The Shard of Darkness

[Ripheus23]

OK, so I don't know much about "The Dark One" thing Sanderson is going to work on, except that it used to be a Cosmere scenario and that it involves someone prophesied to be the anti-savior or something. [Correct me if I'm wrong about either of those things...] Also, all I know of Calamity is what I just read in the Wikipedia article about the Reckoners stories. However...

I'm going to guess that Calamity "used to be" a Shard, ditto for whoever is behind the anti-savior plot. As they say in those ads for that one recovery center, "Now I'm not." Meaning, two characters/figures who used to be Shards, have gone on to other things, but this still leaves open the possibility that the Intents of two of the unidentified Shards can be retroengineered from what is known about the identity of Calamity and the anti-savior concept.

From what I was reading, it sounds like Calamity would have been a proto-Odium [although the article had it that Calamity was hateful of humans(?) in a way that Rayse at least so far is not]. There's a super-antihero character known as Obliteration who reminds me of Ruin, except if Ruin weren't actually a Shard-level being or whatever. IDK how long the Reckoners stuff was in the works before it was published but I'm guessing that if there was some Calamity-Odium split/transposition, it was a long time ago. That being said, IDK when the Cosmere and the Reckoners stuff parted ways, either, but in any event I'm going to work off the assumption that whichever Shard would have been represented by Calamity, is the one that the story has Rayse picking up.

So, tinfoil-hat time: there is a Shard of Darkness. Like, it has some intrinsically Evil-related Intent. There might be a WoB about no Shards being inherently evil so I will have to qualify that tinfoil-statement, but I do have a qualification in mind. But first I would like to make the case for the gist of the idea. It might be said that a Shard of Evil as such would obviously be worse than Odium or Ruin, so if such existed, the epistles involving Hoid, et. al. would have made note of this topic. At least, it would not have been so plainly claimed that Odium is the most terrible of the Shards. However, as we know, even if Ati took up the Shard of Destruction itself, his resultant destructive power does not seem to have been greater than all other Shards'. Representing Destruction, and being destructive, turn out to be different matters. Moreover, Ruin had a broader tendency towards decay versus flashy, explosive desolation. So these things considered, I would say that a Shard of "Evil" would not have to seem especially threatening, especially if as with Ati, the relevant Vessel picked it up with a mind to constrain it.

Now, the qualification mentioned above is this: in order to avoid being a Shard of Evil in itself, it would make more sense if this Shard had to do with the concept of evil without being directly so. So, I propose a Shard of Guilt. What would make this Shard questionable? I don't have too much Cosmere-based reason to say this but while I was walking today, it came to my mind that an overly chipper/condemning take on Christianity would corrupt the concept of guilt. Let's suppose sinners only feel guilt if they accepted Christ. Before this, they would not feel guilty, including not for having failed to (so far) accept Christ. However, once they accept Christ, their guilt is supposed to be washed away. So they still would not feel guilty, perhaps. But anyway, people feel guilty even if they have not accepted Christ so I don't see, here, that such faith is required to be a good person, or a person with a conscience, or whatever. Maybe Christ is necessary for some other reason, but I am not an exclusivist about salvation and am anyway trying to describe a hypothetical fictional being in a world written of by an adherent of one of the less guilt-mongering forms of Christianity. The point is, it would be possible to have a Shard of Guilt, and for this being to have a theologically warped Intent, sufficient for it to be a Shard of Darkness.

[imriel452]

Reckoners and Cosmere have always been desperate I’m afraid!

Edited September 1, 2018 by imriel452
Typo

[Ripheus23]

We don't know that for supersure, do we? Sanderson has been percolating these plots in his head for a long time. At any rate I haven't found a WoB to the effect that the Reckoners stuff at all was pulled from the Cosmere, though it seems the Rithmatist stuff might have been?

Secondly, the Odium-Calamity correspondence is tangential to the hypothesis of the Dark Shard.

[imriel452]

Sorry but we do know this for sure- Brandon has said that anything relating to Earth is non-cosmere, which led to this very famous meme...

 

Ruin has been around for a long time in the form of Decay who was part of The Aether of Night

[Bigmikey357]

Well we know Reckoners were never Cosmere. We also know Dark One has been bounced in and out of the Cosmere. Unfortunately, we will probably have to wait for Dark One to come out in order to extrapolate what Shard that would have represented had it remained Cosmere. All we have at this point is a name and a rudimentary plot description.

[Ripheus23]

Do we know that when he was a wee lad, Sanderson had Earth already permanently banned from the Cosmere? I started working on a story that was supposed to be multiple series all tied together, when I was 12, that had Earth in it, but by the time I was 15 I decided Earth was no longer in that universe, even as an otherwise obscure planet. There is a character in this story, who when I first made him up it was for a turned-based strategy computer game where you could make little profiles for some of the units (or at least assign them names), and then he became a peculiar mid-level villain in the version of the hyperstory with Earth still, and now he is one of the major protagonists (and the hyperstory is no longer intended to be a series of series of books but a series of films).

[imriel452]

Reckoners is not Cosmere

The rithmatist is not Cosmere

legion is not Cosmere

Skyward will not be Cosmere

[+Invocation]

10 hours ago, imriel452 said:

Sorry but we do know this for sure- Brandon has said that anything relating to Earth is non-cosmere, which led to this very famous meme...

 

Ruin has been around for a long time in the form of Decay who was part of The Aether of Night

Every time I see this I am reminded of when I had only read Reckoners and Mistborn and posted my first thing of me being an idiot about Reckoners being cosmere. I want to slap myself.

[Spoolofwhool]

11 hours ago, Ripheus23 said:

Do we know that when he was a wee lad, Sanderson had Earth already permanently banned from the Cosmere? I started working on a story that was supposed to be multiple series all tied together, when I was 12, that had Earth in it, but by the time I was 15 I decided Earth was no longer in that universe, even as an otherwise obscure planet. There is a character in this story, who when I first made him up it was for a turned-based strategy computer game where you could make little profiles for some of the units (or at least assign them names), and then he became a peculiar mid-level villain in the version of the hyperstory with Earth still, and now he is one of the major protagonists (and the hyperstory is no longer intended to be a series of series of books but a series of films).

Rithmatist was originally planned to be part of the Cosmere as the token Earth story. As both Rithmatist and Steelheart came out in the same year, I suspect that at that point, it was well decided that Reckoners would not be part of the Cosmere, and that Brandon had decided that Earth in its entirety would not be a part of the Cosmere. Brandon has talked about Rithmatist bearing an example of an entity demonstrating a realmatic property that he wanted to go into more detail later on, but won't using that entity since Rithmatist isn't Cosmere. As far as I'm aware, I haven't seen any WoBs where he talked about pulling Reckoners out of the Cosmere. The general feel has always been that Reckoners would stand in its own continuum.

Relevant WoBs in spoiler

Spoiler

Quote

Questioner

What was your decision not to make The Reckoners series part of the cosmere? Because, without giving away too many things, I can see a Shard affecting that world.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, I made the decision based on two things. Number one, the fact that I don't want Earth to be in the cosmere. And so all the books that are referencing Earth, I don't put in the cosmere. Number two, the mythological source I was using as the--I can't give away spoilers--foundation for all of this, is a very "our-world" mythology, not a very "cosmere" mythology.

source

Quote

Questioner

With The Reckoners you had to make the decision not to put it into your cosmere cosmology, was that a difficult one?

Brandon Sanderson

It was not difficult once I realized I did not want Earth to be part of everything else.

Questioner

If it had been would Calamity have been a Shard of Adonalsium?

Brandon Sanderson

That’s an interesting question.  Maybe.

source

Quote

Questioner

With your upcoming series, Apocalypse Guard, would there be any chance for crossover with Rithmatist?

Brandon Sanderson

No, but it is crossover with Reckoners. But no... Rithmatist occupies a very weird space in my writing, because it was originally in the cosmere and I popped it out. And so it's not in any of the continuities I have devised.

source

Quote

Ironeyes

So, uh, we know that the charcoal creatures are afraid of coins.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Ironeyes

So are the white chalk creatures, which I think are called Shadowblazes…

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Ironeyes

Are they also afraid of coins?

Brandon Sanderson

Are they also afraid of coins? To a much lesser extent. Um, I can give you guys some backstory on this. What’s going on here is that the place these things come from, um, linear structure and things like this are frightening to them, like they come from a non-linear location. Time does not move linearly where they come from. When they come into this world, structure and linear time progression, is bizarre to them. And there are some who have embraced it, and been like, “This is cool and different!” and there are others that are still terrified of it, as a representation of what is so alien from the world they came from. So that’s why we’ve got this whole clocks, and even structure, as a metaphor for, um, something that is terrifying to them.

Uh, Rithmatist started in the Cosmere. The magic shares a lot of its roots, then, in Cosmere magic worldbuilding. I split if off because I wrote the whole first book with it being in the Cosmere. I split it off, saying “No, I don’t want Earth to be in the Cosmere.” Even an alternate version of Earth. It just raises too many questions about the nature of Earth being involved in this. I want the Cosmere to be its own dwarf galaxy of which not even a dimension of Earth is involved. And when I made that decision, I broke Rithmatist off. That’s the only one I had written that didn’t belong, but it still has, so, it means that the magic is going to feel very familiar to you, uh, it’s going to feel like the magic of a, um, of the Cosmere. And Cosmere magic is based around, usually, human beings making a symbiotic bond with an entity made out of the magic. This is, kind of, one of the origins of Cosmere magic, and Rithmatist has, therefore, its roots in that. I’ve done some things since I’ve split it off in the outlines to distinguish it, but it’s going to have the same roots. So you’ll notice some things like that, that are similar.

Questioner

Uh, before you split The Rithmatist from the Cosmere, did the Shadowblazes come from the Cognitive realm?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. Yeah, the Shadowblazes were in the Cognitive realm, they’re--you know, well, they’re more Spiritual realm. They were Spiritual realm, sorry. They were Spiritual realm entities that got pulled in, uh, to the Physical realm. And the Spiritual realm has no time, um, it exists independent of time and location, all times and all places are one, and so, uh, when something that’s from the Spiritual realm got pulled into the Physical realm, it was like, “This is so weird!” Um, and there are very few things in the Cosmere that exist only on the Spiritual realm, which was a really fun thing I could do with this book, was show that. Cause most things exist on all three realms. Um, so, yeah. So, yeah, I mean if you’ve got, if you’re a Cosmere, uh, theologian--not theologian, magic, uh, what do you call it? Uh, they call that, uh, I have a word for it in-world. But anyway, if you’re a realmatic theorist, you can kind of pick out how the Spiritual realm beings were related, originally, to the realmatic theory.

source

 

 

Edited September 2, 2018 by Spoolofwhool

[Fanghur Rahl]

Plus, I think ‘Calamity’ and ‘Darkness’ would be too similar to Ruin for Brandon to waste one of the remaining Shards as that. 

[HeyLookItz]

I don't think Brandon Sanderson would make a shard with an evil intent, since the cosmere already has ruin and odium as "evil" shards.

[Draginon]

Maybe we're lucky Ruin and Odium weren't fused, could you imagine what those two would do together?

@Spoolofwhool That was interesting to read on how Rithmatist would've connected to Cosmere if it had stayed. I wonder if it would've been easier to change the name of the planet and other locations to something more Cosmere than just pulling it away from there. Heck it would be hilarious if in the sequel, since it would be going to the South America equivalent, the heroes found a reference in a temple or something mentioning the Cosmere and them pulling the planet out of it to someplace safer, mostly having this be a fun Easter egg similar to the Cosmere references in Alcatraz.

[Fanghur Rahl]

1 hour ago, HeyLookItz said:

I don't think Brandon Sanderson would make a shard with an evil intent, since the cosmere already has ruin and odium as "evil" shards.

Actually, I disagree with you about that one. I personally suspect that at least one of the remaining five (or is it six?) Shards that we haven't seen yet is probably on the malevolent side as well, since so far only two, at most three if we count Dominion, of the Shards we've seen are unambiguously malevolent whereas the others are either benevolent(ish) or mostly apathetic. Personally, I like the idea of having a Shard of Jealousy or Avarice to go with Ruin, Odium, and possibly Dominion on the list of 'evil' Shards.

[Draginon]

7 hours ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

Actually, I disagree with you about that one. I personally suspect that at least one of the remaining five (or is it six?) Shards that we haven't seen yet is probably on the malevolent side as well, since so far only two, at most three if we count Dominion, of the Shards we've seen are unambiguously malevolent whereas the others are either benevolent(ish) or mostly apathetic. Personally, I like the idea of having a Shard of Jealousy or Avarice to go with Ruin, Odium, and possibly Dominion on the list of 'evil' Shards.

You know I'm almost hoping there's another 'evil' Shard since it seems weird that there's so few negative intents, and if Odium is going to die somewhere in Stormlight then there needs to be one more bad Shard out there causing trouble. Maybe this Shard could be Pride since that's the worst of the seven sins and if the Vessel was more on the negative side to begin with then Pride would lean more towards the sin side.

[Fanghur Rahl]

24 minutes ago, Draginon said:

You know I'm almost hoping there's another 'evil' Shard since it seems weird that there's so few negative intents, and if Odium is going to die somewhere in Stormlight then there needs to be one more bad Shard out there causing trouble. Maybe this Shard could be Pride since that's the worst of the seven sins and if the Vessel was more on the negative side to begin with then Pride would lean more towards the sin side.

Yeah, but pride isn’t intrinsically bad though, and quite frankly I have a hard time seeing how the intent of ‘Pride’ could lead to a Shard being some malevolent monster like Odium or Ruin. Jealousy or Avarice are easier to picture.

[Angsos]

I would say autonomy is evil and don't forget there's still Ambition's power somewhere. Dominion could've turned like Ati or maybe Devotion had better luck keeping him sane.

[Calderis]

Don't see why Adonalsium would need a sense of fear, but man would I love a terror shard. 

The lack of self direction means it wouldn't be afraid itself necessarily, just wish to propagate that in... Everything. 

Would be a fun world/magic system I think. 

[Angsos]

Wouldn't the Survival Shard be like that?

[Fanghur Rahl]

44 minutes ago, Calderis said:

Don't see why Adonalsium would need a sense of fear, but man would I love a terror shard. 

The lack of self direction means it wouldn't be afraid itself necessarily, just wish to propagate that in... Everything. 

Would be a fun world/magic system I think. 

Already been done, it's called the Yellow Lantern Corps. lol.  In all seriousness though, Brandon has said that if he were ever going to do a horror story, it would be of the Lovecraftian, Eldritch Nightmare variety; I certainly wouldn't want to live on that particular Shardworld. That would be absolutely terrifying.

38 minutes ago, Angsos said:

Wouldn't the Survival Shard be like that?

Honestly, my prediction for the intent of the so-called 'Survival Shard' is 'Prudence'. I think that sounds like a great name for a Shard, and it would certainly be in line with it wanting to give Odium a wide berth.

Edited September 3, 2018 by Fanghur Rahl

[Thanatos]

Memba my terror shard theory.

 

[Fanghur Rahl]

Cthulhu Shard? lol.

[Bigmikey357]

A terror shard huh? Sounds like a typical magic user would be like the Scarecrow in the comics.

[Ashertliden]

There's probably going to be a shard of "knowledge" or "scholarliness" or some such. Something related to knowledge/thought. 

[Thanatos]

Here's my theory from a few years back. 

Totally debunked since, but theres still a good story in there.

Quote

What if this Shard that just wants to hide is worse than Odium?

The intent of 'Terror'.

To terrified to sleep lest something deadly occurs.

To terrified to eat lest it eat something deadly.

To terrified to breathe lest it breathe something deadly.

To terrified to... well you get the picture.

(I say it as we dont know the sex of the shard holder)

Now why do i say it could be worse then Odium?

Playing along the lines of this being true, then what happens when a lion backs a terrified mouse into a corner? Itll attack.

I can see Odium catching up with Terror and backing it into a corner, only for the intent of Terror to flip back onto itself.

And he who was Terrified, now becomes Terrifying. A force of pure terror greater than Odium.

Then you have 2 shards that need contending with or if Terror destroys Odium during their confrontation.

 

Edited September 3, 2018 by Thanatos

[StrikerEZ]

@Draginon @Fanghur Rahl I don't know why you guys think that there needs to be another "evil" Shard. Brandon has specifically talked about how he doesn't consider any of the Shards to truly be evil. When certain Vessels hold them and influence the intent, then you can get into whether or not their evil, but the intents of the Shards are not evil by themselves. If there is going to be a big bad I'm a huge fan of it being Autonomy, but I don't think there necessarily needs to be a big bad.