Search the Community

The Horneater origin story, as told by Rock and paraphrased by me, goes something like this: "Always persecuted by the [rest of the] humans, the Horneaters' ancestors asked various spren for help. These spren offered to grant them their homes as their own, but warned that the [rest of the] humans also persecuted their kind (Kaladin scoffs at the idea of Horneaters being chopped down by woodsmen). The 'spren' of the mountain refuses to help them until they have proven they can cultivate a home for themselves on their barren slopes. When they do so, [she] it grants them the home (which they had already made for themselves) that allowed them to live in relative peace alongside the [rest of the] humans." I believe this is the story of a group of listeners that succeed in breaking from the cycle of desolations by convincing Cultivation to give them a human-like and -compatible form, thereby allowing interbreeding. I'll break this down into notions: 1) The persecution by [other] humans definitely aligns with the desolations. 2) All their pleas to the Spren are answered in terms of transformation: The suggestion that, by living in the forest, they would be targeted by woodsmen, or by living in the sea they would be targeted by fisherman, indicates that in those cases they would become wood or fish. Sounds like Listener forms to me. 3) When they went to the mountains they were not offered such an obvious transformation, and were basically asked to Cultivate the peaks into somewhere habitable in exchange for being sheltered from the persecution mentioned in part 1). On the face of it this seems like the weakest offer, seeming to be 'if you make a home for yourself, thereby making this place easily habitable by humans (and therefore accessible to the ones persecuting you), I'll let you live there'. However, we know there is a Shardpool in the middle of the Horneater peaks, and the suggestion has been that it is Cultivation's, what with all the surprisingly habitable ecosystem. Perhaps, in fleeing to the peaks and Cultivating it into a home, a group of Listeners convinced Cultivation to grant them a human-like (and -compatible) form. It was this that made them safe from the humans, with whom they could now breed to dilute their hereditary vulnerability to Odium whilst maintaining their culture (hence the singing, and treating spren as gods). What do you guys think?