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Preface: I'm definitely not super sold on this, but the thought came to me so I wanted to put it down in the best place to get other people to either shut it down or upgrade it) I thin Cultivation might have been involved in enabling the False Desolation. By which I don't mean she wanted it, but that she had something to do with Ba-Ado-Mishram. (TL;DR/theory in a few sentences at the bottom) The facts that lead me to this thought: - Ba-Ado-Mishram's ability to grant forms of power and Voidlight in the False Desolation was new, somehow. She didn't do that in previous desolations. - She's the only Unmade with two hyphens. Yes, it's time for a bit of morphology. She's also referred to by Kalak as "Mishram". This might be refering to what BAM was before being Unmade, and maybe Unmade Mishram was Ado-Mishram before becoming what she is now. As dumb as this sounds, I think the second hyphen might indicate involvement by another shard. At first I thought "hm, but who? Cultivation I guess, because she's the only one left", but a few more pieces of information might play into it. BAM gained new abilities somehow, which she didn't have before. These include being able to create Voidlight. Cultivation is able to do something similar. She both a) created a magic system together with Honor that uses Honor's Investiture but not hers and b ) gave Lift the ability to fuel her Surgebinding with Lifelight anyway. BAM was something before she was unmade. I like the idea that Odiums truest/signature Surge is Division, so I'm postulating that "Unmaking" isn't exactly a unique process, but Odiums Version of "changing an invested Being" or something like that. Point is, Odium isn't the only one who can change Spren, but Unmaking is just his version. (For exmaple, if Ruin were to do something similar, it'd end up with a Spren weaker and "less" than it was before, due to Ruin's nature) Another Shard could be able to do that too. We know that Ruin isn't the only shard able to control someone with spikes, so it can be argued that just like Future Sight and SpikeControl, any shard - whose intent wouldn't inhibit that - can corrupt or change investisture. Cultivation is training the Nightwatcher to understand human's better, for a reason we don't really know. This hasn't always been the case, but is a fairly recent development. (I can't find a source for this but I remember it being this way, I'd welcome any WoB or quote that either proves or disproves this). Cultivation, like Honor, was a god of the Singers and Spren before they swapped with Odium. Singers and Spren were affected by Ba-Ado-Mishram's imprisonment, but at that point in Time Odium was the god of only one of those groups, not both. Cultivation's plans have involved an Unmade on-screen once already. Cultivation is said to have excellent Future-Sight, and we have not heard from Sja-Anat that she was in contact with Cultivation, so Sja-Anat leading Odium to Nightblood (whom Cultivation might also have had a hand in creating) was either something they planned together or, more likely, part of Cultivation's plan. From a Meta Standpoint, the dead Shard Honor has been much more present in the fight against Odium than the alive shard Cultivation so far, and I think that that is not because she's inactive, but because her plans (as we saw with Taravangian in RoW or Dalinar in OB) are slow and long. Ever since Secret History, it's clear that Shards aren't easy to group into "good" and "bad". Preservation was good in comparison to Ruin, but would've been happy with an enternity of the Lord Ruler ruling Scadrial. Cultivation herself acknowledges she can't always control what happens to things she helps grow. To put it meanly, a Cancer cell is pretty aligned with Cultivation's intent, growth for the sake of growth is growth nonetheless. Now, to put the theory into words: I think Cultivation changed the Unmade that we now know as Ba-Ado-Mishram somehow. In a time of Odium's Absence/occupation with torturing Heralds, Cultivation "enhanced" (her version of the process which is "unmaking" for Odium) the Unmade, granting her new abilities in the process. As one of the godesses of Spren and Singers and Roshar itself, this process made Ba-Ado-Mishram more connected to those than she had been before. Ba-Ado-Mishram's imprisonment didn't create Deadeyes and Slaveform because of what she was before being Unmade, but because of the new part of her that was of Cultivation. So, the timeline of BAM would be like this: 1. "Mishram", whatever she was before being unmade. Kelek refers to her as this in a respectful/appreciate way, possibly because he knew what "Mishram" was before, 2. "Ba-Mishram", one of the 9 Unmade for the longest time. 3. Ba-Ado-Mishram, now changed once more by Cultivation, granted new abilities. The "ado" in her name comes from "adoda", meaning Light- A kind of pseudo-sibling, with both Odium and Cultivation's touch in her. She starts the False Desolation and her imprisonment taints all the other beings touched by Cultivations presence on Roshar. The Nightwatcher probably became Cultivation's "main project" only afterwards. Whether the false desolation was an intended or unintended consequence, I have no idea. Whether BAM wanted to betray Odium or even usurp him and came to Cultivation because of that, or if Cultivation "hijacked" BAM, I'm unsure. What do you guys think? Tinfoil hat theory, or might there be some merit to it?

I'd like to bring your attention to Maleshi, now mentione twice - in WoR and OB (emphasis mine): Melishi – the sole Bondsmith of the last Radiant generation during a False Desolation. He imprisoned Ba-Ado-Mishram, the highprincess of the Unmade and commander of Odium’s forces (according to Mythica), who was providing voidlight for the parsh in the absence of Odium - already imprisoned by Honor at that time I assume. These parsh are ‘the devils’ the KR were said to be fighting at Feverstone Keep in Dalinar’s vision of Recreance. Not only did Melishi and the coalition of Radiants manage to capture Ba-Ado-Mishram, but also caused the fighting parsh to lose their ability to form bonds with spren. Around this time the Last Legion escaped all and hid until their descendants were discovered by Kholin expedition. Somehow they managed to avoid losing the ability to bond spren, so the imprisonment of Ba-Ado-Mishram is not the main reason other parsh were stuck in dullform. So, matching False Desolation, cognitive destruction of most parsh and Recreanse, we get Windrunners and Stonewards abandoning their Shards for people to easily find and take. If the reasoning behind it was what was done to the parsh, surely this wasn’t the best way to do it. They deliberately left both Plates (that could have been dismissed for all we know and disappear as a footnote in history) and Blades out in the open for anyone to take at Feverstone Keep. The only threat I can think of that is worth fighting with Shards are Odium’s forces, so I suggest the Radiants were inclined to think they did not permanently defeat their enemy. In the light of all that, I do not believe the revelation humanity isn’t originally from Roshar played as big a role as the Stormfather claimed. They disbanded for whatever actual reason, yet left invaluable weapons to humanity for future war. It is interesting to point out previous books claimed Urithiru was abandoned before Recreanse, yet there doesn’t seem to be much of a time difference between the two. How whatever was happening with the Sibling, Urithiru becoming unsafe and uninhabitable (for more see Urithiru the corrupted city), along with the tensions between Windrunners and Skybreakers, the only ones who kept their Oaths to present day, is related to it all remains to be seen.