Tarion

A less ambitious command would make sense, but my guess is that it's just significantly less Invested - Enough that it can withstand Nightblood, but not enough to gain sapience.

Moash wasn't broken by ambition though. Sure, he was ambitious, but his defining trait was vengefulness. And he doesn't seek freedom, but embraces being under control. He's definitely a traitor, but not the Traitor.

I legitimately had tears in my eyes. It was just beautiful.

So I spent pretty much all of Part V utterly blown away. A few things stood out though. Taln's reaction to what the others did was beautiful. He's not upset about 4,500 years of torture. He's happy because of what it bought humanity. And considering what we found out about the Oathpact, I'm even more impressed - Other Heralds, even with the ability to split pain between them, couldn't last a year at the end. He survived it for four and a half millenia. Sure, he's a mess right now, but I'm confident he's going to recover a fair bit. Adolin and his shardblade. I'm so happy that she seems to be doing better. Szeth choosing Dalinar as his anchor. Honestly, it was pretty poor timing (although he didn't know it), but you can definitely do worse than following Dalinar. Cultivation can definitely do it, but I don't think we have any evidence of her granting that ability to anyone else. And she demonstrated the ability wonderfully in this book, outplaying Odium, tricking him and trapping him in an agreement. There's a Truthwatcher gem that mentions foresight, but they don't seem to be very open about it. Emeralds being the gem associated with Pali, the patron of the Truthwatchers (Also the gem used in the epigraph that talks about "fellow Truthwatchers").

Interestingly, isn't that where the Parshendi gemhearts are? Kaladin stabs a Fused in one, IIRC, and it's lower down than the heart. I'll find a quote, but it may take me a while. Not saying the Heralds necessarily grew gemhearts (Although I wouldn't be surprised if Radiants did with the 5th Oath), but it might be an important location Hemalurgically, if that's where the Parshendi have their gemhearts.

"White on black" got an actual fist pump and me saying "Gotcha" out loud. Real payoff from all of Zahel's colour imagery. Also, I felt that part 3 could have finished as an actual climax for the book (Or, a smaller less epic book, anyway). I had a proper moment of realisation when I realised that we had 2 whole parts remaining.

Chapter 3 for the first. Chapter 7 for the second. And it's a rough sense before they know what the Everstorm is. If it happens again, I'd be willing to bet she recognised the feeling and could place it as the Everstorm. After all, Syl is intimately familiar with highstorms, so it makes sense that she can recognise the sensation and understand it's source. In Edgedancer, they're experiencing the Everstorm for the first time. They've got no reason to put names to the sensation, because it's something entirely new. The other spren in Kaladin's flashbacks has already been through the Everstorm, so would have the sense for it.

That had been my thought until my most recent listen to Edgedancer, in the context of the Oathbringer chapters we already have. So, Syl sensing Highstorms: And Wyndle to Lift, on the topic of the Everstorm: There's a few others, I think, but these are the ones I spotted straight away.

I'm not touching Mraize. There's too much there we don't know. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear that there are separate and distinct Cultivation- and Honor-senses. Syl can sense highstorms coming, but not the Everstorm. Lift and Wyndle sense the Everstorm coming before it happens, but make no mention of sensing highstorms. I suspect that this Unmade comes under the Cultivation-sense.

Good news in case you've missed it - New chapters went up a little while back. https://www.tor.com/2017/10/31/oathbringer-by-brandon-sanderson-chapters-28-30/

Her nephew is the heir, so I could see it being passed to him. But that seems... overly sentimental and traditional for Ialai. I think she'll trade it away. Shardblades are going to depreciate in the value pretty quickly, as Radiants pop up. Just from attracting Radiants, Dalinar has picked up 3 new Shards within the Kholin household. Ialai is smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing. She'll be doing what she can to attract new Radiants, and money/favours will be worth more for that than a single Blade that she can't personally use.

This makes me wonder if Szeth ever recovered the black sphere. Before the Diagram found him, he had it hidden in Jah Keved. But I could totally see him hiding it in Urithiru later, once he started travelling internationally again. It's the safest place he knew, after all. He's the only character we know had access to Urithiru and it seems like more than a coincidence that he is also one of the few people who could have possessed the captured Re Shepnir.

Another close parallel in other settings might be Jim Butcher's Ghost Story, where an illusionist does exactly that when ambushed - a half dozen copies of herself dash in different directions. It's the sensible reaction to being surprised if you've got those powers.

Eh, it looks like the Sons of Honor have been working towards the return of the Voidbringers. Gavilar did a decent chunk of it by telling the Parshendi that he could return their Gods (Setting off a chain of reactions that led to the Everstorm), but Amaram has continued his work. Taravangian's body count is bigger now, but 10 years down the line it will be entirely the other way, if Amaram has his way. He's actively working to save as many people as possible. Sure, he's pretty awful, but he's honest about how awful he is. I can respect that, disagree with him and still enjoy reading about him.

Genuine question - Who's worse, Adolf Hitler who wanted to kill a small percentage of the world's population and believed that Germany and the Aryan race should lead the world, or Amaram who wanted to kill 90% of the world's population and believed that the church should lead the world? Acting according to your beliefs is not inherently moral. Believing that millions should die so that your beliefs can be enacting is often outright evil. Again, 90% of the world. World War one killed ~1% of the population. World War 2 killed ~3% of the population. Amaram's actions would be roughly equivalent to 30 WW2s all happening at once. There's literally never been a catastrophe near that scale in the world. It was enough to reduce civilisation back to the stone age.

I'm going to go from the beginning, but I'm cheating. I've got a decent chunk of that week off, so I'll be able to take my time. Depending on how desperate I get, I may go back and read through the online chapters instead of reading in the book.

No, probably not. I'd be very surprised if the average Dustbringer was actively evil. But I also think there's a lot of really dark readings for "Life before death" that would fit, if some Orders are okay with murdering Sadeas. Even looking at Kaladin, who can kill Parshendi (People who are, at the end of the day, fighting to survive themselves) in order to protect. There's a fair amount of flexibility as to what they actually mean. Killing to protect is explicitly okay. Preemptive killing is explicitly okay (Or maybe vengeance killing, depending on which parts of Sadeas' murder appeals to each Order). Would all of the Orders disapprove of killing innocent Parshmen, knowing what Shallan knew in WoR? Maybe not. But I could totally see the Dustbringer being the moral compass for their Spren, rather than the other way around (And I'm totally fine with that).

Look, my first interpretation of Pattern's words was that it was reminiscent of a serial killer. This wasn't me nitpicking to try to find something bad about Dustbringers. I've already said that I don't think that Dustbringers are necessarily evil, but that their Spren might have an alien enough morality that we find them disturbing. This isn't unique to Dustbringers. Cryptics are initially revolted by the concept of eating but like lying, whereas Syl has no problems with eating, but hates lies. Some Orders would disapprove of Adolin brutally murdering Sadeas, others (Including the Dustbringers) would approve. I don't know what to tell you. I read that line, my mind goes somewhere specific. Maybe it's intentional, maybe it's not. But I've laid out why I think it holds up. I'm not writing off the order because their Spren are potentially creepy, but as we've seen from Oathbringer so far, I don't think the lines of good and evil are going to be as simple as "Knights Radiant = Good, Parshmen/Parshendi = Evil".

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that. Pattern isn't good at extrapolating how Shallan will feel in the future - He spends a lot of time getting her to explicitly lay out why she says or does certain things. Understanding why Shallan found Malata annoying, tying that to Malata destroying things and then seeing that it'll annoy Shallan more is a level of nuance that I simply don't think he has. I also don't think he says that Shallan will find her more annoying. It takes a bit of contortion of the language for that to work. Shallan says she's annoying, not that she found her annoying. Pattern says that it (Meaning her being annoying) will get worse. They're both speaking objectively - there's no subjectivity to their statements, which is what it would require for your reading. There's no "probably" to it, either. He states, outright, that "it will be worse". But at this point, we're getting to a degree of nitpicking that's unhelpful, I think. We'll see within the next month which of us is right

Pattern's explicitly not neutral. He appears to agree with Shallan's read of her as "annoying" and then things that she'll get "worse" as she starts destroying things. The absolutely most positive reading from Pattern is still pretty negative. Not sociopathic, but negative all the same. As for Balat's tendencies, the relevance is context. In a story in which a PoV character has expressed sociopathic tendencies, by an author who has used characters which kill things to see what's inside them, I don't think it's unreasonable to read "break things to see how they work" as sinister. Now, it's possible that Pattern is expressing something that we'd find mundane in a sinister way (As I noted he has done before), and that the Dustbringers are entirely benign.

That's more than one distasteful thing. Let's tally them up. He steals Shards. He kills men to cover it up. He sells a man into slavery to cover it up. He lies about how he obtained his Shards. He also steals another Shardblade in Words of Radiance. He's also explicitly working to cause a Desolation, an event which will kill 90% of the world's population in order to cause the return of the Heralds.

It's interesting, because I've been entirely positive about Dustbringers, deliberately assuming nothing bad about them until I read this chapter. On it's own, it is innocuous. But it's also a really common serial killer trope. The idea of killing people to see what's inside them. As Ciridae points out, it's even one that Sanderson has used before. And this is a series in which we already have a character who enjoys torturing small animals.

I'm tempted to say "Entropyspren" or something - It fits with the flame idea and the Dustbringer powers/reputation. It's also a more abstract idea, which fits with the other Nahel spren we've seen. And I'm not saying that the Dustbringers are evil, untrustworthy or dangerous. But I wouldn't be surprised to see their spren being pretty alien. We've already seen aspects of Blue and Orange morality from Pattern, who was horrified by the concept of eating, but considers lies as good. If they're the Spren who give powers related to division and abrasion, who like to "break what is around them" what will they consider "good"?

It's interesting that everyone had such a positive interpretation of the Spren's intent. To me, it was much more disturbing - Destroying things to see how they work just makes me think of sociopaths. Nan Balat, tearing limbs off helpless creatures. And that fits with the distrust so many people have for Dustbringers. Constantly with a devil on their shoulder telling them that they don't need to deal with the niceties of society and that the best way to solve a problem is to reduce it to it's simplest components. Admittedly, I think this may be me reading it in view of where I think Oathbringer is going. I think it's going to show that not every Radiant Order is "nice" or even necessarily "good". Balanced by the "new" Parshendi (the Ex-Parshmen) being not necessarily evil.

I disagree, because the boon was specifically to duel "Highprince Sadeas". It did not specify Torol. In this chapter, we're told that Amaram is for all intents "Highprince Sadeas". I think there's a strong argument to be made that the duel is still valid. I think it would be the opposite - I can totally see him "suffering" through a romantic interaction in order to "do what is best for Alethkar". He sees himself being in power as being best for Alethkar, and therefore he'll do something as distasteful as hitting on a widow in order to save the world. That said, I doubt he would, but only because the patrilineal succession wouldn't let him become Highprince - The title passes to a nephew, rather than Ialai herself.