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Shardcast: Nightblood Confirmations! Legion Release Words of Brandon P1


Chaos
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Today on Shardcast, there's yet more Words of Brandon, this time from the Legion release party, and boy do we have some real good ones. We get some actual, real-to-goodness confirmations about Nightblood, including some longstanding mysteries being discussed. It's exciting! This Word of Brandon episode is not one to miss. We also get upper and lower bounds on how many Desolations there are! Are you not entertained! Some theories are also destroyed in this one. 

We have Eric (Chaos), Ian (Weiry), Evgeni (Argent, and head of Taln's fandom apparently), and joining late due to traffic is Ben (Jebus). We'll see you all next week for part two from the Legion release!

 

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So, after doing this podcast I actually did work on some math regarding how long the Desolations period of Roshar would be, along with Pagerunner. The short answer is that the Desolation period basically has to be at least three thousand years, but could also be nearly five thousand or six thousand years. (That's the TL;DR, incoming long wall of text about math.)

What data points can we use? We know that for the Last Desolation, the Heralds broke less than a year from the previous Desolation. For the purposes of math I said it was .5 years. We also have a quote from the Starfalls vision (Way of Kings Chapter 19), where a Radiant mentions what year it is: "It is Eighth Epoch, three thirty-seven." Now, that's very explicit. I can only assume what separates Epochs in this scenario are Desolations. I also assumed that this means it has been eight Desolations since the Heralds formed the Oathpact. 

So when t = 8, we had at least 337 years (with a Desolation coming soon, according to that vision). Since Brandon said "not much more than 15" Desolations, I looked at having 20 or 25 Desolations, so t = 20 would be .5 years. I thought it'd be a pretty nice exponential decay but curve sketching actually led to sums of the Desolation period always being a bit over 5000 years. We abandoned curve sketching pretty quick because that would have meant the first Desolation post-Oathpact would have taken nearly 700 years, if we got 337 years after 8.

In the end, I made a quick spreadsheet where I just picked numbers to see what the lower bound on the timeframe of Desolations could be. I said every other Desolation before t = 8 would be exactly 300, and then I had the numbers drop off very rapidly after eight. Check out my poorly formatted spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1prORC7cmaPfyzR3O6RBYT5NtZRDEsmu_rG10oRaSQOI/edit?usp=sharing

Don't take any numbers too seriously, but if you just map out the numbers like that, I really don't see how the Desolation period could be less than 3000 years, and it could be upwards of nearly 6000 years. 

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Woohoo! You opened with my Nightblood questions! :D  Yeah, that was a lot of fun getting those confirmations from Brandon.

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Wyndle does specifically say Lift metabolizes food into Stormlight in the WoR interlude. I guess he could be wrong. 

On the length of the desolations, I like the idea of it taking longer than like anthousand years although the text and a WoB make it sound like it couldn’t have been many thousands of years. 

in the prelude Kalak thinks he’s been tortured for “Centuries, perhaps millennia”. Granted it would be hard for him to keep track, but his statement makes it sound like the length was over a thousand but not so long that he couldn’t confuse it for hundreds of years. 

Also, there is this WoB where Brandon says the whole Cosmere storyline takes place over about 10,000 years and Roshar is right in the middle of that timeline which makes it hard for the Desolations + 4,500 years to = 7,500 or more years. 

I guess he could have misspoke or something.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/97-idaho-falls-signing/#e2728

Edited by Child of Hodor

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4 hours ago, Chaos said:

In the end, I made a quick spreadsheet where I just picked numbers to see what the lower bound on the timeframe of Desolations could be.

Thanks for the math :). Something that interests me with these speculative numbers is that if this spacing of time were similar to what really happened, that means the last generation of people to survive a desolation had actually survived several. I mean, I knew that the last two were right on top of each other, but potentially the adults would have actually seen 3 or 4 desolations, the 70+ crowd--if anyone actually survived that long--may have seen 6-8 in a life time. That is CRAZY!

So even though 6,000 years seems like a long time, that last century...it would be like the Mongol Hordes, the Black Death, 30 Years War, American Civil War, WWI, WWII, all happening back to back. Anyway you crunch the numbers, that would be the worst time to live on Roshar.

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I'm not sure if it can go back that far, simply because there had to have also been time for civilization to arise on Ashyn, for their knowledge of magic to have grown to such a high degree that they were able to lay waste to the entire planet, and Odium's involvement means that a lot of this, at the very least, happened post-Shattering.  And after that, the refugees came to Roshar and spent several generations (apparently) living in Shinovar before the whole Girl Who Looked Up bit kicked off the original Desolation.  Make the Desolations period too long and you start butting up against the start of the timeline.

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Your suggestion that the shards swore not to interfere with each other makes a lot of sense. Frost and Hoid were both at the Shattering, and this little tidbit from the Traveler makes me think that everyone there except Hoid swore that.

Quote

“You sly old lizard!” the Traveler said, pointing. “You already knew! You were watching! And here you were chastising me.”

“I did NOT interfere,” the elderly man said. ”You meddle in things we promised to leave alone. Things that we—”

Traveler held up a finger, interrupting him, then slowly he pointed at the older man. ”I. Made. No. Promise.”

Frost even uses the word interfere directly right here.

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Jozomby

Posted (edited)

Woot!  My questions were on Shardcast!  That just made me really happy :)

Also, just an fyi, it's pronounced "Joe Zombie", so the second time you guys get it right. (Edit for clarification - the second time in the podcast, it was correct)

Edited by Jozomby

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2 hours ago, Jozomby said:

Woot!  My questions were on Shardcast!  That just made me really happy :)

Also, just an fyi, it's pronounced "Joe Zombie", so the second time you guys get it right.

Noted for the future :)

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"intuitively obvious to the casual observer"? Let's hope it's not that clear, or we'll be guessing for the next 15 years.

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5 minutes ago, Kalinovsky said:

"intuitively obvious to the casual observer"? Let's hope it's not that clear, or we'll be guessing for the next 15 years.

I am glad somebody is noticing these things :P

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the title to this got my hopes up i thought he announced the book nightblood was coming out soon.

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About the whole Fused are looking for the Cryptic thing, there's another aspect to there that you guys didn't mention. If the KR are returning, and are the biggest threat to Odium, then they need to be stopped as quickly as possible. If the Fused in Kholinar had found the Cryptic, then they might have tortured or killed it before sending it back to its brethren in Shadesmar. If this was the case, they could unsettle the Cryptics enough that they might pull back from the Nahel bond entirely, effectively eliminating an entire order of Radiants.

Also, as the person responsible for throwing some doubt at Kandra/Mistwraith immortality, I am totally having a few evil laughs whenever it starts an argument.

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I have always though Lift is channelling Cultivation’s Power, not Honor’s, when she burns food; wasn’t there a scene in one of Lift’s early interlude chapters in which Nin is trying to keep Stormlight infused gems away from her, not understanding that she is getting her powers from food ?

Anyway, that’s  what I tell myself when I decide to have a second bowl of cornflakes for supper. 

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Wax

Posted (edited)

Isn’t Paatji an inanimate island with investitutre?

 

Edited by Wax

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Finally had the chance to listen to this shardcast fully and it was so worth it. The "who's that cosmere character" quiz at the end is amazing everytime. I managed to finish reading Warbreaker yesterday too so the topic of this shardcast was perfect.

I really hope we'll get to see Zahel and Szeth talk about Nightblood in the next book since there would be good opportunities for them to meet I think? Zahel trained the Kholins' sons and is a respected swordmaster so now that Szeth is Dalinar's bodyguard maybe Dalinar will ask Zahel to spar/train with Szeth. Or maybe the soldiers just talk about a scary black all-destroying crazy sword that Dalinar's new bodyguard wielded on the battlefield and Zahel hears about it too. Oooor if Szeth just brings Nightblood close enough for Zahel to hear it ("O hai vasher, I destroyed a lot of evil, are you proud of me now?").

Also Sword-nimi as a name is funny since in Finnish "nimi" means "a name" so everytime I read Szeth say it I read it as "sword-name-goes-here".

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teknopathetic

Posted (edited)

Will you ever do a Reddit AMA WOB  cast? There are so many on Reddit and I am surprised people don't talk about Brandon's /u/mistborn account

Edited by teknopathetic

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1 hour ago, teknopathetic said:

Will you ever do a Reddit AMA WOB  cast? There are so many on Reddit and I am surprised people don't talk about Brandon's /u/mistborn account

Uh, we probably should, given the sheer volume of answers we've gotten in the last month, but we are going to need to be super picky about what we talk about, because otherwise we'll end up with a 12-hour episode...

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3 hours ago, Argent said:

Uh, we probably should, given the sheer volume of answers we've gotten in the last month, but we are going to need to be super picky about what we talk about, because otherwise we'll end up with a 12-hour episode...

You say that like it wouldn't be awesome. :rolleyes: 

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Hey @Chaos, voting seems to be broken on this page specifically.  Trying to upvote anything ends up with the vote never registering. Any idea what's going on?

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Hey guys! Sweet podcast and thanks for the math and Happy Birthday @Chaos! Really great questions. I knew Nightblood was a powerful Investiture Vampire, but can you imagine! Nightblood Shard! That would be simultaneously sweet and terrifying, he would always be trying to get that evil destroyed! Although would that be too bad of a thing, like say on Threnody. (Probably! :P) With Lift, since I've always imagined Cultivation Investiture as "earthy", I thought she would gain Stormlight by consuming the "earth", i.e. food. I would be curious to know if she could ingest anything edible, say like crem and still produce Stormlight. Like Honor's Investiture, you inhale the Stormlight; it's almost an "airy" Investiture. I wonder, if Voidlight is in fact Odium's Investiture, would it be the "fire" Investiture? If the Investiture's are associated with the elements, is there a "water" one? Another form of Investiture we haven't seen yet on Roshar? I take what Wyndle says with a grain of salt as Wyndle's memory still isn't all there and Lift doesn't know the right questions to ask at this time.

P.s.- @Argent In what language would Vessel mean joy? I'm curious, I really like languages. I know what it's not, English and French, the only languages I know. Oh and Latin, as that's a dead language.

Excellent podcast!! Hilarious Whose that Cosmere character!!

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With Ruins connection to Nightblood, is it possible possible Hemalurgy was used in Nightbloods creation? I think I have heard that theory before but this seems to give it more credence. 

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6 hours ago, Mason Wheeler said:

Hey @Chaos, voting seems to be broken on this page specifically.  Trying to upvote anything ends up with the vote never registering. Any idea what's going on?

Must be a consequence to the HTTPS update. Something is wrong with HTTPS support on the IPS Content module (which this is on) that I guess I just need to do software updates to fix. That will not be soon at all. Any news page, this will not work on for the next while. I suppose I'll just need to hide the buttons in the meantime.

13 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

Will you ever do a Reddit AMA WOB  cast? There are so many on Reddit and I am surprised people don't talk about Brandon's /u/mistborn account

Yes, we will, but do note that this was the Legion release. Though this episode was popular, and that's really great, we also want to balance other topics so Shardcast isn't just WoBcast. We are allotting three episodes of time to the Skyward tour. With that and the AMAs we'd really need to get all of them done in four episodes total and spread them out. Too many WoB episodes at a time is too much. That's why we did the last two Kholins episodes before airing this one and next week's.

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12 hours ago, whattheHoid said:

P.s.- @Argent In what language would Vessel mean joy? I'm curious, I really like languages. I know what it's not, English and French, the only languages I know. Oh and Latin, as that's a dead language.

That'd be Bulgarian.

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