Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 27 (Banners)
Epigraph: How can there be “a wound upon the Spiritual Realm where Ambition, Mercy, and Odium clashed” anyway? The Spiritual Realm is supposed to be divorced from location and even time. How would a breach in the Spiritual Realm be localized to Threnody? Or maybe it’s just saying that the other two realms were damaged in such a way that the Spiritual Realm bled through? It doesn’t sound like
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 26 (A Little Espionage)
Epigraph: Devotion and Dominion are dead, their power shattered. Yes, yes, news at 11.
Shallan surrounded by cryptics every time she breaks out the sketchpad :-) All the other Lightweavers must be jealous-- “No, I can be artistic too, I swear. Come back Pattern… no, not you, my Pattern. The one with the fractally, no, not you. Pattern! Stop ignoring me.”
Hm, yeah, maybe
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 25 (Devotary of Mercy)
Epigraph: Great Googly Moogly! More shard names? What inspired Brandon to give us this sudden windfall? Whimsy, Mercy, and Valor now, in addition to Invention from the previous chapter. Not much information about them beyond hints, though I really want to see what kind of magic system Whimsy inspires. (Maybe that’s the magic kite story that was mentioned in the State of the Sand
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers
Chapter 24(Full of Awe)
Epigraph: Invention--that’s a new shard that I haven’t heard of before. It’s possible it popped up in some of the WoBs I missed in the past year, but I’m gonna guess this is the first mention. S/he is hiding or otherwise unreachable, which makes me think of the mystery shard that just ‘wants to hide and survive,” though that’s pretty tenuous. Endowment isn’t ignoring Harmony, which sounds
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 23 (Binding Wounds)
Epigraph: Nothing to say.
Once again a good depiction of depression in its various stages and forms. Also a nod to chronic pain as experienced by Mil.
Syl reading Kaladin’s book for him is cute.
Jasnah takes time to soulcast medicine? That’s awesome, and a level of specificity/precision I might not have expected of soulcasting. I can’t wait for someone to bring that a
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers
Chapter 22 (No Use Talking)
Epigraph: These letter segments are too short. It does sound like Sazed may be more open to helping than he seemed from the last correspondence.
Alright, this has nothing to do with the chapter at hand, but I was thinking about how Mraize was bugging Shallan about getting the Ghostblood tattoo. She was rightly hesitant, and correctly pointed out that it probably wouldn’t stick. Bu
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers
Urithiru
The first Urithiru sketch already featured in Oathbringer, but the scale of this place is insane. Very worthy of its mythic stature. I do like the cutaway sketches that give a sense of the internal space as well as how it would be used. I can really imagine those inward-facing balconies becoming a thriving neighborhood community. It’s interesting to me that the main atrium at least does not close off bet
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Okay, so first I want to say that the key I was using switched the L and R characters in the Alethi women’s script, which made this transliteration much more difficult to puzzle out until I’d realized the error.
It is interesting to see what sounds are used phonetically and which English spellings are directly transliterated (e.g. the C in “space” uses the K/C letter, while the one in “entrance” uses an S) b
Whooo, my first post on the art blog, this is exciting! This is Heather and Pearl, Star's daughters. Heather is 18 and she's adopted, Pearl looks like she'd be like 2 in this picture. I find this picture quite anecdotal, to be honest. Little kids, however adorable, are not my cup of tea. I'm happy to say though, that Heather and Pearl do get along pretty well eventually. Heather just needs to get used to sharing her mother.
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 21 (The Seething Knot)
Epigraph: Oh, nope this is Sazed after all. Presumably a second letter, then. Has Hoid been contacting everyone again, or just the people he thinks are most likely to be sympathetic?
Adolin is delightful. I love how he’s justifying his fashion obsession with an appeal to Alethi manliness. “Oh, yes. Picking the right outfit is exactly like fighting a duel, with the same prepara
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 20 (The Unseen Court)
Epigraph: A letter! Who is this one from? Relative youth, but not Sazed since we heard from him in the last book. So I’m guessing this one isn’t a Vessel. The first letters were to/from Frost, also not a vessel, so that’s not unprecedented. Without knowing more I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this is the president of Silverlight University. Seems as likely as anything else I
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
A Portion of the Southern Sea of Souls
Map image here.
I want to reiterate that Nazh is a gem. He’s much more present on this map than some of the others, with lots of annotations. I love it.
First of all, what is that creature in the top left?! It looks reminiscent of a larkin but is clearly a creature of the Cognitive Realm and looks awesome. A less fanciful rendition of this absolutely has to appear i
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Interlude I-3
Taravangian. Yes, this is definitely new header art.
Title: “Into The Fire” Just going by what Odium said in the last chapter, this is probably a reference to being called up to actually do some betrayal. Dun dun dun.
Is this the usual form of deviation from his initial prediction, caused by multiplied butterflies, or is it a larger divergence now that at least one Shard is actively parti
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Interlude I-2
Sja-Anat. Huzzah! I am really excited for this one. I spent a long time during Oathbringer trying to translate the Keeper of Secrets text, and we still only got ~60% of it worked out. Plus, she’s a fascinating character that we need more insight into, and who recently accepted an offer from the Ghostbloods. Secrets, here I come!
Odium trapped the Unmade in “a halfway existence” fully in neithe
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Interlude I-I
Sylphrena! Hooray for spren interludes. (Sprenterludes?)
First thing first, have to acknowledge the chapter header art with an interesting depiction of Syl. I’m pretty sure that even in Oathbringer the non-recurring characters didn’t get unique chapter art, right? With respect to this piece, it isn’t very similar to most of the fanart I’ve seen, even accounting for the consistent style across
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 19 (Garnets)
Title: I really don’t remember what garnets do in fabrials. Are they the opposing-motion counterpart to spanreed rubies? I know they soulcast blood, but that’s not the association we care about for a Navani chapter.
Epigraph: Open exchange of scientific research? Looks like Jasnah isn’t the only one shaking up cultural norms and having a huge impact on Rosharan society. Industrial Revol
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 18 (Surgeon)
Title: I’m expecting more disappointment from Lirin this chapter. Maybe Kal will ask if he can go back to a healing role? I can imagine the response would not be encouraging.
Epigraph: The Fused have a “stormlight draining” fabrial that relies on a second unknown metal (i.e. not the aluminum alloy used for blocking blades). By the analogies we’ve seen so far to the metallic arts it seem
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 17 (A Proposal)
Header: Navani chapter, with kalak. Significance: someone has bad breath? Yeah, not sure why I’m even noting the herald icons.
Epigraph: learnin’ about Aluminum. Or, whatever alloy of it is being used in the Fused weapons. We know from Shallan’s necklace that aluminum is a known material on Roshar, and I would have expected the scholars studying this stuff to figure out that connecti
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 16 (An Unknown Song)
Oh, hey. This is the first time seeing Navani’s chapter-header symbol. I like that shining gem.
Incidentally, I also paged back through to look at the herald symbols gracing each chapter, and much like Oathbringer all of the chapters so far have 4 of a kind (in contrast to WoK in which usually there were two heralds per chapter). I’m not great at analyzing the heraldic attr
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Chapter 15 (The Light and the Music)
Finally! On to the next chapter!
Title: This is a Kaladin chapter, so I’m guessing it’s a reference to the things other people enjoy that he can’t because his life is suffering and depression. Sorry, Kal.
Epigraph: So logicspren can reproduce any Boolean operation, timing gate, or similar mechanism based on the design of the fabrial they are used in. I see compu
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Back Cover
Before jumping into this, I want to share something very cool that I learned this week. Did you know that the Coppermind has implemented a time machine function where you can access the articles as they appeared prior to the release of a particular book? That means you don’t have to avoid the wiki entirely if you are trying to stay spoiler free. Props to the Coppermind staff and contributors for ma
I took the time to update the statistical analysis of Rhythm of War today and wanted to share some fun charts!
SPOILERS FOR RHYTHM OF WAR!
Word Count by Character
Self explanatory. Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar lead the pack in that order, as I think most people would assume.
Word Count by Character (excluding the big 3)
Zooming in a bit better on all the characters besides Kaladin, Shallan and Dalinar... Navani and Venli both leaped up tremendously in Rhythm of War. Ado
Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.
Internal Art (Part II)
Nale. Darkness. Oh, yes. His detached expression really works for what we know about his emotionless approach to things, while at the same time that eyes-closed transcendence looks almost rapturous despite the internal focus. He’s centering himself like a completely self-assured Javert from Les Mis.
Also, he’s floating in a very defying-gravity sort of way, which is appropriate. A
