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Chapter 9


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Welcome to my liveblog of Rhythm of War! Index post here. Beware of spoilers.

 

Chapter 9 (Contradictions)
Epigraph: Pewter cages. Nothing revelatory here. I do wonder what a duralumin cage would do, since the pewter version seems to be a fast and hot expenditure of stormlight. Would it really be near-instantaneous? Is there a way to control such a device without the more mental control of allomancy or other internally directed magics?

By extension to a related metal, is it possible to make a useful device using an aluminum cage? Presumably aluminum would resist the flow of investiture and be more of an insulator than a conductor. It’s most likely that it would be inert, useless in the way aluminum “gnats” are as mistings, but it’s worth considering any edge cases where the aluminum is in fact functional.

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“They’re congratulating Laran,” Syl explained. “She spoke the Third Ideal while we were in that burning building.”

Nice reminder that things are progressing outside of the protagonists.

This depression sequence is difficult to read about, not because it’s sloggy but because it’s too close to home. Very well depicted.

Nice to see that Teft is being the useful kind of supportive here, and that this family of broken people are covering each other’s weaknesses as well as they can. It’s not great, but at least everything isn’t falling to pieces. (yet)

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On the other hand, that deviant stood out. Like a fraction on a page of integers. A seven within a sequence of otherwise sublime multiples of two. Contradictions whispered that her knowledge was incomplete.

Is this regular engineer speak, or is there something in Alethi numerology to make evens “sublime” and/or sevens be undesirable?

Evil fabrial has: four garnets, no (visible) spren, unknown metal, unfamiliar cut of gems. That’s not much to start theorycrafting. I’m going to take a stab and say that the metal is nicrosil, given that is the one that governs investedness / connection to one’s magical abilities in Feruchemy. The alternative would be duralumin, which is feruchemy for identity, since Syl reported feeling “less here.”

Garnets are associated with Ash/Lightweavers, which doesn’t seem relevant, and the soulcasting element of blood, also not particularly relevant. Unless blood is symbolic here in terms of vitality?

I’m unsure whether this is an indication that spren are strictly unnecessary, serving primarily as a shortcut to Rosharan developments, or whether it suggests spren that fail to manifest visibly when trapped.

Hm. The cut of the garnets matches the Urithiru tower fabrial, indicating that the singers are using ancient fabrial tech rather than the modern (spren-reliant) version. We still don’t know nearly enough about the principles that differentiate the two.

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Could it be the opposite? she thought, putting down the alien fabrial and making a note in the margins of the drawing. A way to suppress the abilities of the Fused?

That’s not what I thought she was going to say. I thought “the opposite” was leading to a conclusion about localized enhancement of Radiant abilities and bonds, but a suppression of Fused would be a lot more in line with the purported reason for constructing Urithiru in the first place. Not that the two are mutually exclusive--there are a whole lot more than garnets in the tower fabrial, after all.

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For years, they’d assumed no spren were trapped in Soulcasting devices. [...But in Shadesmar] Soulcasters manifested as small unresponsive spren, hovering with their eyes closed. So the Soulcasters did have a captured spren. A Radiant spren, judging by their shape.

That’s fascinating.
My first thought was that maybe the Recreance didn’t just result in shardblades dropping--maybe Regrowth fabrials and Soulcaster fabrials were the dead spren of those orders. But there are plenty of reasons to think that’s not the case. We’ve seen dead blades appearing to belong to most of the orders; dead spren are pretty unmistakable in shadesmar and don’t match the soulcaster spren description; Dalinar saw Regrowth fabrials in use in his visions, so they predated the Recreance.

But it is still significant that (if I’m reading this correctly) the soulcaster manifests as a single spren, despite having interchangeable gems, so it’s locked into the device in a different way. And it’s not made out of god metal in the same way that Oathgates are, unless there is a more malleable form of Cultivation’s metal that we haven’t seen.

That’s an interesting parallel that I’m sure has been noted before, though--adding gems to Soulcasters to recapitulate aspects of their abilities, as compared to the addition of gems to shardblade pommels to make them summonable.

The Urithiru elevators use a waterwheel for power. I don’t know why this is disappointing to me, but I feel like some of the magic has been lost. Glad to know they got upgraded though. I would definitely be more comfortable riding a Navani-certified elevator than a relic of the lost Radiants.

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The Soulcaster cache discovered in Aimia earlier in the year had brought an incredible boon to the coalition armies.

More references to the Dawnshard novella. WHY CAN’T I READ IT YET?!?!

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[Dalinar] flew in the line—kept aloft by a Windrunner—and wore a face mask with goggles to keep his proud nose from freezing right off.

Snerk. This is hilarious. I love your chapters, Navani. 

Thinking about Dalinar flying through the air-- if he tries to create a perpendicularity, does it travel with him a la highstorm mechanics, or is it anchored in place?

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Dalinar looked like a chull that had found itself among a flock of skyeels and was doing its best to pretend to fit in.
She loved that chull. 

Awww.

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A trip like this, all the way from Alethkar to the Shattered Plains, still took close to six hours—and that was with a triple Lashing, using Dalinar’s power to provide Stormlight.

This is a lot of helpful details. I feel like I should go start calculating travel times using the continental map of Roshar, and then extrapolate to more conventional (not Bondsmith aided) travels. But that sounds like a rabbit hole not worth diving into until it becomes specifically relevant, at which point someone else will probably have done it already. So for now I’ll just mark it for future reference.

Ooo, hidden spanreed ruby. Intrigue! Suspense! Who is trying to contact Navani?

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You are the monster Navani Kholin. You have caused more pain than any living person. [...] I couldn’t watch any longer, the pen continued. I had to stop you.

Was it a madwoman who wrote with the other reed? The ruby started blinking, indicating they wanted a response.

Movies have trained me to expect explosions from blinking red lights. Are they really just waiting for a reply? I also admit to being intrigued by whoever thinks that Navani is the worst problem Roshar has at the moment. There are a few (hundred) other issues of the day that would easily top her on a list if I were to put one together.

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You capture spren. You imprison them. Hundreds of them. You must stop. Stop, or there will be consequences.

Oh, okay. I’ll buy the unintended disaster of magical ecology approach. Not buying that it’s an immediate threat, compared to the Everstorm, but yeah. I’ll hear you out, mystery person.

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The honorspren cannot be trusted, the pen wrote. Not anymore. You must stop creating this new kind of fabrial. I will make you stop. This is your warning.

Fascinating. The “not anymore” (and the ranting) makes me think of a herald, though there are other options. Running down the list: 

  • The male heralds and Ash are all accounted for. 
  • There’s a popular theory that Chana is the assassin Liss, and this doesn’t seem to match what little we know of Liss, though Chana is associated with “spark and soul” which could fit an obsession/interest in spren.
  • Vev, patron of the Edgedancers, could have gone crazy in a “listen to the rocks” sort of way, an exacerbation of her virtues rather than a subversion of them. However, I put a little too much trust in the substance of this warning to jump to that conclusion. 
  • Pailiah is associated with the virtue of “Learned,” so stopping scientific progress might fit.
  • Battar is patron of the Elsecallers, most able to travel to and from Shadesmar. 

So far I’m liking Battar as the mystery pen pal, but we really haven’t narrowed it down much at all, and there’s no reason it has to be a herald.

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Back to Shallan. She probably hasn’t managed to look at Ialai’s notebook yet, but I did realize that it is probably going to be the source of the next set of epigraphs. That should be fun. Well, a set of epigraphs. We still need to learn about the in-world Rhythm of War, which probably heads the chapters with more Venli in them. I’m betting that is part II, and possibly IV as well, so Ialai’s notebook will be III. Unless that’s where the newest letter goes, in which case the notebook might not show up until part V.

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 I trust you, Shallan. But sometimes… I wonder if I can trust all three of you. Veil especially.

Yes. Tell me more about how these aspects are affecting your relationship. Adolin won a ton of respect from me for being willing to take that on directly, largely on Shallan’s terms but imposing his own boundaries for prioritizing her over Veil and Radiant. How has that developed in the past year?

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 And deep within Shallan, something else stirred. Formless. She had told herself that she would never create a new persona, and she wouldn’t. Formless wasn’t real.

But the possibility of it frightened Veil. And anything that frightened Veil terrified Shallan.

Yup. Absolutely stable. Nothing going wrong.

Also, gotta say that the bar keeps rising for whenever her past actually gets revealed. I’m largely expecting to be disappointed and think “that’s it? That’s the big deal?” when it finally comes out. Sanderson has his work cut out for him in making it impactful after teasing us for 4 books.

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I won’t let them use my honor against me. And… Stonefalls. I say things like that, and…”

Stonefalls. That’s a new one. I’m not really sure what to do with that in terms of categorization. I’ll just add it to the list for now. The capitalization makes me wonder if it’s a proper noun.

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She also hadn’t told him about the Ghostbloods

Really? I got the impression from the end of OB that she planned to tell him, but not Jasnah. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe she went back on that idea. But it looks like she’s about to tell him after all?

Adolin getting confused about all the different secret societies is kind of funny. I sympathize, and it’s good to get a recap along with this character moment.

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 Adolin might claim he was different from his father, but in fact they were two shades of the same paint. Often, two similar colors clashed worse than wildly different ones would.

This is a great metaphor, and fits Shallan very well for the POV.

Oh. A list of shard worlds in Ialai’s book. That… we already knew very definitively that they were world hoppers, but it is interesting to have that knowledge pop up right in front of one of the main characters, even if they don’t recognize it yet. It puts me in mind of some comments Brandon has made about the order in which certain series must be published, and it makes me wonder what the characters will be getting up to in the time skip between the front and back five stormlight books. If they are stumbling on the wider cosmere already, I’m going to bet that there is some world hopping that gets undertaken before book six rolls around. Looking for allies and/or magical solutions, probably?

Shallan say’s they’ll give the notebook to Jasnah “eventually.” I know she’s trying to keep the Ghostblood thing secret (and I think I support that choice in this instance) but I do wonder if those place names are things Jasnah already encountered on her jaunt through Shadesmar during WoR, and she would be able to give them answers a lot more quickly.

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Keeping secrets from Adolin was eating at her from the inside. Fueling Formless, pushing it toward a reality.

Ooo. Not good.

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She needed a way out. To leave the Ghostbloods, break ties. Otherwise they’d get inside her head. And it was way too crowded in there already.

Ha. Nice.

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I didn’t kill Ialai though, Shallan thought. I was close to it, but I didn’t. So I’m not theirs entirely.

I’m not sure that’s the correct metric to be using. You might want to figure out something else to judge yourself by.

Glad to hear we’ll see Mraize soon, though. He’s always interesting. I’m particularly curious to see which aspect Shallan uses to speak to him, and which she uses for advice. My guess is that Shallan will be front and center with Veil the primary advisor, but we’ll have to see. Pretty much any of the permutations could work, since she’s displayed multiple faces and guises for him already.

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