recreatable | open post.

Write to your mother? he doesn't yet ask. That's a conversation best had later, he thinks. Perhaps when they're lying in the dark and trying to fall asleep. Discussions feel easier to have when they can't see each other.

So, instead, he just says, "All right," and gets up to root through their things for a second time today. He pulls the end table over in front of the divan, setting her up with the spanreed, paper, and yes, her glass of water, lest she's forgotten.

"...Don't let me catch you on the floor when I get back," he says, expression pointed, before he makes his way out the door.

Tracking down the right person to speak to at the harbor ends up taking longer than he'd expected, but he doesn't want to return to Jochi's without answers. It's dark when he finally gets back, Jochi having already come up from downstairs—with a couple savory pastries in his hand—and conversed with Jasnah over supper before retiring to his own quarters.

"I spoke to the harbormaster," he calls as he opens the door, fatigued from having to chase down the aforementioned harbormaster but mood improved nonetheless; a little distance from Jasnah has done him good. Stupid little feelings seem less important from afar.

"Anything back from the spanreed?"

In his absence, the end table becomes a makeshift command center. At first, Jasnah reads. Then she writes, including a short, clinical note where she commits to paper what she can recall of the assassin: Short. Broad-shouldered. Right-handed. Moved confidently in close quarters. Smelled faintly of tar and citrus oil—dockside. No visible glyphs. Darkeyed. Below it, underlined once: Do not trust appearances. Lightweavers exist.

Just before sunset, Jochi returns upstairs. They talk. She tells him — selectively — about having interviewed a Herald. Two, in fact. He asks whether Taln truly resembles his statues, and she does not have the will to explain how centuries of torture erode a man without touching his flesh.

Also, she explains the risk of staying: not only what it means if the attack wasn't isolated, but what consequences Jochi himself might face for sheltering her. Even social ones matter. Jochi agrees it's unwise to linger but insists, stubbornly, that hospitality is the one small contribution he can make against Odium. The explanation of what Odium is takes the better part of an hour.

They agree on one thing: she cannot move without alerting her mother. One way or another. Together, the two scholars devise a solution. A relay station in Tashikk — where both maintain accounts — can serve as a middlewoman. A spanreed there can receive a message and retransmit it onward, provided one accepts that the intermediary will read it. It's inelegant, hardly private, but effective. They route a warning to Navani, urging her to check Jasnah's private spanreeds.

At no point in the evening does Jasnah mention Ivory. She does not glance toward the drawer where the spren is hidden, wrapped and protected. Trust, to Jasnah, has compartments. Even old colleagues are not guaranteed full access.

Eventually, Jochi retires. Jasnah reads a little longer. Then fatigue overtakes her vigilance, and she drifts off propped against the arm of the divan, head tilted back, knuckles tucked beneath her jaw.

So — enter Verso, stage left.

The end table is still pulled close, exactly as he left it. The water glass is empty — perhaps refilled more than once. One pastry remains on the plate, torn open and forgotten. The apartment is dim but not dark, pale stormlight glowing softly from trapped spheres.

Oh, and the spanreed. It rests upright in its stand, paper neatly aligned beneath the tip. The gemstone cap blinks once. Then again. Soft. Patient. A message is waiting — it only needs someone to twist the mechanism to let it be written.

Ah.

Verso quiets the moment he sees her, leaning down to remove his boots to soften his steps, leaving them lined up by the door. He pads further in after, socks on the wooden floor he's come to be know intimately over the past week. His first course of action is to retrieve a blanket and lay it atop Jasnah as she sleeps. His next is to perch on the very edge of the divan, light and careful so as not to stir her, and investigate the blinking spanreed.

It might not be his place to receive a message on her behalf. But he is part of this, too, an extension of her will in many ways, and— sue him, but he's curious what a message from her mother might be like. After casting a silent glance her way, he twists the cap.

Under another circumstance, under another auspice, Jasnah would have woken at the faint shift of air around her makeshift bed, at the soft scrape of movement or the subtle change in presence. Tonight, she doesn't. The day has hollowed her out. Even as the blanket is settled over her shoulders, she lies unmoving, mouth parted just enough for a quiet, unguarded sound to escape her. Barely more than breath. Unmistakably a snore.

For once, the world turns without her watching it. And the spanreed begins to move. Letters form. Then sentences. The strokes are neat, controlled — too controlled, the way handwriting becomes when one is gripping the pen a little too tightly.

Jasnah—

The tower remains secure. Your absence was noticed immediately when you didn't return to Urithiru as expected. I am telling myself, repeatedly, that you are exercising your usual judgment.

Even so, Jasnah, you might consider the strain placed on others when you vanish without explanation. Could you not have taken Colot, or some other member of the Cobalt Guard? By the Almighty, I had not anticipated being put through this again so soon.

We dispatched members of the Unseen Court to Kharbranth within a day of your absence. Looking for you or for the foreign man last seen in your company. I understand now why your trail went cold. And when you return the Coalition will insist on a conversation about your choice to withhold knowledge of an off-worlder from all of us.

—N. (Dalinar is pacing nearby and wishes me to add that he is not cross, merely concerned. I wish I could say the same.)

It's quite... cold. Nothing like the sort of letters Maman used to write him after he'd moved out to attend the Conservatory. My darling boy, she'd address him. Lumière de ma vie. Mon trésor. If he'd gone missing after an outing, she would have been even more effusive. She'd always been afraid of losing him, and ignorant fool that he was, he'd never understood why.

Another piece of Jasnah's puzzle clicks into place. If even her mother, the person who's supposed to be the most warm and affectionate to her, is like this with her, then maybe that explains a little bit of her withholding nature.

He cringes a bit at the mention of a 'foreign man', concerned for the very first time that he might somehow be in trouble for this. She'd disappeared in his company, after all. It would be understandable to question his motives. —Ugh. Something to ruminate on and face at a later date. Verso gives Jasnah one last lingering glance before he gets up off the divan and settles down onto his pillow on the floor, leaving the message for her to find when she wakes.

For the first time in a while, she wakes with a start. A sharp inhale, a lurch upward like being shoved off some internal, spiritual ledge. Mishim, the third moon, still hangs in the sky, visible through the corner of a window she never meant to leave unshuttered before bed. Damnation. She forgot to have Jochi close it. For a moment she tangles with the blanket she doesn't remember pulling over herself, rubs at one eye as she yawns, disoriented and faintly irritated, only to realize...

It's still night. All the dozing and forced rest and exhaustion have thoroughly scrambled even the threadbare sleep cycle she'd possessed to begin with. She lets the dim room swim back into focus and...?. Verso is on the floor. Asleep? Awake? Impossible to tell. She sits excruciatingly still, listening for any pattern in his breathing, any telltale shift. Nothing she can confidently identify.

Well. Just in case. Jasnah proceeds slowly, silently, as he eases herself upright, and — oh.

Not only is the spanreed is blinking, but there's already a message recorded. Her frown is immediate, comprehension arriving all at once: he must have returned, set the pen to write, and now there's a second message queued behind it.

Leaning forward, she exhales thinly and resets the fabrial. And with a muted scratch, the pen writes: Reaching out via Tashikk and then not even replying? Really, Jasnah. Be decent and give us some sign of life.

She mutters a curse under her breath (storms!) but still doesn't rush to answer. Instead, she turns the pen carefully to standby and reaches for a mundane, non-fabrial pen and scrap paper. She scratches out a line. Rewrites it. Crosses out half a sentence, stares at the remainder like it's personally offended her. Tells herself this care is practical — that any message might be read aloud in a council chamber and that precision matters. All true. None of it quite sufficient to explain how long she lingers over each word.

If Verso is asleep (or awake and wisely choosing not to involve himself) she'll eventually settle on a reply and send it. But otherwise, she's interruptible.

Yeah, he's awake. Verso never sleeps particularly deeply, but most nights spent in Jasnah's company have been even more sleepless than usual—he has things to worry about, plans to make, the sensation of her thumb grazing his ear to play over and over in his head.

When he hears her stir, he does nothing. Doesn't even move. Just lies there, facing away from her, eyes closed. He can hear the scratch of the spanreed—another message?—and then Jasnah's muttered storms, remarkably quiet but still easily decipherable in the silence of night. A moment later, and he hears the flutter of paper, the scratch of writing again.

"And you were doing so well at besting your insomnia," he mutters (hypocritically).

She scratches out another line. It had sounded almost too reassuring. Too eager to soothe bruised feelings in a way that felt profoundly unlike herself. Storms, it's not as though she vanished on purpose. Last time, she would have traded a great deal to return sooner or to find any way to communicate across the realms. That Navani still holds it against her...well. It stings. Less for the fact of it than for the irrationality. For the refusal to account for circumstance.

Anyway. Her chin lifts at the sound of Verso's voice.

In the dim room she can't make him out clearly. He's just a shape on the floor, a darker smudge where his head might be. No hope of meeting his eyes across the distance.

"When did you get back?" She asks calmly.

Oh, storm it. She snatches up the spanreed and writes something quick and brutally simple: I'm alive, mother. Stand by.

Then, lowering the pen, she adds aloud — almost as an afterthought, but not really: "...Any word about the Wandersail?"

"It won't be in port for another two weeks," Verso reports, and although he'd been willing to discuss whether waiting was a viable—perhaps even prudent—option, right now doesn't exactly seem the time. He turns, facing toward her now, although it hardly makes any difference. It's too dark to properly see her, his only image of what she's currently doing created through memory, echolocation, and supposition.

He can hear the sound of the spanreed making quick strokes on paper, so he makes an assumption. "You wrote back already?"

It's the middle of the night. Surely she could have waited for a more opportune time, no matter how impatient her mother's message had sounded.

Two weeks. Her groan carries, edged with disappointment and the grudging recognition that the worst option could indeed be the correct one. As if to compound her irritation, the spanreed begins blinking again. Her lip curls in dark.

"I decided to at least acknowledge the message," she replies, her tone flattening deliberately.

"I didn't want to speak for you," is his excuse for leaving Navani on read.

The gemstone blinks softly in the dark. He doesn't acknowledge it yet, waiting to see if she'll decide to take the message on her own. It is, after all, her mother.

"Kind of a harsh message."

"I appreciate that," she answers — taking the excuse at its face value, folding it up, and tucking it somewhere between her ribs.

Jasnah tells herself it's just as likely that Navani was sitting in a room of five-to-ten advisors, highprinces, other coalition monarchs visiting the tower — there's any number of reasons to cut as deeply but as coldly as she did. Still, it hardly seems appropriate. Not only is Jasnah not a child, she's a queen in her own right. Daughter is so very far down the list of vital, critical identities.

But she does not comment aloud on the harshness of the message.

"I haven't yet asked if they have Windrunners to spare. But if the ship isn't due back soon..." Jasnah trails off, briefly, before switching tracks. Choosing to be decisive. "Two weeks is too long."

"If you say so," is his only reply to that. He isn't necessarily opposed to two more weeks of waiting, but the message from her mother had sounded tetchy. Certainly, it's the kind of letter that would have sent him running home with his tail between his legs. At least, it would have in another world, in another time.

Besides, he's not inclined to argue against traveling via Windrunner.

Still, that's not the topic on his mind at the moment. He watches the light blink for a few more seconds. "You know, I'm a good listener." It feels a bit like taking a leap. Shooting his friend-shot. "If you ever wanted to talk about... family things."

The spanreed blink, blink, blinks. Four or five spheres, scattered on the table, cast their eerie too-blue light — and Jasnah tries to draw some of it with a breath, just in case. Nothing happens. Maybe tomorrow. She sinks back against the cushion, lost to the shadows.

"Family things," she repeats. "You mean my mother. Specifically."

Mm. This isn't going as well as he'd hoped.

Lightly: "Mother problems. Father problems. Third cousin twice removed problems. I've been known to lend a sympathetic ear about them all."

She reaches out in the dark, fitting the edge of her thumbnail against the desk corner. Working her nail into a groove, there, and lifting a splinter.

"She worries. And I suppose I've given her cause to."

Jasnah's nail makes a slight scraping sound against the wood. He can picture what she must be doing with startling clarity. Perhaps he's been spending too much time around her. Observing her, memorizing her.

"We've all done things to make our parents worry." He can recall staying out late, sneaking out of the house, doing the reckless things that young men who feel invincible do. "Is she always that curt with you?"

Older now and wiser, sanded down by years of careful introspection, Jasnah understands that the freeze began with her. Not Navani. Time has given her the clarity to see how resentment knots itself: how a child learns to blame one parent for the other's cruelty. Even so, it was never something she and her mother fully managed to untangle.

"Always? No, no," she waves the notion away in the dark. More often, Navani drifts toward a weary capitulation — like a woman at the end of her tether, still trying to learn how to function as Jasnah's mother, just as Jasnah never quite learned how to be her daughter.

Blink. Blink. Blink. The steady pulse of the spanreed confirms what she already suspects: Navani had been awake, waiting. Still is.

"She thought I was dead, once," Jasnah says quietly. "I don't believe they ever proceeded as far as funeral rites. I was trapped in the Cognitive Realm, after all. It's not as though they had a body to soulcast." She references a royal Alethi funeral custom, where the dead are turned into stone statues and stored in the Kholin crypts.

"It's...understandable," she concludes, measured as ever, working through her humanity aloud, "that she's impatient to hear from me."

Intimately acquainted with the depth of a mother's grief for their child, Verso feels suddenly and unexpectedly empathetic toward Jasnah's mother. Maybe he'd judged her too harshly, too quickly. Or maybe he'd judged her right the first time, and it's only his own familial projection changing his mind now. Either way, he frowns and says, "That must have devastated her."

He eases himself up to a sitting position, then scoots toward the blinking spanreed. One of them is going to have to receive the message eventually.

"Is that why you expected her to read your private correspondence?" Verso doesn't bother explaining that Jochi told him this; he should have figured it out on his own even before that. If Jochi's spanreed was only used to contact Jasnah, then the only way she could have ever expected her mother to see it would be if she were snooping around in her daughter's things. "Because she's worried?"

...Those first few days back had been so odd. Every time Jasnah and Navani had been in the same room together, it was as if they both knew they ought to say something, do something, hug maybe. But no. Both women had thrown themselves into work, cataloguing Urithiru libraries.

Less than a month later, Elhokar had died.

Jasnah hmms, audibly, as she considers his question. "Yes," she eventually answers. "She's done it before — it seemed a rational assumption that she would do it again. I suppose I should be pleased to learn I was wrong."

And that it had taken being approached from a different angle to nudge her towards her daughter's private quarters.

There's no part of Verso that's private, nothing that hadn't passed through someone else's eyes before it got to him. Even still, his mother never read his personal letters. Then again, maybe she just didn't feel the need to, knowing that her hands had molded every groove in his brain and vein in his heart.

He scoots closer still, near enough now that he can make out Jasnah's facial features when the spanreed light blinks. "Want to see what she has to say?"

She bites back a not especially. Mostly because it'd be a lie — she does dearly want to know what Navani's message says, even if she can already predict its general tone and contents. Storms, she wouldn't be surprised if she'd already ordered a pair of Windrunners to the city.

— And, actually, apprehension about that possibility alone prompts her to reach out and turn the spanreed to receive. She pulls an infused sphere near to the page, so she can read.

WE'LL WAIT — the malformed, messy letters are at first a horror to decipher. Her heart leaps into her chest, taking her turn to be worried about what would prompt Navani to...oh. An exasperated exhale, as she realizes Dalinar had taken over the pen. That exhale stutters into a shaky, awkward laugh.

"When I respond," she explains to Verso, resetting the pen, "I want to do so with something actionable. Something decided."

Verso peers over the edge of the end table like a toddler trying to see what the adults are working on. That script is unfamiliar and quite unsettling, but he turns his gaze to Jasnah and watches her laugh, so it can't be indicative of anything truly horrific. An... inside joke, maybe?

"Well, you know what they say," he says, obviously about to say something no one has ever said, "there's no better time for making decisions than in the middle of the night."

...And now he's right there. Scant light from spheres catch on his features, and she tilts herself a degree to the right so she can see him over the table edge. Jasnah doesn't provide an explanation for what he might see. She doesn't know the ideal words or the ideal order to put them in to explain why and how it is that her uncle runs interference between her and her mother.

"Two weeks is a long time to wait when we could have Windrunners here tomorrow," although she touches her side in a brief acknowledgement of the time she's already assured him she'll take to heal before they leave, whatever the manner. "Or, say, seven days."

It's a soft bargain.

"Your optimism is inspiring," he says, droll, "but I think seven days is probably more realistic." Flying will already be unpleasant enough for her without all the pain and bleeding.

A pause. "How's the healing going?" The stormlight healing, not her natural, biological process. She looks no better than she had when they found Ivory.

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