Chapter 70: Within the Mirror – Summary and Analysis
Spoiler Notice: This page contains detailed summary and analysis for Oathbringer, Chapter 70. If you haven't read this far yet, you may want to explore the book hub or return to Chapter 69.
Summary
Veil, relishing the tense, chaotic energy of Kholinar, surveys the city's districts. She notes the functioning market near the tailor's shop, ransacked mansions, desperate refugees near the walls, and the eerily quiet palace district where wealthy families stubbornly remain. Soldiers in dark uniforms patrol mansion grounds, moving with predatory wrongness.
She meets Kaladin at the palace steps, confirms her identity with their boot passcode, and takes the king's letter. Climbing the steps, she is met by guards and escorted inside. Despite her claims of being a messenger from the Shattered Plains, a soldier suddenly runs her through with a sword. Veil feigns death, holding a tiny breath of Stormlight to heal internally while Pattern stays silent.
A guard carries her through a hallway lined with stationary soldiers. Passing a floor-to-ceiling mirror, she glimpses a shadowy figure with white-spot eyes noticing her from within the reflection. She is dumped in the wine cellar among seven decaying corpses. After the guard leaves, she rises, calms herself with Pattern's voice, and disguises herself as a servant. She navigates through the Kholin mausoleum and escapes outside with Pattern luring guards away using a sound illusion. Kaladin finds her, and the two share gallows humor before heading back to the hideout.
Key Events
- Veil surveys Kholinar's districts: functioning market, ransacked mansions, refugee-filled areas, and the unnerving palace district.
- She observes guards with strange movements and cultists dressed as rotspren roaming the streets.
- Veil meets Kaladin, confirms her identity, and takes the king's letter for Queen Aesudan.
- She climbs the palace steps and is admitted by guards who do not speak to one another.
- A soldier stabs her without warning; she feigns death using Stormlight to survive.
- She is carried past rows of motionless soldiers and glimpses an entity watching her from inside a mirror.
- Veil is thrown into a wine cellar with seven rotting corpses.
- She escapes through the Kholin mausoleum, uses an auditory illusion to distract guards, and reunites with Kaladin.
Character Development
Veil / Shallan: This chapter deepens the fractured identity dynamic. Veil explicitly feels emotions more intensely than Shallan—she notes she likes Kaladin's brooding in a way Shallan does not, and finds Adolin bland by comparison. The Shallan part of her is "bothered" by this. After the trauma of being stabbed and left among the dead, Shallan desperately needs to smile and treat the horror as something that can "simply roll off me." This compartmentalization serves as both survival mechanism and psychological warning sign.
Kaladin: Though his role is brief, his dry humor—"I'm glad we … took a stab at this anyway"—shows growth in his ability to meet dark situations with levity. He trusts Veil to handle the infiltration but remains ready to help.
Pattern: His distant, analytical observation—"You destroy some things, but seeing others destroyed upsets you"—captures Shallan's internal contradiction. He provides the grounding voice that pulls her back from panic.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
Mirrors and Duplicity: The chapter title "Within the Mirror" operates on multiple levels. Veil is a mirror image of Shallan. The literal mirror in the palace hallway contains something looking back—an entity watching from behind reflection. This reinforces the motif of identity-as-performance and the sense that Kholinar itself has become a distorted reflection of a proper city.
Wrongness and Corruption: The Unmade's influence permeates everything near the palace. Soldiers move like predators, spren sprout lash-like tendrils, and the air itself feels off. Veil's persistent unease—the prickling skin, the sense that planters and doors shift when unobserved—builds the horror atmosphere without explicit monster reveals.
Survival Through Performance: Veil survives by acting—first as Lyn the scout, then as a corpse. Jasnah's lesson to feign death directly saves her. Lightweaving is not just an illusion power; it is a philosophy of adaptation, though the chapter hints at the psychological cost.
Why This Chapter Matters
"Within the Mirror" transforms Kholinar from a troubled city into an active horror setpiece. The palace guards' casual murder of a messenger establishes that the Unmade's grip is not passive—it eliminates outside contact. The discovery of seven corpses in the wine cellar suggests previous messengers or petitioners met the same fate, explaining the queen's total isolation. Veil's glimpse of the entity in the mirror provides the first concrete evidence that something is watching from within reflections, foreshadowing the nature of the Unmade occupying the palace. This chapter also escalates the internal Shallan/Veil conflict, setting tension between her attraction to Kaladin and her engagement to Adolin.
Study Questions and Answers
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Why do the guards kill Veil immediately rather than interrogating her? The guards operate under the Unmade's influence and seem programmed to eliminate any external communication. The captain's brief interrogation—asking who her commander was—suggests a perfunctory test, but the stabbing comes regardless of her plausible answer. This implies the palace has a standing order to destroy all messengers, keeping Queen Aesudan completely cut off.
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What does Veil's reaction to the trauma reveal about Shallan's coping mechanisms? Shallan pushes the memory away entirely—"Don't think. Don't see it"—and insists on smiling, on making it "all right." This mirrors her lifelong pattern of compartmentalizing trauma into separate personas. Veil, as the tougher identity, absorbs the horror so Shallan doesn't have to. But the desperate plea—"Please"—reveals the fragility beneath the performance.
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What is the significance of the entity Veil sees in the mirror? The shadowy figure with white-spot eyes that notices her from within the mirror is likely a spren or aspect of the Unmade that has corrupted the palace. Its presence inside reflections—a realm of inverted images—connects to the broader theme of Kholinar as a place where reality has become twisted and where nothing is quite what it seems.