Chapter Text
The story starts with a boy.
He was young, maybe eleven or twelve, when he arrived to Vammanah. He did not come riding on the back of a Ryshadium or carried by a litter on the backs of Parshmen. That is the way of heroes, and although this child might fit into one archetype or the other in later years, this is not that sort of story.
He was a small thing, curled up and quiet where he laid in the back of the trader’s cart. His skin was dark brown, deeper in tone than typically seen in Alethkar. His hair hung heavy and as black as the Sea of Spears during a highstorm. With the color being what it was, it was harder to notice the blood forming clumps along the strands.
The driver of the cart was an elderly man named Vedanor, who’d lived as a trader traveling between the port cities and nearby farming towns for many decades. In all those years, he hadn’t ever been in a similar situation. Children could easily be hurt when they were careless along rocky patches, but this felt different. He’d found the boy lying at the side of the road somewhere between Portsmouth and the northern fork, closer to the eastern border of Highlord Sebariel’s lands. Where exactly, Vedanor couldn’t recall. The sight had thrown him into a panic; the caved-in contour of the back of the boys head holding the brightest of his blood like a bowl, the way his tiny body laid so still even as the chull sensed their master’s distress and pounded away at the ground.
The trader, Stormfather bless him, had scooped the boy up without a second thought. He’d done his best to dress the wound with bandages from his own supply. When the bleeding inevitably soaked through those, he’d cut strips of canvas from the cover of his cart to make new ones. That cloth had quickly stained burgundy and brown, new blood mixing with the old. Vedanor urged his chull on as quickly as they would go, only barely choking down his own panic. Vammanah was the nearest town, so that’s where he took the boy. It was late in the night when he arrived, but he did not wait to pass through the first farm’s gate before he began shouting.
Here’s something you need to understand about the Alethi: they are a cautious people. Not unkind, no, but skeptical of anything that falls outside of the expected.
“Be wary of the unfamiliar beast, lest the teeth fall upon familiar throats. Protect your own above all else.”
By all means, neither Vedanor nor the boy was expected. Yet the people of Vammanah who heard—mostly the darkeyed laborers whose lands laid on the outskirts—filled their lamps with infused spheres and ran from their homes into the dark. They asked only the questions which could be answered in a breath and did not linger longer than the time it took them to lift the boy from the cart. Then they started to run.
They sprinted along jagged paths wearing nothing but their house slippers. When one man grew tired, another hefted the boy into his arms then continued because even that was faster than waiting for the chull. This carried on until they reached the edge of the town proper where the physician lived.
The physician, like many in town, had been grown old in the same home she now worked out of. Her father had been a physician before her, and having no sons had raised his daughter to continue his profession. It is important to note that the physician was not a surgeon. While the physician could sew up gashes and slice open boils, heroic operations were not her typical area of practice.
When the boy arrived on her front step, she took one look at him and made a declaration: he was going to die. She did not recommend carrying him further to the surgeon; she assured the crowd that he would say the same thing she had. A head wound is a tricky thing to fix, and any amount of poking about can hurt more than it helps. If the boy did not bleed out, his brain might forget how to make his body breathe or to keep his heart beating, and well, that would end the same way. The physician had a reputation for speaking in hard truths, as well as for saving more than she lost. The people took her word as fact.
Even so, the physician, still wearing her nightclothes, gathered her tools and attempted to prove herself wrong.
She sutured the arteries she could, burning away others with a heated pin when they proved too difficult to manipulate. She flushed the hole in his skull with salt and water as she picked broken bits of brown stone from the tissue lining his brain. She gave him blood to replace what he lost, admittedly after debating whether this dying boy was worth the loss of her precious few soulcast units. Eventually, the bleeding stopped.
The boy was not safe though—he had a thrashing fit shortly afterwards that threatened to undo the physician’s work. It required nearly three whole bitterleaf stems to quiet the shaking. His heart still beat at the end of the night though, and that was a miracle as far as she was concerned. The people returned to their houses with the light of day and the physician had her apprentice fetch a scratchy set of clothes to replace her bloodstained gown. Despite her success, she was still fairly certain her initial assessment would prove true in the end.
Over the course of the next three days, the boy had a total of five seizures. One occurred less than a minute after the prior, an ill omen. The physician’s nightly vigil at the boy’s bedside left her exhausted, even her regular work continued. Patients sought her help for their coughs and aches. Her young apprentice proved his worth in triage that week, treating the simpler maladies himself while sending her only the more complex cases.
The physician ended the week with nearly her entire stock of bandages and bitterleaf gone. In the end, it was a concoction of tiensap and kepproot had kept the boy’s seizures from returning. Two days after that success, the boy opened his eyes.
That evening, the physician drank two bottles of clavendah by herself and sang “for a fool a life’s too long, better to be giddy and pretty and wrong” as she hung out a window on the top floor of her house.
It took two more days for the boy to make an attempt at sitting upright. After another week, he could walk with the help of two poles for balance. Soon enough, he was forgoing use of the poles as he walked, reached, ran. Even as his body grew stronger, the physician could not gauge the function of his mind beyond the most rudimentary reflexes. This was because the boy spoke a language that no person in Vammanah could seem to place.
One woman in town, Malmari, made the best attempt to decipher the mystery of the boy. Although she was Alethi by birth, her father had been a prominent Azish merchant whose travels rivaled those of prominent Thaylen masters. Malmari herself spoke at least four languages and dabbled in several more. Still, the harsh onset and rounded ends of the boy’s words with were something entirely unknown to her. This was somewhat expected. The boy looked foreign, with large eyes and a thin nose that twisted upward into a rounded point.
The trouble was, despite different people sitting him down and pointing and repeating Alethi vocabulary, the boy showed little ability to learn. It would not have been so bad if the boy could trace meaning enough to pantomime a conversation. Instead, he stared. The physician took it as proof of the damage done by his injury, though she did nothing to dissuade the many who came to her home to make an honest attempt at communication. At one point, even the citylord’s wife knocked on her door, a basket of treats in hand, eager to meet the boy the town couldn’t seem to stop speaking about.
Soon, the larger question was raised: who would watch over the boy? The physician had done a good enough job in her weeks of work, but she was no mother as her apprentice could attest. So it came to be that the very same workers who’d brought him to the doorstep of the physician weeks earlier were the ones who debated amongst themselves who would care for him.
It was assumed the boy would never be able to work given his mental impairment, so he needed to go to a home where the extra mouth would not push the family into poverty. It would also be good for him to be around other children early on. People listened and nodded and listed all sorts of things that the child would need, though most already knew they would ask Dalen to take him in. Dalen was a farmer whose family had lived in Vammanah for longer than anyone could remember. He had a reputation for being pious and was married to Malmari, the scholar who’d been one of the first to try and speak to the boy. They had two daughters together, Jezira and Nalaneh, who were known for being as different from one another as a sphere and…well, anything that was distinctly not a sphere.
Needless to say, the people chose Dalen to raise the boy. It was not in his nature to refuse responsibility when it was cast his way, so he agreed to the request. That is how “the boy” became “Dalen’s boy” before being given the name he was better known by.
One question I find myself asking as I write is “why?” Why would anyone—let alone an Alethi—go through the trouble of saving some nameless boy? Life on Roshar is pragmatic, often at the expense of charity. If a plant doesn’t curl up on itself, it’s scooped up by a highstorm. Beasts that linger to protect the back of the group risk being picked off themselves.
This boy was not one of Vammanah’s own, not the the town’s responsibility. He was foreign, darkeyed, and there would be no reward for saving his life. The laborers that carried him were not particularly generous, nor was the physician that watched him for weeks as he recovered. They were not exceptions to the rule of suspicion, not philanthropists nor martyrs.
Were there objections to bringing a stranger into the town? Almost certainly. I do not mention them because the result is the same: Vammanah’s people helped a stranger because enough of them were good in the way all people should be.
In another iteration of our story, a boy dies of his wounds on the side of the road and everyones’ lives go on without consequence. That reality, more common by far, is the one I don’t like to think about.
This story is not a parable. Vammanah’s fate remains the same, regardless of the goodness or cruelty of its inhabitants. I just feel you deserve to know that, like most others in the Cosmere, they deserved better than they got.