Mysterious yet complex future sight on Scadrial and Nalthis

[AleStaar he/him]

Disclaimer. This whole post might just be me coping with trauma that’s come out this week. I don’t want to talk about it. 

Other disclaimer. I am very early into The Way of Kings. This week has… caused me to restart my first read of that.

Genuinely I don’t know if this post is a coping mechanism for childhood trauma that’s built up across 24 years. And just flooded into me on the final week of the holy month of Ramadan, and plateaued in something close to peace on Eid. Or if it’s a topic I’ve been intrigued by ever since I first looked into the Terris Prophecies.

All I will say is that an idea that I think will help is that… someone… has planned out the Shardic plans on Scadrial and Nalthis. I don’t know who, what, why, or how. But I think something or someone did.

Perhaps this is the HEART and SPIRIT of the Terris Prophecies, Preservation’s plan, and the Hero of Ages. And possibly why Discord and Sazed’s sword will be a thing. Basically I think Preservation, Sazed, and possibly Adonalsium create plans that invoke “the one and many”

There is one plan that involves a determined future possibility. One outcome, perhaps predetermined or deterministic. We don’t know.

But there are also MANY plans that give the humans they create free will. MANY plans that also stretch towards the ONE plan.

But “the one and many” is both known and unknown by malevolent Vessels and/or Shards. Hidden from Ruin, Autonomy, and who knows what else. In all the history of mankind.

And perhaps “the one and many” is active on Nalthis with Endowment. Maybe it’s the HEART and SPIRIT of so many Returned being in the history of Nalthis. Including Vo, the God Kings, and the Five Scholars. All of which are deliberately created by Endowment. And there are nations born or destroyed out of the Manywar - the world war started by Vasher and worsened by the other Scholars. Nations could’ve been destroyed by the second Manywar if succeeded by Bluefingers, Denth and his crew, Arsteel, and Yesteel.

And yet there seems to be a grand plan still in motion for Vasher and Nightblood. 

 

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

There are many forces at work in the Cosmere. The 16 shards of Adonalsium. Aethers. Beings like Hoid with vast knowledge and influence. Silverlight. Various groups like the Ghostbloods/17th Shard/Ire/Iriali/etc. And of course, Fortune - the strangest of them all.

Each force has it's own motivations and goals, and they each influence each other. One popular theory is that Adonalsium knew they/it would be split into 16 shards and knew how things were likely to play out afterwards. Some suggest that (if Ado was an actual person/vessel) they stayed behind as a cognitive shadow and continued to nudge things along a particular path. 

Fortune is, I think, the most interesting force in relation to the topic here. It is tied up with the right people being at the right place and having the right things at the right time.... but the unanswered question is what does 'right' mean? Hoid uses what Brandon calls Fortune shenanigans to know where he needs to be, but he doesn't usually know why. My suspicion is that Adonalsium saw the many paths that the future could take when they/it was 'killed' and did something that only all of the shardic powers combined could do: defined or gave purpose to the Cosmere's Fortune to push everything eventually towards a certain goal.

From there, I see it like a family tree: if you look at it from the starting point, there are 2 people who split off into more people and more people as they have more descendents who have more descendents, etc. But if you look at it from the end point of 1 single descendent, it does the same thing in the opposite direction (see below). So Fortune (as I currently imagine it for now and could be totally wrong about) is in the background pushing things towards the end goal. there are a million different branches and ways for ti to end up getting to the end goal, and the actual path could be any number of them, but eventually it will converge on that end point as Fortune continues to push things that direction. It may also be 'subconciously' influencing the Shards themselves