Chapter Text
12 years after the creation of Retribution
Clang!
Adolin Kholin grunted as he blocked the Heavenly One’s spear. The Fused flew away, hovering some ten feet above Adolin’s head. A retreat, barely. Adolin wanted to scream with frustration. The Fused was just barely out of reach but it might as well be on Braize for all Adolin could reach it.
As Adolin struggled to catch his breath, two more Heavenly Ones raced across the sky to join the one he had been fighting. To their left, he spotted a Magnified One running towards them.
“Three more, seriously? That seems excessive.”
Adolin’s lips twitched in the ghost of a smile at Maya’s wry voice.
“I guess that means they’re finally taking us seriously.”
“Took them long enough.”
A pause.
“Adolin…this is bad.”
“I know.”
He glanced about desperately for any reinforcements, but there were none. The remnants of Bridge Four fought near him, as always, but here on the Shattered Plains they were as grounded as Adolin and were barely surviving their own battles.
Leshwi and her rebel Heavenly Ones flew from fight to fight providing invaluable air support, but there just weren’t enough of them.
“It’s just us, then.”
“It’s not the first time we’ve fought one against four. We were fine then, and we’ll be fine now.”
Neither of them pointed out the obvious flaw in his reasoning. Yes, They had been in that arena alone against the four Shardbearers. Yes, they had held their own for a time. But they had most certainly not been fine. They hadn’t been fine until -
The Magnified One slammed into him, knocking him off his feet. Adolin dismissed Maya and slammed his armored fist into the Fused as hard as he could. It barely budged. He abandoned the attempts at attacks and dismissed his Plate leg while twisting. The sudden disappearance of the leg unbalanced the Fused and Adolin was able to scramble free.
He summoned back both Maya and his Plate leg, and in moments was back on his feet in a fighting stance.
He frantically looked for any sort of cover, anything to put his back to, but there was nothing but the barren expanse of stone.
You’re not cornered.
A memory, from another lifetime.
They’re scared of you.
He could do this. He had done this.
Do you see it in them?
They had sent four Fused against him, a single non-Radiant human.
Show them why.
Adolin surged forward, swinging Maya at the Magnified One. In the opening that gained him, he used his Plate to jump into the air high enough to attack one of the Heavenly Ones. The Fused was surprised enough that it didn’t block in time and Maya cut through its arm. The Fused screamed and the spear dropped from its dead hand.
Adolin grinned. Over a decade later, and this whitespine was still not -
One of the other Fused stabbed into the back of his good leg with its spear. It couldn’t reach him through the armor, but Adolin felt the greave crack. He turned around swinging wildly, but the Fused had already flown up and out of reach.
Even as he turned, the third Heavenly One struck the shoulder blade of his sword arm. Again his Plate protected him from any real damage, but the strength of the blow forced him to drop Maya. Before he could re-summon her, the Magnified One was on him once again.
Maya appeared in his hand again, but pinned as he was he could do nothing as the Heavenly Ones flew in low and began relentlessly striking his Plate. Cracks began appearing all across the armor. Adolin shouted as the left pauldron shattered. Unlike dead Plate it would re-form, but not as quickly as living Radiant armor would have.
He kept struggling but he just couldn’t get enough leverage to budge the Magnified One.
“Any ideas?” The words were barely audible; he couldn’t get enough air for a full breath.
His left vambrace shattered.
“Not this time, Adolin. I’m sorry.”
His breastplate cracked.
“I’m proud to have known you, Adolin Kholin. You have always fought with such bravery. Honor is not dead so long as he lives in the hearts of men, and in that way you have kept him alive.”
Adolin’s breastplate shattered as she finished speaking. The pressure from the Magnified One lessened for a moment. Not enough to break free, but enough to take a much-needed deep breath. It didn’t matter. With the breastplate gone, he was finished. He had escaped death so many times over the years, but this time it had finally caught him.
Maya’s last words echoed in his mind.
Honor is not dead.
He knew she meant them to be comforting in his last moments, but Adolin was suddenly filled with an angry fire that he had thought nearly extinguished. Because that just wasn’t true. Honor was dead, just like he soon would be. Like they all were. As the Heavenly One raised its arm to strike the killing blow, words punched their way out of Adolin in a final shout of rage and pain and sorrow.
“No! Honor is dead and my father is dead and Kaladin is - “
He cut off abruptly as the Fused pinning him to the ground was wrenched away with a scream.
In the months that followed, Adolin would ask if Heralds were omniscient, or if at the very least they had superhuman hearing. Everyone he asked would tell him the same thing: no, of course not. But Adolin would remain unconvinced. Because there was no other explanation he could fathom for what happened next besides a desire for dramatic storming timing.
The Fused that had been about to kill Adolin fell to the ground with burned eyes. All around him, he heard similar sounds of Fused being attacked and destroyed.
A woman with striking red hair and an oddly familiar face swung a Shardblade through a Flowing One just before she caught up with Lift.
A tall dark-skinned man pulled a Focused One off of Skar. As he turned, Adolin caught a glimpse of a crescent-shaped mark on his right cheek.
An older pale man with a beard placed his hand against a Heavenly One that had been about to strike Zahel and attached it to the ground with a glowing thread.
Two Makabaki warriors, one thin and graceful, the other solid and strong, fought side by side near a group of windrunners. Adolin had last seen them dying atop a pile of Fused corpses in a seemingly doomed city over a decade ago.
And right in front of him, reaching down a hand to help him up, stood the man who had saved Adolin’s life. (Again). He was glowing faintly, inexplicably still in a Kholin blue uniform, complete with a Kholin crest on one arm and a Bridge Four patch on the other.
Adolin had the strangest feeling that he’d been here before. Over a decade ago, on a rocky field of shattered stone under the pelting rain of two warring storms. And then again and again and again in his nightmares, each time alone and scared as the Assassin in White killed him. He instinctively braced himself for it to happen again, as it had every time he revisited this moment.
But this time was different. The man’s long dark hair was pulled back from his forehead to reveal not glyphs of slavery, but the swirling lines of the Bridge Four tattoo. Instead of a sword, he held a gleaming silver spear in one hand. Adolin thought it was a Shardspear at first, but no - it had to be a form of Honorblade, for he saw a streak of blue twist around the man before coming to settle on his shoulder in the familiar shape of a young woman.
But most startling was the self-satisfied grin he wore, so different from the stormy expression he had always worn when Adolin had known him before. And it was that grin, more than anything else, that convinced him that the Herald - because yes, the man was a storming Herald - must have been waiting and listening until he could make his entrance at the most dramatic possible moment. It was just too storming smug. Adolin felt a smile - a real smile - stretch across his face as he grasped the offered hand and the man pulled him to his feet.
“I’m not dead, actually,” said Kaladin Stormblessed. “So let me see what we can do.”