Theory. Stormwardens are Odium's Voidbinders

[Nepene]

Who are the Stormwardens?

Kaladin had torn up had also included a list of highstorm dates purchased from a roving stormwarden. The storms could be predicted mathematically; Kaladin’s father had made a hobby of it. He’d been able to pick the right day eight times out of ten.

Stormwarden. He reached by reflex for the prayer sewn to his left sleeve, waiting for the day he’d need to burn it for aid. “They seek to predict the future.”

Beings who can predict the future of the Storm with maths. Kaladin's father can do whatever they do. The storms are widely believed to be manifestations of the Gods in some way or form.

the stormwarden’s promises were always filled with caveats. The Almighty’s will was mysterious, and the signs couldn’t always be trusted.

They interpret the Almighty's will.

"Amaram was talking to one of his stormwardens, a middle-aged man with a square beard and robes of deep black. “…why Thaidakar would risk this?” Amaram was saying, speaking in a soft voice. “But who else would it be? The Ghostbloods grow more bold. We’ll need to find out who he was. Do we know anything about him?” “He was Veden, Brightlord,” the stormwarden said. “Nobody I recognize. But I will investigate.”

At least one stormwarden is aiding opposition against Ghostbloods. The Ghostbloods are trying to kill Jasnah, possibly due to her research on Voidbringers.

They claimed they didn’t, but he’d seen their books filled with glyphs. Glyphs. They weren’t meant to be used in books; they were pictures. A man who had never seen one before could still understand what one meant, based on its shape. That made interpreting glyphs different from reading. Stormwardens did a lot of things that made people uncomfortable.

The Plate glowed with an even blue light, and glyphs—some familiar, others not—were etched into the metal. They trailed blue vapor.

When she finally finished, she knelt back on her knees before a glyph twenty paces long, emblazoned as if in blood. The wet ink reflected sunlight, and she fired it with a candle; the ink was made to burn whether wet or dry. The flames burned across the length of the prayer, killing it and sending its soul to the Almighty.

They use Glyphs, which you can supposedly use to commune with the Almighty by burning them, which cover the Radiant Shardplates. Glyphs which you see on the front cover as the essences of Surgebinding. Aka, things which probably have magical and religious properties.

Voidbinding is a dark and evil thing, and the soul of it was to try to divine the future.”

No man should try to know the future, nor lay claim to it, for it belonged only to the Almighty himself.

Voidbinding is centered around divining the future according to Vorinism.

Based on all this, I would guess that the Stormwardens are agents of a God, probably Odium but potentially Cultivation who Honor notes is good at prophesies. Cultivation is splintered so she's not a major candidate in my mind. If they are of Odium they may be his priests, there to bring about the final desolation and do whatever things need to be done. In book 2 we should watch them carefully, as most people do- they are regarded as suspicious by most as they predict the future, but used because they are so useful.

They may currently be using the power for good purposes, but you should not trust them.

Their books of glyphs may allow communion with Odium, similar to how people burn symbols to send their symbol's Souls to the Almighty or how people used metal piercing in Mistborn to commune with Ruin. Those with an appropriate sDNA may be able to do voidbinding using the glyphs contained within to guide them or aid them. Kaladin's father could do the maths of Stormwardens, and so Kaladin may have inherited his sDNA from him.

Edited December 10, 2012 by Nepene

[name_here]

Stormwardens are weathermen who use Glyphs as a pictographic writing system. I seriously doubt that their meteorology has any magical component whatsoever, although the fact that they don't need scribes for long-distance communication, the way the general populace fears them and the likely result of them becoming socially isolated from nonmembers, as well as apparently being the only truly transnational organization (the Ardents are under the temporal and religious authority of their brightlords, at least theoretically, and have been since Sunmaker) does lend itself to some sort of massive conspiracy.

Actually, I wonder if the Stormwardens are a unified organization. I've been assuming they are, mostly because creating the calculation tables and modifying glyphs into a writing system seems like it would require a joint effort by a lot of people and be fairly difficult to learn, but they might just have some colleges like surgeons on Roshar do.

Regardless, most people are afraid of them because no one else understands what they do, and because they edge towards violating Vorin gender roles. It's kind of like why an angry mob showed up outside Kaladin's house one night.

Edited December 10, 2012 by name_here

[Nepene]

Stormwardens are weathermen who use Glyphs as a pictographic writing system. I seriously doubt that their meteorology has any magical component whatsoever, although the fact that they don't need scribes for long-distance communication, the way the general populace fears them and the likely result of them becoming socially isolated from nonmembers, as well as apparently being the only truly transnational organization (the Ardents are under the temporal and religious authority of their brightlords, at least theoretically, and have been since Sunmaker) does lend itself to some sort of massive conspiracy.

Actually, I wonder if the Stormwardens are a unified organization. I've been assuming they are, mostly because creating the calculation tables and modifying glyphs into a writing system seems like it would require a joint effort by a lot of people and be fairly difficult to learn, but they might just have some colleges like surgeons on Roshar do.

Regardless, most people are afraid of them because no one else understands what they do, and because they edge towards violating Vorin gender roles. It's kind of like why an angry mob showed up outside Kaladin's house one night.

You are right that the people are afraid of them due to them being socially isolated, a massive transnational organization, they violate Vorin gender roles as with Kaladin.

The thing is, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

I imagine being a servant of Odium would make you socially isolated from mainstream society, good at unifying as hate is a powerful unifier, and distrustful of Vorinist, aka Honor, religion.

I think it quite unlikely that there is no magical component to Stormwardens. They are, after all, peering into the actions of the Highstorm, which is likely from the gods. The gods are magical sentient beings (or shattered sentient beings) and so predicting their whims would be difficult to do without magic. And people do repeatedly say Stormwardens are predicting the future, that may well be foreshadowing.

[name_here]

Modern society predicts the future, too.

The Stormwardens are noted as not being entirely reliable, and they calculate storms well in advance. That implies that they're using fairly mundane methods of predicting the behavior of a complex system. If the Shards are actively controlling the Highstorms, they'd be entirely unpredictable, especially with precognition. I wrote a thread on this a while back, but basically in the Cosmere, using precognition to predict the actions of someone who is predicting your actions with precognition pretty much instantly becomes worthless for ordinary humans. When two people are using it, Atium produces a large enough shadow cloud to overwhelm people benefiting from its mental enhancements, and it only looks a second ahead at most. If a Shard, with their massive future sight and capacity to usefully interpret the huge decision trees, were actively controlling the Highstorms, there's no way Stormwardens could use future sight to predict them with any reliability. If they're not being actively controlled, future sight would be perfectly accurate.

[Nepene]

Modern society predicts the future, too.

The Stormwardens are noted as not being entirely reliable, and they calculate storms well in advance. That implies that they're using fairly mundane methods of predicting the behavior of a complex system. If the Shards are actively controlling the Highstorms, they'd be entirely unpredictable, especially with precognition. I wrote a thread on this a while back, but basically in the Cosmere, using precognition to predict the actions of someone who is predicting your actions with precognition pretty much instantly becomes worthless for ordinary humans. When two people are using it, Atium produces a large enough shadow cloud to overwhelm people benefiting from its mental enhancements, and it only looks a second ahead at most. If a Shard, with their massive future sight and capacity to usefully interpret the huge decision trees, were actively controlling the Highstorms, there's no way Stormwardens could use future sight to predict them with any reliability. If they're not being actively controlled, future sight would be perfectly accurate.

Modern society often predicts the future with lower accuracy than Kaladin's father does. Stormwarden predictions are very impressive. And we have a lot more science than them.

http://forecastadvisor.com/Ohio/Hilliard/43026/

Edit. I am not saying maths is bad. Maths is awesome. But no amount of theory can make up for a lack of objective scientific data. Maths needs physics to help it if it wants to understand the weather and the Stormwardens don't have much physics.

I would assume they would be doing their predictions with some degree of aid from Odium, if they were his priests. So they would be working with his future sight aiding theirs to a small degree- his actions would reinforce their predictions. If he opposed them it would of course as you say be impossible for them to successfully do it on their own due to the massive future shadow cloud.

There is some possibility that they are contacting Cultivation, and she is less fragmented than we thought in the form of the Nightwatcher. My point is based off Odium being the only Shard around and the Stormwardens predicting the future. If that is not true, as we may well find out in book 2, they may be something else.

Edited December 10, 2012 by Nepene

[Voidus]

With regards to accuracy I think the difference is that Highstorms are an event of their own, they either happen or they don't that in itself means that predicting a highstorm is going to be a lot easier than predicting the weather. Additionally I think that most of us can agree that there is some kind of shardic influence behind highstorms but I doubt there is any conscious effort involved, more like the mists than anything, which were also predictable (every night) I'd say that the rules governing Highstorm appearances are just a bit more complex. I also doubt that it wouldn't have been mentioned so far, after all there are plenty of scholars who aren't stormwardens who would be capable of checking the maths behind the predictions.

[hoser]

Voidbinding is a dark and evil thing, and the soul of it was to try to divine the future.

Is this true?

Sunmaker took over the Ardents and "revealed" that there were no visions. Does this mean that the Hierocracy was justifying it's control based on visions?

Dalinar has visions that may be from Honor/Tanavast who doesn't seem to have qualms about looking into the future (although he doesn't seem to be great at it).

Could the link between voidbinding and prediction be Sunmaker disinformation?

Both Gavilar and Hoid make references to the skies in relation to concurrent events. They seem to have information that we don't about how the world works. So I believe that the state of the sky is significant and dynamic.

The Highstorm(s) (do we know that there are multiple?) are somewhat regular. The Purelake drains as they approach. Is this due to a shardic relationship between the Purelake and the highstorms? Could it be tidal based on the three moons with a single Highstorm traveling with the point of lowest lunar gravitational influence?

Thanks Nepene for highlighting the idea that glyphs might be different than writing for communicating to the Shards. I like it, even though I don't understand it.

The Ghostbloods, Oldbloods, Stormwardens, Ardents and healers all seem to have transnational links. Taravavangian may be using the healers as a part of his network. The stormwardens could easily be another network with an agenda (the quotes with Amaram seem to indicate it). With glyphs and fabrial pens they would be able to communicate instantaneously worldwide. The Ghostbloods seem to be led by Thaidakar and have an agenda, likely related to Vorinism if we can judge by Kabsal. In general, all these organizations (except maybe the Oldbloods) seem to know something about what is coming and are angling to take over as the calamity hits.