Liar of Partinel question

[Zelly]

Do the events of the Liar Partinel take place before of after the Shattering?

It's been referred to as Hoid's origin story, but.....is that referring to like his youth pre-Shattering or his origin as a storyteller  post-Shattering?  

One WoB says Cephandrius is the name closest to Hoid's real name, only a few decades off, and this is how the Shards refer to him.   So I assumed this was his name during the events of the Shattering.  Which makes it seem like he took the name Midius would be after the Shattering.

[Weltall]

Dragonsteel is the story that will lead up to the Shattering, Liar is a prequel to it. So yep, Liar is going to be the earliest Cosmere work once it's rewritten and canonized. Here's an old WoB where he made it really clear.

Mind you, he's now contemplating reworking Liar into something more lije Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle so it may be that the main focus of Liar predates Dragonsteel but it will have a framing story set at some other point on the timeline.

Edited January 23, 2019 by Weltall

[Zelly]

4 minutes ago, Weltall said:

Dragonsteel is the story that will lead up to the Shattering, Liar is a prequel to it. So yep, Liar is going to be the earliest Cosmere work once it's rewritten and canonized.

But if Liar's the prequel, then Hoid was Midius before he went by Cephandrius?  

So wouldn't Midius be his oldest known alias?

And if it's a prequel, it seems even stranger that Ash name drops "Midius" in OB, since the Shards call him Cephandrius.

[Weltall]

1 hour ago, Zelly said:

But if Liar's the prequel, then Hoid was Midius before he went by Cephandrius?  

So wouldn't Midius be his oldest known alias?

And if it's a prequel, it seems even stranger that Ash name drops "Midius" in OB, since the Shards call him Cephandrius.

Brandon has said that Cephandrius is one of his earliest aliases, not that it's the earliest. He's also said that it's closer to his original name than Hoid, but that doesn't mean much since we know that the basic idea from Liar that he took the name 'Hoid' from an old master of his is canon (Frost confirms it in the WoR letter) so anything he called himself on Yolen other than maybe Topaz might be closer to his real name than the one we know isn't the one he was born with. The questioner in that second WoB didn't appear to know about Midius being another alias, so it didn't come up in relation to Cephandrius.

As for why Ash and presumably the other Heralds know him as Midius, well, who's to say he can't go back to other aliases when the mood strikes him? We know he's gone by at least two aliases on Nalthis for example, since he calls himself Hoid during the events of Warbreaker but Vasher knows him as 'Dust', a name that Brandon used in the first draft of the book and which gets name-checked in Words of Radiance. Why not reuse Midius with the Heralds for similar reasons.

Edited January 24, 2019 by Weltall