Waffles

Nightblood, having absorbed immense power becomes a bondsmith spren and Kaladin becomes his bondsmith. Through adhesion and gravitation Kaladin, in a moment of severe depression (egged on by Hoid), sucks all of roshar into a Nightblood singularity. Nightblood (now a sword the size of a planet), using the dawnshard now inside him wishes himself to be a real boy and spends the rest of eternity on Braize, having his accomplished his mission of destroying evil. Nobody on Roshar was truly innocent.

I'm curious if people felt shallan was tiresome in ROW were also annoyed by frodo sam gollum scenes later in LoTR...

my theory is that because cryptics love lies and have no eyes... they're only pretending to be deadeyes. Its the thing cryptics love most... a conspiracy.

This is a refreshingly different idea of the dawnshards than what we usually see and also manages to incorporate the "one is different" hint we've gotten. Plus it fits into wider cosmere themes and worldbuilding such as the three realms. I have the feeling this line of logic might actually be close to what we might get. Very insightful!

I've always struggled with "how are cryptic deadeyes made?" because it seems like cryptics seem to savor lies and lightweaver truths seem difficult to contradict. Imo, oaths and contradictions seem to matter less to cryptics and the abilities are instead linked to the lightweaver's current relationship with their spren so unlike windrunner tiers, cryptics may provide access to any of their abilities at any time. edit: *and contradictions

We all know Renarin and Rlain are the most powerful beings in the cosmere because of the mutual love and respect they have for each other.

Change and "Leave a mark" seem like the same concept to the point we could rename "leave a mark" into "Change 2". Cultivation and Ruin certainly "leave a mark" etc. I think conceptually something even like "altruism" or "sacrifice" may be a better fit thematically with valor and other shards. I think part of this is a problem with Brandon's dawnshard categories, singular words are probably going to apply in a meaningful way to every shard and depending on how the dawnshards divided up the powers it may be a 4x4 punette square situation where each shard is influenced by 2 dawnshards and each dawnshard correlates to 7 shards (with 4 being heavily aligned to a dawnshard) Actually given the two change categories totalling 7 its possible that a punette square dawnshard pairing makes more sense than 4 groups of 4. Edit: Pairing each shard to up to two dawnshards each does allow additional dawnshard names such as "antithesis" or "opposition" where the shard is a subverted version such as "opposition to change" resulting in preservation and "opposition to survival" resulting in ruin but it would have to have an ordered quality or else it would create pairs of identical shards (eg opposition/change cannot mean the same thing as change/opposition, the first property would have to be more influencing than the second - the first would be preservation, the latter whimsy)

it makes more sense if it is Nale because he does seem to carry more archaic linguistic flourishes than, say, Dalinar.

the plate is happy to be plate while the shardblades are not. Imo it sould only take a few people or a herald working on behalf of spren to reduce the number of shardblades. Additionally there may just be different survivorship patterns for example if somebody doesnt know you carry a blade then shoves you off a cliff, you die and your blade is covered by crem for years. Whereas if you have a plate not only is that known but its more likely you'll live to pass it on. Recall that when Sadeus died they still had his plate but his sword was not found until much later.

I'm not the best scholar here, but the reason I came up with this idea is because Brandon has implied that Investiture is linked to intent: 1) There's a WOB somewhere saying that Night Blood technically has Ruin's investiture, though ruin may not be involved, hinting thay his intent (Destroy) is linked to Ruin in some way. 2) I believe Raboniel posited in RoW that anti-investiture is what killed honor though Odium has implied that breaking promises is part of what destroyed Honor. If intent matters then both would be true. 3) Intent matters in creating anti-investure So the premise that anti-intent creates anti-investiture seems like a neat way to link the ideas. I suspect though that the anti-investiture carries the same intent as the investiture because of how Navani created it originally but in a way that damages it. Perhaps Ruin's antinvestiture would be more like "Undo" and would be me more like a healing magic that unchanges things. Anti-preservation might be more complex maybe preserving something that is naturally in flux, like making somebody unable to grow.

Does anti-investiture have anti-intent? Basically does antistormlight break oaths? Does love generate antivoidlight? basically does anti-investiture carry an anti-intent? Followup. If it does then would it be possible to convert all of a shard's investiture into anti investiture and invert the shard?

There's an entire plot line along the horneater peaks thats been completely out of focus of the books so far. Likely this is a war between Odium and Cultivation that will carry on into the latter books.

I think reforging honor requires reuniting the heralds and changing some of them out via Ishar's bond transfer trick (Dalinar of course will not see the implications bond transferrance soon enough) Likely with Dalinar in the hands of Odium that means the latter books will involve Odium trying to and likely succeed in destroying cultivation. Book 5 will resolve 3 things for sure: the day of sorrows, a plan to restore the oathpact between Kaladin and Ishar, and Dalinar in some way failing the contest of champions.

I would note that name similarities to heralds tend to not be an accident but a common occurance. I find its more likely that Melishi is simply named after Ishar similar to Kaladin/Kalak, Shallan/Shallash, etc.

a "divide" or "separate" dawnshard is almost certainly what is necessary to tear apart Adolnosium