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

Title: In the Dancing Ring
That’s one way to euphemize a likely death dojo. Until told otherwise, that’s how I will picture the honorblade training Szeth’s family got.

Icons: Ishar
King of heralds, appropriate for a presumed introduction of honorblades and oaths, not to mention the extreme piety that Szeth presumably acquired from his family.
I note also the color-swapped Szeth for these flashback icons. He’s still facepalming, but now he’s an assassin in black, not white.

We’re going back 26 years. Is that the longest any of our flashbacks have gone? No, probably not. How long ago did Dalinar’s start in Oathbringer? Before his sons were born, so something similar to this. I’ll have to go check and compare at some point, especially if there is some potential Unmade action that would ripple across the continent and cause the sequence of events to matter.

Szeth was attracted to the Wind as a child, just as Kaladin was. These two both being her chosen champions seems to have been a long time coming.

He was also a weirdly melodramatic kid. The trees are hoping to escape their bark “and emerge with new skin, pained by the cool air.”

Quote

“Painful and delightful, like all new things.”

Well, that’s a worldview in a nutshell. 

Oh, he really is dancing. It’s not an artful phrase for doing combat katas or something. His sister is accompanying him on the flute. More Kaladin parallels.

Quote

“Molasses minutes and syrup seconds.” 

Brandon doesn’t really go in for alliteration very often, but this is a cool phrase. And I feel silly for pointing this out, but molasses and syrup are much more likely to exist in Shinovar than the rest of the continent, given the plants that live there. So it’s even valid as an in-character reference for content of the phrase, beyond matching the melodramatic style of internal narration that smol Szeth apparently has going on. 
The dance is worship for a large rock they found. I didn’t really question it before, but I don’t think i have a good explanation for why stone is worshipable for these shamans. I mean, it’s religion, it has its own motivations, but… I’ll just leave that thought there. We don’t have any depth at all on this belief system or how it meshes with the Shin people.

Yeah, the Wind is all over this thing. 

They’re sheep herders? Not what I would have expected. Molli the sheep trying to eat the sacred rock is humorous, but Szeth’s “not again, stupid sheep” reaction is revealing. Rocks may be important, and people can’t walk on them or break them, but they don’t revere them to the extent of being offended at disrespect from the livestock.

Elid-daughter-Zeenid. We have a name for his sister, and presumably for his mother as well. I don’t think we’ve met a female Shin by name yet, and I hadn’t been ready to assume they used matronyms for their daughters. That does seem to be the case, though.

His friend is named Dolk-son-Dolk, which is unfortunate. Maybe it’s a noble name for Shin natives or something, but it’s so close to “dolt” that I can’t possibly take him seriously. That’s probably the intended effect, since Szeth immediately classifies both Dolks as idiots.

Quote

“She wore orange as her splash.”

That’s a revealing line. Culturally apparently they get to have one spot of color in their attire. Oh, and in the next line it says it’s a privilege afforded to people “who add,” which harks back to Rysn’s WoK interlude. 

Ah, right. Wood is the normal construction material for shinovar, but rare elsewhere. 
“What kind of training do shepherds even need? You just have to listen to the sheep.” I can’t decide if this is a special empathy thing for Szeth or a naive childhood thing.

Oh my gosh. Szeth’s splash is a red handkerchief around his neck. He’s literally cosplaying as a cowboy while being an 11 year old shepherd.

Quote

“Szeth glanced at their family stone. It peeked up from the earth like a spren’s eyeball, staring unblinking at the sky, a vibrant red-orange. A splash for Roshar.”

Wow, so much packed into this short line. First, it’s their family stone, implying that each homestead has (or wants to have) one big rock. Maybe the exposed stones partially determine where people live? Second, I like his appreciation of the color as a splash like he wears. It’s a good parallel. Then I was going to say something about the kind of rock it could be from the color, but we know that Roshar’s continent has a whole lot of artificial processes going into its creation, not the more familiar deposition, mountain building, and plate tectonics of Earth. So instead, I’ll just say for Third that the spren eyeball simile is bizarre. 

Elid and Szeth’s speculation about the outside world is depressingly accurate for wild hyperbole. “People constantly kill each other out there.” Um, yup. It’s called Alethkar and everywhere their armies can reach. “Maybe everything has tentacles and wants to eat you.” Well, maybe not tentacles, but between axehounds, whitespines, chasmfiends, and other greatshells, i wouldn’t blame you for being uncomfortable with the wildlife.

The family homestead is way more isolated than I thought. You can walk for days across the prairie without seeing anyone else. I’d assumed that Shinovar was way more densely populated than that. I guess I should have expected from calling it a “homestead” that it would be away from other settlements.

Wait a minute. Going by Szeth’s description of an annual cycle for how they care for the sheep, does Shinovar have actual seasons? The storms dominate the rest of the planet so that “seasons” of spring, winter, etc are only days or weeks long, a transient weather pattern with no consistent sequence, but Shinovar escapes the violence of storms, the crem they carry, and may also have a seasonal cycle.

Quote

“They were blessed as people who could add beneath the Farmer’s eyes.”

Is that capitalized Farmer a deity? A noble-like title?

There are frequent pirate raids to steal their sheep, perpetrated by Eastern Rosharans, and the people who train with swords never come to help because they protect the secrets of the Honorblades. I can totally get Elid’s frustration there.

That’s a more dramatic response to the newly uncovered rock than I thought. It’s not just Szeth’s particular devotion at play, because Elid also gasped at the sight, then immediately ran to tell her Father. Stone is really important.