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[OB] Oathbringer chapters 28-30


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33 minutes ago, Sliverofnone said:

As great of a battle scene as that was, I think I enjoyed the philosophical debate between Dalinar and Mr T. I thought that Mr T. would veil his 'greater good' philosophy, but it seems he is very genuine about his belief in that. Hang all 4 is exactly what he has been doing, to save all, he sacrifices as many as necessary. This will be a great driver of the KR strategy moving forward, I mean this definitely puts Mr T in the driver seat for second bondsmith role.

 Also, the fact that Dalinar is being rejected by every kingdom is certainly pushing him into becoming the warlord again. I think this is pretty significant, given that this conflict is mentioned in the Diagram. Will he become the warlord, and a ready ally to Mr T, or will he continue the path of the peacemaker, and gain the enmity of the diagramists? It certainly would provide an excellent contrast with the background chapters, where is war lust is unbridled. I can't wait for another Dalinar/Mr T chapter!

I really like this theory of Taravangian becoming a Bondsmith. The Physical one, I would think. Meaning we only need the Spiritual one still...

(Dalinar is most likely Cognitive, as he can do that map trick together with Shallan, and the Order of Lightweavers as well as the Illumination Surge are Cognitive)

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Chapter 28: Another Option

I read this before I got to my PC, but I didn't find much of note. The ending made me happy.

Chapter 29: No Backing Down

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Lurking within it all, somewhere, was a predator that only Veil could hear.

I don't think you are fully sane, Shallan...

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Sword training with Adolin each day—more frolicking and flirting than useful swordplay—and the occasional meeting with Dalinar where she had nothing to add but a pretty map.

Heh, frolicking. You are not just a pretty map, Shallan, you are a full character!

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Hanged. Storm it. The thing didn’t imitate the attack with the bottle… it imitated the execution that followed!

I was wondering why Veil hadn't taken this possibility into account. Seemed obvious.

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“Where?” Shallan asked.

...

Veil ran, heedless of the danger.

...

Radiant dropped to her knees,

...

That's a lot of personality switching in a short time. Feels weird. A sign that Shallan doesn't have her personalities under control?

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Radiant lowered her Shardblade, letting it slice into the rock at her feet. A hole. Like her drawing of spiraling blackness, a pit that seemed to descend into the void itself.

Futuresight? Perhaps Lightweaving has the inherent ability to see the future a little bit, and Renarin - for whatever reason - is simply better.

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That’s you, a part of her cried as she adopted the persona. That’s the real you. Isn’t it? Why do you have to paint that face over another?

Oh, that's alarming... How broken are you, Shallan? It feels like Urithiru is making it worse too, she was nowhere near as bad in the first two books. 

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“There’s something down there,” Renarin whispered, leaning out over the pit. “Something… ancient. You’ve felt it, haven’t you?” He looked up at Shallan, then the others in the room. “This place is weird; this whole tower is weird. You’ve noticed it too, right?”

The Unmade? Assuming it is an Unmade sending this spren, what I think is one of the Ten Deaths. 

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She’d begun to imagine an infinite spiral, like with old Dilid, one of the ten fools. He ran up a hillside toward the Tranquiline Halls with sand sliding beneath his feet—running for eternity, but never making progress.

Hey look, it's Sisyphus! Also, aren't the ten fools normally capitalized? Ten Fools?

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A solitary figure hovering above the ground before a large blue disc, arms stretched to the side as if to embrace it. Depictions of the Almighty in his traditional form as a cloud bursting with energy and light. A woman in the shape of a tree, hands spreading toward the sky and becoming branches.

Oooh, this is nice! The depiction of Honor sounds a little bit like Jezrien's belt buckle, though not exactly. It's nice to see Cultivation show up too, even if Shallan is too dense to recognize her :)

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Other murals depicted shapes that reminded her of Pattern, windspren… ten kinds of spren. One for each order?

Curses, woman, don't tell us about the two spren we've seen so much from! Tell is about the others!

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“Your father doesn’t seem to be able to feel it,” Shallan said. “Why can we?”

“I… I don’t know. Maybe—”

Huh. Is it because they are more advanced in their Oaths? I doubt the Stormfather is being malicious here, hiding stuff from Dalinar, but I wonder if the Stormfather can even detect this wrongness, this suspected Unmade.

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A library. They’d finally found the books Jasnah had dreamed of discovering.

They were ruined.

Oh, that's sad... Not entirely surprising, but sad nonetheless.

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“She’s here,” Renarin whispered. “One of the Unmade. Re-Shephir… the Midnight Mother.”

Ayyy, it's so nice when theories come together. Not only is she an Unmade, she is also spawning those other things - like Ten Deaths now.

Ooooh, those are just Midnight Essences. Brandon talked about how they take the shape of whatever was around them - the ones Dalinar saw in his Heb-vision looked somewhat like whitespines. These look like Shallan and the crew. Should've made that connection earlier...

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Then pressed her safehand against it.

Oh.

And, of course I need to run for a meeting... We'll finish this later.

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3 minutes ago, Leyrann said:

I really like this theory of Taravangian becoming a Bondsmith. The Physical one, I would think. Meaning we only need the Spiritual one still..

Where did you get the theory that there is one Bondsmith for each realm?  That is super intriguing, and I kinda like it, but is there a source to this. 

 

I personally was linking the Bondsmiths to the moons in my head (no source, just my brain squirrels running in circles)

 

Edit: Unrelated thought below:

The name Veil.  I've been curious how Shallan chose the name Veil, other than that the persona is a veil she wears.  Well, I just started my reread of the first two books this week, and have finished part one of WOK.  I was floored when the reading area between the Palaneum, which costs 1000 emerald broams to enter, and the rest of the city, is called the Veil.  As a lot of important formative work with Jasnah was done there, I wonder if that had any effect on her choosing the name Veil for her first persona.

Edited by Stark
THoughts added to avoid a Double post
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Just now, Stark said:

Where did you get the theory that there is one Bondsmith for each realm?  That is super intriguing, and I kinda like it, but is there a source to this. 

 

I personally was linking the Bondsmiths to the moons in my head (no source, just my brain squirrels running in circles)

Actually not related to Realms. Rather, related to the Orders, which themselves are, through the Surges, related to the Realms. It's still a work in progress, but I'm pretty confident that I'm looking in the right direction.

This is a post about it I worked out this morning, and is better structured, but is in relation to a (pretty long) theory I wrote about the Surges before I realized they could be connected to the three Realms. This is the post in which I originally realized that, which is less organized but maybe be easier to understand.

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1 minute ago, Calderis said:

Haven't had time to read everything but anyone notice how Shallan tapped into her hate to fight? 

I had not noticed.  But that feeds into the theme of hate that keeps cropping up in her chapters, and my pants-wetting fear that she will be the champion, because she hates so much, and most of that is directed inwards.  And now, there is an Unmade that knows her.  She is in a really, really dangerous position to take a huge fall.  And not just bcause she stood on the edge of the void like stairwell and looked down.

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14 minutes ago, Gigalemesh said:

I feel like she might have been the female scout that spoke to Shallan about wielding a blade. It's quite early in and I haven't gone back and checked, but I made that connection 

Just checked and there is no mention of her name there, so this is purely speculation on my part

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41 minutes ago, dantlee said:

He said "one for each herald that broke under torture." Before the start of every new desolation, all ten heralds broke. Including Taln. So no, according to his stated theory, there would be 10 unmade. 

So... There's this thing. It's called Context reading. He started with the number 9. Now, what do we know of with 9 heralds? 9 heralds didn't go back after the last desolation. Specifically because they "couldn't go back." 

That's another definition of "breaking" as a result of torture. 

You're being over literal. Don't. 

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1 minute ago, Stark said:

I had not noticed.  But that feeds into the theme of hate that keeps cropping up in her chapters, and my pants-wetting fear that she will be the champion, because she hates so much, and most of that is directed inwards.  And now, there is an Unmade that knows her.  She is in a really, really dangerous position to take a huge fall.  And not just bcause she stood on the edge of the void like stairwell and looked down.

That would actually be a really cool twist. I'd love seeing Shallan be the villain like that. She's not (to me) a particularly compelling hero. But her personality quirks would make a fantastic villain.

Hopefully she'd be redeemed at the end though.

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Ooooo, so Unmade are like unmade Radiant Spren? What happens when an Unmade successfully bonds with a human I wonder.

There may be 1 for each Order but the Bondsmiths since, you know, super spren.

 

The Midnight Mother was underwhelming if truth be told.

 

Bridge Fooouuurrrrrrrr now with a woman?

.....who is this chick that Bridge 4 would accept her?

 

Shallan Skar has the easiest name to remember of the group, come on now.

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An interesting thought...

All or most of the books have decayed, unsurprisingly. How well paper lasts depends upon a lot of factors but it's rare for it preserve well across 1500 years, or however long it has been since the tower was abandoned.

So anyway... books should have a spren / cognitive part. They should "remember" what they were. Maybe they can be restored with Soulcasting?

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3 minutes ago, Nymeros said:

 

Bridge Fooouuurrrrrrrr now with a woman?

.....who is this chick that Bridge 4 would accept her?

 

 

Read it again. Shallan thought the same thing, but she wasn't a member of Bridge Four. Just near them. Different uniform and everything.

Spoiler

“We must have passed by this point a dozen times,” a soldier said from behind. Shallan started; that voice was female. Indeed, she’d mistaken one of Dalinar’s scouts—the short woman with long hair—for another bridgeman, though her uniform was diff rent. She was inspecting the cuts Shallan had made to get into this room. “Don’t you remember scouting right past that curved hallway outside, Teft?”

 

Edited by dendrophobe
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1 hour ago, dantlee said:

I found it pretty cool 

The unmade have existed long before the last desolation, and there are nine, not ten, so no, they don't correspond perfectly to the heralds. 

To me, this suggest that there are 9 Unmade, one for each order except Bondsmith since they are bonding the super spren and so far, we have no suggestions that there are any Odious super spren.

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I wonder if the reason Urithiru is thought of as protected is that stormlight gemstone pillar thing.  If once that thing is fully loaded up with stormlight it grants some sort of immunity or creates a shield from the Unmade and/or the Voidspren.

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51 minutes ago, Gigalemesh said:

Midnight essences were part of desolations so at least one unmade existed beforehand 

That's one possibility.

Unless essences predate the unmade. Or the essences became the unmade. That's not proof, but it is grounds to theorize on. It still doesn't disprove his idea. We don't know when or how the unmade were unmade. But their name probably tells us something. 

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1 minute ago, frozndevl said:

To me, this suggest that there are 9 Unmade, one for each order except Bondsmith since they are bonding the super spren and so far, we have no suggestions that there are any Odious super spren.

Ahh I just explained this. If it's based on the Heralds the superspren don't matter. 

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