[OB] Szeth's shardblade

[NightFrost]

So I was reading oathbringer and came across something interesting when Szeth swore his third oath it mentions that he felt approval from a hidden spren. Well we know the Szeth has bonded a spren and with his third oath he should get a shardblade but because he has nightblood it doesn't appear. This is interesting because he now could theoretically duel wield shardblades. So i am thinking that in later books nightblood is going to go back to one of his orginal owners and then Szeth will then finally summon his shardblade. A note on this is I wounder if Nightblood somehow makes spren nervous as Szeth has not really meet his spren yet.

[TequilaJack]

It'd be a waste to give Szeth nimi only to take it away. And though it's theoretically possible to bond multiple sprens, owning multiple shardblades seem excessive. 

And nimi is far more powerful than any other Spren shardblade, though difficult to use. Im curious if nimi will be the one to kill Odium. 

[Yata he/him]

On 8/1/2018 at 1:16 AM, TequilaJack said:

It'd be a waste to give Szeth nimi only to take it away. And though it's theoretically possible to bond multiple sprens, owning multiple shardblades seem excessive. 

And nimi is far more powerful than any other Spren shardblade, though difficult to use. Im curious if nimi will be the one to kill Odium. 

nimi is just an honorific not a name, as Szeth doesn't know the name, he calls simply Sword with an honorific, it's like "Mister Sword"  ;-)

By the way Szeth has two Blades now, one of them is extremelly more useful than the other....and it's his Skybreaker's Blade.

The more eloquent one is to use only into specific circumstances as a regular Shardblade does its work well 9/10 of the times, there will be instances where the Black's one is decisive but mainly a Radiant's Blade is more than enough and by the way, it could be used by Szeth as protection while he uses Sword-nimi as offensive tool

Edited January 9, 2018 by Yata

[WhiteLeeopard she/her]

It would indeed be easier and better to use his Skybreaker blade most of the time, and just whip out Nightblood when the chull dung hits the peak of the mountain. At anything less than a crisis using Nightblood is dangerous, wasteful and overkill: Szeth chances death whenever he uses it, the sword takes a ton of stormlight, and most things don't need to be killed on all three realms to die. 

But say...for killing Unmade, Nightblood could be handy .

[Patrick Star]

The sword's name is Nightblood, not nimi lol

Since it sounds like you haven't read Warbreaker, I'll give a cliffnotes version of what Nightblood is, and why he's significant to the story.

Nightblood is a shardblade, but of the shard Endowment instead of Honor or Cultivation (like Radiant sprenblades are), and is what's referred to as an "Awakened Blade".  In other words, Nightblood was a normal sword that was infused with Endowment's investiture and given a command to awaken to and fulfill.  In Nightblood's case, that command was "Destroy Evil".  However, Nightblood's personality is quite childish, so it doesn't quite understand what evil is.

Nightblood operates by absorbing investiture, hence why enemies turn into smoke when it hits them, but it also requires investiture as fuel when it's drawn (hence why it started eating Szeth and Lift).  This is significant because the Fused cannot be destroyed via physical weapons or standard shardblades; they just come back with the next everstorm front.  However, since Nightblood absorbs investiture, a fused that Nightblood kills (or a spren, thunderclast, presumably an unmade, etc) is gone forever, making Nightblood the only current way for our new Radiants to actually inflict permanent casualties on the enemy.

Now, there is a possibility that Szeth could form some sort of bond with Nightblood.  As discussed in Shadesmar, spren learn things very slowly, which is why Nightblood still acts and thinks like an immature child.  If Szeth were to bond Nightblood, it could potentially learn more about what exactly evil is, and mature.  However, given that Nightblood's purpose is to "Destroy Evil", Szeth would probably have to make his personal quest oath for the Skybreakers to be about destroying evil to jumpstart the bonding process.  Something like "I will destroy the evil false leadership of the Stone Shamans" might fit the bill.  Of course, since Nightblood is of a different shard, this is purely speculation at this point.

This also ties into Brightness Azure, who's actually the Warbreaker character Vivenna.  We see her with another blade, which is presumably a Nightblood 2.0.  However, we don't know what command her blade was awoken with.  If you recall, the fused raiding Kholinar stayed away from her; this is because of the perma-killing that I mentioned earlier.  That leaves us with a second possible weapon for killing Fused.

Also, Szeth's highspren doesn't appear because it's (rightfully) scared that Nightblood will eat it.  Nightblood is more invested than a sprenblade by several orders of magnitude, so if it came into contact with a sprenblade (and likely an honorblade), it would just absorb the other blade.

[Mutantspicy]

Nale wielded both  Nightblood and his bonded spren shard blade at the same time for the record.

[Drag0nR3born]

I made a similar post on this you may want to look through also

 

Edited January 8, 2018 by Drag0nR3born

[WhiteLeeopard she/her]

Realistically, while using his Skybreaker Shardblade would be more useful for most situations, there may be the added curveball of Nightblood been jaleous. Nightblood is often nice, happy, and generally likes his partners. And he still nearly kills them when they wield him. Does anyone really want to know what would happen if Nightblood is pissed at you while wielding it? So maybe Szeth needs to introduce Nightblood and his spren and let all 3 be friendly with each other before trying to wield the spren that will not kill you. Its really not fair for the poor spren to make something that will make the weird, powerful spren that can kill the poor average spren angry/jaleaus of them.

As an aside, i'd love to see Szeth and a group of KR travel to the cognitive realm, and their reactions to whatever Nightblood looks like .

Edited January 8, 2018 by WhiteLeeopard

[Patrick Star]

18 minutes ago, Mutantspicy said:

Nale wielded both  Nightblood and his bonded spren shard blade at the same time for the record.

Nale's also a 5-oath skybreaker, while Szeth was at 2 oaths until the very end of the book.  Nale's spren is probably more cognitively mature than Szeth's.

[Calderis he/him]

22 minutes ago, Mutantspicy said:

Nale wielded both  Nightblood and his bonded spren shard blade at the same time for the record.

Nale gave Nightblood to Szeth. We've seen him use his Honorblade, and summon his spren as a Shardblade once. We've never seen him wield Nightblood. 

[thejopen27 he/him]

18 hours ago, TequilaJack said:

It'd be a waste to give Szeth nimi only to take it away. And though it's theoretically possible to bond multiple sprens, owning multiple shardblades seem excessive. 

And nimi is far more powerful than any other Spren shardblade, though difficult to use. Im curious if nimi will be the one to kill Odium. 

I have a feeling that Nightblood will end up in the hands of Odium's champion somehow. 

[Mutantspicy]

3 hours ago, Calderis said:

Nale gave Nightblood to Szeth. We've seen him use his Honorblade, and summon his spren as a Shardblade once. We've never seen him wield Nightblood. 

Yeah that sounds right. Now that you mention it, I just remembered him wielding two blades, but you're right it was an honorblade at that point. Brain fart.  That said I don't feel having nightblood on his person would prevent Szeth from forming a shard blade with his spren. 

[Everstorm Entropy he/him]

5 hours ago, Patrick Star said:

This also ties into Brightness Azure, who's actually the Warbreaker character Vivenna.  We see her with another blade, which is presumably a Nightblood 2.0.  However, we don't know what command her blade was awoken with.  If you recall, the fused raiding Kholinar stayed away from her; this is because of the perma-killing that I mentioned earlier.  That leaves us with a second possible weapon for killing Fused.

I've only read Oathbringer once and my memory isn't perfect, so I could be wrong.  But, I'm pretty sure we witness Azure kill with her blade and it doesn't puff anything to smoke, it just drains color from the body.  I can't recall the exact spot, but I remember her fighting and color draining from her victim and me thinking "Oooh, that must be Vivenna."  So, while I'm 99% certain Azure's blade is an Awakened Blade (the knowledge of how she created her blade was enough to barter with in Shadesmar) it doesn't seem to be on the same caliber as Nightblood, for a few reasons.

* Nobody is drawn to it the same way that people will greedily kill each other for Nightblood
* No one becomes physically ill from being her sword
* We don't have evidence that the Awakened sword speaks to her.  Azure does refer to the sword as a "she", but otherwise does not give it any other personification (and people give genders to their possessions a lot).
* No smokey puffing from killing

[Patrick Star]

12 minutes ago, Everstorm Entropy said:

I've only read Oathbringer once and my memory isn't perfect, so I could be wrong.  But, I'm pretty sure we witness Azure kill with her blade and it doesn't puff anything to smoke, it just drains color from the body.  I can't recall the exact spot, but I remember her fighting and color draining from her victim and me thinking "Oooh, that must be Vivenna."  So, while I'm 99% certain Azure's blade is an Awakened Blade (the knowledge of how she created her blade was enough to barter with in Shadesmar) it doesn't seem to be on the same caliber as Nightblood, for a few reasons.

* Nobody is drawn to it the same way that people will greedily kill each other for Nightblood
* No one becomes physically ill from being her sword
* We don't have evidence that the Awakened sword speaks to her.  Azure does refer to the sword as a "she", but otherwise does not give it any other personification (and people give genders to their possessions a lot).
* No smokey puffing from killing

As I said, we have no idea what command she used to awaken the new blade, so we shouldn't really use how it acts or influences the people around it as a guide for how powerful it is.  Nightblood's a wrecking ball because of how general the command "Destroy Evil" is, as well as how much extra investiture it's absorbed over the years.  If Vivenna used a more specific command to awaken it, we definitely haven't seen what it's capable of once it's in a position to fulfill that command.  While Nightblood is definitely more invested, Vivenna's blade should still have a good chunk of investiture, at least 1000 breaths.

Also, if it's draining color, it definitely has an investiture absorption mechanism going on, as Endowment's investiture is tied to color.  As I said, it's a second possible weapon for killing fused.  Emphasis on possible.  The only question is whether it can absorb a fused or a regular sprenblade.  I'd lean towards "yes", as the sword would be pretty useless otherwise, plus the Fused were hesitant to get hit by it.

[Jeffo]

5 hours ago, Patrick Star said:

 However, Nightblood's personality is quite childish, so it doesn't quite understand what evil is.

 

I think Nightblood understands perfectly well what evil is, to the point I would rely on his opinion of a character to judge their true personality.

hes like a litmus test for bad guys.

[Patrick Star]

Just now, Jeffo said:

I think Nightblood understands perfectly well what evil is, to the point I would rely on his opinion of a character to judge their true personality.

hes like a litmus test for bad guys.

No, he does not understand what evil is.  It's extremely well-established in Warbreaker.  From Coppermind: Nightblood was Awakened with the command "Destroy Evil." The sword had no concept of evil, and so the Breaths it inherited decided "evil was someone who would try to take the sword and use it for evil purposes, selling it, manipulating and extorting others, that sort of thing."

Now, Nightblood does generally, but not always, work as a litmus test for good guys (if he thinks somebody's good, they're probably good), but he's killed a lot of people who are decidedly not evil because of his flawed understanding of the term.

[Yata he/him]

13 hours ago, Patrick Star said:

Since it sounds like you haven't read Warbreaker

This is exactly the reason I avoided to explain stuff, maybe he wanted to read it in the future. Spoil the whole stuff is something to avoid unless unrequested (to me)

[Patrick Star]

7 hours ago, Yata said:

This is exactly the reason I avoided to explain stuff, maybe he wanted to read it in the future. Spoil the whole stuff is something to avoid unless unrequested (to me)

I don't consider characterization like that to be spoilers, as it doesn't say anything that happens in Warbreaker.

Now, if I said something like "Goku finds Nightblood and uses him to kill Cell and combine the Dragonballs to go into Super Saiyan 4", that would be a spoiler.

[NightFrost]

You know i don't think Nighblood would absorb a sprenblade due to the fact that the bond gives them extra strength and stability. It would probably hurt a lot though.

[Patrick Star]

4 hours ago, NightFrost said:

You know i don't think Nighblood would absorb a sprenblade due to the fact that the bond gives them extra strength and stability. It would probably hurt a lot though.

Nightblood is more invested than a sprenblade by several orders of magnitude.  He'd eat it up like Joey Chestnut eating a hot dog.

[RShara she/her]

Nightblood would pretty much eat anything.