recreatable | open post.

Perhaps it matters less that Verso fully understands the nuances of Investiture, and more that Jasnah feels at ease just enough to speak freely around him. He's become a place to set things down. To store and to vault the grander, less rigorously edited theses that orbit her thoughts on the topic.

"The Queen's Wit. Your predecessor," Jasnah confirms his hiring with a single, economical word, "had access to at least three Invested Arts. Likely four — though I was never able to confirm the fourth." A faint shrug. "Regardless, most of what I know about Investiture beyond Roshar came from him. Each Invested Art is handled differently, and produces different outcomes. Like different instruments."

She returns to the analogy she used moments before, clearly pleased with it. Invested Arts as instruments. It has a satisfying precision. When she eventually commits a small explainer to paper, she suspects she'll use the analogy again. Refined by whatever she learns at Verso's side.

"Ah," he says, trying to remember all of what she's told him about the Wit before. He remembers that she'd explained about his— predecessor. (Okay, then.) From another world-planet-universe; he's still somewhat shaky on the understanding there. Everyone hated him, too, apparently. Clearly, he's very powerful, if he has access to such magics—maybe that's why.

"I see your aim. You find handsome"—literally no one said anything about 'handsome'—"men from other worlds, hire them as your jesters, and use us to fill your knowledge gaps."

Although this man from another world seems significantly less impressive than that man from another world. He can barely infuse his blade with elemental magics, much less use four different kinds of Investiture (again, whatever that is). But could the previous Wit do really, really good shadow puppets?

"I'm not sure I understand why he was hired, though." Or, more accurately, why he'd accept the job. Verso just doesn't have anything better to do. Someone that skilled, though, surely has other things on his plate. "He seems a bit... overqualified."

"Truthfully," Jasnah muses, "I've no idea why he was hired either. I didn't find him. I inherited him along with the throne."

The tone is cool, indifferent. As though the former employee under discussion scarcely matters at all. And why should he? He's no longer on Roshar. Or...she is mostly certain he's no longer on Roshar.

"His overqualifications weren't — still aren't — public knowledge. Not even privileged knowledge, really. I doubt my brother ever understood the sort of creature he kept in his court. But Elhokar found him amusing, so he stayed."

Now, she is convinced Hoid had a deeper agenda involving Roshar. Deeper even than his interest in keeping Odium trapped within the system. He'd clearly possessed a fondness for the planet, but never so much that he wouldn't burn it if higher, loftier goals demanded it. A line Jasnah could not bring herself to cross, despite her own philosophy.

"To everyone, myself included, he was little more than the nuisance one had to endure at the door before entering one of my brother's feasts. A slew of insults was often the price of admission."

Only later (after learning otherwise, after taking the throne) did she find more suitable uses for the man. Drafting a contract with a god, for one. Tapping into an inter-Cosmere intelligence network, for another.

Okay, he has to know. "Did he insult you?" Is there a man out there who roasted Jasnah Kholin and lived to tell the tale???

"Occasionally, yes. He would. When he was still the King's Wit."

Jasnah hadn't spent much time on the Shattered Plains during her brother's reign. And when she had been present, she rarely attended the royal feasts. Even so, Wit had always gone easier on his favourites. On her and Renarin. And later, on Shallan. On Kaladin. Jasnah had noticed.

But — perhaps most importantly — Wit's compliments had always bitten deeper than his insults. At least, for her. That’s why I'm so fond of you, he'd once told her. You are poised, you are clever, and you are always ready with a ploy; but when each of those fails you, Jasnah, you are — above all else — paranoid.

Jasnah thinks about what to say next. And how to say it. Like rolling a ball back and forth between her hands, testing how it might land.

"But then he became the Queen's Wit, instead."

He became her sword to draw. Ironic, given Wit's inability to physically harm another living creature. Storms, the man couldn't even eat meat without getting sick.

Edited 2025-12-29 20:55 (UTC)

There's something in her body language, in her tone, that makes Verso wonder if there's a dimension to this that he doesn't yet understand. The briefest of thoughtful pauses before she finishes her sentence, naming him the Queen's Wit instead. He knows it well; it's the same kind of pause he'd make before saying something nominally true that omitted important details.

But to believe Jasnah withholding or untruthful because of a familiar pause would be insane, so he doesn't.

"And it's wise workmanship not to insult your employer," he finishes for her, the only reading of that sentence that he can fully comprehend. "Smart fellow."

Precisely. She nods as though he's hit the nail so squarely on its head. And although she considers expounding — considers explaining how, unlike her brother, she was less enthusiastic about using the Wit for casual insults and instead favoured targeted, political spectacle. But it feels like a topic better reserved for their return. Regardless, she'll leave it to Verso to define how to fulfill the position's brief. Y'know, provided it doesn't reflect too poorly on her.

Jasnah is about to walk them straight past an alleyway at their slow, step-by-step pace when she pauses. Turns her head, eyeing the narrow passage.

"...It's this way, isn't it?" She asks with a jerk of her head toward a storefront whose louvers are angled shut, paint long since peeled away. Uncared for between storms. "I remember those shutters."

It's odd the details that stick with you when you're bleeding out.

Wayfinding happens to be one of Verso's strong suits—a skill borne of necessity out on the Continent; even the gestrals' Ancient Sanctuary in which he made his home had purposeful twists and turns so as to confuse any wandering Nevrons—but he allows Jasnah to lead them. It's her companion they're looking for, so it should probably be her who decides where they do it. They have some sort of spiritual link, or at least they did, and he hopes it'll guide her to where they need to go.

He does, however, take a pause before they head down the alleyway, the very tips of his fingers resting lightly on her arm.

"Hey. Are you going to be okay?"

It had no doubt been a traumatic experience. Being stabbed, bleeding out, being unable to heal herself. The violent separation from Ivory. Anyone might feel some trepidation at returning to the scene of the crime so quickly.

She pauses. Is she going to be all right?

Her first instinct, the one she trusts by default, is to pull a face. To roll her eyes. Of course she will be. She is made of sterner material than the sort to fracture under a little wayward trauma, isn't she?

— And yet. Why has she avoided Shadesmar since being trapped there? Why does she loathe her own bed? Why does she not miss the stately corridors of Kholinar Palace, the very ones she once walked only to find her father dead at their end?

Jasnah closes her bare hand over his and gives a firm, rallying squeeze. Rallying herself, really. Because his question lands more gently than she expects. Comforting. As if few people ever bother to ask her something so plainly human. Are you going to be okay.

"Yes," she says. A promise, measured and deliberate. If nothing else, she trusts her capacity to compartmentalize. "I'll be fine."

And if she isn't? She squeezes his fingers once more, brief but grounding. She's not alone.

...And that is when something flickers at the edge of her vision.

Not light, exactly. More like a pattern out of place. An impression sliding where it should not. A flattened whorl, half-thought, half-shadow, skittering across the brick as if the wall itself has momentarily forgotten how to behave.

Jasnah startles hard enough to draw breath through her teeth. Instinct overrides pain, caution, dignity. Her fingers clamp around Verso's hand and she moves, yanking him with her into the alley despite the protest flaring in her side.

"Ivory?" she breathes, already tracking the disturbance, eyes sharp and unblinking.

"Hey— hey—" he protests as Jasnah starts to move. Too quick, too impulsive. In his mind's eye, he can practically see the wound reopening and begin gushing again, a perfect repeat of the week prior. Same setting, same wound.

It's unlike him to be commanding, especially when it comes to Jasnah, but there are times when one has to put their foot down. "Stop," he says, squeezing her hand and planting his feet, anchoring her to him. "Unless you want to bleed out in this alley for a second time."

Sorry, Ivory, but he has priorities.

"Take it slow." He isn't against following whatever it is that she thinks she sees, but he is against her falling apart to do it. "If he's still here, he isn't going anywhere."

For a heartbeat she resists him.

Her grip stays tight, tendons standing out in her wrist, gaze locked past him on a faded barrel where the pattern she witnessed earlier clings, patient and infuriatingly present. There is a sharp, brittle disappointment that she does not bother to soften.

"I know," she says, clipped. Controlled. Frustration bleeds through anyway. "Storms alight, I know."

Her breath is shallow now, anger and pain tangling together under her ribs. She hates this — hates that her body is now the limiting factor, hates that she can see a thread and not be allowed to pull it. Hates that he is right. The moment stretches. Then she exhales, long and sharp, and the tension drains from her fingers.

She yields — not by stepping away, but by stepping back. Back towards him, her shoulder finding his shoulder with the same unconscious trust as when they first left the bakery. The rebounding motion costs her; there's a quiet hitch of breath, a flash of white pain she locks down with practiced efficiency.

"Slow," she repeats, not arguing now. Just conceding. Her eyes never leave the barrel.

The pattern sits there, flattened and coy. The spren isn't Ivory but the other possibilities are enough to make her pulse thrum. It's like a lure. Like a hypothesis begging to be tested. She doesn't draw Verso's attention to the spren, near-camoflauged as it is. Explaining would not make him relent.

Instead, she tightens her grip on his hand again. Not to pull him forward this time, but to steady herself instead.

"A moment," she murmurs. "Then we move."

Slowly, together.

Verso expects pushback. Perhaps he even welcomes it. Pushback means that she feels well enough to argue. Her capitulation comes as a bit of a surprise; she must know that, rationally, he's right. She'll be no good to Ivory if she's half-dead. It's a pity that Verso doesn't have access to the healing abilities some in Lumière are skilled with, or he'd be happy to let her march forward without a care.

Unfortunately, he has no such skill, so all he can do is allow her to squeeze his hand to gain her balance. It's, ah, a little tight. He grits his teeth and endures it without complaint.

"All right," he says, "when you're ready."

His eyes drift in the direction of her gaze, but he doesn't make out anything. "Did you see him?"

Ordinarily, she wouldn't lie. Not about this.

There is no reputation to protect in admitting that instead of Ivory's oil sheen and precise geometry, her attention is caught by something else entirely. Something curved. Recursive. Beautiful in a way that makes her pulse misbehave, skittering half into panic at how fundamentally wrong it appears. A cryptic, if she's not mistaken. And there are half a dozen plausible reasons another Radiant spren might be here. None of them inherently dangerous but none of them hers to disclose.

She risks a glance back at Verso, brief and assessing. Could he see it? Possibly. Possibly not. Jasnah has always been better than most at perceiving the Cognitive Realm, but even so, the pattern is faint and barely there. It's a flattened whorl hidden in the barrel's wood grain, easy to dismiss as a trick of light or an overactive imagination. The kind of thing you would never notice unless you already knew how to look and what it looked like.

Her gaze drops, checking the ground, the orientation of her shadow. It behaves as it should. Pointed in the proper direction. She draws in a steadying breath and asks herself, with sudden, unwelcome precision: Is this actually happening? Perhaps she should ask if he can see it too. Anchor the observation. Confirm that the cryptic isn't something she's conjured alone, a phantom born of blood loss and stress and absence and—

Not relevant, Jasnah. Focus.

"Maybe," she finally says, and it's a half-lie at most. "At any rate, I saw something."

Her voice stays level. Casual. Deliberately unremarkable. One step forward. Then another. Only as far as their linked hands allow, the space between them resolving into a measured tether. Two arm-lengths of permitted distance.

Without looking directly, she subtly adjusts her posture, letting her attention slide just enough to keep the barrel and the flattened, pulsing whorl clinging to it in the corner of her vision. Close enough to track. Not enough to betray exactly where her eyes want to go.

If it moves, she'll know.

Something. Verso thinks again of Jochi's quiet admittance of Jasnah's mother's fears. That she'd made up her correspondents in her head. Is the 'something' she's seeing real, or is it an image conjured by her own mind? He doesn't dare say anything that would suggest so.

Instead, he simply moves along with her, allowing her their wingspan of free rein while carefully stepping behind her. Perhaps presumptuous, given his lack of knowledge of spren, he suggests, "Maybe... you should call out to him." Maybe Ivory is alone and scared, and he just needs to hear her voice. "That's how I located Monoco under that building."

Jasnah glances back over her shoulder, across the short span between them and their joined hands. Her tongue presses to the back of her teeth, turbulent, every line of her posture broadcasting the effort it takes not to say don't be an idiot — particularly when the idiot in question has no real framework for spren at all.

But she reins it in. She has been operating on an assumption: whatever happened to Ivory, it happened in the Cognitive Realm, across a boundary her thoughts and voice couldn't reach once she lost access to stormlight. That assumption has served her well enough so far. But it's still an assumption. And her frustration, however well-informed, is a poor substitute for data.

So, instead of cursing him out, she gives Verso a grudging nod.

"—Ivory?" she calls. The name comes out stiff, awkward. The alley answers with nothing but city-noise. Footsteps somewhere distant, the creak of ship-masts, canvas snapping lazily in the breeze. No voice. No familiar, precise presence brushing against her mind.

But in the corner of her vision, as if answering a question, the cryptic peels itself off the barrel. Not all at once. It rolls, flattening and unfolding as it slips down onto the cobblestones, a shadowy seethe rippling over stone. Responding, she thinks. To Ivory's name.

Her stomach tightens. Why? Ivory loves to warn her about cryptics. They were trouble. They loved lies. They fed on them. Speak one untrue word at a gathering and seven will cluster around you, humming until your ears ring. Even Design — Hoid's spren — had barely been tolerated by Ivory. And Design, in turn, had barely tolerated him.

A cold, sudden panic cinches beneath her ribs. Jasnah stops dead in her tracks. Is this Design? Would that make this day better or catastrophically worse? The thought of the former Queen's Wit reappearing here, of all places, after vanishing so neatly from her life, is almost laughable. Almost.

"Ivory," she tries again. Louder. This time, more command than question. And the little cryptic responds, rolling deeper into the alley.

She starts forward once more, her grip on Verso steadying even as her attention locks onto the flicker-trick of light skating ahead on the ground. Something only she can see. Something she is now unmistakably following.

And without turning back, she adds, almost idly, as if the words have only just occurred to her. Mild, measured, maybe-praise: "You might be onto something."

Jasnah gives him such a look that he expects to be on the receiving end of a lashing from her razor-sharp tongue. His knowledge of spren—and most everything in this world—is lacking compared to hers, and he braces himself for being told just that, and to stay silent unless he has an educated theory to share.

It doesn't happen, though, and in fact she gives him a nod of acknowledgement before, surprisingly, giving his idea a try. He's not certain it will work. He doesn't even fully understand if Ivory is here physically or only as some spiritual remnant. It's a better alternative than standing around hoping he'll appear, though, so he figures it must be worth a shot, no matter how foolish it might feel.

She calls out, and through their linked hands he feels the thrum of anxiety underneath his thumb, at her pulse point. Something has happened, although he can't tell what. She takes a step forward and he follows, thinking in some distant place in the back of his mind how their responsive steps aren't that different from the waltz.

"Did he respond to you?"

Edited (department of redundancy department) 2025-12-31 20:36 (UTC)

...Really, she doesn't want to lie. Not outright. So she can't claim Ivory responded — an amateur fib, easily dismantled. Instead, she leans on a more reliable constant: Verso's ignorance in this world. It gives her room to maneuver, to speak carefully, contingently. Just in case the cryptic is Design. Or just in case it's something else entirely.

Jasnah slows, then comes to a soft halt. The alley splits ahead, and the cryptic has reconstituted itself along the edge of a window box. Hairline fractures in the wood, elegant and wrong. She avoids looking at it directly, partly because the undulating pattern churns her stomach, and partly because she is not prepared to hold Verso's hand through his first encounter with a cryptic.

"No," she exhales her confession. She lifts her chin, looks back at him, and catches his gaze. Anchoring it with deliberate, unwavering eye contact. "Look at me." Soft, but certain. And hoping he'll do as he's told. "There's a...strange spren. Ahead — keep looking at me. Don't try too hard to see it. If you do, it may spook. And it's my best lead."

At least that's entirely true. Although it's not a tactic she'd take if she'd known which of her secrets Jochi had already spilled.

Verso does as she says, eyes on her, but it seems unlikely he would have been able to catch sight of anything even if he didn't. He'd seen nothing similar in appearance to Ivory, although Ivory is so small that he imagines it would be challenging to even notice that a spren was there. It's perfectly possible, really, that Jasnah has a keener eye than him, but—

He thinks yet again of Jasnah's childhood predicament. He hopes, at least, that she has a keener eye than him, because he hasn't any idea how to respond if she's seeing things.

"I would allow the pure-hearted maiden to approach the unicorn herself"—because that's how she's making it sound, like the spren would just sense something about him and take off—"but she was stabbed recently."

Under less pressure, Jasnah would have asked what's a unicorn? Or she might have barked one of her short, breathy laughs and taken immediate issue with why this particular myth insists upon a maiden. There is cultural criticism to be had there. Volumes of it. But she lets the thought go cold on the plate. She's hungry for something else now.

So she says nothing. Which, for Jasnah, is its own concession. She doesn't rush. She turns left into a narrow, dead-end nook off the winding alley and follows the cryptic's pattern as it skates across brick and wood and shadow, slipping from surface to surface until, until, until.

There. Tucked beside old crates and sagging sackcloth, half-sheltered beneath a cart long stripped of its wheels, something catches the light. A flicker of metal. Wrong and bright.

Twice now on their adventure she's surged forward only to be rebounded back into Verso's care. The third time she refuses to be anchored. Jasnah shakes loose his hand and, palm braced against the wall to spare her wound, sinks carefully to her knees on the stone. A grunt escapes her. Then a hissed, thin request for help. Between them (but mostly Verso) the cart is shifted aside.

Leaning against the wall, no taller than the length of Jasnah's index finger, is Ivory. He is all angles and oil-sheen geometry, his impossible little body fixed in place through his tiny eye by a thin metal needle.

Aluminum? She wonders distantly. Or, damnation, silver?

There is no movement. No flutter of awareness. For want of a kinder metaphor, Ivory resembles a cremling mounted in an enthusiast's collection. Pinned. Displayed. Preserved in a parody of life. Jasnah wasn't the only one who was stabbed, it seems. The realization unfurls cold and precise in her gut. If the attack was coordinated, if the enemy possessed one of the disruptive metals capable of harming spren, then this was not merely an assassination attempt. It was a severing.

"—Give me your hand," she orders Verso, sharp and immediate.

The ground is too far for her to bend properly with her own wound screaming its protest, and she needs both hands free. She intends to lift Ivory — carefully, reverently — and set him into Verso's palm so she can examine the damage without jostling him further.

And in the corner of her eye, the cryptic dances across a pane of glass. Its lines ripple. Curl. Pulse. For just a heartbeat, she could almost swear its movements are triumphant.

He's a little sad to have his hand batted away. There's a lack of warmth there where her palm used to be, and his fingers twitch a little involuntarily. He doesn't allow himself to make anything of it. To her, that was nothing more intimate than using a crutch.

The tone of her command brooks no argument, no questioning. Neither does the sight of tiny Ivory run through with a needle. He cups his palms out in front of him, ready to receive what appears to be an injured spren. Careful, gentle. Patient, as he'd said.

"Are spren—?" Immortal, he intends to say, although it seems too close to asking if Ivory is dead or dying to finish the thought. "I didn't realize that they could get injured like this."

He had imagined them to be like the mythical beings he's used to. Impossible to truly harm.

"Spren can be injured via three distinct mechanisms," she says, voice clipped and curt. Lecture-precise. She retreats into facts the way she has always done when panic claws too close to the surface. Leaning on objective truth the way she has, without quite admitting it, leaned on Verso.

"The first is irrelevant here. The second and third both involve the disruption of Investiture. All spren are composed of Investiture that's coalesced long enough to achieve sapience. They can't die," she answers the question he didn't quite ask but she anticipated regardless. "Not in the way we mean it. Death is...different for them."

Her words are firm. Measured. Unshakeable. Her hands are not. They tremble as she settles Ivory into Verso's waiting palms, the minute shiver transferring through her fingertips into the needle itself. The thin metal quivers when she brushes its head, vibrating like a struck wire. Ivory does not move. Should she pull the needle? Storms — what if antilight is involved? But no, she reasons, too fast and too desperately: if it were, this entire block of Thaylen City would have been obliterated in the resulting detonation.

—Has he been pinned here for a week? Damnation. The thought lands like a blow. Why did she stop Verso when he offered to search? Short-sighted. Proud. Self-absorbed.

"Aluminum blocks Investiture," she says, quieter now. "Silver disrupts it. I don't — we don't understand this well enough. It's a fledgling field. Storms, Wit only brought aluminum from off-world a year ago."

Stop prattling and do something. Jasnah draws in a breath so deep it tugs painfully at her wound. She tears her gaze away from Ivory and looks to Verso.

"I'm going to pull it," she says. But she doesn't yet. She hesitates, suspended in that awful, narrowing moment before action — waiting for something she would never ordinarily ask for. Agreement. Objection. Peer review.

It's irrational. His guess will not be better than hers; it will almost certainly be worse. Still. She wants something from him.

Ivory looks so small. He always does, but— it strikes Verso now just how tiny he really is. Fragile, with this needle piercing him. He grinds his teeth a little at the sight. It's... unpleasant. He looks away, toward Jasnah's face instead. It should be a better sight, but the look on it only makes his stomach sink more. She's afraid.

The moment after she speaks is spent silent. Of course it is. She won't want his opinion either way, and so he doesn't even think to have one. His eyes ping-pong from her face to Ivory's little body and then back again, and then—

"Oh."

She's waiting for approval, or encouragement, or any response at all. He swallows. If Jasnah doesn't understand this well enough, he doesn't understand it at all. Anxiety bubbles up at saying the wrong thing and making this worse, at making the fear in Jasnah's eyes grow stronger.

"I think that... he trusts you to do what you think is best."

Verso's words — halting, not quite an answer — land closer to that truth than he realizes. At its core, the Radiant bond is trust. And it hardly matters what he says. What matters is that he answers at all. That his attention steadies her wrist. Her arm. Her spine.

She pinches the needle between her fingers. Still unsure of the metal. Still unsure of the consequences. And then, holding her breath, she pulls. There's no blood. No sound from Ivory. Just the faint, obscene normalcy of it, like plucking a pin from a cushion. The needle drops, striking stone with a thin, bright ping.

"Ivory?" she whispers. Her hands — one gloved, one bare — slide to the backs of Verso's hands, holding him as he holds the spren. As if she's not yet ready to trust herself to take Ivory back alone.

Nothing happens. Then, something does.

A faint stream of stormlight leaks from her pocket, misting upward toward her mouth. She'd pocketed them out of habit, unwilling to wander far without spheres. The stormlight is just enough to dull the pain at her wound without actually healing it — like the Connection is restored, but not yes functioning properly.

Ivory remains still. No movement. No sign of recovery. But Jasnah can feel him again. That reedy-thin presence brushing the edge of her awareness.

Her shoulders sag. Her posture collapses inward with relief.

Verso holds his breath as the extraction occurs. It's an approximation of surgery, like the operations he and Clea would do on their toys as children. Replacing a worn-out button eye (Verso) or performing the world's first head transplant (Clea). Just like the toys, Ivory doesn't wince, doesn't respond at all. It's only by Jasnah's body language that he realizes they've had even a modicum of success at all; although he can't see it, she must be able to feel it somehow, through their bond.

"He would want you to hold him," he says, steadying her hands with one of his as he gently tips the palm holding Ivory, slipping him into her grasp. Selfishly, his fingers stay curled around her hand.

"Will he be all right?"

Protests bite at the back of her throat. For all the times Verso answers with I don't know, Jasnah loathes the taste of it in her own mouth. She resents the way hope flares like a false dawn anyway when she inventories the answers she wants to give instead.

Ivory settles into her palm. There is no sign of life. But then again, there never truly is with a spren. They do not breathe. They do not bleed. Ivory, she knows, is capable of remaining perfectly still when it suits him. Even so, this stillness is too complete.

She doesn't pull away when Verso's fingers curl around hers. Instead, her hand sinks into the support he offers, instinctive and unguarded. A platform resting on another platform.

"I'm not certain," she admits at last, carefully. "But I felt stormlight. Just a trace." Her thumb curls protectively around Ivory's angular form. "That suggests he isn't...lost."

She glances up at Verso then, searching his face. "Spren take time to reconstitute themselves. He may need hours. Days." A pause. Two convalescents, then. But at least with Ivory found, Jasnah feels more prepared to move on once she's stable enough to travel. Quieter: "Possibly longer, depending on what exactly was done."

Her gaze drops again, sharp and intent, scanning the stones until she spots the fallen needle. She leans, wincing faintly, and retrieves it with two fingers as if it might still bite.

"We're keeping this," she says, more firmly now. To him. To herself. "Whatever did this matters."

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