This is my reaction blog for Wind and Truth. Beware of spoilers! Index post here. 

Note: I just realized that I’ve been calling the book Winds and Truth (plural) when it’s really just Wind. That’s important given what we have learned about Wind the being, so I’ll adjust going forward and correct the overall blog title.

Title: What Might Still Be
First thought is a reference to Testament, second thought is something to do with Shallan’s aspects. Probably it’s none of those.

Icons: Ash
We got lightweaving to do.

Epigraph: The author considers herself both a historian and a philosopher. It doesn’t sound like Jasnah, though (to whatever extent I remember her tone after however long it’s been).

A surrealist drawing of the vertiginous experience of Lasting Integrity’s impossible architecture? Yes please! I doubt we’ll actually get that sketchbook page, but I’ll hold out hope.

Strange faces are sneaking into her art. The last time that happened she ended up faking a suicide attempt as she fled from Pattern and the other cryptics surrounding her. But now she’s in Shadesmar, so what could she be seeing? One unlikely alternative is the way faces showed up all over the place in the landscape of the White Sand graphic novels, which would indicate an influence from Autonomy or one of her avatars. I would be surprised if that were the case here, though. Not that Bavadin wouldn’t have a strong motivation to push on events here, but it would require an overextension of power and high risk of being caught and injured if she involved herself so directly in Odium’s affairs.

Hm, the first face she mentions is a singer with a crown-like carapace, similar to the face I identified as an unhappy honorspren in the mandra sketch. 

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“Each drawing done today had that singer face hidden somewhere, and she didn’t remember making them.”

Now that’s interesting. It’s the same face repeated across multiple drawings, not a variety of faces showing up. And she mentions the warping of her drawing at Urithiru when Re-Shephir was infesting the tower. I sadly don’t remember the details of how that manifested in her drawings outside of the vortex sucking in the tower in the one image we got from the sketchbook. I ought to go reread those sections at some point soon.

The rest of their party, or at least Shallan’s agents have been granted access to Lasting Integrity. That's not entirely a surprise, but it speaks to a shift in the politics of the city, and also I had been under the impression that the rest of the envoy had moved on rather than simply waiting outside the walls. 

You know, it hadn't occurred to me that the windrunners coming to Lasting Integrity would be bringing honorspren in direct opposition to the locals who are arguing to remain unbonded. Not the most politically delicate of choices, but with the skybreakers working in opposition, there really wasn't another option for fast travel. At least not without using elsecallers who don't seem to be a well-used resource at this point. Perhaps their numbers are too low?

Shallan is bemoaning the low turnout of volunteer honorspren convinced by Adolin’s arguments. I personally am surprised they got any. Twelve is a decent start, especially given that it’s unreasonable to expect every member of a population to sign up for the war. Your entire people cannot be warriors, presumably even if you are cognitive entities. Even the perpetually warring Alethi need support staff and camp followers and all the infrastructure that enables warfare.

Does Radiant emerge here because Notum addressed her as Radiant Kholin, or because they're speaking of warfare which is one of Radiant’s areas of excellence? Some other reason? 

It doesn't make sense to me why the honorspren who are willing to be bonded are passing to the physical realm here at Lasting Integrity when they could instead join the group about to return to Urithiru where most of the candidate squires are present. Why risk the extra time and distance on a journey through the physical realm where they might forget themselves? 

Notum has decided to join the candidate spren. However, he loathes the idea of bonding with a human. Does that mean we'll get a singer windrunner, or rather a listener windrunner, from Venli’s people? Oh, looks like Shallan has talked him into staying at Lasting Integrity to argue the cause of cooperation, rather than pursuing a bond he doesn't want. 

Smart to leave an edgedancer as the designated ambassador. Their listening skills will be a boon for that task. I'm curious about Shallan’s choice to leave a lightweaver agent. What would she task them with in this case? And who would she pick? 

Why can't the seon travel (well/quickly)? Is it because of the injury it sustained from being trapped inside Mraize’s radio box? Or is it something intrinsic to the seon’s nature?

When Shallan says that she'll bring Mishram back to “The Bondsmith” it's interesting to me that she uses the singular. Well, maybe not. Navani’s bond is recent enough that even assuming they've heard about it from Wit, it won't be natural yet for her to automatically think of Navani as a second Bondsmith. I'm interested to see how having multiple active bondsmiths plays out in the leadership of the Radiant community. That is complicated by the fact that two of them are currently married, but the dynamics will be interesting anyway. 

The creationspren looking like lights on the cognitive side feels off to me. Have we seen them before? I'm pretty sure we did at the lighthouse, but I don't recall their description. Little floating lights are less physical than I have come to expect of Spren in shadesmar. That they can apparently still change shape on this side, even if that’s not their usual behavior, is interesting to note as well. 

Huh. According to Kelek, Shallan’s drawing ability where she captures an aspect of a person as they could be, their potential, is a result of drawing on Fortune. Presumably that's similar to what's done by feruchemists. That's something she did with the mercenaries way back in book two and has repeated several times, though I don't recall all the instances. While I'm interested in this, it also starts to set a concerning pattern. Kaladin has an extra connection to the Wind, a power and entity that were barely hinted at in the earlier books but now shows up to mark him as additionally super special. Shallan now has an extra connection to Fortune with the same result. Too many of these sorts of reveals will start to annoy me with questions like “why was this deliberately hidden in the world building up to this point?” So far it hasn’t reached problematic levels, and I do generally love when another layer of lore is folded back to reveal more beneath, but at some point you have to ask why certain aspects remained obscure despite all of the exploration that came before. 

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“Strange things happen when the Nahel bond is imbricated.”

Whoowee that's a useful word. “Imbricated.” I like it. Presumably that's the same effect that occurs between twinborn with paired metal abilities on Scadrial: there's two separate abilities and then the resonance that results from their interaction. In that case Shallan’s bonding of two spren creates an extra affinity through the overlap of those bonds. It makes me wonder if we'll see multiple bonds to disparate spring types in the future back five books.

The face she's drawing is Mishram. I had thought that she got different faces on different days, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Neat that she has some sort of guide to or understanding of the spiritual realm. That will become essential as she continues her quest to find the unmade. 

It’s possible that this is because both her bonds are to the same type of spren. Rather than imbrication giving her an extra power, as one might expect from the interaction of distinct power sets, her dual cryptic bonds give her a deeper connection to the spiritual realm. 

Kelek suggests that Shallan talk to Wit, who he names as Midius, because he's an expert in drawing on Fortune–which I now recall is the same force that tells Wit where and when he's supposed to be for narrative significance. Also, the archaic word fantdodic is an interesting one. Not one I've encountered before, but the dictionary confirms it's real and archaic in English. This lends some verisimilitude to the skillful translation of rosharan languages.

Shiosak is an interesting name, I wonder where it's from? Oh he's Veden. Good reminder that the squires are being drawn from across the allied nations at the tower.

Haha, Adolin is making them carry Gallant all the way to Urithiru.