Proof that adolin has already partially revived his sword?

[Darkness Ascendant]

This blows my mind.

[junior]

On ‎11‎/‎4‎/‎2016 at 1:11 PM, Massik said:

Isn't the blade he pulled on Amaram Taln's blade though?  

Remember Dalinar gave his away to free Bridge Four, and the only reason he confronts Amaram is because he knows he is lying about the very blade he pulls, Taln's.   Likey an Honorblade, right?

That blade screams after he bonds with the Stormfather, and right before he gets rid of it.  So it's a dead spren.  In fact, right after he uses the blade against Amaram, he notes that he doesn't feel entirely comfortable with it.  He thinks it's because it's not his old sword.  But the simplest explanation is that he's starting to develop his powers, and is becoming sensitive to the fact that the shardblade is a dead spren.

 

 

When Dalinar pulled the shardblade on Amaram, no mention of 10 was given. Its reads very well at that point.

 

I read that as Dalinar not being obvious that he's summoning his shardblade, which he knows he's going to need because he knows that Amaram will summon his own.  Since Kaladin's the PoV character, and Kaladin's focus is on his hated enemy, Amaram, Kaladin manages to completely miss the fact that Dalinar has started to summon his new blade (assisted in the fact that *everyone* in the camps knows that Daliran doesn't have a blade to summon. so they're not watching for it).

[JUQ]

On 11/5/2016 at 7:04 PM, goody153 said:

Oh yeah i was about to mention this one until i've read your comment. I remember that certainly is one of the things we've seen so far for those who became radiants like Dalinar or Kaladin(though probably not since he was disgusted fighting Parshendi due to their honor)

To be honest, I've always imagined Kaladin resisting the Thrill in a similar way to how Vimes resisted the Gonne in Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett. 

Quote

The spirit of the Gonne pounding up Vimes' arms collided with the armies of pure Vimesness coming the other way.

ie: Kaladin resists the Thrill through sheer cynicism.

[Massik]

6 hours ago, junior said:

That blade screams after he bonds with the Stormfather, and right before he gets rid of it.  So it's a dead spren.  In fact, right after he uses the blade against Amaram, he notes that he doesn't feel entirely comfortable with it.  He thinks it's because it's not his old sword.  But the simplest explanation is that he's starting to develop his powers, and is becoming sensitive to the fact that the shardblade is a dead spren.

 

 

 

 

 

I read that as Dalinar not being obvious that he's summoning his shardblade, which he knows he's going to need because he knows that Amaram will summon his own.  Since Kaladin's the PoV character, and Kaladin's focus is on his hated enemy, Amaram, Kaladin manages to completely miss the fact that Dalinar has started to summon his new blade (assisted in the fact that *everyone* in the camps knows that Daliran doesn't have a blade to summon. so they're not watching for it).

Honorblades are still shardblades, just more powerful, so I would assume they're still spren.  

But I do see your point about Kals POV.

[goody153]

1 hour ago, Massik said:

Honorblades are still shardblades, just more powerful, so I would assume they're still spren.  

But I do see your point about Kals POV.

Err Syl already said "That’s because it’s not a spren," with certainty. And she referred to it as weapon not entity so i presume it's not sentient kinda like the mists in mistborn.

[1stBondsmith]

Agreed. Honorblades are a technology spren copied according to Brandon. They are not spren.

[Massik]

Point conceded.

[+hwiles]

On 11/3/2016 at 3:52 PM, king of nowhere said:

when rereading WoR, I noticed this particularly interesting tidbit that may bring great support to the idea that adolin will revive his sword. During the battle of Narak, when Adolin is engagedby Eshonai (chapeter 83, page 1002 of english hardcover edition):
 

So you see, first adolin drops his blade. then he is surprised. And then he summons the sword again. No mention of preparing to summmon. No mention of counting heartbeats. And quite a short time to summon a blade normally. It really would seem that adolin can summon his blade without the heartbeat thing.

Not only that, but the "thank you" is strongly reminescent of a similar scene, when shallan is in the chasm and she is trying to cut handholds with her blade (chapter 72, pag. 863). She thinks that the blade is too big to cut while climbing, and it shrinks. And then the story goes

Which would be quite the coincidence otherwise.

So, theories that adolin will revive his blade have been around for a while, but I think I found a solid piece of evidence that he's already started the process.

Awesome theory, but I do feel like one thing is missing for Adolin to be able to "revive" his blade: The original owner's shardplate.  I'm assuming plate and blade are linked in some fundamental way, otherwise...a Radiant might be able to manufacture plate by bonding and unbonding the same spren over and over, which would be silly.  I'd therefore assume that you would need to revive the dead plate as well as the dead blade; how plate could be revived however is a question we won't be prepared to answer for probably another 2 books though, based on WoB indicating that we won't be seeing how Shardplate is created for a while yet.

That said...in Dalinar's vision of the battle in the Purelake...I believe he meets a female Edgedancer and pointedly remarks how close a resemblance her armor bears to Adolin's...hmmm....  Further evidence, coincidence, or red herring? You Decide!

[maxal]

32 minutes ago, hwiles said:

Awesome theory, but I do feel like one thing is missing for Adolin to be able to "revive" his blade: The original owner's shardplate.  I'm assuming plate and blade are linked in some fundamental way, otherwise...a Radiant might be able to manufacture plate by bonding and unbonding the same spren over and over, which would be silly.  I'd therefore assume that you would need to revive the dead plate as well as the dead blade; how plate could be revived however is a question we won't be prepared to answer for probably another 2 books though, based on WoB indicating that we won't be seeing how Shardplate is created for a while yet.

That said...in Dalinar's vision of the battle in the Purelake...I believe he meets a female Edgedancer and pointedly remarks how close a resemblance her armor bears to Adolin's...hmmm....  Further evidence, coincidence, or red herring? You Decide!

I don't think Plate is needed to revive a Shardblade... Brandon has given several clues Adolin will indeed revive his Shardblade and while it certainly might take time, I don't expect it to linger until book 5. 

As for the vision, the Plate in question was glowing red: it has been assumed to have belonged to a Dustbringer and not an Edgedancer.

[+hwiles]

5 minutes ago, maxal said:

I don't think Plate is needed to revive a Shardblade... Brandon has given several clues Adolin will indeed revive his Shardblade and while it certainly might take time, I don't expect it to linger until book 5. 

As for the vision, the Plate in question was glowing red: it has been assumed to have belonged to a Dustbringer and not an Edgedancer.

Interesting, I initially assumed Edgedancer because of the Radiant's abilities in the fight but for some reason Dustbringer never occurred to me, though I admit it fits.

I've never heard this theory proposed, is there any in-world reason we should associate red-glowing armor more with a Dustbringer than an Edgedancer, or is it just because glowing red armor wouldn't align well with the typical battlefield medic abilities held by Edgedancers?  Not trying to discredit the theory, literally just curious.

[maxal]

33 minutes ago, hwiles said:

Interesting, I initially assumed Edgedancer because of the Radiant's abilities in the fight but for some reason Dustbringer never occurred to me, though I admit it fits.

I've never heard this theory proposed, is there any in-world reason we should associate red-glowing armor more with a Dustbringer than an Edgedancer, or is it just because glowing red armor wouldn't align well with the typical battlefield medic abilities held by Edgedancers?  Not trying to discredit the theory, literally just curious.

It has been stated quite often though not recently and by recently, I mean in the last year or so  You might not have seen it. To make a long story short, each Radiant order is associated to a specific gemstone and a given color. For Windrunners, it is sapphire (I think it is sapphire) and the color blue. For Dustbringers, it is ruby and the color red, but for Edgedancers, it is diamond and the color white... It is thus, when the Radiant's Plate within Dalinar's vision glowed red, many of us made the link with the given color of the Dustbringers.

It makes sense for a full Radiant's Plate to glow with the color associated with its order. Hence, most of us believe Adolin's Plate belonged to a Dustbringer. A while back, it was an argument often use to theorize Adolin would become one.

[junior]

On ‎11‎/‎11‎/‎2016 at 2:03 PM, hwiles said:

Awesome theory, but I do feel like one thing is missing for Adolin to be able to "revive" his blade: The original owner's shardplate.

 

I'm skeptical.  While I suspect that shardplate is somehow connected with the bond (it's the only thing that makes sense), I also suspect that it's not a physical manifestation of the spren, unlike the shard weapon.

 

Some reasons why not -

 

 - Spren shard weapons and surges are supposed to duplicate the honorblades.  The only honorblade that we've seen used so far is Szeth's and he never wore shardplate.

 - Shard weapons don't use stormlight.  The only mention of gems that we've seen with regard to shardblades is the one used to bind a shardblade to its wielder.  Shardplate, on the other hand, needs stormlight.  For instance, stormlight is infused into the armor to regrow it.  Damaged armor is constantly described as leaking stormlight.  And when Kaladin "borrows" the shardplate helm during the arena duel, it ends up sucking up all of his stormlight.

 - Each suit of shardplate is a complete set, with its own identity.  In TWoK (I think), there's concern over the possibility of the Parshendi feeding stormlight into damaged shardplate pieces left on the battlefield, thus making it take longer to regrow those missing parts on the main shardplate suit.  The implication is that the damaged pieces are still connected to the rest of the suit - despite the distance - right up until new parts are grown to replace the missing pieces.  But there's no indication that shard weapons are connected to a given suit.

 

 

My guess is that the shardplate armor is an outward manifestation of a fully completed bond, created using stormlight turned solid by the Radiant.  Chances are that when one of the modern characters eventually gets around to creating their armor, we'll see more dramatic capabilities than what we've seen so far (similar to how Syl was able to rapidly change shape when Kaladin fought Szeth, something that a dead spren blade can't do).

 

As for Adolin, I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up forming a bond solely based on the time that he spends with the blade while it's temporarily revived, and completing the stage at which he triggers his order's equivalent of the Windrunner's third oath will be what ends up permanently reviving the dead spren.

[+hwiles]

@junior

I agree at least partially with your guess that Shardplate is an outward manifestation of a fully completed bond.

The question at hand is: How could one revive a dead shardblade.  WoB have suggested that one would essentially need to replace the dead spren's lost connection, ie: build a bond with the spren that closely resembled the bond it had when it "died".  We have confirmation that this is an incredibly difficult feat, and serious suggestions that we shouldn't expect it to happen often if it ever even happens at all throughout the course of the series.

I posit that, since shardplate is a part of the Nahel bond, it may well be instrumental in reestablishing the lost connection.  I would also think that if the Radiant who carried Adolin's blade had sworn all of their oaths already, he would probably need to swear all of them before his blade came back to life, which would probably be more difficult than attracting a new spren.  Now, there's a super easy way out of this requirement: Sanderson could just write in that the spren inhabiting Adolin's blade was betrayed by a Radiant who had only spoken the first oath or two.  We don't know for sure when each spren gets the ability to manifest as a blade, some orders might have gotten their blade after a single oath, and Adolin has in his possession a book that has the first oath written down for him.

TLDR; Adolin has access to knowledge of what the first oath of the KR is, and his blade may very well have belonged to a trainee Radiant who had only spoken the first oath (or first couple oaths, whatever, doesn't matter).  A bit of a stretch, but revival could easily be within his reach.

[1stBondsmith]

I think the line of thinking above misses the mark. Brandon's quote about needing to reestablish the original bond with the spren to its Knight appears to be to also touch on the nature of the Nahel bond. A spren cannot bond except to one person, it "dies" otherwise. It can be revived ONLY by that person (like Syl and Kaladin). So I agree that we should not expect this to happen unless we revive an original Knight radiant. That would exclude Adonlin bonding to his sword. The bond for a spren is forever, and when broken, breaks them. That is why the swords are abominations to other live Spren. It is like waving around a dead person and using it to fight. Not cool to spren, or to Parshendi. Should be not cool to people if they totally understood. But we are a practical race most of the time. Honor forbid we honor others' dead!

[king of nowhere]

15 minutes ago, 1stBondsmith said:

I think the line of thinking above misses the mark. Brandon's quote about needing to reestablish the original bond with the spren to its Knight appears to be to also touch on the nature of the Nahel bond. A spren cannot bond except to one person, it "dies" otherwise. It can be revived ONLY by that person (like Syl and Kaladin). So I agree that we should not expect this to happen unless we revive an original Knight radiant. That would exclude Adonlin bonding to his sword. The bond for a spren is forever, and when broken, breaks them. That is why the swords are abominations to other live Spren. It is like waving around a dead person and using it to fight. Not cool to spren, or to Parshendi. Should be not cool to people if they totally understood. But we are a practical race most of the time. Honor forbid we honor others' dead!

I think there are specific words of brandon stating that it would not be impossible to revive a shardblade and that a new person can, in fact, bond a dead spren.

Also, I wonder why the spren care so much if their dead are used to fight voidbringers, and if they'd rather see odium wins. I don't know you, but if it turned out that my dead body could be turned into a superpowerful weapon to repel, say, an alien invasion, I'd be totally cool with letting them using it. Now, I fully understand why spren frowned upon humans using shards to kill each other, but a desolation should change their perspective.

[Eki]

54 minutes ago, 1stBondsmith said:

The bond for a spren is forever, and when broken, breaks them.

We know this isn't true, because a Knight dying without giving up their oaths doesn't kill a spren, and the spren can re-bond someone else. It is heavily implied that Syl has done that before.

I think the reason it would be easier for the original knight to revive their own spren is because the bond isn't completely broken. Or at least because it's easier to re-forge a bond that has already existed before (which would explain why Kaladin and Syl could restrengthen their bond so quickly at the end of WoR).

[1stBondsmith]

I agree with you @Eki. A knight dying doesn't kill a spren. Also, some part of the bond must be left at the braking of oaths. But that is what would keep the spren from bonding to another. Part of the broken bond is left, and cannot be revived by someone else. If that person dies without the bond being broken, I think the spren can rebond according to the WoB you referenced. But I do not think that when some knight who breaks their oaths dies leaves the spren available to rebond. So maybe I should have worded the line above, "When a radiant breaks their oaths, the bonds are nearly severed and the spren "dies" but may be revived by only them". If the Radiant dies first, a zombie spren cannot be revived fully. From what I have read, this appears to be the case.

Edited November 14, 2016 by 1stBondsmith
spelling

[ScarletSabre]

On 03/11/2016 at 7:52 PM, king of nowhere said:

She stood before him, rain streaming from her armor. What had she named herself? Eshonai.

Inside his elm, Adolin grinned at the shardbearer. This he could do. An honest fight. He raised his hands, the shardblade forming from mist as he swung upward and deflected her attack in a sweeping parry.

Thank you, he thought.

I always took the "Thank you" to just be to the universe/Cosmere in general, perhaps the Stormfather/Almighty, for giving him something he understood, something he could fight. It seemed directed at fate and Eshonai more than anything else to me.

[Eki]

15 minutes ago, 1stBondsmith said:

I agree with you @Eki. A knight dying doesn't kill a spren. Also, some part of the bond must be left at the braking of oaths. But that is what would keep the spren from bonding to another. Part of the broken bond is left, and cannot be revived by someone else. If that person dies without the bond being broken, I think the spren can rebond according to the WoB you referenced. But I do not think that when some knight who breaks their oaths dies leaves the spren available to rebond. So maybe I should have worded the line above, "When a radiant breaks their oaths, the bonds are nearly severed and the spren "dies" but may be revived by only them". If the Radiant dies first, a zombie spren cannot be revived fully. From what I have read, this appears to be the case.

Hm... I don't see why a potential remnant of a bond would stay if the spren died first... The other way around, yes, because a spren isn't really dead, but... I think the bond breaks if the human dies. That's how the bonds to deadblades and honorblades seem to work, anyway.

Regardless, I found this WoB, which I don't think is the same one I've seen before on the subject (the other one just said it would be difficult, I believe):

Quote

Interview: Jan 17th, 2015

Firefight Tour - El Cerrito, CA (Paraphrased)

Question

Cool. I’m not going to bother asking who did right now. With Syl being able to be revived, is Adolin ever going to be able to revive his own blade, or-

Brandon Sanderson

Ah, that would be very difficult, as the orig-, in most cases, the original person who broke the oaths has to be the one.

So the "most cases" doesn't rule out that it could be done in Adolin's case, but it seems like for most spren, it's just flat out not possible.

[1stBondsmith]

22 minutes ago, Eki said:

Hm... I don't see why a potential remnant of a bond would stay if the spren died first... The other way around, yes, because a spren isn't really dead, but... I think the bond breaks if the human dies. That's how the bonds to deadblades and honorblades seem to work, anyway.

If a person dies, an idea given life through them would be cut from them. But the idea may persist in the general belief or experience of other sentient beings. If a person no longer believes something, but lives, the idea is still there but bereft of all power or influence. Still tied to the person who believed it, but now existing as an impotent historical relic.

We do this in our work with Asset Management. If a pump wears out and we replace it, we still have to keep a record of the dead pump as; it was this type, it had these specifications, it lived this long, it cost this much to replace, etc. This way, it exists in the mental world, but not the physical. The guy assigned to maintain the pump no longer has a schedule to do anything to it, but neither does anyone else. We only have a record of who that guy was. The bond is all cognitive instead of also physical. This could be the description of a spren that exists, but cannot do anything or have sentience and thus, in the Cognitive, be "dead". The spren pump lived, and had a link to the physical realm once, and interacted in the building, but it no longer can. I can summon information about it any time I want, so It still exists, but I cannot interact with it. Add a stormlight Fabrial to call it back to existence, and I can use the pump to look at and maybe sit on, but it would not be able to use electricity (stormlight) to ever pump again. This is the best parable I can give to my understanding.

Edited November 14, 2016 by 1stBondsmith
grammar

[Nymeros]

Methinks the fandom is reading too deeply into things and this is proof of nothing.

[manavortex]

Quote

Methinks the fandom is reading too deeply into things and this is proof of nothing.

This is exactly what we're here for. 
 

*goes to the chalkboard and writes*

Nymeros's attitude

[Djarskublar]

4 hours ago, 1stBondsmith said:

If a person dies, an idea given life through them would be cut from them. But the idea may persist in the general belief or experience of other sentient beings. If a person no longer believes something, but lives, the idea is still there but bereft of all power or influence. Still tied to the person who believed it, but now existing as an impotent historical relic.

We do this in our work with Asset Management. If a pump wears out and we replace it, we still have to keep a record of the dead pump as; it was this type, it had these specifications, it lived this long, it cost this much to replace, etc. This way, it exists in the mental world, but not the physical. The guy assigned to maintain the pump no longer has a schedule to do anything to it, but neither does anyone else. We only have a record of who that guy was. The bond is all cognitive instead of also physical. This could be the description of a spren that exists, but cannot do anything or have sentience and thus, in the Cognitive, be "dead". The spren pump lived, and had a link to the physical realm once, and interacted in the building, but it no longer can. I can summon information about it any time I want, so It still exists, but I cannot interact with it. Add a stormlight Fabrial to call it back to existence, and I can use the pump to look at and maybe sit on, but it would not be able to use electricity (stormlight) to ever pump again. This is the best parable I can give to my understanding.

The pump analogy goes both ways. Fluid (Investiture) can still flow through a replacement pump. Kal revived Syl even though he wasn't exactly the same person he had been before he broke the bond. He was wounded in body, mind, and soul. There has to be some leeway for who can revive spren. It may go so far as to require similar physical traits, but a separate person must be able to revive spren because you are certainly not the same person after breaking your Oaths. You are close enough to the original person to create new bonds with your spren. That is how I have seen it for some time now.

[maxal]

10 hours ago, hwiles said:

@junior

I agree at least partially with your guess that Shardplate is an outward manifestation of a fully completed bond.

The question at hand is: How could one revive a dead shardblade.  WoB have suggested that one would essentially need to replace the dead spren's lost connection, ie: build a bond with the spren that closely resembled the bond it had when it "died".  We have confirmation that this is an incredibly difficult feat, and serious suggestions that we shouldn't expect it to happen often if it ever even happens at all throughout the course of the series.

I posit that, since shardplate is a part of the Nahel bond, it may well be instrumental in reestablishing the lost connection.  I would also think that if the Radiant who carried Adolin's blade had sworn all of their oaths already, he would probably need to swear all of them before his blade came back to life, which would probably be more difficult than attracting a new spren.  Now, there's a super easy way out of this requirement: Sanderson could just write in that the spren inhabiting Adolin's blade was betrayed by a Radiant who had only spoken the first oath or two.  We don't know for sure when each spren gets the ability to manifest as a blade, some orders might have gotten their blade after a single oath, and Adolin has in his possession a book that has the first oath written down for him.

TLDR; Adolin has access to knowledge of what the first oath of the KR is, and his blade may very well have belonged to a trainee Radiant who had only spoken the first oath (or first couple oaths, whatever, doesn't matter).  A bit of a stretch, but revival could easily be within his reach.

When Brandon mentioned reviving a dead-Blade absolutely required the original knight before adding, in most cases it did, the though had crossed my mind perhaps Adolin's Blade once belonged to a trainee Radiant and not a fully-pledged one. However, I would rather if it weren't the case: it would feel too much like Deus Ex Machina. I rather prefer the idea Adolin has enough similitude with the previous knight for the spren to attach itself to him. Or perhaps, if we play with Brandon mentioning sprens are ideas which seems to fill in void without a given individual, much like most spren will be of opposite gender except for Renarin who feels inadequate as a male, then we might come up with the idea Adolin's spren Blade can be revive if she feels a void in him similar to the one she used to fill, in someone else.

9 hours ago, 1stBondsmith said:

I think the line of thinking above misses the mark. Brandon's quote about needing to reestablish the original bond with the spren to its Knight appears to be to also touch on the nature of the Nahel bond. A spren cannot bond except to one person, it "dies" otherwise. It can be revived ONLY by that person (like Syl and Kaladin). So I agree that we should not expect this to happen unless we revive an original Knight radiant. That would exclude Adonlin bonding to his sword. The bond for a spren is forever, and when broken, breaks them. That is why the swords are abominations to other live Spren. It is like waving around a dead person and using it to fight. Not cool to spren, or to Parshendi. Should be not cool to people if they totally understood. But we are a practical race most of the time. Honor forbid we honor others' dead!

We have explicit words from the author it is possible, but extremely difficult. We have words stating Adolin, specifically, might be able to do it, but it is clear this would be a once in a lifetime event. Brandon has RAFOed most questions with respect to Adolin, with respect to his Shardblade, his future status and his capacity at forming a Nahel bond.

8 hours ago, Eki said:

So the "most cases" doesn't rule out that it could be done in Adolin's case, but it seems like for most spren, it's just flat out not possible.

Random idea: Adolin is actually a descendant from the original knight via his mother.... Too convenient... 

[+hwiles]

Everything I'm reading here seems to at least tacitly agree that there are a multitude of valid ways for Adolin to bond his blade that would be consistent with past observations about his character, internally consistent with cosmere physics, and in line with supplementary information supplied from q&a with Sanderson. As always, there is wiggle room for the author to take a different direction; that'd be his prerogative and I'm ready to support it. However, as far as speculation goes, I think we can agree to applaud OP for a rock solid contribution. I think we've been supplied real evidence that Adolin might (keyword being might) have already begun a Nahel bond with a dead blade, using specific events. That's huge in my mind, the specifics are almost a non-issue.