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Theory: Heralds are now evil. (Words of Radiance SPOILERS)


GroundPetrel

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So I was reading Words of Radiance again, and I realized...that Nalan'Elin/Darkness is kind of a perversion of justice at this point.

He's twisting the code that he himself used to uphold to suit his own ends, he brought Szeth back from the dead, which I personally feel is outright evil because there is NO justification for forcing someone to endure that degree of mental torment, and now he just handed a mentally-unstable killing machine the single most dangerous weapon in the Cosmere.

Even if Szeth can't draw Nightblood, due to its Breath-burning requirement*, it's still a devastating weapon; anyone who doesn't meet Nightblood's standards is basically dead on proximity. I cannot see any rational reason for giving a weapon like that, that also speaks to people telepathically, to a man who is rapidly going completely insane from the screams of those he has killed. And then telling him to go get revenge by killing the people who sent him out to be Truthless.

Seems like tempting Odium, there.

From what we've seen of Nalan and other potential Heralds, I find it likely that they are now...some sort of perversions, psychologically speaking, of the men and women they once were, using their rationale of preventing the apocalypse to do things the unethical way, and to do things that are directly opposite their original purpose.

And besides, they are mostly human; thousands of years of torture coupled with running away from a critical task like that of the Heralds could break anyone.

Also, how the heck did Nalan get his hands on Nightblood? Something like that doesn't seem right. Based on Vasher's interlude, I feel that he did NOT give that sword up willingly, which means that Nalan is doing things that are perhaps less than ethical in pursuit of his plan to stop Odium's rise.

In a nutshell, I interpreted Nalan's scenes as showing a broken man, desperate to avoid a world-shattering onslaught of pure malice, believing that the ends justify the means. And Brandon seems to have indicated that Honor is all about the ends NOT justifying the means. Which means that Nalan's tactics may actually give Odium an opening.

Anyway, this theory is probably nuts, but does anyone have any thoughts?

*And I think it likely that Nightblood will be able to feed on Stormlight, given that Breath and Stormlight are both manifestations of Investiture (magical "fuel"?) that can be carried by humans and pushed into inanimate objects. I'll bet that the systems are compatible like that, given the nature of Shards.

EDIT: Well, my paragraph breaks are broken, not sure why...

EDIT 2: Guess that fixed them...

Edited by GroundPetrel
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