[OB] Where did the listeners get their shardblades?

[Calvin101]

We know shardblades are a manifestation of the dead spren from the recreance. This was after the last desolation, the false desolation, and the trapping of of Ba-Ado-Mishram. So assuming the Listeners weren't fighting and winning blades from the humans anymore, how did they get them? 

I guess this question goes hand in hand with 'where are all the missing shardblades?'

Its clear that some of these secret societies, like the Ghostbloods are holding some of these missing shards. Did they for some reason pass off shards to the lLsteners at some point? 

[Ciridae]

Kinda late but this is an interesting question. 

OB spoilers:

Spoiler

So we know that shardblades weren't always able to be dismissed, only relatively recently did humans discover that it was possible to add gems to them and then summon them at will. 

We also know that the listeners' forms outside of dullform are a relatively recent discovery. Do we know when these were discovered? WoR listeners remember a time when the council of 5 consisted only of dullforms. So pretty recent, right? 

Anyway, we know Eshonai's blade could be dismissed and summoned. I don't think listeners in dullform would have made that discovery. It took humans centuries to come up with that, and that was by accident. 

So either the listeners were really lucky or smart to find that out after gaining the forms, or their blades have to originally come from humans who owned the blades, attached gems and then lost them somehow. 

Maybe they were found in Stormseat or the craters that would become the warcamps. But that would mean that shard wielding humans have to have lived there between the discovery of attaching gems to blades, and the listeners moving in. And it means they must have left shards there. Which is unlikely. 

So did they win the shards from humans? Equally unlikely I'd say. 

Maybe they were given some shards from Radiants if during the Recreance. Maybe someone saw that these singers who kinda look like all the other slave form singers don't actually need humans to survive. Maybe they actually were lucky enough to figure the whole gem attaching deal out themselves. Maaaaybe? 

I hope we find out in Eshonai's flashbacks. 

 

Edited April 29, 2018 by Ciridae

[Yata he/him]

We don't know for sure.

To me, Radiants broke Oaths before Recreance during others Desolations (not in mass but It could happen) and Odium's forces had some Shards. The Last Legion had a bunch of Shards from back than.

Edited April 29, 2018 by Yata

[Leyrann]

1 hour ago, Ciridae said:

So we know that shardblades weren't always able to be dismissed, only relatively recently did humans discover that it was possible to add gems to them and then summon them at will. 

Not true. Dismissing them was discovered only a few decades after the Recreance, according to Navani in Words of Radiance. She mentions it was "an accident of ornamentation".

1 hour ago, Ciridae said:

Maybe they were found in Stormseat or the craters that would become the warcamps.

Though I am not sure if we have confirmation, it is generally suspected that the Shattering of the Plains predates the Recreance, and may be one of the reasons for it.

1 hour ago, Ciridae said:

Maybe they were given some shards from Radiants if during the Recreance. Maybe someone saw that these singers who kinda look like all the other slave form singers don't actually need humans to survive.

Turning the singers into the mindless beings known as parshmen is, if I am not very mistaken, brought up as one of the main causes for the Recreance in the books themselves. Therefore, the Radiants of the recreance will know about the origin of those "slaves". They will also have known about the forms and have realized that those dullform singers weren't actually in slaveform.

[Ciridae]

1 hour ago, Leyrann said:

Not true. Dismissing them was discovered only a few decades after the Recreance, according to Navani in Words of Radiance. She mentions it was "an accident of ornamentation".

Ah my mistake, I thought it was more recent than that. 

 

1 hour ago, Leyrann said:

Though I am not sure if we have confirmation, it is generally suspected that the Shattering of the Plains predates the Recreance, and may be one of the reasons for it.

I agree, I wasn't referring to the shattering, or the Radiants that presumably shattered them, only that other humans may have lived there in between who had shards with gems. Or am I misunderstanding and you're saying the Radiants may have left the shards at stormseat? 

2 hours ago, Leyrann said:

Therefore, the Radiants of the recreance will know about the origin of those "slaves". They will also have known about the forms and have realized that those dullform singers weren't actually in slaveform

I explained poorly I think. I was trying to say that maybe some of the Radiants, after seeing what they had done, looked at the docile yet self sufficient dullform listeners and thought "Hey, let's not just let our bestfriend-murderblades lying around for anyone to grab, let's give them to these guys who look like they might not start murdering each other with them, to keep them safe and cause minimal harm." But I was only brainstorming ideas and I don't know how likely this really is. Wouldn't there be lighteyed listeners then? Do we know Eshonai's eyecolor? 

@Yata I agree that Radiants must have broken oaths before the Recreance, but can we be sure that those dead spend would have become shardblades? It's as good a possibility as I've seen, but do we know for certain that that's how it worked? 

[Yata he/him]

@Ciridae become a Deadeyes/Shardblade is the only outcome of a Oathbreaking death if the bond was strong enough to allow a Spren to manifest as Blade

[Leyrann]

1 minute ago, Ciridae said:

I agree, I wasn't referring to the shattering, or the Radiants that presumably shattered them, only that other humans may have lived there in between who had shards with gems. Or am I misunderstanding and you're saying the Radiants may have left the shards at stormseat? 

I was under the assumption myself that Stormseat had been abandoned ever since the shattering.

1 minute ago, Ciridae said:

I explained poorly I think. I was trying to say that maybe some of the Radiants, after seeing what they had done, looked at the docile yet self sufficient dullform listeners and thought "Hey, let's not just let our bestfriend-murderblades lying around for anyone to grab, let's give them to these guys who look like they might not start murdering each other with them, to keep them safe and cause minimal harm."

I guess I don't have in-book or WoB evidence against this, but taking the assumption the Recreance was pre-planned plus some other stuff described in the "The spren were in on it" topic (which I think gives a likely overview of the evens), it is unlikely there were Radiants that specifically sought out people who would do little harm with them.

[Patrick Star]

I think they just found them tbh.

In the flashbacks, we saw that the Radiants created way more shards than they currently are, and it's a pretty safe assumption that in the hundreds (thousands?) of years since, some of them got lost.

Plus we saw Oathbringer start sinking into the pottery, so it's possible some buried themselves on the Shattered Plains or other locations for people to find.

I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that a couple of unaccounted-for shards ended up in the hands of the Listeners by accident.

[Stark he/him]

Also worthy of debate, seeing as the listeners seem to have a deeper connection with the cognitive, and can see/feel/hear more of the spren approaching than humans see - Can the listeners see the Deadeyes when the blades are not summoned?

[Xtafa]

They didn't have many, they likely won them in combat in the past. There are many unaccounted for, I also imagine any noble family who lost a shardblade wouldn't want to announce it and would keep it secret.

[Leyrann]

On 1-5-2018 at 5:32 AM, Xtafa said:

they likely won them in combat in the past.

Unlikely. There seem to be no surviving records on listeners and humans meeting up, and listeners in particular seem to have a long memory (they know that it wasn't them that Shattered the Plains, to mention something), so it's unlikely the listeners have had contact with humans at any point since the Recreance, and they likely have not had contact even hundreds our thousands of years before.

[ScavellTane]

No doubt they could have found one or two in and around the Shattered Plains or even in the warcamps where they lived before moving to Narak. What I don't understand is how would they have learned to bond the blades if they never had any contact with human society.

[Leyrann]

6 hours ago, ScavellTane said:

No doubt they could have found one or two in and around the Shattered Plains or even in the warcamps where they lived before moving to Narak. What I don't understand is how would they have learned to bond the blades if they never had any contact with human society.

Humans also had to figure that out themselves.