RachelZA Posted January 20, 2018 Report Share Posted January 20, 2018 My question is regarding Warbreaker. How can the Idrian royalty, sporting their Royal Locks, have ancient Returned blood in them if the Returned cannot reproduce? I thought that particular fact was made clear by the God King's priest and Lightsong's narrative. I'd love someone's help understanding what logical explanation I missed while plowing through this mesmerizing novel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yezrien Posted January 20, 2018 Report Share Posted January 20, 2018 Warbreaker was constructed as the first half of a duology. Brandon left many questions unanswered because he intends to address them in the second book (Nightblood). I'm assuming we'll learn that Returned reproduction, much like transferring breaths without a tongue, is not as impossible as we've been led to believe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunbird she/her Posted January 20, 2018 Report Share Posted January 20, 2018 ^ What Belzedar said. Many questions remain unanswered, but it's pretty much given that many of them will (eventually) be answered in the sequel to Warbreaker. Also can one of the mods relocate this topic to the Warbreaker subforum? @Kaymyth, @Mestiv? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RShara she/her Posted January 20, 2018 Report Share Posted January 20, 2018 Have you read the Warbreaker Annotations? Chapter 55 talks about this a bit: https://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-warbreaker-chapter-fifty-five/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The One Who Connects he/him Posted January 20, 2018 Report Share Posted January 20, 2018 14 hours ago, RachelZA said: How can the Idrian royalty, sporting their Royal Locks, have ancient Returned blood in them if the Returned cannot reproduce? While it's a bit of sequel-bait, the Chapter 44 Annotations do provide an answer to your question(spoiler tag, because it's a text wall) Spoiler It is possible for a Returned to have a child. Vo, the First Returned, did it. The God King isn’t special in that he can do it; any of the Returned could, but it requires some special knowledge that—I’m afraid—I’ll have to keep secret until the sequel. Suffice it to say that the priests know how it is done. The problem is, they aren’t always able to get this to work. Sometimes, they have to do what Siri guessed—replace the God King with an infant Returned. Infant Returns happen very infrequently. It’s more rare than an adult Returning, so there is something sound to the Hallandren reasoning that you have to do something heroic in order to Return. (That’s not true, but it is more sound a doctrine than Siri thinks it is.) Now, an infant has indeed Returned. The priests see this as a major vindication of their faith, as they made the wedding contract with Idris twenty years ago and now, just when the marriage was to happen, an infant Returned. The problem is, now they’ve got to push Siri to get pregnant, because they’re on a deadline. They don’t want to have to replace the God King with this infant; they’d rather use his own child. Hence the push for her to have a child. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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