Your Predictions for the Gap? (Book 5-6)

[+ILuvHats]

On 12/28/2018 at 6:46 PM, Dalakaar said:

Odium (or something) kills the Stormfather. No more highstorms. No more Stormlight. I'm sure there will be some tit for tat in this exchange. The loss of the Stormfather as the price for winning the time between books. Odium's great counter-stroke to a plan from the KR that goes awry perhaps. In that same vein, I go back to Lift. She doesn't need Stormlight to surgebind... she'll have access to powers, and I could see her being the reason Stormlight comes back in book 6. It also fits in with the Honor/Cultivation duality we have. The front 5 seem particularly relevant to Honor. Cultivation is just sort of sitting back biding her time. Except we know she's not just sitting back. She directly impacted Dalinar like a chess piece to counter Odium's Champion plot. Cultivation seems to be playing the long game, and if I had to guess I'd say Cultivation is going to be more of the theme in the back 5 to compliment Honor in the front. Lift being something of her Champion possibly? (Thus she took from Lift the need for Honor and replaced it with sustenance, cultivation.)

This death rattle actually lends credence to this theory.

Quote

"Above silence, the illuminating storms—dying storms—illuminate the silence above."

— Collected on Tanatanev 1173, 18 seconds pre-death, by the Silent Gatherers. Subject was an illiterate Herdazian.

It's always hard to tell how metaphorical death rattles are, but the reference to dying storms could be foreshadowing for the Stormfather's death.  And since I brought up this quote, why not try to dissect it further?  

First of all, note that the word "storms" is plural.  The Highstorm, despite its size, is always referred to as a single storm.  So, perhaps both the Highstorm and the Everstorm are both coming to an end simultaneously in this event.  "Silence" could either refer to death, or mourning/shock/fear.  So one interpretation is that the silence above is the Stormfather's death, and the silence below is the shock of humanity and Singers alike when they realize the storms have ended.  Even though the Stormfather is usually seen as part of the storm, I think silence above could still refer to him since he could also be metaphorically viewed as riding atop the storms.  Another interpretation, which is absolutely crazy, is that the silence above is Rayse's death and the silence below is Cultivation's vessel's death.  Odium, obviously, is bound on Braize, in the sky, so he is figuratively above the storms.  Cultivation, meanwhile, is associated with nature and life on the surface of the planet, so she would be below them.  

And to address Calderis' point about repercussions of the Stormfather's death, I don't think if the storms died they would be permanently gone.  Either somebody would have ascended as Honor and would be able to reinstate the Highstorms, or some other method would be employed to keep all life on Roshar from literally dying out.  So I guess in that way, my opinion differs from the OP's theory.  

[Arith Matic]

18 hours ago, Dalakaar said:

Cultivation versus Honor

Yes, but isn't honor confirmed to be dead?  If I read correctly, honor was splintered and one of the splinters is the stormfather, who bonded to Dalinar.  So woudn't it be Cultivation versus Odium?

 

On 29/12/2018 at 0:58 AM, Dr. Dapper said:

I read somewhere that the highstorms predated the arrival of Shards to Roshar. Maybe in Arcanum Unbounded. Good theory otherwise.

(I'm really lazy, could someone find that quote)

Yep your right.  Arcanum unbounded, Roshar system intro.  My guess for it is that maybe the shards made highstorms invested, even though they were still there before.

[Dalakaar]

3 minutes ago, Arith Matic said:

Yes, but isn't honor confirmed to be dead?  If I read correctly, honor was splintered and one of the splinters is the stormfather, who bonded to Dalinar.  So woudn't it be Cultivation versus Odium?

Yup, gonna have to use your imagination a bit. Could be Dalinar ascending, could just be Team Honor vs Culty after a surprise win against Odium in the first 5.

[Eris]

The amount of times people say Dalinar is going to descend, I have to disagree. Sanderson has already done that, if were to do it again, he would be repeating himself. I don't think Dalinar will become Honour or hold the shard or whatever. I believe something else will happen that we will have no way of guessing without more information

[galendo]

I'm going to quote from a post I made in another thread (https://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/65750-ob-the-timeskip-after-ob).  The thread was technically about the time skip between Oathbringer and book four, but the thread meandered a bit so there's a fair bit of discussion about the book five skip as well.  Here's the pertinent part from one of my posts:

Quote

You're probably right, but honestly, I hope not.  I want Roshar wrecked by the time the last five books roll around.  This is supposed to be the True Desolation, but so far this feels like Desolation-lite.  I want the "nine out of ten people dead" that Nohadon mentions, and then I want things to get worse.  I want Dalinar dead, I want the Stormfather splintered.  I've been promised that "So the night will reign, for the choice of Honor is life," and I'm going to be disappointed if the night doesn't get to start reigning sometime soon.  I want things to get worse (so they can eventually get better again, of course).  Alethkar is what I call a good start.

Now I'm fine if not all of this happens right away.  It's been established that splintering can take a while, so I'd be fine if, say, the Stormfather got splintered at the end of book five and then spent a good part of the time-skip dying, so that when book six rolls around the characters have to deal with infrequent, unpredictable, intermittent highstorms and the twin impacts of ever-rarer Stormlight and the corresponding devastation that the lack is having on the Rosharan ecosystems.

But you know what I don't want to come back to?  Happy-go-lucky explorers traveling around in their super-awesome flying ships fueled by massive amounts of Stormlight, clearly the product of massive investment and infrastructure, having somehow survived the Desolation of all Desolations without much difficulty despite Honor being dead, his Heralds being broken, his Knights Radiant being annihilated, and his peoples at each others' throats.  If flying happyships need to happen, make them happen sooner rather than later.  If we've got to have them (and we probably do, unfortunately), I hope they happen by book five at the latest.