Writing Roshar: Week Two

[Clarity-Art she/her]

Hello, Radiants! Week Two of the Writing Roshar prompts over on r/stormlightarchive has come and gone, so here's my second shot at the prompt. This one doesn't have any spoilers for The Stormlight Archive, so I'll be copy and pasting it down below. Again, it also requires some heavy editing, but at least I remembered to include the spren this time. Enjoy.

 

Prompt: [No spoilers] As a woman with one dark and one light eye, you've always had an. . .  interesting life. As you lay on your deathbed, you begin to reminisce about your life.

 

I selected the no-spoilers prompt this time. Content warning for mentions of illness, blacking out, body horror due to spren, and verbal abuse.

 

Benla had always thought she’d go to the Tranquiline Halls after a fight, but not like this. 

The blood sickness had weakened her body to the brink of death, so she spent most of her days in her bed, letting her servants take care of her townhouse during the day. Her fellow thieves hadn’t come to visit that day, but she didn’t mind. As the leader of the thieving crew, she was in charge of organizing their newest marks, not helping them run day-to-day operations. Even if she wanted to help them, she was far too frail these days to think about stealing, thievery, and an active life of crime. 

With a wince, Benla looked out the window, down at the cityscape below. Farcoast wasn’t an unpleasant town to die in, and besides, she’d spent her entire life in the Vamah princedom. She was born here and she could easily die here. As a halfeye—her left eye was light violet, her right eye was brown—she hadn’t expected to live this long, or even die from a pathetic sickness. Most halfeyes were murdered before they reached adulthood, beaten to death by someone in the streets or sent away to starve by their own families. And if it wasn’t her halfeyes, it would’ve been her dark skin that drew suspicion; her father was part Makabaki, and despite his sheltered position as a lighteyes, there would’ve been someone who judged her for it. But she’d done well for herself as the leader of the crew. After all, when she’d first joined up with a merry band of thieves, it’d been one of the few avenues open to someone of her status. 

She reminisced about when she first became a part of the crew. It was right after the assassination of King Gavilar. Her father had enlisted as a soldier in Highprince Vamah’s army. He’d argued with her mother about it for ages, and at the height of their bickering, Benla had slipped out of the house. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she’d run into a former schoolmate, a woman named Melyan. One conversation led to another, and Benla had told Melyan that she didn’t have many friends, much less anyone who was willing to employ her. So Melyan took her to a thieving den, where she introduced her to the crew. There was Sahi, a brunette from Jah Keved who worked as their resident intelligence gatherer. There was Kteth, a Thaylen trader with a sensitive heart but a knack for haggling. And then—most importantly—Natalah, a darkeyed Alethi lady from the second nahn. Back then, she’d simply been Natalah, or Nattie, or Nat, before earning the name of Natalah the Silent.

Benla had never considered the life of a criminal before then. She was well aware that she occupied a precarious position in Alethi society: with a lighteyed father from the eighth dahn and a darkeyed mother from the third nahn, her opportunities in both echelons of society were limited. Her darkeyed and lighteyed relatives were wont to associate with her. People from all nahns and dahns balked at the idea of letting her work in polite society. It was no surprise that after Natalah welcomed her into the crew, she dove headfirst into thievery and never looked back.

 

She coughed slightly. Her chest had begun to throb. The blood sickness, according to her physician, affected her circulatory and cardiac functions. Just last week, she’d had near-fatal heart spasms. If Sahi and Melyan hadn’t been at the townhouse, helping Benla count the loot from their latest theft, she would’ve died. All it would take was another spasm, and she’d be nothing more than food for a greatshell. Almighty, she wished that Natalah was still here. Nat had been the closest thing the crew had to a medic, and although she never finished her training to become a licensed apothecary, she knew plenty about anatomy, physiology, and medicine. She’d be able to help Benla with her blood sickness.

But that was in the past, and she forced herself to keep reminiscing, to keep remembering, to keep recalling her history with the crew.

For five years, they worked together, starting with small thefts and working their way up. She befriended everyone in the crew, but most of all, she sought to earn Natalah’s respect. Natalah was a darkeye of the second nahn, and in Alethi society, she had a higher position than Kteth, Sahi, and Melyan. Benla, who was of the ninth dahn, was the only one in the crew who outranked Natalah. They treated her as their leader for the longest time, until one day, Benla decided that things needed to change. 

Her father perished at war, cut down by Parshendi as he was trying to cross a bridge over a chasm. The soldiers under Highprince Vamah were unable to recover his body. While grieving, Benla’s mother eventually moved back home to Revolar, where she now lived with her sisters and brothers. She’d wanted Benla to make the move with her, but Benla had been so single-minded, so short-sighted back then. Her desire to make the lighteyes pay for his death drove her to seize control of the crew’s operations. Without consulting Natalah, she organized hits on countless lighteyed businesses, mercantiles, and estates, plundering their properties down to the last crem-covered brick. When Natalah’s back was turned, she took Kteth, or Sahi, or even Melyan with her, as an extra pair of eyes and hands to help her accomplish the thefts.

It was a profitable project, yet not the most discerning one. The authorities in the Wistiow and Aladar princedoms caught wind of their trail, and when Natalah heard the news, she’d confronted Benla. Even as the pain in her chest grew and grew, Benla drifted into her hazy memories, thinking about their confrontation.

They were back in their thieves’ den. Kteth was getting stagm from the market, but Melyan was there with Sahi, watching Benla take out her temper on Natalah. 

“You can’t do this anymore, Benla,” Natalah said. She adjusted her spectacles, which were beginning to slide down her nose. “I know you’re furious about what happened to your father, but he enlisted of his own free will. And the whole problem with Wistiow and Aladar—it’ll get us all in trouble. Do you want to languish in a prison for the rest of your life? Do you?”

“You don’t understand, you storming crem-brain!” shouted Benla. Natalah flinched back, and Benla pressed her advantage, advancing on her like a whitespine stalking its prey. “All your life, you’ve never had trouble with the lighteyes! Perfect Vorin girl from her perfect storming darkeyed family! Perfect thief with her ability to flawlessly forge art and writing! Perfect, perfect, perfect. And you’re second nahn, for the Almighty’s sake. Second nahn!”

“Parentage is irrelevant to this argument—” Natalah said, but Benla interrupted her with a slap across the face. Natalah stuck out her elbow to catch herself as she fell. Her spectacles clattered to the ground. One of the lenses shattered. 

“Get out,” said Benla. “You’re not in charge and you’ve never been willing to take charge. Decent thief, for sure, but a poor excuse of a person. Are you going to open your mouth and challenge me, or will you shut up and skulk away, Natalah the Silent? Like you always do, you quiet whore?”

Natalah lay on the ground. Then she put her broken spectacles back on and stood up. With nothing but a single glance at Benla, Melyan, and Sahi, she left the den. She only carried the clothes on her back. Benla held her breath and counted to ten, and when Natalah didn’t come back, she breathed a deep sigh of contentment. 

“Back to work,” she said to Melyan. “When Kteth comes back, start preparing supper. For now, we need to organize another hit at Highlord Paladar’s summer home.”

Melyan gazed numbly at Benla, but after a moment, she gulped and nodded. She darted over to the map of the Vamah princedom that Benla had pinned against the wall. They’d marked each and every one of their lighteyed targets with a dot of colored treb paste, with a circle drawn around the territory of Highlord Paladar. Sahi followed her over, deliberately avoiding Benla’s gaze. 

The aftermath was a blur, but Benla picked through the few moments she could remember. The frown at Melyan’s mouth when she was consulting the map, the hurt in Kteth’s eyes when she came home from the market to find Natalah missing, the blankness on Sahi’s face when she studied her records on Paladar—Benla could tell that something unspeakable had happened between them all. And she had been the one to cause the rift.

As she emerged from the maze of memories inside her head, she gasped, with tears streaming from her eyes. A gigantic crop of angerspren, no doubt fueled by her feelings from that past confrontation, bubbled around her feet. They emerged from her blankets like a massive pool of blood. The sudden, sharp pain in her chest had now spread throughout her torso, stabbing at her insides like a thousand tiny Shardblades. A blood sickness spasm. She tried to sit up so she could see the angerspren better, but her body went stiff and she sprawled against her own pillows. 

That was when the painspren began to swarm her. Tiny orange hands swarmed her body, crawling up from her carpet or pushing through the pool of angerspren. Benla tried to scream, but the painspren kept coming, latching onto her body with their sinewy fingers. Darkness crept at the edges of her vision as she struggled to breathe. It was like a scene ripped straight from someone’s nightmares: dying slowly and painfully, all alone except for a bunch of irritating, storming spren. 

The door to her room banged open. Her stewards were standing in her room, accompanied by Sahi, Melyan, and Kteth. Benla knew nothing about how, why, when, and where they had arrived, but none of that mattered, now that she was on the threshold of death. Though her vision was fast deteriorating into a mass of shadowy blobs, she opened her mouth, doing her best to call for help. Faintly, she heard Melyan shouting at Kteth and Sahi, telling them to send the servants for a physician. 

It was the last thing Benla remembered before she blacked out.