ElMonoEstupendo

Woah woah, you mean The Lopen's Cognitive image had two arms all along? As for El's metal plates, there's a few possibilities that come to mind, some of which require him using other Shard's magic system. Perhaps that's why he's been denied the Rhythms? Odium wants to keep him at arm's length. They're Hemalurgic spikes. The trouble with this is: who is he spiking? He replaces his carapace soon after being reborn. Surely it would be a prominent thought of Lezian's if this guy required multiple sacrifices of Invested peeps after each rebirth. Spikes also wouldn't look like carapace replacements. They're Feruchemical metalminds. Notice the quote doesn't specify a particular metal. Now, he'd probably lose them after each death, but if he's a Ferring he can just create new ones. They're manifested spren. We see lesser spren become Radiant Shardplate, right? This may be the Fused version of that. They're some other godmetal. Potentially very powerful, but hard to see how he'd repeatedly get enough, or why. They're ralkalest, to protect against Radiant powers and Shardblades. The trouble is that aluminium is terrible as actual armour. They're steel! He's adopting the human habit of encasing oneself in manufactured armour instead of growing it oneself. Note that steel was immune to Ruin's interference, too, so it might be more practical. They're ornamental. He's just as nuts as other Fused. Perhaps they used to be one of the things above but now he's just stuck doing what he did 5,000 years ago. It's a punishment he's compelled (or wants?) to suffer. Similar to being denied the Rhythms. Most of these have some problems with them. It seems very unlikely that Odium would let him use other Shard's magic.

We have, right? The Fused. Similar but different to Knights Radiant: powered by Voidlight; one Surge instead of two; one soul instead of two. Odium doesn't strike me as the type to bind with Oaths the same way Honor did. That was all to control the power of Surgebinding, right? Odium doesn't care about that, probably even wants the opposite. Then there's whatever's going on with Vyre. Rayse gave him an Honorblade rather than granting a Surge or two, despite their deepening Connection. He's also not making any more Fused, since BAM messed it all up for him. One thing I've liked about the Shards is how none of the Intents are absolute good or evil, and the Vessels have a significant influence. I mean, Ruin and Preservation are literally black and white and one is obviously more sympathetic than the other, but it's clear that the best outcome is the balance between the two, and total victory for either is not desirable. I think this applies to all three Rosharan Shards too. Honor's good, right? He's the God of the good guys. He's about obeying rules, keeping your word, protecting. Cultivation's good, right? She's about growth, progression, change. But obeying rules to a fault isn't big-R Right (looking at Nale and Szeth). Unfeeling adherence can be outright evil. Change for the sake of change can be damaging, intrusive, lethal. And the same must apply to Odium - we have seen some redeeming qualities in the Passions and the culture of the Fused. He took away Vyre's anguish - perhaps it's not the best path in terms of therapy, or the most deserving subject, but as a power or an act in and of itself it is benevolent. The aspect of God's hatred is a thing for a reason - it speaks of just retribution, or the quelling of evil. I think there's scope for TOdium to work with that.

Hang on. Spren can end their bonds! That seems like a much cleaner solution to dangerous Surgebinding than the Recreance... A relevant WoB: I wonder if a spren breaking the bond damages the human the way the opposite does. Would that make Melishi a "deadeye"? And if it doesn't, why the hell did all those Radiants simultaneously break their bonds? They knew it would at least be very painful to their spren, if not as-good-as lethal. It was done by the spren's choice, per Maya. If that all adds up, there must be something else entirely going on with the Recreance. A reason for the drama, the timing, more than just not-Surgebinding-for-the-sake-of-the-planet.

That's pretty solid, thank you. It means all those sources and wiki entries saying nine Orders abandoned their oaths in the Recreance are straight-up wrong, though I suppose they could be mistaken in-universe. On the other hand, the current honorspren were definitively not around at the time, and have been shown to not be too in-the-know regarding the whole affair. Maybe the only people who would know for sure are the Heralds, the Sibling themselves, and the newly-revived deadeyes. The two aren't mutually exclusive - people and spren help each other heal. Adolin started connecting with Maya long before there was any communication between them. The process of taking care of his Blade, making use of it, spending time with it, all of these processes could be applied to a thousand people making oneself their home. Ah, if it's from the horse's mouth that's the end of the matter. I think it probably also puts paid to my pet theory that the Recreance was the very same day as the Binding. Oh well!

The question's in the title. Maybe it's obvious, and there's a passage I'm forgetting, so let me know if this is duh. We know the following, either directly from text or WoB: Nine out of ten Orders of Knights Radiant took part in the Recreance. There was only one Bondsmith alive at the time: Melishi, bonded to the Sibling. Melishi was definitely alive for the Binding of Ba-Ado-Mishram. The Binding was very shortly before the Day of Recreance. The Sibling was considered dead for a long time. Many of their functions shut down, and they lost their Light. It seems a slam dunk, to the extent that I'm amazed the connection isn't explicit in the book, or even the question. Did I miss something? It also means that Adolin isn't the only person to rehabilitate a deadeye - Dabbid has too.

I believe in the passage in RoW where Venli first starts to use her Willshaper Surges she vibes hard enough to Roshar's Top Ten that the stone forms figures, an entire scene, apparently in response to her thoughts. That might not be how it works for Stonewards (i.e. it's a Willshaper Resonance) or it might be specific to a listener Stoneshaper.

I really like the idea of Dalinar's path to victory involving giving up power, but I think the mechanism you describe wouldn't work. Death severs Nahel bonds, and the contest is explicitly to the death. Odium wouldn't gain any influence over Honor's remnants that way. He just wanted the Blackthorn. This. Rehabilitation and healing is a major theme especially in RoW. He's not only righting a millennia-long wrong and recruiting new allies, I suspect this will also be instrumental in fixing the problem the Recreance tried to address - something makes Nahel bonds unsafe. There were hints that his bond with Maya is something else entirely, almost the reverse of a Radiant relationship.

No, I think my phrasing is right. I'm trying to find an explanation for why humanity wasn't absolutely curb-stomping Odium before, given how evenly matched it seems in the present day and the advantages it seems they would have had. One of those advantages is that they had ten magic super-soldiers actually on their side, but this is an explanation for why they might not have made as big a martial difference as they would now, if they helped.

Absolutely. I think this is one of the few confirmed ways we've seen so far of "safely" killing a Vessel, and why Odium seems to have gone after dishardic systems first - the agreements between shards are mortally binding, and a third party affords some leverage. It probably also explains why Tanavast slowly went mad and died shortly after the Recreance - something about those events caused him to break his word, and for him in particular that must have caused incredible tension between him and his Shard's Intent on top of the baseline "hole in [his] soul".

A few more points I haven't seen made: Not all the Fused are back yet. We've only seen, I think, 7 of the 9 types and only just seeing Husked Ones etc. and what they can do. One is reminded of the scene in RoW where the human soldiers are making amazing headway before Lezian rocks up and scatters them. At this point the Heralds have been alive and in the same bodies for several thousand years - it's entirely possible their abilities weren't nearly as prodigious when they were getting new bodies every decade. Honor is dead, and he had been restricting the power of Surgebinders. We're explicitly told about Bondsmiths being unchained now but it may apply to all Knights Radiant. Near the end, the Heralds are terrified of death. That's got to affect their performance on the battlefield. And one final one that deserves its own paragraph - I think it makes sense that in a Desolation Odium's forces would be doing their damnedest not to kill Heralds in battle. It's the sure fire way to prevent your own resurrection and end the Desolation. Any time a Herald rocks up at the front, the best thing they could do is back off, work around them, outmanoeuvre, refuse to engage, and meanwhile do as much damage as possible elsewhere. There's only 10 of them, after all, and only a few of those have some form of rapid transport. When one side has such overwhelmingly powerful units (that you also absolutely want to avoid killing), you just nullify them by never letting them actually fight you. We can presume that the very nature of Odium works somewhat against his forces in pursuing tactics like this.

Dawnshards are the primordial Commands Adonalsium used to create all things. "Unity" isn't a command - Dalinar's line can't be referring to that, although the instructions he gets to UNITE THEM could count. He could be talking about a new Shard's name, though, in a similar way to Harmony, but it's difficult to see where or how that would have happened right then and there. More likely he was talking about being the unison of some or all of these things: The Physical, Cognitive, and Spiritual Realms. That unison is what a Perpendicularity is, which he then opened for the first time. The fragmented aspects of Honor - the different, dispersed powers and responsibilities the Almighty once held, which he is now in possession of. The hearts and souls of men - his quest the whole book has been to unify the nations. The conflicting aspects of himself, flung into contrast by the reveal just beforehand. Odium's "We killed you!" line seems far more likely to indicate that he thinks he's seeing Honor reborn. The more interesting part of that is "We"... Vessels might have some degree of sway over what their actual Shard name is - for example, by WoB we know that Harmony could just as easily have been Discord depending on how Sazed handled it. Honor is the Shard associated with bonds and rules and oaths - "Unity" could be Dalinar's interpretation of that, meaning he really is in the process of Ascending.

Ah, good shout! You sent me off on another WoB dive, thanks. Here's an interesting related WoB:

There's another disturbing implication in the very last line: Odium's been bound up on Braize for 4,500 years, since Aharietiam. Did Wit visit him there? Ulim mentions the Everstorm has been building up for centuries. Nale believes a bridge like that would be impossible without some Connection between worlds. Did Rayse pull a similar trick to Taravangian? Is Hoid the thread that allowed the Everstorm to ever-so-slowly build up? Admittedly it's probably just a turn of phrase, but you usually use that phrasing when it's somewhere close to but above the number you say.

The whole Harmony/Discord thing indicates that the actual result of a merging of Shards depends heavily on the Vessel's impression of each part and their relationship to each other. One is the result of them acting together, the other the result of opposition - both are possible, and the result isn't necessarily greater than the sum of the parts. You'd also expect that as Shards combine they would get closer and closer to divinity, but it's difficult to name them without narrowing their Intent, rather than widening it. So War as the combination of Honor and Odium makes sense in the cooperative mode - conflict and hatred bound by rules, directed rather than wild, channelled. What does the opposed mode look like? Hatred placing binds on people, hateful rules; it could be Tyranny? With Honor and Cultivation it feels harder to guess because "Cultivation" already implies some kind of curated, rule-bound change in the direction of growth. Rule-bound growth, or rules that grow... Culture? Direction? Evolution? Science works nicely, too. Cultivation & Odium: Hateful growth, or progressing hates. Nemesis? It's also awkward because there's already a shard for Change in the negative direction: Ruin. Perhaps passionate change... Revolution? Honor/Cultivation/Odium: I think this is where Roshar is heading. Difficult to say without knowing the other combos, but if War is H/O then we can thinking about progression through directed conflict, or conflict through progression. Makes me think of exercise, training, or games. Competition? Escalation?

Absolutely. I think the most convincing thing is that Odium was bound away on Braize when Tanavast died and Honor was Splintered. More than that, the gemstone archive indicates that Honor was both changing and going mad. If any Shard would resist change, it would be Honor, obsessed with rules and binding. He was being changed by the events on Roshar and it drove Tanavast insane. Now it could still have been a benign act. They were lovers, after all. Cultivation might have killed him with his own consent, for his own good (which is a bit more morally suspect), or for some other "good" reason. For example, there being no one Vessel meant that nobody had the authority to release Odium until Dalinar came along, two and half thousand years later. Or she could be a genuine unfeeling force for change, no matter what.