NinjaAlligators

I am very interested to see how Szeth will learn to draw in Stormlight, assuming that happens in Oathbringer. I have serious doubts that any Nahel spren would consider him while he possesses Nightblood, even with the recommendation of a Herald. Nightblood can devour spren, destruction beyond even the breaking of Oaths, and all Szeth would have to do is run out of Investiture with Nightblood drawn. Unless highspren have very little sense of self-preservation, I have a hard time seeing one take that kind of risk. Moreover, Nightblood (my favorite Cosmere character, BTW) is a wrong Shardblade, one that is broken and alien and Other compared to spren of both Honor and Cultivation. Imagine a disturbingly lifelike doll with no eyes that moves and acts like a human, but eats people. That is what Nightblood is like for a Nahel spren. Would you go near him? Side note, I'm still holding out hope that we will soon see what Nightblood looks like in Shadesmar.

I agree with you that "mink" is a generic word for a carnivorous mammal, as evidenced by a lion being thought of as a big mink. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the "minks" we've seen have been cats, weasels, etc. They can't be rats, though, as we know there is a different word for rats, which has come up several times. If the mink in Urithiru is just a mink, I imagine both it and the rat in the vent must have both come in with the Alethi. What other food would there be to support a rat population in an abandoned tower for hundreds of years?

So, minks have popped up in suspicious places. In this week's readings, Dalinar found a mink in the air vent, but minks have already been seen in two unusual situations. In WoR, in the Shallan flashback chapter Middlefest, we find a mink slinking around in the shadows, surprising Shallan, who expected that all the minks in that area would have been trapped by now. Unusual but not notable, right? Except that in Veil's Lesson, Mraize shoots a cremling and a mink with a blowgun, both of which are retrieved by Iyatil. We already know that cremlings are suspect of being Aimian hordelings; is it possible that minks are similarly suspicious? I am not sure whether we should be suspecting them of being minks made of hordelings or some other weird creature, but I suspect there is something odd going on there.

OK, here are some others I have. --Dawnshards: What were they and is it possible to win this war without them? --Greatshells: What relationship do they have with Odium and Voidbringers? --Afterlife issues: What is wrong with the Rosharan afterlife? Is it just Moelach? --Larkins: Why are they considered so important? Why are they the background to the Surgebinding chart? --The Nightwatcher: basically everything about the Nightwatcher, including the nature of the Old Magic. --Cusicesh: It's just weird. Is it an Unmade? Another Bondsmith spren? Speaking of which... --The identity of the third Bondsmith spren. --Lighteyes vs Darkeyes: Is there actually some supernatural element here? --Fabrials: Will there be unexpected consequences to trapping spren as power sources? --Secret Societies: What are their ultimate goals?

I did not think this review was spoiler-free, to be honest. Aside from the Dalinar remembering part (which is a huge spoiler considering how shocking his sudden remembrance was when reading normally), it implies that Kaladin will spend a lot of time in a war zone, which is huge when you consider where we find him now, travelling with the group of escaped parshmen. We now know that he definitely does not spend the rest of the book doing diplomacy!

I'm going to end up re-reading this book like 4-5 times anyway, so it makes sense to start at the beginning and just make it a mini-re-read.

First of all, I firmly believe that Dalinar's Problem of Evi is (was?) an active, ongoing effect. I somewhat more hesitantly believe that the effect is Spiritual (rather than Cognitive or Physical) in nature. As a few others have pointed out, the most striking part of the issue is that in addition to his loss of past memories, Dalinar is/was being actively prevented from hearing his wife's name or seeing her face--which is especially interesting because he knew she was blond, he heard Navani describe her as not terribly bright and as someone that Dalinar loved. In other words, some information about her was being blocked, but not all. Perhaps the parts being blocked were those most tied to his emotional response toward Evi? If the damage were purely neurological, I would not expect her name and her hair color to be so clearly distinguished by the Old Magic. I think the most likely way the Old Magic could accomplish the effect we have observed from what we already know is to suppress his Connection to Evi--a suppression not accomplished by excising a piece of the Spiritweb, but by adding a foreign piece--a plug, so to speak, of Investiture(?) that actively dampens the Connection, ensuring that he does not re-Connect with her. I hypothesize that this is consistent with what we have seen of other recipients of the Old Magic, namely Taravangian, Lift and Av's father and brother. When Av's father sought out the Old Magic, he received a Physical boon--a "heap of good cloth". This indicates that the boon granted by the Nightwatcher is not necessarily the same (Realmatically) every time. Did she Soulcast the cloth out of air or stone? Did she happen to have cloth on hand from a previous client? We don't know enough of the story. However, it does demonstrate that what the Nightwatcher does isn't necessarily limited to messing with peoples' heads. On the other hand, she causes him to perceive the world upside down, which to me sounds like a Cognitive effect. However, Av's brother came back with two permanently numb hands--an effect that sounds suspiciously similar to the effect of being cut by a Shardblade, which in turn suggests that his hands were separated from his Spiritweb. It is possible that this effect could be accomplished Cognitively, I would imagine, but there is a clear mechanism for it to happen Spiritually, so that is a possibility. Taravangian's effect, his intelligence and empathy fluctuating in a random and inversely proportionate relationship, appears to me to be more clearly Spiritual in nature: many have noted the similarity to Feruchemy (though I think it uses a different mechanic, because diminishing returns would prevent days like that of the Diagram, and because it is very doubtful that Taravangian could have "stored" enough intelligence on his stupidest days to "tap" on the day of the Diagram), and Feruchemy is primarily Spiritual in nature. Lift is an especially interesting case, particularly since her observed powers have little to no obvious correlation with the request that she actually made of the Nightwatcher--she really is growing and getting older, whereas she expected her aging to halt. To cease aging is an attainable effect--we know now that age is actually a Spiritual attribute, one that is, in fact, modifiable through known means (Feruchemical atium) and though...less known means (Cosmere "immortality" that we know exists from WoB). If the Nightwatcher is as powerful as we all believer her to be, as powerful as the Stormfather at least, she almost certain has the power (the sheer quantity of Investiture and knowledge of the necessary techniques) to produce that effect. However, Lift does not presently show that effect, which means that either 1. The Nightwatcher was unable to give her that effect for reasons unrelated to her power level (i.e. as a force of Cultivation she finds it difficult to make things static, just as Honor would struggle with breaking a promise), or 2. Lift did receive that effect, and later lost it, just as Dalinar seems to be regaining his memories of Evi. Either way, while Lift's...condition...does manifest in how she interacts with the Cognitive Realm, the change to her has to include Spiritual components since it has impacted the way she can obtain Investiture itself. With this in mind, I believe that whatever was happened that caused Dalinar to begin remembering Evi, I would expect it to be something with Spiritual impact, and something capable of specifically removing the "plug" blocking his connection to Evi. If merely using Stormlight was enough to expel the plug, which I consider possible, then the amount of Investiture used for the plug must have been relatively small. However, I doubt this somewhat, if only because the Old Magic is normally permanent, unlike other Spiritually based magics that produce such dramatic effects (Feruchemy and especially Soulforging). I think it is more likely that either his remembering was tied to an unexpected interaction, such as his held Stormlight overfeeding the pain fabrial, or more likely due to the wording of his boon/bane itself. As some others have suggested, I am very tempted to think that his request was not related to Evi directly. I find it very curious that the Nighwatcher allowed Dalinar to collect even as much information as he had about her--he could have been curious, could have imagined her based on physical descriptions, perhaps? Would those images have slipped away from him, even if they did not look much like her actual appearance? I suspect his loss of Connection to her was based on some other request: that he requested to have Navani, or to become a good person. I think the goal of what the Nightwatcher did to him is not to erase Evi completely--he is able to put far too much together for that--but to erase her emotional impact on him. He is free to know that she was blond, or 5'10" tall, etc, because this does not allow him to form an emotional bond with her. Her name, her face, these things are too evocative, and thus the Old Magic suppresses them. All in all, I'm looking forward to seeing what new clues and new questions tomorrow's new chapters will bring us!

Dlyol never said that skin colors (he prefers skin phenotypes, which I also prefer) are socially contructed, he said that the way we racialize these is socially constructed. Race is a social construction in that it assumes common descent and typical characteristics based on phenotype--if your skin contains a certain quantity of melanin, certain characteristics are assumed. Aside from Dlyol's excellent examples based on 19th century perception of Irish and Italian immigrants in the US, I could add to that the strange double-perception of Jews as being both "white" (I am ethnically Jewish and phenotypically "white", showing the hollowness of that phrase) and "non-white" (witness the attitude of the KKK toward Jews, historical persecution in Europe, Russia, etc....). Most importantly, race as a social construct has been conclusively demonstrated by our ongoing understanding of human genetics, which has shown us that "black" populations within Africa can be further apart genetically than either is from "white" Europeans. We could argue all day about how dark your skin has to be to be "black", or whether a light-skinned Dravidian person bears the same class stigma in India as a dark-skinned Dravidian person, etc. Race (at least, race based on skin color) is not an inherent thing, a genetic thing. It is a thing that humans on Earth have constructed based on our phenotypic observations, vast generalization, and our innate desire to divide society into neat categories, including "us" and "them". The Alethi absolutely have conceptualizations of things very like race, but they aren't based at all on skin color--a great example is the Makabaki. The Alethi court obviously considers Azir and its court to be legitimate, even as peers in a way. Where national differences are emphasized, what is important isn't skin color so much as religion--the Makabaki are not Vorin, and leadership is not based on the lighteyes/darkeyes dynamic that is the essential source of Alethi racial construction. It is, of course, completely possible to recognize skin color difference and even to associate it with cultural difference without it becoming essentially racialized; a strong historical example is the attitude of Romans toward black Africans; they were assumed to have "Ethiopian" cultural characteristics, but not to be racially inferior. Incidentally, I think both Ishar and Shallash as depicted here could be described as "tan", so I feel that if anything we should probably update our idea of stereotypically Alethi beauty accordingly--if young Navani was considered gorgeous, she probably looked something somewhat like the depiction of Shallash we have here. I don't think Alethi are much lighter skinned than what we have here. I imagine Nale and Taln as being much darker-skinned than this.

1. Dalinar entrusts Jezrien's Honorblade to Adolin to make up for him not being a Radiant. 2. No highspren will bond Szeth because he holds an abomination beyond even dead Shardblades (Nightblood). 3. Nale goes to Urithuru to meet up with Dalinar and his group of Radiants, and ends up exposing Adolin as a murderer (which by Alethi law, he is). Adolin is exiled. 4. The Stone Shamans repeatedly attack Dalinar's party in an attempt to retrieve Jezrien's Honorblade. 5. Shallan and Kaladin are confused about their feelings, but neither openly says anything. 6. Towards the climax, Adolin returns to the Alethi group and marries Shallan. He dies in combat, leaving Shallan confused and Kaladin conflicted about what to do with Shallan. 7. Epic fight scene between Zarel and a Nightblood-wielding Szeth. 8. Dalinar was only able to become a good person because he had forgotten his wife. 9. Aesudan is revealed to be a Ghostblood. 10. Elhokar grows in self-awareness, and decides to abdicate, leaving Dalinar as king (which confirms to Taravangian that Dalinar is a rival and a threat). He progresses towards becoming a Lightweaver.

Soulcast a narrow shaft in the ground going straight down and drop the Shardbearer in it. Drop supplies in, and extract the Shardbearer later with ropes, if desired. Cutting your way out with the Shardblade is impossible for the simple reason that there is nowhere to move the cut stone. Sanitation would be an issue, though.

I heartily agree with this.

Your guess is as good as mine how the spren chose to imitate and reverse engineer the Honorblades, but as Syl tells Kaladin, she's a piece of Honor, and bonding comes naturally. With enough understanding of the magic, a good magical scholar can "hack" imitations of other magical systems, sometimes with unintended consequences, as Warbreaker and Shashara did in creating Nightblood based on Shardblades. While I doubt the Nahel spren understood what they were doing as much as the Five Scholars did, they had a clear model to copy in the Heralds, which is exactly my point. When you copy something without knowing exactly how and why it works, you risk dangerous side effects. I'm not sure what the spren know about death in Roshar. The most intelligent and knowledgeable spren live in Shadesmar, which few of the characters we have met so far have access to. The spren we have heard from the most are Syl, Pattern and Wyndle, and all of them are only slowly recovering memories over time. We will probably learn more in Oathbringer, since it seems that we will get to see some of Jasnah's adventures in Shadesmar. Even so, she talked to the highspren, and we can't be certain that the spren of the Skybreakers have the same perspective as the other Nahel spren, considering the relationship between the Skybreakers and the Recreance is still murky. It is possible that the spren in Shadesmar do know that something is terribly awry with the afterlife, we just haven't gotten to see any conversations with the right spren to find out (yet). What is interesting to me is the certainty that Syl, Pattern and even the Stormfather seem to have that their Radiants will eventually kill them--it is almost as though they know that once the truth (whatever it is) is known, betraying the Oaths is inevitable. That can't be a good sign, and I'm pretty sure it means trouble for our new Radiants later on.

I suspect that when Radiants who have reached a certain degree of progress in the Nahel bond die, they go to Braize. Several points of evidence have led me to to suspect this: The Nahel bond was not designed by Honor, but was an attempt by the spren to imitate what Honor had given to the Heralds. In WoR chapter 87, Syl clarifies to Kaladin that the Nahel bond was specifically based on the Honorblades. The Prelude to the Stormlight Archive tells us that one of the conditions of the Oathpact is that the Heralds would return to Braize to be tortured if they died, and were expected to return willingly if they did not die during a Desolation. To abandon the Oathpact, they had to leave their Honorblades behind, willingly and intentionally giving them up. They did so by slamming the Blades into the stone ground. This suggests that the Honorblades was the basis of their connection to the Oathpact, and thereby to Braize. The coded passage from the Diagram found in the WoR Chapter 84 epigraph references "the secret that broke the Knights Radiant". Apparently there is such a secret, and obviously it would need to be a very significant one. When Dalinar observes the Recreance in his vision (WoK Chapter 52), he sees the Radiants slam their Blades into the stone ground, as the Heralds did, and as Dalinar does when he relinquishes Oathbringer to Sadeas. This is clearly how the Bond is broken, though why they needed to leave the Plate behind as well is unclear, mostly because we know so little about what Shardplate actually is and whether it has any connection at all to the Heralds (whom so far have never been shown wearing Plate of any kind). Nale believes, following Ishar, that when the proto-Radiants "naturally discover the greater power of the Oaths"..."without Honor to regulate this, there is a small chance that what comes next will allow the Voidbringers to again make the jump between worlds." (Edgedancer, Chapter 9) This suggests that the Radiants are connected in some way we do not yet understand to Braize, and could potentially (though by no means certainly) bring a Desolation the same way the Heralds do. Whether Ishar is correct in this belief or not is not yet known to us. To bring these points together, the Nahel bond is based on the Honorblades, and severed by the same means that the Heralds severed their ties to the Oathpact. Is it possible, then, that by copying the Honorblades, the Nahel spren inadvertently recreated the not-so-desirable aspect of the Honorblades that connects the Heralds to Braize? If so, it is possible that when Radiants die, their soul(?)/Cognitive shadow/non-material aspect goes to Braize, as the Heralds do, instead of going through the usual afterlife? This would be an extremely serious side-effect for the Nahel bond to have, and it's hard to imagine anyone, least of all the Radiants who were all broken people in some way, stoically accepting more-or-less-eternal torment after their death. As others have theorized, we already have reason to believe that the afterlife is messed up in some way on Roshar, but if the Radiants suddenly found out that they were more or less guaranteed to go to Damnation, that would go a long way toward explaining the Recreance.