Words of Radiance

“Corpses with burned eyes. Bodies littered the floor like discarded bones at the dinner table.”

Shardblades sever a person’s soul from their body and in doing so, burn their eyes out. In this excerpt, in which Jasnah sees the devastation wrought by Szeth at Gavilar’s feast, she sees the destruction wrought by a Shardblade and compares the bodies to food scraps. This simile not only demonstrates the destructive power of the Shardblade but also evokes the horror of war, in which human beings are treated as mere meat.

“Think of a man who gets angry often. Think of how his friends and family might start referring to that anger as a beast, as a thing that possesses him, as something external to him. Humans personify. We speak of the wind as if it has a will of its own.”

Jasnah depicts spren as the manifestation of human ideas, using the example of how humans personify the natural and emotional world. She describes how anger can be personified as an external force that influences a person, rather than an internal emotion, demonstrating how spren manifest in the physical world. Not only do they appear as human feelings outside the body, but they also come to represent natural forces, giving such things as the wind an identity.

“Aladar, like most of the other highprinces, used Sadeas’s philosophy on bridge runs. Quick, brutal assaults that treated manpower as an expendable resource. It hadn’t always been this way. In the past, bridges had been carried by armored troops, but success bred imitation.”

The Alethi operate in a hierarchical society in which lighteyes exploit darkeyes and parshmen. The bridge crews are the greatest example of this skewed system, as highprinces like Aladar and Sadeas sacrifice enslaved, darkeyed men to distract their enemies just so their soldiers can