“I had suspected it was true. Your … situation is unique. Why, seeing into the Cognitive Realm—even a little—is an uncommon feature in a human! And turning food into Light. Why … if Mother is involved … perhaps this isn’t Stormlight you use at all. Hmm … You realize how special you are, Lift.”
“I didn’t want to be special.”
“Says the girl who was comparing herself so dramatically to a shadow earlier.”
“I just wanted what I asked for.”
“Which was?” Wyndle asked.
“Not important now.”
“I rather think it is.”
“I asked not to change,” Lift whispered, opening her eyes. “I said, when everything else is going wrong, I want to be the same. I want to stay me. Not become someone else.”
“Those are the exact words?” Wyndle asked.
“Best I can remember.”
“Hmm…” Wyndle said, snuggling down into his vines. “I believe that is too vague.”
“I wasn’t! I told her. Make me so I don’t grow up.”
“That is not what you said, mistress. And if I might be so bold—having spent a great deal of time around you—you are not an easy person to understand.”
“I asked not to change! So why am I changing?”
“You’re still you. Merely a bigger version.”
She squeezed her eyes shut again.
“Mistress,” Wyndle said. “Lift. Will you tell me why this bothers you so much? Everyone grows. Everyone changes.”
“But I’m … I’m her little girl.”
“Whose little girl?” he asked gently. “Your mother’s?”
Lift nodded. Stupid. It sounded stupid and she was stupid. Mother was dead. That was that.
Why hadn’t she said the correct words? Why hadn’t Cultivation just understood? Cultivation was supposed to be some sort of starvin’ god. It was her fault if a little girl came and begged for a promise, and the god deliberately misinterpreted and …
And Lift liked who she was. Who she had been. She wouldn’t be the same when she got older.
Crawl through dark tunnels? Sure. Fight against Fused? Eh, why not.
But feel your own body changing you into someone else, and not be able to stop it?
Every human being lived with a terrible terror, and they all ignored it. Their own bodies mutated, and elongated, and started bleeding, and became all wrong. Nobody talked about it? Nobody was scared of it? What was wrong with them?
The last time things felt right, Lift thought, I was with her. Before she got sick. And I was her little girl.
If she saw me now, she wouldn’t recognize me.
A few strange spren, like faces mocking her, faded in nearby. Wyndle slowly wrapped his vines around her. Gentle, like an embrace. Though others could barely feel the touch of their spren, Wyndle felt solid to her. He wasn’t warm. But … it was comforting when he rested his vine head on her shoulder. For once he didn’t ruin the sentiment by saying something dumb.
And then he perked up in a suspicious-like way.
Lift wiped her eyes. “What?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” Wyndle said. “Something just happened. In the tower. I feel … a darkness resting on me like a blanket. I think I felt the tower stir.”
“You said the tower’s spren was dead.”
“Dead spren can stir, Lift,” Wyndle said. “Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.”
Lift grabbed a large piece of flatbread and stuffed it in her mouth. Then she scurried through the tunnels, Wyndle following. She tried to use Stormlight to make her body slick to get through a particularly tight squeeze, but it didn’t work. She frowned, tried again, then finally forced herself through without it.
What on Roshar?
She came out above an empty room at the perimeter of the tower. She dropped from the opening in the ceiling, then trotted to the window. It was nearing evening, and the Everstorm had passed. Nothing looked wrong about the tower from her vantage; just an average day up in the mountains.
“Something’s wrong with my powers,” she whispered as Wyndle lowered himself from the top of the windowsill. “I couldn’t become awesome.”
“Look, down there.”
Some people had gathered on the Oathgate platform to the Shattered Plains. Several figures who seemed to have fallen to the ground. Blue uniforms.
“Windrunners,” she said, squinting. “Somethin’s wrong with them. Maybe they broke the Oathgates?”
“Maybe.”
Lift searched out across the snowy landscape, trying to listen. Listen. The Sleepless had told her, Always listen.
She heard screams. But not human ones.
“There,” she said, pointing. “What’s that?”
A bright red something was flying through the air in a desperate loop—being chased by something else that was green. Faster, more dangerous. The two collided in midair, and when the red something tore away, it dropped feathers in the sky.
Chickens. Flying chickens. She didn’t need to be told to instinctively understand that the green one was the predator, while the red one was prey. It gave a few beleaguered flaps toward the tower, seeming barely able to stay in the air.
“Come on,” Lift said, swinging out the window. “I need handholds.”
“Oh, mistress!” Wyndle said, moving onto the outside of the tower. He wove back and forth to make a ladder of vines clinging to the stone, which she climbed. “We are far too high up for this! What if I drop!”
“You’re a stormin’ spren. You’d be fine.”
“We don’t know that!” he said. “I could fall hundreds of feet!”
“Cowardspren.”
“Wisdomspren, if anything!” he said, but kept weaving as she scrambled upward.
The red chicken barely dodged another attack in the sky before darting in toward a balcony above and vanishing from her sight. The green chicken rounded, and she got a good look at it. Wicked talons, a sharp knifelike beak. She’d always thought chickens looked silly, but this one was different.
She reached the balcony and found the red one on the floor, bleeding from one wing, trying weakly to right itself. It was bigger than she’d thought, at least a foot tall, with a vivid red body and head. It had bright blue wings that went red at the ends, like fire. It chirped weakly as it saw her.
She perched on the rim of the balcony and turned to see the green one coming in. “Wyndle, I need you,” she said, holding her hand to the side to make him into a weapon. Not a sword. She hated those things. A rod she could swing at the nightmare chicken.
Nothing happened.
“I can’t become a weapon, mistress!” Wyndle cried. “I don’t know why! It’s something about the wrongness in the tower!”
Fine. She didn’t need a weapon anyway. The green chicken came swooping toward her, claws extended. It seemed to expect her to flinch. So she didn’t. She took the hit directly in the face and grabbed the chicken as it tried to rake her with its claws.
Then she bit it. Right on the wing.
Its startled scream seemed more confused than pained, but it tore out of her grip and fluttered away, crying as if it thought Lift wasn’t playing fair.