The Long Sleep

[AquaRegia]

Just reread RoW ch. 48, in which Eshonai refers to "things that the listeners had forgotten during the long sleep, the time they'd spent wearing dullform, memorizing songs by sheer force of will."

I'm sure this isn't the first mention of the listeners' time without forms... but it didn't match my previous impressions of the history of the listeners vs. the singers as a whole.  What else do we know about this?  Why and how did this one group of singers regain the ability, seemingly lost to others, to take different forms?  What does the timeline look like?  With only paper copies of the novels, it would be a PhD project to find and compare all the other references, so I invoke the power of the 17th Shard to do it for me!

[apepi]

Maybe something with them being connected to Honor first, then Honor turned tot he humans instead, which caused them to lose their forms of powers?

[Sandra]

The reason was Ba-Ado-Mishram, as far as I remember, she messed with their Connection. Try checking the WoBs for her and you might find some more information. 

[LewsTherinTelescope]

3 hours ago, AquaRegia said:

Why and how did this one group of singers regain the ability, seemingly lost to others, to take different forms? 

They fled during either the Last Desolation or the False Desolation (prior to RoW, the implication was the former, but RoW implies it to be the latter instead), throwing off their forms and abandoning the war. As such, they didn't have the forms of power when Ba-Ado-Mishram was captured, and so didn't suffer the same fate as the others.

[AquaRegia]

9 hours ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

They fled during either the Last Desolation or the False Desolation (prior to RoW, the implication was the former, but RoW implies it to be the latter instead), throwing off their forms and abandoning the war. As such, they didn't have the forms of power when Ba-Ado-Mishram was captured, and so didn't suffer the same fate as the others.

Aha - I just read this.

During the Last Desolation (~4500 y ago), the Last Legion became the listeners with a rejection of Odium, the Fused, and Forms of Power; this was naturally seen by all other singers as a betrayal.  They CHOSE to remain in dullform, in an attempt to hide from their "terrible gods".  After a few generations of dullform, there would be no listeners left who knew of the other forms...except through the songs passed down from parent to child.  This, then, begins the long sleep.

During the False Desolation (~2000 y ago), BAM "managed to Connect with the vast majority of singers -- all except those who would become the listeners."  Then BAM is imprisoned, and all the singers Connected to her become locked into slaveform.  This EXCLUDES the listeners, who were explicitly NOT Connected to BAM. 

Over thousands of years, the listeners had eventually learned how to regain workform and others, gradually ending the long sleep.

[LewsTherinTelescope]

On 3/13/2021 at 9:59 AM, AquaRegia said:

During the Last Desolation (~4500 y ago)

This part's a bit unclear, as it turns out the Unmade are also counted among the singer gods, and so it might have meant Ba-Ado-Mishram rather than the Fused, and RoW has a mention of the listeners' weapons dating back to the False Desolation, but other things prior seemed to point to it being the Last Desolation iirc. But yeah, one of those two.