General Thoughts

[Chessboxin']

I think a lot of people picked up on this, but Liss, the assassin hired by Jasnah, using a shardblade really makes me curious. It's said that there are only so many shardblades&plates out there, but what if the number is much higher than that, both in terms of people who are hiding the ones they possess - and Shallan seems like a good candidate to be in this category - and just ones that are disappearing. I mean, there must have been hundreds of shardplates/blades before the Recreance, they can't possibly have just disappeared from existence? Or if they have, there is a theory I heard that they were in the realm of the spren, so perhaps there are countless ones there just waiting to be claimed?

 

If the islands that Rysn visit have their own spren that are sentient a-la Cryptics/Honourspren, does it mean that large creatures in general have them? And putting aside the Santhid, what does that say about the chasmfiends which I think are the largest creatures we've seen yet in modern Roshar aside from the islands?

 

I am starting to think that the Constable, if he's in fact Nalan, needs to know something bad about a person they would kill before they can actually do it. There's that line he says that it took him a while to discover something bad about Ym, and it seems to me that if the only criteria that mattered to him was just offing people who he thought would bring back the Desolation, it seems that he would have gone just straight for him. It seems to me that this is either a very, very literal interpretation of Nalan's focus on Justice. Part of me believes that this by-the-book interpretation of his mandate suggests that the Heralds are either somehow restricted by their "focus", which seems very unlikely, or perhaps even that the Heralds have become corrupted somehow.  I mean, what better way for Odium to win the True Desolation than stack the odds in his favour by killing off any potential surgebinder before the whole thing starts?

 

Is Urithiru on the Shattered Plains? There's a part of Eshonai's interlude where she thinks something about the humans not knowing that they stepped on the remnants of inhabited lands and also that there was ancient engineering in the way the spires were still holding or some such. My first thought was that Urithiru(spelling?) was the Plains itself, but that seems way way too big for a city even for one that's supposed to be among the world's largest and certainly its most important.

 

I'm pretty sure there'll be more thoughts over the next few days, but those are the main ones that come to mind.

 

Edit: We've been reading more and more about how Gavilar changed in the period leading to his assassination. And with Eshonai mentioning that what he proposed to them was something that the Parshendi considered horrific and dangerous enough to intentionally doom themselves to a very brutal war against the Alethi. What if Gavilar was being somehow influenced in a negative way by Odium? We know that he's on Roshar and we also know that he's intent on laying the grounds for his eventual and total victory. It seems to me that it might make for a good dichotomy from a literature point of view that just as Dalinar is receiving visions from Honour, then Odium would create his own and if that's the case, who better to try and influence than the unifier of Alethkar? The organization that Shallan's father belongs to also seems to be a good candidate for the cause behind the change in Gavilar. And to flip it around, what if Honour himself had first come to Gavilar and told him to go back to the Old Ways and reform the Knights Radiant like he's done with Dalinar. If this ends up being the case, then the Parshendi must believe as the Constable-Nallan believes that surgebinders have an important orle in the Desolations themselves? One way or the other, it's looking like a big Chekov's gun with the number of times Gavilar's changes has been mentioned.

Edited January 26, 2014 by Chessboxin'