Could Ambition have been Splintered but Uli Da still be Alive

[Kandrafish]

Could Mercy have spared Uli Da while splintering Ambition?

I think it is in line with Mercy's intent and a logical guess with the minimal information that we have.

Ambition is separate from Uli Da and I think that it could be shattered while.

Also could Uli Da being Fain mean that The Evil is Fainlife created from a piece of her? --This was a discussion from 2017 that got closed and I want to re-discuss.

Honestly, I want to discuss anything vaguely Threnody--Shard--Cosmere related...

[Thaidakar the Ghostblood]

wait, you just changed the font? interesting. Threnody is one of those planets that are REALLY interesting that I want to know more about, can't wait to see what everyone puts up here. 

[Eternal Khol]

29 minutes ago, Kandrafish said:

Also could Uli Da being Fain mean that The Evil is Fainlife created from a piece of her?

Thats been my theory a few years. That its fain. Or some type of fain Shadow.

i was exited when Brandon recently stated that Fainlife has made it off Yolen in "significant" ways(i think i made a post about it and ambition/the evil about a month ago) 

so Its ever so slightly backed by that fact.

[Wandering Shade]

The Evil being Fain makes a ton of sense and is nothing I hadn't thought about until I saw this post.

But, the other half of this theory is that after Odium wounded Ambition fatally, Mercy decided to Splinter Ambition but saved Uli Da somehow? Like, de-Vesseled Uli Da, then Splintered Ambition so Odium wouldnt come after Uli?

Then Uli crashes into Threnody and since she's Fain starts corrupting the planet making the Evil. But the leftover splinters of Ambition also alter the planet and allow Shades to exist?

This explains a lot about Threnody

[Kandrafish]

1 hour ago, Wandering Shade said:

The Evil being Fain makes a ton of sense and is nothing I hadn't thought about until I saw this post.

But, the other half of this theory is that after Odium wounded Ambition fatally, Mercy decided to Splinter Ambition but saved Uli Da somehow? Like, de-Vesseled Uli Da, then Splintered Ambition so Odium wouldnt come after Uli? -Yeah, that's the idea

Then Uli crashes into Threnody and since she's Fain starts corrupting the planet making the Evil. But the leftover splinters of Ambition also alter the planet and allow Shades to exist? -Yeah, I feel like Ambition's power would need to be twisted... Maybe even unmade? (perhaps Rayse tried the trick before Roshar)

This explains a lot about Threnody

All I really have to go on is Mercy's intent. But, using Ruin as a guide, intent can be very powerful. 

So the theory is that Mercy did spare Uli Da and/ or the Fainlife that she created.---But, I am trying to work out the why. I have clues but no firm conclusion that clicks.

1-The Evil embodies Ambition and Uli Da would (most likely) choose her own people to back.

---Spreads quickly and takes large amounts of land --- Made no compromises  ---If it is Fain, it fits even better with Uli Da and Ambition

2-The shades are the opposite of Ambition and they seem angry, perhaps even odious. I was in another chat with Thaidakar the Ghostblood where we discussed this.

--- you need to walk and not run --- you need to use the same old fires and not go making any new ones --- you cannot go around killing anyone 

3-Rayse as Odium can unmake power, but that can invest him and trap him over time (Roshar), but maybe not if the enemy shard is dead...

4-Mercy worked with Rayse and worries Sazed, so she is probably crafty and power hungry. When following her intent, it will be justified with anterior motive.

5- We know cognitive shadows require investiture. So the shades need it, while the evil could just be toxic life (Fainlife).

I feel like I have pieces of a puzzle that I cannot quite get to fit together.

[Eternal Khol]

23 minutes ago, Kandrafish said:

The shades are the opposite of Ambition and they seem angry, perhaps even odiou

Yeah, i was thinking maybe they were corrupted with Odiums power. I mean they are obviously corrupted. Their eyes turn red and Brandon said that when he uses red for eye color or spren its a sign of corruption.

 

the question is, whose power are they of orginally? and whos power did the corruption?

Edited January 30, 2022 by Eternal Khol
Typo

[Kandrafish]

14 minutes ago, Eternal Khol said:

Yeah, i was thinking maybe they were corrupted with Odiums power. I mean they are obviously corrupted. Their eyes turn red and Brandon said that when he uses red for eye color or spren its a sign of corruption.

 

the question is, whose power are they of orginally? and whos power did the corruption?

I didn't know that red eyes meant corruption. Thanks! Do you think that mean that the green eyes indicate that their existence is normal, but the enraged part is the corruption? That makes me think it is Ambition's power corrupted by Odium because when the shades are angry, they look hateful... Odious and they discourage ambition.

[+Bzhydack]

12 hours ago, Kandrafish said:

I didn't know that red eyes meant corruption. Thanks! Do you think that mean that the green eyes indicate that their existence is normal, but the enraged part is the corruption? That makes me think it is Ambition's power corrupted by Odium because when the shades are angry, they look hateful... Odious and they discourage ambition.

So maybe Odium suffers in this encounter as well and part of his power droped with crushed Ambition onto Threnody

[cometaryorbit]

I took the contagious nature of the Shades and the expanding, maybe soul-eating (corrupting?) nature of the Evil to be the result of Ambition/Odium combined - Ambition's Intent might be something like increasing one's own importance/significance/power; combined with hatred, that could result in contagious, corrupting growth trying to transform all of the world into more of oneself.

[Wandering Shade]

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

I took the contagious nature of the Shades and the expanding, maybe soul-eating (corrupting?) nature of the Evil to be the result of Ambition/Odium combined - Ambition's Intent might be something like increasing one's own importance/significance/power; combined with hatred, that could result in contagious, corrupting growth trying to transform all of the world into more of oneself.

Sounds like how Fainlife is described to spread.

[LewsTherinTelescope]

23 hours ago, Kandrafish said:

Also could Uli Da being Fain mean that The Evil is Fainlife created from a piece of her? --This was a discussion from 2017 that got closed and I want to re-discuss.

This has definitely been my favorite theory for the Evil. We see with Rayse that when the Vessel dies, even their clothing comes along with the corpse for the ride, so I think a fain Vessel who was killed would very likely have skullmoss on their dead body. Though, it would likely be affected by the immense amounts of Investiture in some way (we know if a kandra were to eat a Vessel's corpse there would be minor weird effects, but if one were to be made into a Lifeless there would be major weird effects, so there's definitely some changes going on on a less Physical level, which could play oddly with the way skullmoss spreads and twists things). Worth noting that Ambition was Splintered outside the Threnodite system, so I don't know if Uli Da's corpse would have been on Threnody, but the "mortal wound" could have ripped some stuff off, perhaps (which would likely result in it being even more twisted than Ascension alone would do). So maybe we're working with not just skullmoss but like... shade-ified skullmoss, or something.

Whatever the Evil is, it seemingly didn't force evacuation from the Homeland for several millennia after Ambition's death (Shadows for Silence takes place between Warbreaker and Stormlight, and Silence's grandparents were among those who initially fled), which could be explained if only a small amount made it to a place it could spread from and so it building up enough to consume an entire continent took a long time.

[cometaryorbit]

6 hours ago, Bzhydack said:

So maybe Odium suffers in this encounter as well and part of his power droped with crushed Ambition onto Threnody

That might explain why one of the Stormlight Archive epigraphs refers to (probably) Odium as "the broken one" - which always puzzled me since Odium isn't Splintered.

17 minutes ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

Whatever the Evil is, it seemingly didn't force evacuation from the Homeland for several millennia after Ambition's death (Shadows for Silence takes place between Warbreaker and Stormlight, and Silence's grandparents were among those who initially fled), which could be explained if only a small amount made it to a place it could spread from and so it building up enough to consume an entire continent took a long time.

That's an interesting thought.

Another possibility that occurs to me is that whatever the Evil originally was existed in kind of a "dormant" state, or wasn't yet especially dangerous, but became something civilization-ending after being combined with/exposed to (or consuming) some off-world Investiture. Nazh's comment on becoming a Cognitive Shadow being a "rite" implies he's from an era of Threnody when people didn't live in the Forests of Hell, so perhaps when Khriss and other worldhoppers showed up something bad happened?

(Maybe that's why the Seventeenth Shard has the non-intervention thing? Because they messed it up big time in the past?)

[LewsTherinTelescope]

12 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

Nazh's comment on becoming a Cognitive Shadow being a "rite" implies he's from an era of Threnody when people didn't live in the Forests of Hell

Yeah, definitely is from before they fled, since he appears in Secret History and Secret History is likely a century or two before the evacuation (Shadows for Silence takes place during the "few generations" between Warbreaker and Stormlight, so presumably 200+ years after Era 1, and they had to have fled within a century-ish of SfS since Silence's grandmother was around then [there's a line about the waystop standing over a hundred years, but that is... questionable for that reason, and may be a timeline screwup on Brandon's part]).

Edit: oops, forgot to comment on the main part of the post...

12 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

Another possibility that occurs to me is that whatever the Evil originally was existed in kind of a "dormant" state, or wasn't yet especially dangerous, but became something civilization-ending after being combined with/exposed to (or consuming) some off-world Investiture.

That's also pretty plausible, yeah. May have been under control for a while, or have been a result of something being messed up.

Edited January 30, 2022 by LewsTherinTelescope

[cometaryorbit]

1 hour ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

Yeah, definitely is from before they fled, since he appears in Secret History and Secret History is likely a century or two before the evacuation

Ah, ok. Was not clear on when Shadows for Silence was relative to Mistborn Era 1.

It's a very interesting suggestion that there were regular "sane" Cognitive Shadows on the other continent. Why is Threnody realmatically different between continents, if the damage is due to a Shardic battle out in space? Is the "wound on the Spiritual Realm" localized, like a Shardblade wound that can affect one limb of a person but leave the rest of them untouched?

1 hour ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

That's also pretty plausible, yeah. May have been under control for a while, or have been a result of something being messed up.

Given that Threnody's problems seem to originate from Realmatic damage, and Threnody has no stable perpendicularity, I wonder if something relating to how worldhoppers arrived contributed to the problem. (Like they accidentally gave the proto-Evil more access to the Cognitive Realm, which gave it more power or let it eat people's Cognitive aspects/souls or...)

[LewsTherinTelescope]

Just now, cometaryorbit said:

It's a very interesting suggestion that there were regular "sane" Cognitive Shadows on the other continent. Why is Threnody realmatically different between continents, if the damage is due to a Shardic battle out in space? Is the "wound on the Spiritual Realm" localized, like a Shardblade wound that can affect one limb of a person but leave the rest of them untouched?

It's worth noting that shades don't just form every time someone dies as far as we know, they seem to form specifically from people being killed by existing shades. So it may not be that there's a Realmatic difference as much as there just not being any to spread it in the Homeland, and the "rites" involving something in a way that produces a stronger Shadow.

[apepi]

I wonder if the shades are in the cognitive/physical realms like the unmade are. If Odium learned that is a better place to put shards, maybe he put some of Ambition's power there. Or this could have been him testing out how to do it.

[Kandrafish]

36 minutes ago, apepi said:

I wonder if the shades are in the cognitive/physical realms like the unmade are. If Odium learned that is a better place to put shards, maybe he put some of Ambition's power there. Or this could have been him testing out how to do it.

I like that... Stuffing enemy shard's power in the cognitive realm does seem to be something that Odium does. I figure it would be him trying the what works, though because he did that to Dominion and Devotion already.

"Argent

Okay. So did Rayse choose those Shards because--

Brandon Sanderson

He went after Ambition first, but didn't find Ambition until after going after Devotion and Dominion. But Ambition was number one on his hit list."

 

 

So, first, we assume the Evil is Fain...

Possibility 1

UliDa is dead or dormant... and a piece of her is the seed for the evil

i) It takes a long time for it to spread

On 1/30/2022 at 5:53 PM, LewsTherinTelescope said:

 when the Vessel dies, even their clothing comes along with the corpse for the ride, so I think a fain Vessel who was killed would very likely have skullmoss on their dead body. Though, it would likely be affected by the immense amounts of Investiture in some way (we know if a kandra were to eat a Vessel's corpse there would be minor weird effects, but if one were to be made into a Lifeless there would be major weird effects, so there's definitely some changes going on on a less Physical level, which could play oddly with the way skullmoss spreads and twists things). Worth noting that Ambition was Splintered outside the Threnodite system, so I don't know if Uli Da's corpse would have been on Threnody, but the "mortal wound" could have ripped some stuff off, perhaps (which would likely result in it being even more twisted than Ascension alone would do). So maybe we're working with not just skullmoss but like... shade-ified skullmoss, or something.

Whatever the Evil is, it seemingly didn't force evacuation from the Homeland for several millennia after Ambition's death (Shadows for Silence takes place between Warbreaker and Stormlight, and Silence's grandparents were among those who initially fled), which could be explained if only a small amount made it to a place it could spread from and so it building up enough to consume an entire continent took a long time.

I like the idea of Shadefied moss and that could apply to all cases.

ii) It is dormant

On 1/30/2022 at 6:12 PM, cometaryorbit said:

Another possibility that occurs to me is that whatever the Evil originally was existed in kind of a "dormant" state, or wasn't yet especially dangerous, but became something civilization-ending after being combined with/exposed to (or consuming) some off-world Investiture. Nazh's comment on becoming a Cognitive Shadow being a "rite" implies he's from an era of Threnody when people didn't live in the Forests of Hell, so perhaps when Khriss and other worldhoppers showed up something bad happened?

(Maybe that's why the Seventeenth Shard has the non-intervention thing? Because they messed it up big time in the past?)

I like the dormant idea. It makes sense with the whole idea of UliDa or a piece of UliDa creating Fainlife. And maybe it does just need investiture. Maybe it needs cognitive connection and investiture... ShoDel and Fainlife are supposed to be more connected to the cognitive realm. (Oathbringer spoiler below)

Spoiler

(This is kind of like the singers are more connected to the cognitive realm in how they can see more of the spren)

So, to me, it would make sense if a disturbance in the cognitive realm involving investiture of some sort and/ or investiture caused the Fainlife to erupt...

 

OR Possibility 2

i) Maybe... Ambition is destroyed, but Uli Da is spared by Mercy in another system and the delay is that UliDa, who's personality is attuned to and perhaps altered by ambition spent those thousands of years roaming the cognitive realm (her soul has been stretched so she can live as a cognitive shadow for a very long time) in search of the her power... With the very ambitious idea of getting revenge on Odium, but first, she needs to get a hold of some of her old investiture...

ii) Same thing except UliDa created or found some ShoDel on the other planet where she died and told them how to hike through the cognitive realm and take Threnody... A planet that is perfect for her people. Mercy kills Uli Da and spares the ShoDel (with an ulterior motive of some sort).

(The 2 i) possibility is little out there... I think I might be stretching what is plausible. But, I welcome criticism. The more possibilities that get struck down as being implausible, the closer we get to the truth.) Also! I would welcome more possibilities! More ideas are better too!