Pagerunner

I appreciate you posting this topic. It's one I've tossed around a lot since Rhythm of War, but I keep derailing all my writeups by getting into suppressors and Enlightening and all these complex interactions that happen in that book, and I have a hard time actually figuring out how to start it. I've got a few big areas I'd like build on your thought: The Frequencies of the Tones First of all, there isn't a sixteen-note scale for the Shards. It was Brandon's initial intent, but it doesn't work, so it's not happening: But I think it is a very good question to dive into anyways: what are the actual frequencies? I think the popular theory is that it's a scale-and-some-change, that there are twelve notes in a chromatic scale and then four Shards that are the beginning of the scale in the next octave. (So, for example, C through the next E-flat.) This has a lot of potential for harmonic Shards that get along (that might share the same note on different octaves) and dissonant Shards that would be opposed (who could be a half-step apart, and have a lot of musical tension). The big problem I have with that is that it's going to put a lot of constraints on the actual Shards themselves, if we were to attempt to map Shards to pitches. Every Shard would need at least two very dissonant Shards (for the half-step above and below, and then any for that octave-and-a-half-step), and then you'd have to consider the fifths as being fairly well aligned, and man that's a lot to keep straight and we're just getting started. Based on the WoB above, I don't think Brandon designed the sixteen Intents around a chromatic scale; he's doing it the other way around, coming up with the Shards and then fitting them to pitches somehow. So either a) most of the musical relationships wouldn't actually matter, beyond maybe the octaves, or b) the notes are not using the chromatic scale. I wouldn't mind a digression into the nitty-gritty of why we have the twelve notes we do in western music, but I'll keep it at the level you presented it above: the harmonic series, where you have a fundamental frequency and use multiples of that frequency for your harmonies. But instruments that we play don't rely solely on the harmonic series to play a full scale: they all need to change the fundamental (whether hitting different drumheads on a timpani, moving your hand up on a string on a violin, or depressing a valve to add tubing to a brass instrument). The harmonic series defines the scale, true, but an instrument that only uses the harmonic series (like a bugle) can only play a selection of notes. I think that's a second option, that the Shardic tones are like a bugle. So that would give you four octaves (say, 110 hz, 220 hz, 440 hz, 880 hz, 1760 hz for your A's) and then a selection of notes within that range (330, 660, and 990 hz being being Es; 550, 1100, and 1650 being D-flats, 770 and 1540 being G's, and then I think an E-flat and an A-flat to round out the last few primes [with the associated minor changes to make it actually sound good because music is crazy]). I think this does a good job of giving us a wide range for the tones, rather than cramping them together in a single octave, and it's a little simpler to try to harmonize Shards. The ones nobody likes (like Odium and Ruin) can get the dissonant multiples of 7/11/13, and then you have a few groups of 'good' Shards that all fit into a major chord. But, the one I go with is purely based on vibes. Three octaves of the pentatonic scale gives us sixteen notes, and it's (relatively) harmonically pleasing for any of them to go together. If I recall correctly, this scale is also based on the harmonic sequence, but without a need to space the notes evenly across like the 12-note chromatic scale, so you don't need to incorporate some of the more dissonant multiples. I like it because I don't think that any of the Shards are truly dissonant, since they were all part of Adonalsium's "divine virtues" but are now "without context," so I like how this doesn't have any really harsh dissonance like an E and an E-flat. The Shape of the Rhythms This is where I'm going to greatly disagree with your interpretation. I don't believe rhythms are sine waves or dyads or anything like that; I think they are complex piecewise functions that become the amplitudes of sine waves, while the tones are the frequencies. A manifestation of Investiture (whether they be Stormlight or allomantic powers) is defined by a waveform with both frequency (tone) and amplitude (rhythm). We can get order-of-magnitude estimates for frequencies just from assuming that sound works in the cosmere like it works on Earth. For tones to be heard as pitches, we'll generally say that they fall in the range of the piano (27.5 hz to 4000-ish). There is a periodicity to the rhythms, but even a fast rhythm is going to be single-digit cycles per second. Two pitches will give you an overtone together; but a metronome and pitch won't make an overtone. The metronome is just too slow. So that's why I don't think you can look at rhythms in terms of a second frequency that's a harmonic of the Shard's tone. I've got some images from one of my abandoned writeups; let's see if I can get them embedded. Here's an example of a simple piece of music with both rhythm and tone: Here's the rhythm represented as a piecewise function with the magic of math: And then given a pitch (or its tone): That's more what I feel is going on: the Command is defining the broad shape of the overall wave, while the Intent of the Shard powering the system specifies the frequency of the wave. You can't just mix and match any old rhythm with any old tone; in the example I threw together, you've got discontinuities. So there is a little bit of a relationship between the periodicity of the rhythm and the frequency of the tone; you need any of your step changes to happen at a node when the sine wave is at 0, so amplitude step changes are continuous. (That will explain why the surges work slightly differently depending if they're of Odium or of Honor; they're very similar broad shapes, but subtly changed to match the tone.) But even though the rhythm's pattern will need to reflect the tone's frequency, it's not in a way that will produce resonance or overtones. Combining Shards We actually see the tone of a combined Shard from Venli's perspective. It's not the Tone of War that I'm thinking of: it's Odium and Cultivation (which I think we've been calling the Tone of Freedom): It's a single tone that is two other tones mixed into a harmony. What does that even mean? A tone can't be a harmony, so it has to be a harmony in context of all three tones, Cultivation/Odium/Freedom. Is Freedom an overtone? That might cause some trouble with some of our scale options I presented above. (What if Cultivation was C, and Odium was C#? What if Cultivation was C, and Odium was an octave higher?) Is it a third note that is in harmony with both, but not necessarily an overtone? (Like if Cultivation was C and Odium was G, then Freedom could be E.) That might also step on some toes for the scales, but that's why I liked the pentatonic scale, because you had the most room to play around in. But the biggest trouble is going to be the sheer number of notes. If you assume that each Shard has its own unique tone (16), and then you assume that each Shard pair has its own tone (16*15/2), then you've got 136 notes, which is over 11 octaves. If we take our lowest note on our piano (A, 27.5 hz), and we allow a half step for each Shard or paired Shard, then we're going to reach over 27,000 hz, which is outside the range of human hearing. Even if we start using microtonal stuff, it's still going to get extremely cluttered, and I can't imagine we'll be able to give each Shard combination a unique tone if we try to meaningfully apply harmony. So, just by crunching the numbers, we can see that we're going to have to reject the idea of new tones for combined Shards. Even though the text describes it as a single tone, it will have to be understood as multiple tones together. Maybe something like this:

I, personally, had no problems with the name, but your complaint was a pretty common one at Nexus. Brandon spoke a little bit more about it the day afterwards:

All right, it took a bit for the text to go up and I could go through the exact wording of some passages. (For anyone who's not subscribed to the newsletter, the text of the reading is on Arcanum, along with all other readings Brandon has done, here.) There are a couple of things worth bringing up: December's Eyes There are a lot of comments about something going on with December's eyes, and with her mother's eyes; it seems like there's something unique about her heritage that manifests through the eyes. Shades have lights in their eyes that change color; the line about "demons of the night" and the "sorrow was her heritage" line might be some subtle clues from Hoid that December's mother was from Threnody. (Remember, threnody isn't a made-up word; it's a song of sorrow for the deceased.) The Threnodites also have goofy names, so I wouldn't put it past one to name her daughter after a month. It's also got me wondering if she's actually dead this whole time. Of the time they met, Hoid says, "She withdrew, and we did not speak again during her lifetime." When Brandon was reading it at Nexus, I immediately interpreted it as "Hoid's going to speak to her after she's dead." But that will be a really tough narrative to sell, especially since he just did something similar in Yumi where she was dead the whole time, so now I'm taking it as a if the "lifetime" Hoid's referring to is just speaking about chapter one. December has a second lifetime, and that's where Hoid is going to interact with her more. Fortune I don't think this is a time loop; we all know, both from other books and from WoBs, that traveling back in time in the cosmere isn't possible. That means this has to be some sort of a vision: either she is a 21-year old who saw an entire life ahead of her, or she's a dead 80-year old who is reexperiencing her life. Like I said before, I think the second option would be tougher to do a meaningful plot with (even if she is a strange kind of Shade), so as of now I'm thinking it's the first. This also fits with the presence of a Prophet, 300 years ago. Why is this happening to December? There are two potential inciting events, and I can't decide on which one it is. It might be from the day before her 21st birthday, when she overheard that Bark was going to ask for her hand, and the only day that Hoid was there with her. December hid it well, but she had a pretty extreme reaction to the news, which could have been an indication of her 'snapping' and then seeing what the future would have been like if she married Bark: The second ties it to the death of the reeve's wife, which is the first thing that happens after she reawakens in her younger life: It might be a combination of both: December has Investiture that allows her to see what would happen if somebody would die, giving her power to prevent that death and change the future. And her first opportunity after Snapping is for the reeve's wife. But ultimately, I don't think the events of the small town are really the true purpose of her vision. She's going upstream, without really knowing why, and the promise of the book seems to be that she won't just save Rivershore, she's going to save the entire nation of Mountaincrest. She happened into this information through her vision, but neither her marriage to Bark or the death of Rema caused the events in the capital that led to the death of the river. They were just her window into learning about it. Which leads into... Hoid's Presence Time to start looking at some WoBs. Does anyone else remember how Brandon started talking about Aethers a bunch after he started writing Tress? Well, I think the Nexus Q&A the day after the December reading might have some clues for December. Most obviously, the one where he talks about what Hoid will be up to in the book: I think we all know that one of Hoid's short term goals is to collect as many magic systems as possible. So I think we're going to see him collecting something from this book, maybe the same power December has. In terms of timelines, I think we'll be able to see what powers Hoid has in this book; if he doesn't have Allomancy, it's before WoA. If he doesn't have Lightweaving, it's before OB. But there was another interesting question about Hoid's favorite magic system: Maybe Hoid gets December's power during this book? Maybe he is experiencing these alternate lifetimes, too? We already know he manages and purges his memories using Breath; that would also let him stay sane through a bunch of these alternate lifetimes. Keep just the information he needs and flush the rest. The Rivers of Blood and the Capital We get a good number of quotes about the river and the capital, which I will dump here so I can reference them as I need to: The blood ecosystem is interesting, to say the least. And rather than try to build to a conclusion, I'm just going to jump to the end and work backwards. Mountaincrest isn't just a nation. It's a being. (That's right, boys and girls: get ready for Bionicle in the Cosmere.) There was a prophet from 300 years ago, but there's no indication that's when the rivers of demon blood started. I don't think that's an accident: @Cosmeregirl told me it reminded her of an artery, and I think that's actually a perfect description of it. The blood isn't leaking out: this is where it's supposed to be in the first place, connecting the cities to the countryside. There's a blood cycle, like a water cycle, and the demon is an essential part of it to manifest the rivers. The citizens of Rivershore are like cells in the body of the uber-being; when the river dies, they also start to die. (And it's worth noting that the river itself is dying in the reading, not just disappearing. We're told it evaporates downstream; so if the demon were to escape, and the flow would stop entirely or even just lessen [as if the demon is filling up an aquifer that feeds the rivers], then the river would just evaporate earlier. None of this turning black and bringing plague; it would just vanish like a real river would if its headwaters dry up.) So, we have this mountain-sized being where people are cells, and whatever this demon is is the heart. I think the cities are the equivalent of the brain; when there's a revolt in the capital it's like the being falling into a coma and slowly dying, and that death moves downstream from the capital to the cities to the towns. This has happened before; the last prophet supposedly healed 'diseases,' but I think it was just one specific disease, the one we saw the people of Rivershore will suffer from. December, notably, is not part of this uber-being. I think she's a descendant of the Prophet, and that the power of Fortune has been passed from parent to child over the years. By being outsiders to the system, these Prophets are able to help guide the nation of Mountaincrest to keep from killing the being of Mountaincrest. Conclusion I have no conclusion, I think that's enough words for now. But for any of you who didn't see the book description from the crowdfunding page: I just have to say, her new friends already sound droll to me. But I am very eager to learn about the religion the priestess will espouse.

All right, finished it up and I'm not unreasonably tired because they didn't release this at midnight, so I can post something right away. As far as a story, I've gotta say I didn't like it. Part 1 was almost painful to read; so many times, a new short scene would have a hook into a flashback, and then the next scene after the flashback would open with rehashing what we learned in that same flashback. Very repetitious, and it felt like the outline showing through a lot. Dusk's scenes in Part 2 were also rough; a lot of talking to himself, and a very Martian-esque sequence of surviving... without any of the tension or emotion of the Martian. I kinda feel this would have worked a lot better with a lot fewer Dusk viewpoints throughout the book. Give me two or three really tightly plotted scenes that serve a lot of function to get him from where we left him to the island with everybody else, rather than a very wordy blow-by-blow. And then Starling's arc was okay, but it really had nothing to do with Dusk's arc. Yeah, they had the same villain at the end, and they each had one interaction helping each other's climax (Starling causing chaos for Dusk to cross the moat, Dusk obviously taking out the gunship), but neither of them were really complementing each other's stories throughout Part 3. She'd go along for a ride in the passage, and then go back to her regularly scheduled activities with her plucky band of misfits. And he's doing the edgy loner RPG character bit. Which are both executed okay; but why did they have to be in the same book? I did whiff on the ending. I thought the island would hold a perpendicularity to Second or Third of the Sun with an advanced non-spacefaring nation that could help them against the cosmere powers-that-be. The narrative continually reinforcing from Dusk's POV that he knew there wasn't a perpendicularity, a line or two about how the Cognitive and Physical Realm weren't quite lined up, some of the lines about the ancestors being protected or led (or something like that) by the snake... But nope. I guess they'll get some visits in the Physical Realm very soon. The ending with the power of perception controlling the Invested entity finally explains what Brandon had on his mind when he whiffed on this WoB from the most recent Nexus. I was kinda thinking we'd see something like that Soon. It's going to be a book well worth the reread for the lore, though. I didn't take a ton of detailed notes on my first pass, but we've got dragons, a Dawnshard, Silverlight (where are the other two places the Nexus goes?), lodestars, Grand Apparatus, Nalthis subastral, Harmony as the only living Shard who has performed the--, a hint that Dominion and Virtuosity have un-Splintered, the golden Investiture of Cakoban... lots of stuff to dig into. There are a couple things that don't quite add up to me, though, with stuff from Arcanum Unbounded: Location, location, location. I got the impression that First of the Sun was close to the Grand Knell (shoutout to the Lost Tales cards; I was pretty sure that was gonna come up in Emberdark). But Threnody and First of the Sun are on opposite ends of the star chart. Was this one of the Nephilim just way far afield when it happened? I think I remember a line or two about how they had spread out through uninhabited regions of Shadesmar, but I also thought they were centered around the Knell. Or, since the star chart is a 2D drawing of a 3D reality, are they actually closer together? (Like, they're the closest to the reader, and everything else is spread out behind them?) This is also kind of related to Roshar and Scadrial being so close, even though they're at war, and there was definitely talk of First of the Sun being between them. So we really need an interactive 3D star chart... maybe once Brandon's done with his medallion mechanics writeup. I'm also trying to understand the timing of Khriss's essay with respect to the overall Cosmere timeline. We know it was written before the events of the novella, and we get a line or two in the book about how the subastral had been found and lost a couple of times, but it really seems kind of inconsistent with how it had been presented in the essay. My reading had been "the area around the perpendicularity is extremely dangerous, and and the few expeditions sent there from Silverlight have not returned" referred to the dangers of Patji, and that expeditions had been killed after transitioning to the Physical Realm. Because it isn't dangerous in the Cognitive Realm; yeah, there are the predators that hunt on minds, but they get dismissed in the story as being pretty common, and copperclouds and other Clouding being a well-established workaround. The other two inhabited worlds in the system had also been studied from the Cognitive Realm, per the essay. So... I'm gonna keep that in mind on my eventual reread, see how well it fits, but it feels like a stretch to me. Like Silverlight, this huge hub where information is currency, just straight-up lost a planet? So, I'm actually ranking it as the worst of all five Secret Projects due to story structure. I love me my lore, but this really feels like the story itself suffered. Space-age Cosmere MMO is what we need. There is one last line in the book I have to disagree with hard. "It will be satisfying to see @Argent's face." No, it will not.

Hot off the presses here at JordanCon, where the Shardcast meet-and-greet just got hijacked by yours truly for a glyph translation panel! We were taking the Ba-Ado-Mishram art from Wind and Truth and decoding the glyphs on the border. We had a great turnout: myself, @Jofwu, @Argent, @Paleo, @Cosmeregirl, @little wilson, @LadyLameness, and more I'm probably forgetting. (While @Kaymyth and Mrs. Jofwu just sat there judging us.) There are some pictures below, but here's the executive summary: The same glyphs appear on all four sides, running in different directions: T H CH L D F L G H T N D M S K. We interpret that as The Child of Light and Music. There had been some previous linguistic analysis of Ba as "child" and Ado as "light," so now we've got Mishram as "music." A lot of us come to JordanCon every year, and we always have a blast, so feel free to join us next year! We might not decode glyphs, but I'm sure we'll find something else just as fun. Me and Argent getting everyone hyped. little wilson, Cosmeregirl, Argent, and Paleo hard at work. (This last one might have also wound up as the latest meme template over on the Discord.)

All right, I'm back from Nexus and almost caught up on my life, so I can get back to this thread. I see everybody is still looking at aligning Shards with Dawnshards. (Which I guess I can understand somewhat, now that we have a new Command revealed, and that is very exciting.) But I feel the need to reiterate the reasons I had after the novella released that the Dawnshards are not the Shard groups shown on the Shattering mural. Timing The four super-Shards did not exist concurrently with either Adonalsium (because they are the four pieces that comprise his power) or the sixteen Shards (since the Shards are each a quarter of the super-Shards). Dawnshards, however, exist concurrently with both Adonalsium (since he used them to create the cosmere) and sixteen Shards (since they exist in modern time). The aspects and then Intents were broken from Adonalsium during the Shattering. But individuals still became Dawnshards prior to the Shattering. Intent vs Command There's an incredibly important distinction to understand. Shard vs Dawnshard; Tone vs Rhythm; and Intent vs Command; they're all different sides of the same underlying principle. Intent is what to accomplish; Command is how it is accomplished. The two are complementary, but neither is a subset of the other. Adonalsium and Investiture are referred to as the Power of Creation; that can be understood as the Intent of Adonalsium, to create the cosmere and actively influence it. But the Dawnshards are specific Commands, ways that Investiture can manifest. Adonalsium Intends to create, and by using the Dawnshards he Commanded Investiture to manifest to accomplish that (by making things exist, by changing them, and by two other broad ways yet to be revealed). Shards, with their subset of Adonalsium's nature, look to accomplish specific goals aligned with that particular Intent. But they still seek Dawnshards (Hoid gives it to Sigzil to keep Odium from obtaining it), because their infinite power is still limited in how they can use it. Relationship to Adonalsium Dawnshards are external to Adonalsium. They are things he used to create the Cosmere. They are not Splinters; they aren't bonded, but individuals can become Dawnshards by taking the Dawnshard into themselves. The aspects, on the other hand, are internal to Adonalsium; they are properties of the deity itself. We get even more explanation in Wind and Truth that the Intents are akin to personality traits of Adonalsium, and that the sum of them is Adonalsium's nature. The aspects are merely the intermediate step between one God and sixteen deific Intents. The word itself "aspect" appeals to Adonalsium's nature. This is what I was trying to get at with some suggested aspects, essentially broader versions of the Intents, because they are inherent traits of Adonalsium. As far as the specific aspects go, the ones at the beginning are just intended to give an example of how to approach the aspects from scratch, rather than starting erroneously from the Dawnshards. What are the four key traits of a deity's nature?

Will this also be affecting Coppermind and Arcanum?

There's a quick little line in Wind and Truth that you might miss that talks about something pretty fundamental to Shattering lore. While Honor and the Heralds are planning to abandon Taln, and they're trying to figure out how many Heralds actually need to go back, there's this tidbit: "Perhaps four would work. The number of Adonalsium's four aspects." I think we saw a hint of the aspects in the Shattering mural from Dawnshard. Adonalsium, split into four, each of which was split into four more. I know it's been a pretty popular interpretation to take the first four sections as the Dawnshards themselves, but I've always said that they're more like "super-Shards," broader characteristics of Adonalsium that each encompass four Shards. (I'm guessing that the Shattering was originally intended for four new Vessels, each of which held a Dawnshard, but the aspects were still too much for a single vessel and had to get broken again and bring in 12 more Vessels as backup. But that's not really important to the topic at hand.) So, with the last Shard name revealed and a bigger clue to what the Shard groups are, who wants to take another crack at it? I've never really found a setup I like; I've gone through a lot of these in the past, and nothing is ever too clean. Here's an example I threw together at the moment, but I could easily get talked out of it: Relational: Ambition, Devotion, Mercy, Endowment Influential: Ruin, Preservation, Cultivation, Autonomy Personality: Reason, Invention, Whimsy, Virtuosity Deific: Odium, Dominion, Honor, Valor

I'm thinking the egg is a dragon's egg. Dragonsteel is a part of their biological cycle, so that's the swirling silver. Does that mean we've got two dragon artifacts? Or could the horn from something else? The red crystal is roseite, and we've seen it before in the collection. The leaf... that's such a weird description. The heat makes me think of Sunlit Man, but I can't come up with any good connection between them.

Well, I guess that means it's time to reread Shadows for Silence. There aren't that many characters in there, right?

The quote from Dawnshard on the Command of the Dawnshard: I see that aligned very well with what we see of Topaz in Dragonsteel. Here's the description of his microkinesis from chapter 52, towards the end of the book: I think the four Dawnshards are four fundamental ways to manifest Investiture; all the various magic systems we see have abilities from one or more of them. I think healing, changing, growing, transforming... all of of those are variations on this Dawnshard's core Command. I'm looking at it the other way around. I'm not studying Ishar's Blade and saying "hey, this looks like a Dawnshard"; I'm looking at the Dawnshard which can bind any creature voidish or mortal and saying "hey, this looks like Ishar's Blade." We know that there's was a Bind Dawnshard on Roshar at some point in the past (the Poem of Ista doesn't match stylistically to any of the other prophetic texts in Stormlight, so I think it's pretty clear it's a history), and Ishar's Blade is a very good fit. My initial interpretation was that the "crafted for Heralds" had to do with taking on powers that belonged to the Heralds (like an Honorblade), but I don't think that precludes a physical meaning, as well. I like the Urithiru parallels. I think it's completely possible that Melishi did something terrible to the Spiritual Realm from the crown of Urithiru; as the Sibling's Bondsmith, it was the seat of his power, and he made extensive modifications that we saw in Rhythm of War. I think there are big narrative between Ishar, Melishi, and Dalinar; and the Wind and Truth cover, with Dalinar on top of the tower, could certainly add another level to these parallels. (I also am very worried about the unintended consequences of Dalinar's quest so far. Ishar broke Ashyn, Melishi broke the singers... what is Dalinar going to break?)

Well, we're less than two months away from another book, which means it's time for me to post another extremely wordy theory. I've been tooling around on this one (in one shape or another) since before Rhythm of War, so I expect this will be a little more dynamic than some of my other ones as the preview chapters keep coming out. I gave it a quick polish just before posting it, but I haven't done a deep dive into the preview chapters to address some of the stuff in there, but I don't recall reading anything that gave me pause. The following theory will discuss some content from Dragonsteel Prime, in addition to the Wind and Truth preview chapters, but not a ton. Dawnshards in Stormlight Five This is a quote that has long puzzled me, as I’m sure it has many of you. Those of us who have been around the fandom a while remember the dearth of information on Dawnshards before the Dawnshard novella and The Sunlit Man; there were three references in The Way of Kings, zero in Rhythm of War, and then only one in Oathbringer that was basically a rehash of one of the Way of Kings’ references. The recent glut of information on them has been fantastic, but I think we’ve kind of forgotten about the first tantalizing tidbit from Way of Kings, the poem of Ista. I think I’ve figured it out, though, I think it will be relevant in Book Five, and I don’t think it’s Rysn’s Dawnshard (although there may be plenty going on on that particular front, too). The high level summary: the ex-Bondsmith Melishi took up Ishar’s Honorblade to imprison Ba-Ado-Mishram. Dawnshard Fundamentals I’m not going to fully lay out all of my views on Dawnshards, Commands, Intents, and Shardic groups here. (Maybe I’ll slug it out farther down in the thread, if anybody wants to hash it out.) But there are a few interpretations that I’m building this theory on, so I feel like I need to lay them out clearly beforehand. 1) The four Dawnshards are not the super-Shards depicted in the Shattering mural in Aimia. The mural depicts Adonalsium being broken into four chunks, and then each of those chunks being broken into four of their own, in turn, to create the sixteen Shards. But the Dawnshards existed prior to the Shattering, since they were used for the Shattering. I haven’t put together a Shard grouping proposal myself, and there may very well be a Shard group that kind of seems like Change, but… 2) Shards/Intents/Tones are contrasted, respectively, with Dawnshards/Commands/Rhythms. The Intent is what goal the Investiture is looking to accomplish, but the Command is the specific mechanism by which it is accomplished. Cultivation is an Intent that looks for things to grow and change; the Change Dawnshard is a Command that can apply Investiture to produce those changes. 3) I think the power (and danger) of the Dawnshards is that they are the four simplest possible Commands, the four broadest ways that Investiture can manifest. A Soulcaster has set conditions under which they can Change matter; a Feruchemist has very particular ways they can Change their body. Some Invested Arts, like Awakening or AonDor, are able to expand and clarify their Commands. I think Dawnshards are a souped-up version of that; if Rysn, the current Change Dawnshard, were able to Invest herself, she would be able to accomplish any magical effect she wanted, as long as it was along the lines of Change. This is a kind of like what we saw Venli doing in Rhythm of War, combining her Rhythms to make a new kind of Surgebinding; but Dawnshards have practically no limits on them. 4) In Dragonsteel Prime, Hoid’s Dawnshard is Change, and Merin’s Dawnshard is Move. How Many Dawnshards? Okay, now let’s get back to the specifics in Stormlight. Why don’t I think that the Poem of Ista is referring to Rysn’s Dawnshard? Well, because there is more than one Dawnshard on Roshar. The Poem of Ista is the only reference to a singular Dawnshard; but Honor talked about “the Dawnshards,” plural. If this was all about one Dawnshard, Rysn’s Dawnshard, Honor would have been talking about “the Dawnshard,” singular. Now that we know the Change Dawnshard lets its user accomplish any magical effect related to changing, let’s look back at the Poem of Ista and identify the Dawnshard that it’s referring to. If it’s able to bind any creature, voidish or mortal, then let’s call it the Bind Dawnshard. Have we seen anything that can be “taken up” and lets you “bind” anything you want? Yes: Ishar’s Honorblade, which makes you a Bondsmith unchained. Remember, the Dawnshards were used to Shatter Adonalsium, so presumably four of the original Vessels held them and took care of them in some way or another. I think there’s a very natural alignment to Change and Cultivation, and similar with Bind and Honor. They are Commands and Intents that pair very naturally; the mechanism and the goal go hand-in-hand. So if Cultivation’s Vessel and Honor’s Vessel, pre-Shattering, held those Dawnshards, I can believe that’s why they wound up with these Shards in the first place. And then they took their Dawnshards with them to the Roshar system. Granted, there’s a wrinkle in this theory, that the Rosharan Shards held the Rosharan Dawnshards. So, the Change Dawnshard came to Roshar through Cultivation’s perpendicularity. I could maybe make a case that it was Cultivation herself, bestowing the Dawnshard through the perpendicularity… but that’s not really central to the theory. The Bind Dawnshard, and a Bondsmith Unchained Let’s look at my proposed Bind Dawnshard. We know that Ishar’s powers predate the Oathpact; in fact, he was the founder of said Oathpact. Yours is the power Ishar once held. Before he was Herald of Luck, they called him Binder of Gods. He was the founder of the Oathpact. No Radiant is capable of more than you. Yours is the power of Connection, of joining men and worlds, minds and souls. Your Surges are the greatest of all, though they will be impotent if you seek to wield them for mere battle. Stormfather, OB chapter 64 He was also the founder of the Knights Radiant, and I believe this was more than just simple organization. I believe Surgebinders functioned more like the Fused (single Surge, no armor, no Blade) before he created the bond structure for that. I think Ishar had the ability to fundamentally alter the magic systems of Roshar like this because he was a Dawnshard. I don’t think he’s the Dawnshard anymore; I think he managed to imbue that Dawnshard into his Honorblade. The other nine Honorblades are a sort of disguise for what Ishar’s truly holds. I think the Radiant Orders are also parallelling Ishar’s uniqueness. I don’t think they’re a true Order that uses Adhesion and Tension (which is why Dalinar’s Surge’s don’t work like the Stonewards’ or the Windrunners’). The actual tenth Order is missing, replaced by pseudo-Bind-Dawnshards. (More tangents, but I kind of suspect that at some point in the future, the Bondsmiths will be replaced by a new, true tenth Order, as the cosmere moves into more of a technological age.) The Imprisonment of Ba-Ado-Mishram To jump aside for a moment, there’s another outstanding puzzle related to the Bondsmiths: Melishi. He’s a very important figure, and we’ve slowly been learning more and more about him as the series unfolds. In Words of Radiance, we first learn the name: We get a little more in Oathbringer, and for a bit I thought that Melishi was Ishar himself. There was also some confusion among the community about which of the Bondsmith spren Melishi was bonded to before the Recreance, mostly because the Sibling’s retreat prior to the Recreance would mean indicate that Melishi must have bonded another of the spren. Rhythm of War is where it really gets dished out. We learn that Melishi was the Sibling’s Bondsmith, but the Sibling did retreat prior to the Recreance. This prompts the question, then: how did Melishi do it? He was no longer a Bondsmith, after all. That’s where the theory started for me, shortly after the book was released: Melishi could have used Ishar’s Honorblade. Powerful and dangerous, a Bondsmith unchained. I’ve believed that for several years. Only recently did I jump to the Dawnshard aspect of it. I’ve always recognized it was there; the less controlled your powers are, the more dangerous you can be. Dawnshards are the peak example of that, but even ordinary Surgebinders can be dangerous without the structures. But as I was reflecting on the Poem of Ista scene, I made the connection that this could be a reference to Melishi. (Which would lead to Ishar’s Blade being the Dawnshard.) I’m not sure where he’s climbing to in the account, what this temple is, where Ba-Ado-Mishram was before she was captured. But it looks pretty clear that we’ll be getting that info in Stormlight Five. The Honorblade Chip I think this is why Nightblood is in Stormlight. Yeah, yeah, Taravangian used him to kill Odium and take the Shard, but that wasn’t in the original outline of the series, that was a twist Brandon came up with while writing Book Four. I think the big reason Nightblood is there, narratively, is to destroy Ishar’s Honorblade. I don’t know if it’ll release the Dawnshard, or if it’ll destroy the Dawnshard entirely, but I think the chip is foreshadowing. The Other Dawnshard The title of this theory is plural, isn’t it? So I guess I’ve got to talk about the other Dawnshard on Roshar. Rysn’s Dawnshard, known as the Change Dawnshard. I also believe it’s Hoid’s Dawnshard, the one he’s uses to make things grow. Which also means it’s also Sigzil’s Dawnshard. And there’s going to be stuff in Stormlight Five about Sigzil’s Dawnshard: In The Sunlit Man, we learn that the Dawnshard went from Sigzil to Hoid. But in WoBs, there’s been the idea that the Dawnshard also went from Hoid to Sigzil, which I don’t recall seeing in the book. (It’s worth noting that Octavia is a Dragonsteel employee who was on the Sunlit Man bookclub video series. I could chalk either one of these up to simple misspeaking, but two of them? I think there’s some info floating around Dragonsteel HQ that’s leaking out.) So there seems to be this sequence of the Dawnshard going to Hoid, then to Sig, then back to Hoid, a bit of a shell game to disguise exactly where it is. Going all the way back to pre-Shattering times, here’s the sequence of events that I see: Hoid has the Dawnshard. Hoid loses the Dawnshard, and it’s used in the Shattering. … time passes … The Dawnshard comes to Roshar via Cultivation’s perpendicularity The lanceryn eventually get a hold of it and hide it under Akinah. The lanceryn die out, and the Sleepless take over as its guardians. Rysn gets it from Akinah. Hoid gets it from Rysn. Sigzil gets it from Hoid. The Night Brigade finds Hoid and uses Connection to learn that Sigzil is their next target. Hoid gets it back from Sigzil. This is what I think we can infer from the books and WoBs we have thus far. There’s obviously more that this Dawnshard can go through… in fact, I think Hoid is grooming another candidate to be his interim Dawnshard distraction in one of the Book Five preview readings. This is Hoid talking to Kaladin. I think playing music is referring to Investiture; using the Rhythms and the Tones. Invested Arts are like a soundboard; you’ve got programmed rhythms that you can’t deviate from. Having a Dawnshard is being the guy behind the drum set. You can make whatever music you like, no matter how loud or how bad it sounds. So Kal might take the Dawnshard at some point (or even turn down the Dawnshard, resulting in Hoid taking it to Sig instead as a backup plan). Although, returning to this to polish it up after the actual version has been posted… this passage has changed substantially. Instead of playing music without playing, he’s talking to Roshar, talking to the Wind. So, maybe no Kaladin Dawnshard tease anymore. WoB Roundup I did a bunch of research while working on this. I’ll include everything I haven’t already cited for completion’s sake, and I’ll add comments on some of these as appropriate. This is the one I’m using to justify the Honorblade as a Dawnshard, rather than a person as a Dawnshard like Rysn/Sigzil/Hoid. I think this has been put into an object, so anybody who holds the Honorblade becomes the Dawnshard while they’re using it. Two Dawnshards, the Hoid’s Change Dawnshard and Jerick’s Move Dawnshard. Define “currently.” This was after we had seen previews of The Sunlit Man, which features Hoid as a Dawnshard. If I’m going to apply it to my theory, I’m going to say that Ishar in Rhythm of War is a Dawnshard, since he has his Honorblade again. This is a little tricky, since it seems to indicate that there won’t be important Dawnshard stuff in Stormlight Five. But since then, we’ve gotten The Sunlit Man and the WoBs about how Stormlight Five will be leading up to that situation. So maybe it’s talking about Dawnshard deep lore, about creation. Ishar’s got a Dawnshard, but we’re not learning about the history of that Dawnshard. I can talk around this WoB, at least enough to keep my theory alive. Just to remind everyone. No idea what this means, and it’s paraphrased. I think this is a clue of what the Change Dawnshard was being used for. Ishar had his Honorblade, but somebody else was the Change Dawnshard. My sense at the time was that Brandon wasn’t going on record saying that Hoid has his Dawnshard again, but… I think that was pretty obvious from the book. It might have been an early clue that it went from Hoid to Sigzil, though? It’s not enough evidence on its own, but the other WoBs that I included are where that idea comes from. Conclusion Two Dawnshards on Roshar. The Bind Dawnshard was Ishar’s, and it is encapsulated in his Honorblade. Melishi used it to imprison Ba-Ado-Mishram and imprison the Parshendi, as recorded in the Poem of Ista. Undoing its damage and keeping Ishar from causing more damage with it will be a major plot point. The Change Dawnshard was Hoid’s before the Shattering. He’ll be taking it back from Rysn, giving it to Sigzil, and taking it back from Sigzil. This might happen during the book, or there may just be seeds of it.

The second example is obviously the Dor. But I can't quite figure out what the first one is. Is it just Preservation, and it's referring to the mists? Or is this something as-yet-unrevealed about Ambition or Virtuosity?