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Maya


Themasterhunter

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I did a quick skim and search through those threads and I had a thought that I don't think has been brought up:  The reason Adolin treats his sword the way he does.  He was trained by Zahel/Vasher, one of the only people on Roshar who knew what shardblades actually were.  Vasher and Shashara knew about shardblades being sentient spren and used that knowledge to help create Nightblood.  I don't know if he thought that training Adolin to treat his sword like he does would help create a new Nahel bond.  But I think Zahel hoped something more than swordsmanship would be developed.

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44 minutes ago, Lidolas said:

I did a quick skim and search through those threads and I had a thought that I don't think has been brought up:  The reason Adolin treats his sword the way he does.  He was trained by Zahel/Vasher, one of the only people on Roshar who knew what shardblades actually were.  Vasher and Shashara knew about shardblades being sentient spren and used that knowledge to help create Nightblood.  I don't know if he thought that training Adolin to treat his sword like he does would help create a new Nahel bond.  But I think Zahel hoped something more than swordsmanship would be developed.

That's always possible.

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12 hours ago, CrazyRioter said:

I'm not sure they actually knew what Shardblades were. We've been told they didn't come to Roshar until well after the Recreance so they might not have known.

If you're referring to Vasher and the rest of them not knowing what a Shardblade was...no, they knew. They did what they did on purpose (minus Nightblood's vague command and the addition of Ruin's Investiture).

Quote

Questioner

Is [Nightblood] like, the Shardblades, kind of thing?

Brandon Sanderson

It is. So, what happened is: Vasher, who was involved in the creation of Nightblood, visited Roshar and came back with this knowledge, and they tried to create something.

Questioner

So he based it off those?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. And they got it kind of right.

source

 

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1 hour ago, Invocation said:

If you're referring to Vasher and the rest of them not knowing what a Shardblade was...no, they knew. They did what they did on purpose (minus Nightblood's vague command and the addition of Ruin's Investiture).

 

That does not say that they knew they were spren. Just that they were aware of Shardblades and the way they functioned. 

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4 hours ago, Calderis said:

That does not say that they knew they were spren. Just that they were aware of Shardblades and the way they functioned. 

 

3 hours ago, Invocation said:

Fair enough, I guess.

Especially if the timeline holds that they first arrived sometime after the Recreance, since they'd have had (almost) no chance of running into a bonded Radiant.  Though I supposed they could have learned that part second hand from the Shadesmar natives on their way to Roshar. 

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2 hours ago, Quantus said:

Especially if the timeline holds that they first arrived sometime after the Recreance, since they'd have had (almost) no chance of running into a bonded Radiant.  Though I supposed they could have learned that part second hand from the Shadesmar natives on their way to Roshar. 

Or maybe they met the Skybreakers. Wouldn't that be something Vasher would do? Try to infiltrate a semi-hostile Invested group and figure out their secrets?

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11 hours ago, Invocation said:

Or maybe they met the Skybreakers. Wouldn't that be something Vasher would do? Try to infiltrate a semi-hostile Invested group and figure out their secrets?

Current Vasher seems more prudent than that, but Young Vasher, pre-Manywar Vasher surrounded by his friends, high on their own genius and fresh off a successful WorldHop could probably do all kinds of silly things, not to mention what the rest might do.  I dont know about "Infiltrating" but I could very much see the Skybreakers themselves taking an interest in a small group of foreigners with strange magic. 

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What's also interesting is that Vasher/Zahel has expertise in wielding a Shardblade - it's not just general "mastery of the sword" that he teaches, but techniques like throwing a Shardblade, as evidenced by when Adolin practices doing so in WoR ("focusing as Zahel had taught him years before, sending a direct instruction to the Blade - picturing what he needed it to do").

We know that constructing Nightblood was based on experiences that Vasher and Shashara had with Shardblades on Roshar, but seeing what they can do from afar versus getting their hands on them enough to become proficient with them are very different things. And Zahel, at least, is darkeyed.

Did they become "swordmaster ardents" first, based on ordinary swordsmanship, to get their "in" to becoming masters of both Blade and Plate (since it seems ardents are not held to the lighteyes/darkeyes types of restrictions, while training in the arts of war are still part of the ardentia)?

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I think Zahel/Vasher's primary motivations are the safety/comfort of his friends and himself. He doesn't seem terribly ambitious at this point. I think he's just found a gig that suits him and is trying to not attract too much suspicion. His skill with a shardblade has earned him this. We know for a fact his devotion to Vorinism hasn't. He is an eminently practical man. If things get too hot for him, I think he'll try to hop worlds.

Edited by Crucible of Shards
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Just a second here... 

On ‎05‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 7:10 AM, Themasterhunter said:

Does Adolin have the potential to become a full Edgedancer?

I feel like Maya, having been already bonded is going to maybe have adverse effects to initiating another nahel bond, or wont be able to bond fully.

Syl says in Oathbringer that she had bonded someone else (then Kalidan) before the Recreance. 

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3 hours ago, John Flamesinger said:

Syl says in Oathbringer that she had bonded someone else (then Kalidan) before the Recreance. 

Syl's first bond was completely broken because the Radiant she was bonded to died before the Recreance, which is how she survived it. She was left catatonic afterwards because she was very young and unprepared for the trauma of losing her bond partner, but she wasn't harmed in a long-term sense. Mayalaran on the other hand is like all deadeyes a spren who's had a chunk of their soul forcibly ripped away. At one point Brandon used the analogy of someone who had a cybernetic implant in their brain and it was forcibly ripped it right out of their head, that's sort of like what's happened to Maya.

So yeah, there's a very definite difference between Syl and Maya here.

Edited by Weltall
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On 11/25/2018 at 11:59 PM, Ookla the Gralsritter said:

Syl's first bond was completely broken because the Radiant she was bonded to died before the Recreance, which is how she survived it. She was left catatonic afterwards because she was very young and unprepared for the trauma of losing her bond partner, but she wasn't harmed in a long-term sense. Mayalaran on the other hand is like all deadeyes a spren who's had a chunk of their soul forcibly ripped away. At one point Brandon used the analogy of someone who had a cybernetic implant in their brain and it was forcibly ripped it right out of their head, that's sort of like what's happened to Maya.

So yeah, there's a very definite difference between Syl and Maya here.

Here's how I think of it:

A spren is a concept made concrete; the "higher" ones that attain self-consciousness are embodiments of abstract ideals created from the thoughts of living, thinking beings, human and listener and so on.

Their "lifestuff" is of the Cognitive Realm. But such a spren that then bonds to a living human who's increasingly committed to embodying that ideal in their own life gets tied to the Physical Realm. The human gains Surgebinding, and the spren gains expansion, the ability to explore and to grow in the context of physical experience.

The link happens at a cognitive level: that's why we see different flavors expressed of the Second and Third Windrunner Ideals in Teft and Lopen than we saw from Kaladin. It's what the person thinks they personally need to do or to become to level up in their own minds to become more "honorable" or "honorworthy" that deepens the tie to their honorspren. Which for the spren, must mean their "lifestuff" is now more deeply entwined with that person's concept of the ideal as well.

The death of a bonded human severs that tie to the spren, which is a traumatic loss, but the ideals remain the same - the link is broken and that is a shock, but the "self" of the idea is whole. If anything, Syl probably retains some imprint of her previous Radiant's conceptualization of "honor", which affected her choice of Kaladin.

But the breaking of the oath from the human side is more than just a severing of the link: it damages, no it full on rejects, the ideal that had been embraced and entwined with the person's cognitive self.

The analogy to a cybernetic implant and its abrupt removal is pretty good.

You know what this reminds me of? My wife once told me that she kept playing with her dolls deep into her teenage years, because early on she developed the idea that her toys were only really alive while she played with them, and she could just about feel them yearning to live. Now imagine if a "toyspren" bonded in such a way that they gained independent life and motion, so long as you believed in it, what would it feel like if you just... Stopped... Believing in it being alive?

Oh no, isn't that what Puff the Magic Dragon is about? Puff is a toyspren with a broken Oath!

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While I use the wet wear WoB frequently, I personally don't think anything was truly removed from the spren itself, just redistributed. 

I think that @robardin's idea of the shift to them being physical is exactly right, and while they are bonded that works just fine.

When the bond is broken though, the physical bond of the radiant on which they are piggybacking is abrubtly and violently removed, and they are forced into the blade form because they are supposed to be a physical being at that point, but lack the Investiture and body to do so... So that Investiture is stripped from their Cognitive aspect. 

Even when dismissed, that physical status would still remain, just as a human in the Cognitive can transition back to the physical, whereas a Cognitive Shadow cannot. 

Edited by Calderis
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