Zalocx

I agree. Remember that Shardblades have no problem cutting through Void binding Fused or Thunderclasts, beings that are WAAY more invested than any Metalborn burning or tapping anything. In fact I'd argue even the argument that Kandra or Inquisitors can get an edge if they deflect the Blade off their spikes is flawed. Shardplate basically exists to be magical power armor and even it cracks and shatters after 3-4 solid blows by a Blade, and a spike is not designed to be a defensive impliment. Best case scenario is that hitting a spike deflects the blade once, but even that would utterly ruin (no pun intended) the spike in question with goodness knows how much damage, possibly similar to how players cracks before breaking. To the point where the poor Kandra or Inquisitor would probably wish they were dead if that spike happened to be one of the critical ones.

Huh, if Rayse does bite the dust prior to Stormlight 6 it would ratchet the threat and tension down alot in my opinion. Since the danger of Odium has never simply been the power but the mind behind it. Even if he or she is a thoroughly unpleasant person, I doubt any newbie will be as capable at using the Shard as a guy who has had thousands upon thousands of years of practice. If we have to pick a likely replacement then after OB my money is on Moash... Err... I mean "Vyre"

Another thing of note that has bugged me pretty much since WoK: Blood. Singer/Parsh blood is always described as being orange and smelling moldy, and the narrative references that often. One context is that that is continously mentioned to set them apart from red blooded humans, but we see the orange and red blood of singers and humans repeatedly juxtaposed with the purple blood of cremlings, axehounds and greatshells. Now animals in real life (several clades of invertebrates for example) have blood markedly different than our red stuff, but as @Blightsongsaid it's never just one species. It's whole groups with similar blood chemistry so you can derive lines of decent and evolution by comparing and contrasting. Singers are the *only* life forms we see on Roshan with orange blood. So I think it's likely that they themselves are not related to the rest of the ecology on Roshar. They might have been humans long ago, or they might have been something else from somewhere else. But I'm not even convinced they are native to this planet. In fact how ironic would it be that the "true inhabitants" of the planet fighting the "invaders" are just an older group of migrants who have had longer to adapt? And the only truly indigenous sentient life, the Amiens, are more or less reduced to a side player in their own world. Do we ever see Axies or one of the Sleepless bleed and find out what color their blood is?

Yeah I trust the super-cosmerically aware Hoid and Frost talking to each other more than what Odium tells the pretty naive Dalinar here. If Odium was really "Passion" or "Betrayal" he would have been called that. I find it pretty incredulous that all the Shards so far have been pegged pretty correctly with their Names=Intent except for this one. Also I never liked the idea that even if Odium was Hate that he couldn't be calm or couldn't plan stuff. Its one of the arguments against the idea that Odium is one of if not *the* best at Future Sight among the 16: That "Hatred" can't possibly be cool and collected and good at foresight. Which makes no sense to me, since literature is filled to the brim with character's motivated by hatred that are exactly that. Look at any of Poe's short stories: his protagonists commit murder based almost exclusively on an irrational sense of hate for their victims and plan it so they almost never get caught until their own guilt or other moral failings compromise them, or just never get caught ever i.e. The Casque of Amontillado, but their planning and execution is always impeccable. Hatred is not Rage. Rayse being calm and coming off as "kindly" is perfectly in character for him. In fact I pretty much expected him to end up being really personable and even likable when he showed up. People read that he has killed 4 other shards and is called Odium and start thinking he's Jason Voorhees whereas I always imagined demigod Hannibal Lecter: smart, sophisticated, charismatic, and able to pull off multiple murders because he is always 5 steps ahead of everyone else..

I'm 101% convinced that Vyre is a metaphorical change. The act of making a Fused seems to require a dead Dawnsinger cognitive shadow to inhabit the body of a parshman the way they normally bind spren. Humans can't bind spren that way because they don't have gemhearts, bonded spren for surgebinders remain external entities. Even the battle at the end with corrupted Alethi was more like them being influenced rather than permenantly possessed. Since it says they stopped fighting and went back to normal once the Trill was removed.

For a third novel in a row everything Syl touches turns to pure gold. Sure there were deeply emotional and inspiring and haunting moments in Oathbringer, but nothing was better than this:

I'm leaning towards #3 myself. When Odium saw what was happening he reacted with shock and perhaps even fear. That shouldn't happen if it was just Honor recoalessing. Odium has at least three notches on his belt, if a Shard he had already killed reformed around a new user who probably wasn't as used to commanding the Power as someone who had been doing it for eons Odium might be shocked or upset but I sought he would recoil like he did. Unity is something more. Add to that the fact that in chapter 54 of the WoK Hoid just name dropped Adonalsium out of nowhere seemingly just to see if Dali are recognized the term, followed by talking about what would happen if you pulled someone apart and put them back together in a rather obvious metaphor for the the Shattering and what it would mean to possibly stich Big A back up. Why would he mention that to Dalinar out of the blue? And the Stormfather having no clue about the visions of warm light Dalinar has os also weird. If it was just Honor's power reforming you think Honor's own cognative shadow would be able to sense *something*. But if it's Adonalsium related it makes sense the Stormfather is oblivious: such power is waaay beyond him.

So we got confirmation that humans came to Roshar because of a major disaster on their "original" world and that the big secret was that they had destroyed their own planet with surgebinding. This is interesting and has many implications, it will probably take a while to shift through all of them (the book has been out for like 2 days at the time of writing this post haha) but I would like to discuss two theories I had just considering the basics within the context of the Cosmere as we know it. 1. The "Tranquiline Halls" is Ashyn So with the confirmation in text that humans are not native to Roshar, something that has been more or less confirmed through various WoBs over the years so isn't groundbreaking news, we start to wonder where they came from. We know that they arrived as refugees fleeing the devastation of their original home, so the initial group must have come from the same world. I posit that that world is Ashyn, the planet right next to Roshar that we know is a blasted wasteland save a few pockets where humans survive. And that it got that way because as Khriss mentions in her essay on Greater Roshar in AU: it "suffered a cataclysm long ago". It makes logistical sense, a massive number of refuges that would be produced by a global disaster would most likely want to settle in the place that was both safe and as close as possible to limit how long they were displaced. Even with the distance warping of the Cognitive why trek halfway across the galaxy with probably nothing but the clothes on your back when you can find shelter the next planet over? Then there is this Death Rattle from WoK that most people have, again, guessed for years refers in someway to the humans initially displacing the native Parsh: The last sentence is of specific import in this case. The place that is "hollow and forlorn" might refer the Braize, where the cognitive shadows of the genocided Dawnsingers that would later become the Fused were locked up. But the part where the speaker (presumably a human "Voidbringer") claiming that they themselves once burned is probably a reference to the disaster that destroyed their homeworld. And guess what? Back in that essay in Arcanum Unbound Khriss names Ashlyn "the burning planet". Other possibilities for the identity of the Tranquiline Halls would be either 1) Yolen or 2) a yet unnamed planet. I find Yolen unlikely because the chronology seems to indicate a big time lapse before whatever happened to Yolen (assuming it happened in close proximity to the Shattering and the Birth of the 16) and the human refugees showing up with Odium as their god. For one we know he was off chasing Ambition in the space around Therody, and also took time to go murder the Selish shards. Assuming the conflict between Odium and Honor started soon after his arrival in Roshar and hasn't abated since he would have taken an unbelievably short time to accomplish his prior goals. Not to mention that whatever happened to Yolen had nothing to do with surgebinding, but that is not that big of a deal breaker as I will explain shortly. As for a yet unknown world? Well I can't find evidence for or against something we don't know exists now can I? So we should really have someone ask Brandon if the Tranquiline Halls are a world we already know about during the OB tour. 2. The Tranquilline Halls were destroyed, but probably not by surgebinding as we know it So this being the big secret behind the Recreance confused me. I understand how the characters in universe might come to this conclusion but it makes little sense for the Cosmerically aware. Obviously something big *did* happen to the homeland of the humans to make them refugees and this being the Cosmere that thing most likely related to usage of Investiture. But we know that, while a magic user can use their magic anywhere given the right resources, initiation into a magic system requires Connection to a certain Shard and/or a certain planet. As surgebinding as we understand it is a system created by bonding a spren of Honor/Cultivation that has learned to mimic the blades Honor forged from his own soul to give the heralds. And he gave those blades to the heralds to enforce the oathpact. So as we know that H+C came to Roshar before Odium and now know that Odium came with the human refugees. It seems incongruous to believe that surgebinders in the mold of the KR existed and destroyed the Tranquiline Halls BEFORE the humans came to Roshar with Odium, who started a fight with Honor, who then forged an Oathpact with 10 humans, which splinters of H+C's power then copied to create surgebinders. Furthermore in WoR Honor in the visions tells Dalinar he "didn't foresee the coming of the Knights" and confirms Syl's comments about the spren mimicking the Honorblades to produce the surges. But if surgebinders already existed and were the reason the Tranquiline Halls were destroyed, why would the coming of surgbinders surprise Honor? But what if surgebinding existed in a different form and Honor was just surprised to see the spren recreate it? Well then I maintain that you can't assume spren-based surgbinding will have the same result (planetary devastation) as whatever was used back home. Its like Hoid's Lightweaving vrs. Shallan's. Even if the effects are similar or even identical, the mechanics are markedly different. And we haven't considered the Dawnshards which in OB Honor claimed destroyed the Tranquilline Halls as he was in his death throes. So whatever wrecked the homeland of Roshar's humans was not surgbinding (again at least not as we know it) and so the truth behind the Recrence seems to be a tragic misunderstanding by the people involved possibly conflating two different magic systems from two different planets, probably.

This part was amazing for those of us who wanted more about both spren culture and world hoppers. The Aonic oracle in the lighthouse who initially assumed Kaladin was an Awakened before figuring out he was a surgebinder and praying to Domi was like the trifecta of cosmere hints. Dead Blades are super creepy on this side, did not expect that. And damnation Syl, how do keep making yourself more and more awesome/adorable/better-than-everyone-else in EVERY subsequent book? Someday you will hit the apex of "best girl"ness but for now that trend line is shooting for the moon and I love it

Almost certain Kaladin breaking the Highstorm was adhesion. In WoK he used that surge on his shield and drew an entire volley of arrows towards it. Here it seems like he just took it to the next level and infused the windpren, who are then described as "sweeping to Kaladin’s sides and parting the winds around him", and made them move to either side of him and pull the wind in between towards the two sides, essentially splitting the storm down the middle. I have had a pet theory since WoK that mature/master Windrunners could use adhesion and gravitation together to form vacuum bubbles around themselves to "fall" with no wind resistance. So I'm pretty happy right now.

I'm not buying that it's Viv. It could also be a more in depth dive into Zahel/Vasher or Nightblood's nature. The review mentions those things but doesn't give any details. WoR likewise was scant enough with details that "read Warbreaker" is advice not for the appearance of a new character but more focus on the existing ones. Also I find Viv showing up now (with SA happening a few hundred years after Warbreaker last I checked) to mean she's either returned, and thus not really "Vivenna" anymore, or she's of the Fifth Hightening. And even Rosharans would probably notice an aura that strong. I doubt she can suppress it since we have seen that even the masters of Awakening like Vasher and Denth could only suppress their one divine breath but not the whole mess of those on top of it.

I highly doubt it's a Kandra because continuity. We know that this first half of SA happens at roughly the same time as the Wax and Wayne books, which are set 300 years after the Final Accension, which itself was a thousand or so years after the dawn of the Final Empire. Ergo Kandra came into existence in the Cosmere ~1300 Scadrialian years ago. Whereas the last desolation according to the prologue in WoK was 4500 Rosharan years ago. And Rosharan years are longer than "Cosmere standard" years too. True, we don't know when the city was abandoned after the recreance, but it was probably longer than merely a 1000 or so years before the events of these books. So assuming this thing has been in the city since before or around the time humans left it, it easily predates Rashek taking a dip in Preservation's perpendicularity in the first place.

Oh Adolin you well meaning but dumb boob, that was about the worst thing you could have said at that point. Also Oooh creepy not!Kandra spren, I wonder if it's one of the singular named Unmade or simply one of a sub-voidspren "species". It's ability to affect the physical (and murder people) seems unprecedented compared to all other spren we have seen so far, so I wonder that's up with that.

On the LONG topic of skin color in this thread, which started off with an observation of "Why is Ash portrayed as dark skinned by a presumably Alethi artist?" I think a few people in this discussion have forgotten that Alethi are described as light brown/tan in a way that if they were transported to Earth I think would make their skin tones much closer to Middle Easterners or Hispanics than Western Europeans. Taln being described as not looking Alethi because because he was too dark was because he probably looks dark brown in a way we would see as someone of African decent. Ash's light/medium brown skin in the art is what I've always pictured Alethi looking like in my head, if anything its that the depiction of Ishar seems too "light skinned" to be Alethi. Maybe he is supposed to be Veden since Shallan is pretty fair skinned? (though if that's the predominant Veden skin color or if its an influence of Horneater blood I'm not sure of)

There is this from chapter 32 of WoR

My feelings are that if it is Cultivation, then why is Renarin acting so strange? Especially when Dalinar mentioned Odium's champion. Also I think that thing with Cultivation and Honor gets blown out of proportion. All Honor says is that she's better at it than him. We don't know how Odium (or any of the other Shards for that matter) compare to either of them. And I'm pretty sure that its not just Vorin Propaganda since it seems to permeate non-Vorin cultures too and I think even Tennavast said something to the effect in one of the visions in WoD. All we know for certain on Future Sight is: -Preservation is better than Ruin -Cultivation is better than Honor My hypothesis is that Odium is better than both of them, perhaps one of the best out of ALL of them. It would explain why he has been so effective at killing other shards, since we have a WoB that they were initially all perfectly equal in power. So even if Odium waited until the others had invested themselves in planets before striking, or used some other methods we are not yet aware of he would still be displaying an absurd amount of cunning and planning that can be explained if he really is better than everyone else at planning 3 steps ahead. We will have to see, I just think its strange that all Shards have Future Sight yet Odium (through the Voidbringers) is the only one known for it in mortal mythologies.

So at the end of WoR almost everyone in the fandom started noting Renarin was acting "kinda shady", and then chapters 8 and 9 of Oathbringer removed the "kinda" and turned the "shady" dial to 11 and snapped it off. The conclusion that a lot of people seem to have reached is that Glys isn't what she says she is or that Renarin is going to turn evil/is already evil. An equal amount of much the same people would also tell you that such a plot twist would be very predictable and kinda lame. So here I am to offer some thoughts I had when thinking about this while procrastinating at work First let me set up where I'm coming from: - We know the bondspren are at least a mixture of Honor and Cultivation's Investiture. With some (Honorspren) leaning almost fully one way while other (Cultivationspren) lean the other. But I don't think we have a definitive WoB about if any of Odium's power is also mixed in there. -Seeing the future is said to be "of the Voidbringers". We know from previous books that facets of myth and legend on various shardworlds are in-fact hints or obtuse references to the natures or powers of the Shards that inhabit or shaped that world. So I am pretty confident in predicting seeing what is to come is associated with the Voidbringers in the cultures of Roshar because its something Voidspren or Odium himself are very good at. And hey look! It's also what the Truthwatchers pretty much do all the time! -For all their being personifications of concepts, spren do show a bit of an ability to make choices as long as those choices don't contradict their concepts. Like the dichotomy of truth and lies between the Honorspren and the Cryptics are part of their nature, but the fact that this has grown into a big racial conflict in Shadesmar between them as implied by Jasnah is probably not. The two people most likely chose to express their rivalry this way instead of it being something hard-coded in them as Honor/Lie-spren. So from that base I would like to posit that Truthwatchers bind a type of spren (Prophesyspren?) that are actually mostly (or even entirely) of Odium, explaining why they are associated with Future Sight. But who in ages past turned against their master and joined the forces of humanity in the conflict between the 3 Shards. Maybe they foresaw something that rankled them if Odium won, maybe their nature as beings who conceptualize "seeing what is to come" meant that they are afraid of losing their entire purpose if Odium wins (a Cosmere where he has shattered the other 15 and rules unopposed would probably be very dull and predictable to a race of Seers). For whatever reason they turned against Odium and joined team Roshar, then when the rest of the bondspren started to imitate the Honorblades and give birth to Surgebinders they followed suit. That explains Renarin acting super weird around mentions of Odium's Champion and the general distance and obscurity attributed to the Truthwatchers in history: its not just that they are aloof and cagey because they get to know deep terrible secrets by their very nature, it *is* partially that, but also that as technically Voidspren they have an innate knowledge of Odium and his designs. The aloofness also probably comes from the fact that the other orders and other spren still probably didn't trust them, and who knows what the general populace would have done if they had known. It also kinda explains why Renarin DOESN'T TALK TO ANYONE ABOUT ANYTHING. His father has pledged to destroy Odium and is bonded to Honor's own Sliver, what is someone who was already a wallflower before this all started supposed to do? Go up to Dalinar and say "Hey dad, just wanted to tell you all this super secret stuff I know from my bond with a fragment of the Lord of Hate, but its cool she says she's on our side!"? So yeah, Renarin, Glys, the rest of her kind and the order of the Truthwatchers. I believe they are ultimately good guys, they just have an INCREDIBLY complicated backstory that explains why they are so, well *shady*, about it all.

It's interesting that people seem to be discussing decay/rot spren for Dustbringers. Since the implications are that they used their surges to light stuff on fire as noted by Kelak way back in the intro of WoK I always associated them with firespren as their "windspren are to honorspren" analogue.

Well that wedding was fast! And I am genuinely surprised nothing went terribly wrong, calm before storm I presume (I do NOT apologize for that pun) The follow up to Kaladin reaching home is something I have been slavering over ever since Brandon released the rough draft of whats now Chapter 5 like two years ago! It was really touching and I liked that Lirin and Hesenia were both still in town and okay instead of "Oh they moved to Kolinar years ago!" style your-princess-is-in-another-castle plot. Especially since the indication that they want him to stay with them sets up some good dramatic hooks since Kaladin probably needs to end up in Kolinar or another big city for the climax anyway to get back into the overarching plot. Lastly as one of her few defenders on this forum (she was just a little girl who had just lost her dad and been told these strange new people would basically decide her future, of course she did whatever she thought would make them happy!) I really wanted to see where Laral ended up. I hope Roshone hasn't done to her what Lin Davar did to Shallan's stepmom.

One thing I'm interested in is getting confirmation that the dawnsingers are actually spren. The only source we have on that is an ardent talking about what they are considered in Vorin mythology. And that's makes me just buying what Kabsal said at face value unlikely at best. Considering the "Singer" part of the name, I wouldn't be surprised if the Dawnsingers turn out to be what the newly arrived humans called the Listeners before the Desolation began and Odium got his hands on them. Kind of a "Kalad the Usurper and Peacegiver the Blessed are the same person and history has just forgotten“ kind of deal. Especially since that conversation discussing them as "kindly spren" happens when Shallan is asking why the Dawnsingers didn't help the humans against the Voidbringers

There is something super weird going on with death on Roshar, that's for sure. Yet Roshar has sections of its major magic systems that give unprecedented access to Shadesmar and yet we never see the dead transition. Shallan was looking into the cognative when the boarders started executing the crew of her ship. She saw their "lights" blink out but no shadow popped up in Shadesmar before stretching away beyond. This makes me think that Odium or his servants are somehow "snatching up" people when they die instead of letting them naturally pass Beyond. The death rattles might be a side effect of this.

Edgedancer Blades are already Cultivation Blades. Actually I would assume that there are three different "types" of Shardblade considering they are more or less made out of God metal: pure Tanavastium blades (like Syl), pure Cultivationium blades (Wyndle) and Honor/Cultivation alloy blades since we know some spren including possible Bondspren are mixtures of different Shards + pre-Shattering remnants of investature

I *really* don't think Aesudan is one of the two women in the meeting. We know from the interludes in WoR that she is basically a hedonist that bribes ardents and pays lip service at best to the Almighty. I don't see someone like that being part of the Sons of Honor. Whatever else Gavilar, Amaram, and Restares are, they are essentially Vorinism fundamentalists. Someone who cajoles priests to tell her she's not failing miserably at her faith is probably not gonna hang out with people so self righteous they think bringing about the apocalypse is a good trade if it brings God and his champions and the authority of the Church back.

Oh darn, should have paid attention to tour dates. I live like two towns over! Harmonium/Ettmetal being hard to use seems to be a feature and not a bug, since if anyone knows the danger posed by hacking the metallic arts at the highest level (Hemalurgy, compounding, TLR style Fullborn Compounding, God Metals) its Him. So it doesn't surprise me that Harmonium would be something you can't just swallow or slap on as a bracelet, makes it much harder to potentially abuse. Also I don't think there is any mystical reason for it being so volatile when exposed to water, I think Harmony just based its physical characteristics on Group 1/2 metals.

Yup, in fact thinking about it I think the mindset is more important than the ability. We see that having access to a magic-system often changes parts of personality and psychology. Whether that's the "special skills" Surgebinders and Twinborn develop like Shallan's memory or Jasnah's innate direction sense or simply how Vin and Wax try to be as hyper-aware of all anchors near them as possible at all times in their POV. Either supernaturally or through rote experience using certain types of magic predispose people to behaving certain ways. So Bavadin doesn't actually need to be able to lightweave as Autonomy, if her time as a mortal built up a habit of making up personas because that's how she used that power back when she did actually use it. This assumes her Intent doesn't override her old personality quirks, but from what little we know "Autonomy" should not conflict with "manipulate people by using constructed personas". That makes me think that if this theory is true the reason Hoid is antagonistic towards her is because she used Lightweaving for those manipulative purposes for her own ends. Where Hoid seems to take pride in using it to tell stories and be a lorekeeper (though he too manipulates people when he has to).