Talenel'Elin's madness WOR spoilers

[Nick11]

I do remember something mentioning how this time Odium has basically just been chilling back, letting humans destroy themselves. Wasn't it worded like, "He realized you would do his work for him" or something along those lines?

That and the letter mentioning how Odium is contained or invested in another system, so his reach isn't as strong.

So that extended time period, in addition to the 9x level of torture means a very broken Herald.

It's on the back of the print copy of WoK.

 

 "In the end, not war but victory proved the greater test. Did our foes see that the harder they fought, the fiercer our resistance? Fire and hammer forge a sword; time and neglect rust it away. So we won the world yet lost it."

[Trevalion]

11thorderknight's theory fits with what we know. Which makes the fact that Taln gets locked up as a madman all the more tragic. Hopefully Amaran shows his excessive devotion to Vorinism by helping bring Taln recover. The glimpse we had of Taln catching the blow darts seems to point to how to do this, get him to break out of the mental loop he's stuck in by getting him into the action of defending people from the desolation, and watch him come back to himself as a voidkicking Herald. He always succeeded in the past in fighting where it was the thickest, where it seemed like hope was lost.

[junior]

This time, he had to specifically break one (who coincidentally may have been the hardest to break?). It's like getting to throw ten dice and needing one of them to read 6, vs. throwing one dice and needing it to read 6.

 

Agreed.  Taln is mentioned as the herald who typically picks the hopeless situations.  And then usually dies.  But still wins.  Resisting Odium's torments a ridiculously long amount of time just seems to be perfectly in character with what little we know about him.