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There were a few upsides to being stuck in the Cognitive Realm indefinitely. Not many, but Shallan tried to appreciate them when she could. It was what Pattern would call getting an unbiased sample—not only dwelling on the negatives.
One of the benefits was that it was much easier to interact with Testament. When using her radiant powers in the Physical Realm, Shallan needed to craft an illusion as often as swing a sword. And even then, she was more familiar with calling upon Pattern as a blade. While people like Adolin could probably dual-wield, it was hard for Shallan to imagine a situation where carrying two Shardblades would be more likely to inflict harm upon her enemy than to stab herself in the foot.
Here, however, she was close at hand. She still didn’t speak much, but when she did, she reassured Shallan that she wasn’t resentful. She had been a deadeyes for years, alone, cut off from her own people and unable to communicate with Shallan. If she could survive that, Shallan could endure in the Cognitive Realm.
As for Pattern, he wasn’t jealous of Shallan’s relationship with Testament. Quite the contrary. It was uncommon for the same radiant to bond with two spren, but Pattern had handled Testament’s rediscovery with aplomb. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to be a guide and mentor for Testament, helping her rebuild her strength. And, as the months turned into years, they had entered into a more intimate relationship.
At first, Shallan’s concern was for Testament’s autonomy. Could such a broken spren really give consent to her counterpart, that way? But Testament assured her there was nothing to fear. “Parts of you, still broken, when you marry Adolin. Parts, still not whole. But you are strong. You choose to love him. Same with us.”
Shallan still felt a pang of grief when she thought of Adolin. The seons helped, but how long would it be before she could feel his arms around her, splash in the showers of Urithiru together? “Good,” she said. “I’m happy for you.” There would be challenging times ahead; if her spren could find joy and fulfillment together, that would be one more cause for hope in the darkness.
However, there was one unintended consequence she had neglected to take into account.
She was vaguely aware of some of the ways that sprens’ nature differed from humans or singers. Syl had bragged about being the daughter of the Stormfather, but there was no Stormmother who had borne her. As different as spren appeared in the Cognitive Realm, they were even more diverse in the Physical Realm, and Shallan didn’t really expect Pattern or Testament’s bodily forms to correspond closely with what existed under her clothing.
Unfortunately, what the spren lacked in humanoid anatomy, they more than made up for in dirty talk.
“Mmm...Testament,” Pattern groaned. “Touch me periodically!”
“This good?” Testament whispered.
“You are like...a sine wave. Continuous, smooth. I want to feel like the tangent graph, repeatedly driven to infinity and made new.”
“Would you keep it down?” Shallan hissed. “You’re going to traumatize Evime.”
“Mmm,” said Pattern. “She can learn about trigonometry. She is precocious.”
“Like this?” Testament said. “Show me your face.”
“You spend too long talking with humans,” Pattern said. “I don’t have one face. I am like...hmm...a dodecahedron. I am perfect when I am with you, every vertex, every surface just as intricate...you are a tetrahedron. Life has made you sharp, but you are no less brilliant…”
“I am going to get sharp with you if you keep this up all night,” Shallan protested, but her heart wasn’t in it.”
“I want to take your outer measure,” Pattern cooed. “Wrap myself around you until I’m big enough to hold all of you. And then I want to take your inner measure, shrink as small as I need to until every part of me is inside you…”
Shallan glanced over at Evime, who, fortunately, seemed to be sleeping through the whole thing. If the baby started to cry, she would move across Haka’alaku to avoid those two.
“You are like...pi,” Testament said. “Infinite.”
“Mmm?” said Pattern.
“Inside you, everything. Past and future. Every story, written in code.”
“Ah,” said Pattern. “We hypothesize that pi is a normal number, its digits uniformly distributed, but we cannot prove it! We know that the vast majority of numbers, are, as you say, wondrous enough that every string will appear in them, somewhere down the line. But it is surprisingly hard to pinpoint this about any particular number!”
“That does not make sense,” said Testament, which Shallan thought was the most reasonable thing either spren had said all night.
“Consider spren. There are countless spren in the Physical Realm—windspren, flamespren, lifespren.”
“Is that still the case?” Shallan interrupted. “The darkness, the new storm, has changed things. Are ordinary spren still alive?”
“I don’t know,” Pattern snapped irritably. “It’s an analogy!”
“Here, they live,” Testament said. “Mandras pull ships, still. If they did not, we would see.”
“But the vast majority of them have no name, no identity on our side,” Pattern went on. “The spren that you can talk to and understand are few and far between. Look at the highspren—some of them don’t even have human names, just finite numbers.”
“So?”
“So the highspren are like familiar integers; highly structured, but sparse compared to normal numbers…”
“You are like pie,” Testament repeated, “because you are sweet. I want to taste you.”
“Oh, I suppose,” Pattern acquiesced.
Shallan would not have expected to be grateful for some of Testament’s raunchier turns of phrase, which she had probably picked up from Maya and her drinking buddies. But storms, at least that was natural!
“When I was in Kharbranth, Taravangian mentioned an island where half the residents always tell the truth and half always lie,” she recalled. “At the time, I thought he was just dotty. Now I think it was one of his puzzles, to test how capable he was. Anyway, if it really exists, it’ll be a nice pond on this side. If this goes on, I am going to exile you both there.”
The noise Testament made suggested that she would not be opposed to that state of affairs.