Summary:Words of Radiance/Chapter 72
I suspect that he is more a force than an individual now, despite your insistence to the contrary. That force is contained, and an equilibrium reached.
- Characters
- Plot Summary
- Ishakev 1173
Kaladin asks how Shallan has a shardblade and she replies that it is unimportant. He brushes against the blade and doesn't hear screams like he did previously in the dueling arena. He reluctantly accepts the blade and Shallan swears him to secrecy, then says she wants to get her satchel. Kaladin distracts the fiend, dodging around it and leading it away from Shallan. He uses the confined space of the chasm to advantage, and cuts the beast a couple of times, but then gets bitten in the leg as he tries to evade an attack. Shallan distracts the beast and he is able to retrieve the shardblade but then collapses from pain. He picks up a sphere and tries to drain its stormlight but only hears distant weeping. He sees an illusion of himself that distracts the beast momentarily before it vanishes in a puff of stormlight which he somehow thinks that he created. He decides he has to go for the beast's head and stabs at it as its jaws reach for him.
Shallan sees the beast fall on top of Kaladin, and notices some spren around the chasmfiend seeming to leave it. Kaladin's body protrudes from the creature's mouth and she tries to pull him out, and he says ow. They banter as she uses her blade to try to cut him free, and he explains that he stabbed it in the brain to kill it. Once free, Kal asks her to bind his leg for him which she does. They take a brief rest, and despair that the storm will get them anyway. Kaladin then realizes that Shallan could use the shardblade to cut out a cubbyhole above the waterline in the chasm for them to hide in from the storm and flood waters. She climbs up the dead fiend, then changes her blade to be knife-size and carves handholds in the chasm to climb above the waterline to carve a shelter out for them. They banter as Shallan cuts the rock, and it takes about an hour for her to finish. She uses a vine to help Kaladin climb up to the safe spot just before the floods reach them.