those houses devolved into a defunct state?

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The meeting mostly involved Radiant dispensing a few decisions and Shallan auditing the accounts.

Um, how blatantly does she shift personas? What are the rumors surrounding the newest Brightness Kholin?

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The deal is set and arranged. The spren will come.

She held this one for a moment, then burned it. Feeling a chill, she decided she didn’t want to be alone in her room any longer

Well, that message  is successfully foreboding. I feel like I have way too little context to speculate on who that is from or what they have done to arrange this mysterious deal. (Still holding out for Ghostbloods, but I’m not confident.)

Shallan visiting her brothers to draw and pretend she’s just the little sister again is pretty adorable. 
 

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Eyes closed, she drew the hearth

That is next level artistry right there. I’m not aware of any artists that can actually do that.

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She opened her eyes and glanced at the little creationspren gathering around her, imitating mundane things. Her mother’s teakettle. The fireplace poker. Objects from her home in Jah Keved, not objects here—somehow they responded to her imaginings. One in particular made her feel cold. A necklace chain slinking across the ground.

Hmm. That’s interesting. There’s something exploitable there in the realmatic sense, but I’m not coming up with anything at the moment. (Also, way to change the mood of the scene in just two sentences! Charming nostalgia and wistfulness to creeping fear and sorrow.)

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She couldn’t see those memories; didn’t want to see them. As she shied away from them, something dark shifted inside her, growing stronger. Formless.

Dun dun dun!

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she wasn’t experiencing continued memory loss. So maybe she was fine. She’d stabilized.
Everything was getting better. Surely it was.

Yes, Shallan. All three of you are just fine. 
 

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She focused on the sketch—which she’d drawn poorly, since her eyes had been closed. It took her a second to notice that in the fireplace back home, she’d drawn burning souls. One might have mistaken them for flamespren, but for the fact that they looked so similar to her and her three brothers…

Yup, absolutely fine!

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[the hearth] was a depression with a heating fabrial resting in it, set into the wall of a Urithiru room.

Yes, that’s interesting, but look at the bolding. “A Urithiru room,” not “an” ? Have I been saying it wrong? Oo-ree-thee-roo, the way I say it (yes, I have no idea how to properly denote pronunciation, sorry) would require “an” here. Please tell me it isn’t supposed to be You-ree-thee-roo.

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Eylita was kind and genuine. And it took a special person to love a member of the Davar family.

Adolin, your wife is thinking about you!

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Almost, Shallan feared, Navani’s artifabrians would make them all lazy.
As if having servants hasn’t already made most lighteyes lazy, Shallan thought.

I’m glad she made that connection in her mind, at least. The slaves and servants have been taken for granted for a long time, and that’s part of what’s causing this war. Better to acknowledge it than start putting blame on modern conveniences.

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Veil frowned, absently turned around to put her back to the wall, then tucked her foot through the strap of her satchel to prevent it from being pulled away.

I love the shift in body language and priorities, in attention and comfort, when she becomes Veil. These really are unique personalities, not just partitions of expertise.

And Mraize is right there, waiting for her to figure out his plan. He’s so slimy and competent and such an awesome antagonist--especially since we don’t even know his actual goals yet (though Shallan has some good ideas in this chapter that are at least partially on track). It’s hard to remember sometimes that Iyatil is his babsk, and may be in place to outmaneuver Shallan if she ever does get the better of Mraize.

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“coldspren grew like spikes on the balcony railing”

I think this is the first instance of coldspren? Upside down icicles, I guess? (EDIT: checked the coppermind--we saw them previously in OB)

Mraize’s cover name is Gobby? I hope he gets mocked for it.

Hmm, Mraize has some sort of investiture or life-sense. I wonder which system it uses. I’m going to speculate it’s a Heightening from Breath, but there are a lot of possibilities.

Mraize’s chicken is trained. I guess I should have expected that, but I was focused in on whatever benefit (shielding, probably?) it provides rather than an actual functional resource beyond what could be gained from an inanimate fabrial, for example. 

(Aside: Thinking of fabrials and if that was actually an option for Mraize given the nascent state of the industry, I remembered that the Ire in Secret History had one that was impressively advanced even for modern Roshar, and that was a few hundred years ago. It didn’t match what we would have expected from the old style of fabrial, like soulcasters, so someone has been doing fabrial research independent of the current Rosharans. How does this timeline square with the various factions being active on Roshar, or with the mysterious threat that Navani received a few chapters ago? We probably won’t know for a long time, unfortunately.)

Wow, Mraize was working really hard for that “are you a mole?” line. Send your chicken to catch a specific type of rodent and return in time for a dramatic delivery. That has got to be more work than it’s worth, especially since Veil already noted that he’s not as good at presentation and inhabiting a role as she is. His little theater is probably wasted on her.

I do think it’s interesting how much Mraize grasps of the dynamic between Shallan’s multiple personas. Has she told him any of it, or is everything from close observation and his elusive spy network? I’m disturbed by how he’s using that knowledge to manipulate her, tempting out different aspects to deal with them because the current aspect isn’t giving him what he wants.

The mole metaphor works for a lot more than spying. Humans being transplants to Roshar; Shallan’s vulnerability in the Ghostbloods; promises of hidden knowledge. Good grief there are conversations with layers, and then there is this. Mraize is so delicious in his threats and temptations!

I do note that Mraize didn’t realize that Veil had switched to Shallan, (at least he hasn’t yet… we’ll see what happens in the rest of the conversation). So she has at least a little bit of an edge still.

I believe Mraize when he says their immediate goal is securing Stormlight for treks through Shadesmar, but he is very frustratingly obfuscating what they will do when they have that supply line of investiture.

Huh. He is explaining a lot more than I thought he would, at this point. Let’s see what else he reveals.

I’m intrigued that the stormlight itself is bound by its connection to Greater Roshar. We knew from various WoB extant as of the last book that spren would have difficulty traveling away from the planetary system, and we saw that with the character in Secret History, but he was much more heavily tied to the world he came from. I would have thought that the light itself would be more portable, to use Mraize’s term.

He’s already solved the problem? 

What the heck!? That span-reed message was from Sja-anat? How did she send it? What was the chain of messengers that led to that communication? I am baffled.

Given Mraize’s insistence on finding a (corrupted) spren to bond with, I presume his solution is to have an individual with attunement to multiple types of investiture manually convert one flavor to another (e.g. Stormlight to Voidlight to Breath), and being the person with that ability would allow him to personally control the traffic. 

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He had Voidlight before the Everstorm—he carried it from Braize, the place you call Damnation. He was testing the movement of Light between worlds. And one close to him might have answers. 

Gavilar physically went to Braize in order to carry it back? When did he possibly find the time to do that? It must have been while Dalinar was fighting in Herdaz, I guess? 

How did Gavilar get the clues and the ideas needed to make that trek? We think he was getting the same visions that Dalinar did and just interpreted them differently, and we know that at some point the Heralds were working with him, but he was misguided enough (exhibit A: Sons of Honor) that he can’t have actually been trusting the Heralds much.

Also, who was close to him that is still around and isn’t a herald? It’s not Vargo, is it? Because he’s capitulated by this point and isn’t pursuing anything with respect to cornering the stormlight economy, so far as I can tell.

Ah, Restares. Looks like we will get some Shallan backstory for sure. Helaran drama and memories inbound!

The fortress Lasting Integrity--I guess now we know what the tower in the cover art is! At least it’s home to the honorspren, not the highspren. That would be a lot more awkward. I’m not sure why the honorspren are harboring someone who founded the movement to bring back Odium and the Unmade, though. Seems like a failure in judgement to me.

Good job, Mraize. “This is your last job. Succeed, and I give you everything!” That’s not a red flag at all. 

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Surely even Jasnah couldn’t be too angry with Shallan.

Wow, that may be the biggest lie Shallan has told herself yet. The only reason Pattern didn’t break in with “Mmmm, delicious lies” is because she didn’t actually say it out loud.