“Before I read,” Shallan said, “I need to understand something. You Soulcast my blood, didn’t you?”

“To remove the poison,” Jasnah said. “Yes. It acted extremely quickly; as I said, it must have been a very concentrated form of the powder. I had to Soulcast your blood several times as we got you to vomit. Your body continued to absorb the poison.”

“But you said you aren’t good with organics,” Shallan said. “You turned the strawberry jam into something inedible.”

“Blood isn’t the same,” Jasnah said, waving her hand. “It’s one of the Essences. You’ll learn this, should I actually decide to teach you Soulcasting. For now, know that the pure form of an Essence is quite easy to make; the eight kinds of blood are easier to create than water, for instance. Creating something as complex as strawberry jam, however—a mush made from a fruit I’d never before tasted or smelled—was well beyond my abilities.”

“And the ardents,” Shallan said. “Those who Soulcast? Do they actually use fabrials, or is it all a hoax?”

“No, Soulcasting fabrials are real. Quite real. So far as I know, everyone else who does what I—what we—can do uses a fabrial to accomplish it.”

“What of the creatures with the symbol heads?” Shallan asked. She flipped through her sketches, then held up an image of them. “Do you see them too? How are they related?”

Jasnah frowned, taking the image. “You see beings like this? In Shadesmar?”

“They appear in my drawings,” Shallan said. “They’re around me, Jasnah. You don’t see them? Am I—”

Jasnah held up a hand. “These are a type of spren, Shallan. They are related to what you do.” She tapped the desk softly. “Two orders of the Knights Radiant possessed inherent Soulcasting ability; it was based on their powers that the original fabrials were designed, I believe. I had assumed that you… But no, that obviously wouldn’t make sense. I see now.”

“What?”

“I will explain as I train you,” Jasnah said, handing back the sheet. “You will need a greater foundation before you can grasp it. Suffice it to say that each Radiant’s abilities were tied to the spren.”

“Wait, Radiants? But—”

“I will explain,” Jasnah said. “But first, we must speak of the Voidbringers.”

Shallan nodded. “You think they’ll return, don’t you?”

Jasnah studied her. “What makes you say that?”

“The legends say the Voidbringers came a hundred times to try to destroy mankind,” Shallan continued. “I… read some of your notes.”

“You what?”

“I was looking for information on Soulcasting,” Shallan confessed.

Jasnah sighed. “Well, I suppose it is the least of your crimes.”

“I can’t understand,” Shallan said. “Why are you bothering with these stories of myths and shadows? Other scholars—scholars I know you respect—consider the Voidbringers to be a fabrication. Yet you chase stories from rural farmers and write them down in your notebook. Why, Jasnah? Why do you have faith in this when you reject things that are so much more plausible?”

Jasnah looked over her sheets of paper. “Do you know the real difference between me and a believer, Shallan?”

Shallan shook her head.

“It strikes me that religion—in its essence—seeks to take natural events and ascribe supernatural causes to them. I, however, seek to take supernatural events and find the natural meanings behind them. Perhaps that is the final dividing line between science and religion. Opposite sides of a card.”

“So… you think…”

“The Voidbringers had a natural, real-world correlate,” Jasnah said firmly. “I’m certain of it. Something caused the legends.”

“What was it?”

Jasnah handed Shallan a page of notes. “These are the best I’ve been able to find. Read them. Tell me what you think.”

Shallan scanned the page. Some of the quotes—or at least the concepts—were familiar to her from what she’d read already.

Suddenly dangerous. Like a calm day that became a tempest.

“They were real,” Jasnah repeated.

Beings of ash and fire.

“We fought with them,” Jasnah said. “We fought so often that men began to speak of the creatures in metaphor. A hundred battles—ten tenfolds…”

Flame and char. Skin so terrible. Eyes like pits of blackness. Music when they kill.

“We defeated them…” Jasnah said.

Shallan felt a chill.

“…but the legends lie about one thing,” Jasnah continued. “They claim we chased the Voidbringers off the face of Roshar or destroyed them. But that’s not how humans work. We don’t throw away something we can use.”

Shallan rose, walking to the edge of the balcony, looking out at the lift, which was slowly being lowered by its two porters.

Parshmen. With skin of black and red.

Ash and fire.

“Stormfather…” Shallan whispered, horrified.

“We didn’t destroy the Voidbringers,” Jasnah said from behind, her voice haunted. “We enslaved them.”