discuss Way too many Deadeyes

[Light In the Darkness]

So, deadeyes only appear in the cognitive realm when their blades are dismissed, since a blade is their corpse/physical form, and they have lost most mental existence. However, we know they appeared en masse in RoW at Lasting Integrity. We’ve explained the number by saying that a lot of blades have been lost, also explaining the equalizing of the amount of plates and blades, but if they were lost their physical forms would exist somewhere, and the deadeyes wouldn’t be visible in the CR. 
 

Option 1: Over time, as knowledge of the blades and perception of the spren as swords  faded, they were released and the blades dissolved, allowing the deadeyes to return to the CR and making their blades potentially completely unrecoverable and then unhealable. This would make the lost blades the most dead of deadeyes, and would be really sad unless a bond to help them can be formed without the help of the physical blade and that whole process.

Option 2: There are thousands of undocumented shardbearers in hiding. This is not exclusive of option 1, but implies it has a chance of being false, but is frankly the more terrifying thought. Thousands of shardbearers would be lurking somewhere with unknown agendas and unknown allegiances, with complete capacity to blindside every plan in the book not made with foresight. They could be in the hands of the Ghostbloods, the IRE, the Seventeenth Shard, Silverlight Scholars, or anyone else.

 

Thoughts?

Edited October 29, 2024 by Light In the Darkness
Typo

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

4 hours ago, Light In the Darkness said:

So, deadeyes only appear in the cognitive realm when their blades are dismissed, since a blade is their corpse/physical form, and they have lost most mental existence. However, we know they appeared en masse in RoW at Lasting Integrity. We’ve explained the number by saying that a lot of blades have been lost, also explaining the equalizing of the amount of plates and blades, but if they were lost their physical forms would exist somewhere, and the deadeyes wouldn’t be visible in the CR. 
 

Option 1: Over time, as knowledge of the blades and perception of the spren as swords  faded, they were released and the blades dissolved, allowing the deadeyes to return to the CR and making their blades potentially completely unrecoverable and then unhealable. This would make the lost blades the most dead of deadeyes, and would be really sad unless a bond to help them can be formed without the help of the physical blade and that whole process.

Option 2: There are thousands of undocumented shardbearers in hiding. This is not exclusive of option 1, but implies it has a chance of being false, but is frankly the more terrifying thought. Thousands of shardbearers would be lurking somewhere with unknown agendas and unknown allegiances, with complete capacity to blindside every plan in the book not made with foresight. They could be in the hands of the Ghostbloods, the IRE, the Seventeenth Shard, Silverlight Scholars, or anyone else.

 

Thoughts?

I think the underlined portion is a bad assumption and that's where the confusion is coming from. Per coppermind (assuming Ruin hasn't gotten to it): if left to their own devices, a deadeye always attempts to travel (walk) to the place in the CR which corresponds to its blade's PR location.

I take this to mean that deadeyes are present in the CR at all times. Which would mean that...there probably is an entire army of deadeyes out there, basically just always watching and waiting.

As far as is confirmed, a blade getting permanently lost in the PR does not negatively impact a deadeye worse than what was already done to them. Destroying their blade, or attacking them directly in the CR, ie: via nightblood would probably kill them, otherwise they're pretty inert and passive as far as I can tell.

If somebody wanted to hunt down a few thousand free shardblades, all they would need to do is follow wherever deadeyes are gathering in the CR (lasting Integrity is a good start, but there are probably other places, like old battlefields which are coated deep with crem) and trace the locations to their reflection in the PR.

Honestly, I'm expecting the members of the 17th Shard to walk away from book5 with a deadblade each given their advanced knowledge of the situation, but that's pure speculation.

Edited October 29, 2024 by hwiles

[Treamayne]

3 hours ago, Light In the Darkness said:

So, deadeyes only appear in the cognitive realm when their blades are dismissed, since a blade is their corpse/physical form, and they have lost most mental existence. However, we know they appeared en masse in RoW at Lasting Integrity. We’ve explained the number by saying that a lot of blades have been lost, also explaining the equalizing of the amount of plates and blades, but if they were lost their physical forms would exist somewhere, and the deadeyes wouldn’t be visible in the CR. 

Option 1: Over time, as knowledge of the blades and perception of the spren as swords  faded, they were released and the blades dissolved, allowing the deadeyes to return to the CR and making their blades potentially completely unrecoverable and then unhealable. This would make the lost blades the most dead of deadeyes, and would be really sad unless a bond to help them can be formed without the help of the physical blade and that whole process.

Option 2: There are thousands of undocumented shardbearers in hiding. This is not exclusive of option 1, but implies it has a chance of being false, but is frankly the more terrifying thought. Thousands of shardbearers would be lurking somewhere with unknown agendas and unknown allegiances, with complete capacity to blindside every plan in the book not made with foresight. They could be in the hands of the Ghostbloods, the IRE, the Seventeenth Shard, Silverlight Scholars, or anyone else.

Thoughts?

The most commonly held theory I have seen for the disparity is (please recall the structure of the Radiant orders) - Most Radiants during the Recreance would not have been 3rd oath and above. First and Second Oath Radiants would have created a Deadeye without leaving a Shardblade behind. Many threads discuss this and other theories:

• The Reason for Deadeyes
• Where are the Missing Shardblades
• On the missing Shardblades
• The Shin have the Most
• Missing Blade and Plate

And more I likely didn't find in a quick search.

Hope that helps.

[Light In the Darkness]

7 hours ago, hwiles said:

I think the underlined portion is a bad assumption and that's where the confusion is coming from. Per coppermind (assuming Ruin hasn't gotten to it): if left to their own devices, a deadeye always attempts to travel (walk) to the place in the CR which corresponds to its blade's PR location.

So, I’ve always seen this as them following wherever their bonded holder goes. It says, if I remember correctly, when the blades are summoned the deadeyes disappear, making it very hard on the spren family and friends of those who are still actively being used as blades, since they just disappear from there and then reappear in the CR when dismissed wherever they were summoned to. I swear I read about it in the books, but I don’t have a reference.

 

6 hours ago, Treamayne said:

First and Second Oath Radiants would have created a Deadeye without leaving a Shardblade behind. Many threads discuss this and other theories:

This would make a lot of sense, but when Brandon was asked about the numbers I thought that the first thing he referenced was that the blades get lost over time (the WoB was quoted in the thread about the disparity between blade and plate amounts), which would still imply the existence of many deadeyes that would be stuck in the physical realm. Syl, as far as I know, doesn’t have a self that mirrors her in the CR, and while a blade for Kaladin she can’t be flying around separately - she is the blade; it’s made of her essence. A deadeye only would exist for dismissed blades because the blade are the entirety of their substance, unless they eventually fade/transition to the CR when forgotten. So, while this does address the problem of how many deadeyes we see vs. active blades, it still implies the greater tragedy of the lost blades, whose numbers would be smaller but which would be rather unrecoverable.

[Treamayne]

28 minutes ago, Light In the Darkness said:

This would make a lot of sense, but when Brandon was asked about the numbers I thought that the first thing he referenced was that the blades get lost over time (the WoB was quoted in the thread about the disparity between blade and plate amounts), which would still imply the existence of many deadeyes that would be stuck in the physical realm.

Oh, there are definitely a lot of lost Shardblades - the question first arose in WoK with this quote (Ch 51):

Spoiler

“They don’t have their Shardblades out,” Dalinar said. “That’s a good sign.”

The scout outside backed his horse up. There looked to be a good two hundred Shardbearers out there. Alethkar owned some twenty Blades, Jah Keved a similar number. If one added up all the rest in the world, there might be enough total to equal the two powerful Vorin kingdoms. That meant, so far as he knew, there were less than hundred Blades in all of the world. And here he saw two hundred Shardbearers gathered in one army. It was mind-numbing.

So, based on current data we have at least 4 effects:

• Radiants that broke their oath during Receance, creating a Deadeye in the CR, but not a blade (First and Second Oath)
• Radiants that broke their oath during Receance, creating a Deadeye and a blade (and plate), but the Blade was never given a bonding Gem (Third Oath or above)
  • These would remain PR only and are all lost, since all known remaining Blades have bonding gems
• Radiants that broke their oath during Receance, creating a Deadeye and blade (and plate), but the Blade was lost leaving a Deadeye in the CR (Third Oath or above)
• Radiants that broke their oath during Receance, creating a Deadeye and blade (and plate), with the Blade currently bonded-by-Gem  (Connection) which causes the Deadeye to move toward the current wielder and disappear when summoned  (Third Oath or above)

When accounting for the disparity of Thousands of Spren "killed" in the Recreance, but only about 100 known Deadeye Blades, you have to consider all four options, with only one option of the four not resulting in a Deadeye wandering Shadesmar.

The WoB was specifically about option 3 - lost previously Gem-bonded Blades. 

Spoiler

Quote

Jofwu

It seems that deadeyes can wander Shadesmar freely, but when summoned as a Shardblade and subsequently dismissed, they end up at the location in Shadesmar corresponding to the location of the Shardbearer. How does this work for deadeyes who are cared for by a loved one, like Captain Ico?

Brandon Sanderson

They would vanish if their Shardblade were summoned.

Adam Horne

But it's been a while since that's happened, so it's not as much of a concern?

Brandon Sanderson

You can assume that there are more deadeyes wandering Shadesmar whose Shardblades have been lost, than there are ones that the Shardblades are kept. Probably about an equal number, I would say, 50/50. Though I would have to really crunch those numbers. I'd say that across 5000 years-ish... not quite, but you know. That a lot of those weapons, even though they are powerful and things like that, are gonna get lost. Ships are gonna get sunk; things get covered over with crem on Roshar; people go up to cross mountain passes to go attack, and they end up freezing and dying. And I think that over the years, there's been a ton of those that have been lost.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 4 (June 16, 2022)

 

Hope that helps.

Edited October 29, 2024 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Light In the Darkness]

14 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Hope that helps.

Yes it does! Thank you!

Ok, so that WoB seems to imply that when the blade is lost, eventually the deadeyes return to the CR, because when a bearer dies or releases their blade, the blade is summoned. Which means that all blades, when lost, are physical, and the deadeyes would be missing. If they end up wandering the CR when lost, then they must fade out of the PR eventually, somehow. Which is cool, but raises the problem of how could they be healed, and the interesting thought that there are shard blade fossils, in effect, wherever they were buried in crem for enough time for it to be in a stable portion of rock (where the storms don’t break rock along the weakness caused by the hollow).

[alder24]

45 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

So, based on current data we have at least 4 effects:

Option 5 - Radiants of 3rd or higher Ideal who broke their bond, but their spren was not summoned as a Shardblade, thus they became a Deadeye in the CR, without leaving a Shardblade behind in the PR. I expect that the majority of Radiants broke their bond in this manner.

[Light In the Darkness]

Oh, that’s an interesting thought. Though I don’t see why the others would do it after summoning blade and plate if they could do it without, except for a very limited number for show/demonstration.

[Treamayne]

7 hours ago, Light In the Darkness said:

Oh, that’s an interesting thought. Though I don’t see why the others would do it after summoning blade and plate if they could do it without, except for a very limited number for show/demonstration.

It's been theorized that, if the Radiants had not known/realized what the consequences were to become (Deadeyes) the Event of the vision at Feverstone Keep might have been an attempt to make sure Humanity had weapons to fight once the Radient Orders disbanded. 

Not Confirmed.

Edited October 30, 2024 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Light In the Darkness]

12 hours ago, Treamayne said:

might have been an attempt to make sure Humanity had weapons to fight once the Radient Orders disbanded. 

That would make sense; if they believed they were leaving their spren free to leave later, and by doing it they would allow their spren to keep the benefit they gained from the bond (existence in the physical realm with sentience) then that would make a lot of sense.

[+robardin he/him]

I seem to recall (but can't readily find) either a passage in one of the SA books or a WoB that basically said that lost Shardblades (of the deadeye variety)  ...

EDIT: I've been apprised that the reason I couldn't find the passage with a text search in my eBooks is that it is from one of the early release chapters of WaT, so, spoilering my previous mention!

Spoiler

...would eventually "fade away" to Shadesmar as they were forgotten about -- that even the Shardblade form of a deadeye requires some level of continuous awareness of its physical existence by a sentient being.

Attaching a gemstone to a deadeye Shardblade allows a shallow kind of bonding to it that enables summoning and dismissing the Blade from/back to Shadesmar, but it's not like the Blades are permanently physical otherwise.

So it's bit like the "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" question. If a deadeye spren was left in the Physical world but nobody knows about it, it ceases to be physical because the spren itself cannot maintain the foothold (even a "live" sentient spren has difficulty in doing so on its own).

 

 

Edited October 30, 2024 by robardin

[Stark he/him]

Yeah, @robardin's spoiler text was what I was going to respond.  It makes sense in terms of mechanics, but it makes me sad that the likelihood of a secret hidden stash of thousands of sets of blade and plate hidden somewhere in the world is pretty much 0.

I really liked my theory, thank you to @Treamayne for linking it here.  But I think its dead.

[Light In the Darkness]

Ok cool! We have confirmation of the fading. That answers the question. Kinda neat to think about the holes left in rocks somewhere from where they used to be though; Rosharan Archaeology would be really interesting. Thanks for everyone's thoughts and answers!