Wulfhere

I enjoyed the exploration and expansion of past-Venli's motivations. She was manipulated by Axindweth (!) and Ulim more than I recalled. Also enjoyed adding a little more complexity to Eshonai - she wasn't just the 'better' sister, she had flaws too (ignoring family etc.) The flashbacks showed how both had qualities and both were flawed. The flashbacks helped emphasize the total tragedy of Venli being the last* Listener. What bothered me more was the present-Venli still doing a lot of hiding and sulking. I guess it would have been unreasonable for her to be a full-fledged hero by this point, but I think it would have been a more satisfying contrast to the flashbacks. Her arc in book 5 really needs to continue to feel complete. She's the perfect person to continue the Listeners, and she's going to grow into an awesome Willshaper, but she's not there yet.

Thanks for compiling those quotes. That is quite a geometrical quandary, and you've got me thinking about math now... In spherical geometry, we often imagine that a person on the sphere perceives their space as locally linear (i.e. flat) even if an external observer sees the true shape of the space. That's why you can walk in a "straight line" on Earth and have it make sense to you. Since Shadesmar is the cognitive realm and everything there exists based on the perceptions of thinking entities, perhaps "locations" in the cognitive realm don't really have a distance apart but more of a connected relationship. I'm thinking of how you might connect nodes in a drawing of a graph or a social network (image 1.) In such a mapping, the nodes (circles) are important, and the edges show the connections between, but they don't express measurable distance. Perhaps as you get to the "edge" of the known Roshar in Shadesmar, "space" starts to warp and you can only travel to places that are cognitively "linked' to you. This reminds me of how distance and direction get strange at the edge of a hyperbolic disc. (image 2) A worldhopper, however, knows that other places exist, so perhaps they are able to perceive and travel on the connections between the worlds, whereas a native Rosharan (etc.) would not. And then as the connections become more traveled, more entities know about them and the paths between worlds become highways. As to fall damage? No idea. Maybe if you fall from height you perceive yourself as having died, so then you die? image credits: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/graph-theory-and-cocktail-parties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GeometryIsNeat/comments/95au4r/sunflower_spirals_in_the_hyperbolic_plane/