The Thrill

The Thrill is the intoxicating battle impulse that overtakes Dalinar Kholin in combat, transforming danger and slaughter into an experience of clarity, power, and glory. It is not merely courage or tactical concentration: it possesses him as an intensifying force, draws him toward contest, and makes violence feel both natural and magnificent before a sudden recognition of its cost breaks the spell.

Nature and Physical Manifestation

The Thrill first appears as a bodily and psychological surge accompanying competition. While climbing a forty-foot rock formation in Shardplate, Dalinar feels it begin to rise within him. The sensation is weaker than the Thrill of battle, but still strong enough to make an athletic contest a worthy substitute for warfare. Shardplate magnifies the context: its assisted legs propel him roughly eight feet upward, while its strength allows him to pull himself up with the power of many men. The armor transmits sensation through its gauntlets as though they were thin leather gloves, leaving Dalinar physically equipped to pursue the contest and perceptually immersed in it.

The Thrill therefore operates through action rather than reflection. It sharpens Dalinar’s attention, draws his eyes toward the next handhold, and turns a climb against Elhokar Kholin into a charged rivalry. Even when Elhokar chooses another route in an attempt to overtake him and becomes stalled below, Dalinar remains fixed on the platform above. The force does not require a battlefield to exist; battle is its fullest expression, but contest can partially awaken it.

The Thrill in Battle

During the fighting against the Parshendi, the Thrill reaches its most powerful form. Dalinar deliberately kicks Parshendi corpses aside, knowing that the movement enrages their comrades, and uses the desecration to draw opponents toward him in pairs. The maneuver is not simply defensive. The Thrill makes provocation itself part of the battle’s pleasure, converting the enemy’s anger and the presence of the dead into instruments for creating more combat.

As Parshendi close around him, Adolin Kholin fights nearby with alternating techniques, shifting between one-handed and two-handed use of his Shardblade and striking with his fists when opponents come too close. Bodies, armor, bones, and orange blood are scattered across the ground. Within this expanding violence, the Thrill consumes Dalinar, granting him strength, focus, and power. The battle appears to him as something grand and glorious, and the clarity it brings restores an appetite he had kept away from for too long: the conviction that the Alethi must push harder, assault more plateaus, and win the gemhearts.

The force also fuses Dalinar’s identity with the legend of the Blackthorn. Under its influence, he experiences himself as a natural force that cannot be halted and as death itself. The Thrill thus does more than improve his performance; it supplies a temporary identity in which domination feels like destiny. His Shardblade, Gallant’s movement, and the corpses around him become parts of one continuous momentum.

The Reversal into Revulsion

The Thrill’s power is unstable because its glory depends on suppressing what the battle actually contains. At the height of Dalinar’s exhilaration, a powerful stab of revulsion strikes him without warning. He gasps, slips partly on blood, and finds his knees suddenly weak. The reversal is physical before it becomes moral: the same body that had seemed unstoppable is abruptly unable to stand securely.

The battlefield then changes before his eyes. The corpses no longer register as proof of victory or necessary obstacles; they become a horrifying tableau of burned-out eyes, broken bodies, shattered bones, cracked heads, blood, brains, and entrails. Adolin’s brutal punches, previously folded into the battle’s grandeur, are now inseparable from the butchery. The Thrill vanishes, leaving Dalinar face to face with the violence it had concealed. His stunned recognition asks how anyone could enjoy such a sight, exposing the gulf between the Blackthorn’s battle identity and the man capable of recoiling from it.

This reversal gives the Thrill its central dramatic function. It is both temptation and interruption: it invites Dalinar to surrender to conquest, then reveals that the exhilaration has required a refusal to see the dead as people. The sudden movement from ecstatic power to sickness makes the experience a moral turn, not merely a change in mood.

Recurrence and Larger Significance

The Thrill recurs as a recognizable pulse within warfare. During another engagement, Dalinar fights from Gallant’s back while Parshendi with burning black eyes attack in coordinated pairs. Their strategy is costly but purposeful: they try to distract him, shove him from his mount, and crack his Shardplate with repeated blows. Dalinar keeps Gallant moving from side to side, uses broad sweeps of his Shardblade, and stays just ahead of his soldiers so the weapon’s length will not endanger them. The Thrill pulses through this disciplined motion even as the scene emphasizes the real tactical danger surrounding him.

Its recurrence creates an important contrast between mastery and surrender. Dalinar can use its energy to maintain space, protect his formation, and survive coordinated attacks, but the same force can turn corpses into bait and conquest into a source of self-forgetting. The evidence does not present the Thrill as a simple supernatural gift or a purely private emotion. It is an affective pressure that travels through the physical conditions of war—mounts, armor, weapons, bodies, blood, and enemy formations—and changes what Dalinar is able to perceive.

The Thrill also complicates heroic language. It gives Dalinar the clarity to believe that victory is necessary and the power to pursue it, yet it can make slaughter feel glorious until revulsion restores the scene’s human meaning. Its most consequential feature is therefore the instability between these two visions of battle. The Thrill promises a clean world of force and purpose; its disappearance leaves the mess that such certainty had hidden.