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

Ishar's bondsmithing powers may predate him becoming a herald, and certainly predates the binding of the surges. If honor locked away the surges behind some sort of barrier then the nahel bond and the honor blades may function more like keys or doors to access the surgebinding powers. Then its less about power and more about who created what and how they created it.

Dalinar's visions were a year prior to meeting Ishar. Its perfectly possible the memory of the blade is vague at this point, but he absolutely would have recognized Amaram's blade at the time

Unity would make sense thematically in Roshar - bondsmiths as extensions of unity might be why they predate radiants and the heralds. If Ishar holds/held the unity shard it might also explain why he could bind gods, surges etc. It might also explain why honor was interested in roshar in the first place and how mishram could connect so powerfully to all the singers. Change is also thematic to cultivation, progression in the oaths, old magic. All of the surges impose change on the world and soulcasting in particular seems to embody the power. I imagine the surges would be magnified by this dawnshard. Odium also embodies a sort of division and opposition. Its possible there's 3 dawnshards on roshar and that odium actually used some sort of division dawnshard to splinter the previous shards after destroying their vessels. If Odium still has this hypothetical dawnshard maybe dividing the stormfather is what the day of sorrow actually is.

It seems like if he was fusing cognitive beings to physical ones it create a combined creature with a cognitive spren and physical body maybe similar to the "unmade radiants" under the queen in Kolinar or like the Tukari whose eyes were darkened. This would be an invert of the fused, who have the physical aspects of spren and the cognitive/spiritual aspect of singers. It seems like Ishar's experiments are more like spren are being soulcast into flesh or connected to dead bodies or something. Something is turning their cognitive aspects into flesh in addition to a perpindicularity. Its also not clear if these spren were deadeyes or not (unlikely given the tukari kidnap attempt)

What are the minor spren associated with skybreakers? Smoke spren? I expect sky breakers use division to blast apart the sky creating sonic booms and explosions. If division imparts energy into chemical reactions it doesnt necessarily mean its creating less energetic, stable molecules immediately.

Cultivation, Renarin, Taravangian and Odium all foresaw Dalinar becoming Odium's tool. How exactly that will occur is the question. Cultivation's line in the flashback about handing Odium a powerful tool with Dalinar is the real powerful confirmation since it does not portray him as a champion. Its a bit confounding since the endless rain implies some problem with the stormfather and the obvious culprit would be Dalinar but that would suggest that the Honor foresaw the initial defeat of odium and a following dilemma between the stormfather and Dalinar... which seems oddly too specific for Honor who was not amazing at foreseeing the future. Alternately the day of sorrows is the eventual failure of the stormfather based on a separate plan by odium to deal with the stormfather and radiants that - similar to the everstorm - has been in the works a long time. This would play well into Odium's specific timing for the contest of champions - the plan to bring the day of sorrows falls on the day of the contest of champions.

I always interpret this scene as Odium watching some pivotal event. He wants Dalinar as his own so he may have made his presence known to the spren to alert them to the presence of the assassin and protect his investment in Dalinar. Edit: As an additional aside, Szeth has made no mention of his spren reacting when Odium was present during Rayse's death which may suggest Odium can hide his presence from spren.

The day of Sorrows is most likely the event here. Its interesting because the day of sorrows is mentioned in the vision shown to Dalinar so this is something predicted by basically everyone from honor to odium to taravangium to the death rattles similar to Dalinar becoming Odium's champion.

The consistent thing with death rattles is (especially ones written with "I") they are the spoken or internal thoughts of a person at some point in time. The only characters that might talk with that voice that we've seen are possibly heralds. Dalinar doesnt talk like that, Taravangian might but he would have no problem slitting a throat. The only characters that come to mind that might speak like that are heralds. Cultivation or some character we havent fully met yet might be thinking this.

I think Honor promised Cultivation to never harm/restrict the spren and the broken oaths by radiants had been harming him for ages but the imprisonment of Ba Ado Mishram and the resulting purge of radiants finally destroyed Honor in a wave of sprenocide and broken promises. Odium's corruption of spren was a deliberate attempt to corner Honor into harming them In order to shatter odium though, odium's vessel has to be forced to do things out of anti-hate. Rayse couldnt be shattered because was incapable of the opposite of hate. Therefore cultivation realized she had to slay Rayse. The oath broken by odium was probably that he cannot kill the heralds, but since he killed Jezrien he was at Cultivation's mercy the entire time as she positioned Taravangian to be the new vessel. Taravangian cares only about the survival of Roshar and would be willing to sacrifice himself and anyone else to save Roshar thus providing a protection to Roshar beyond measure though the shard itself will eventually threaten the entire planet.