The Desolations Nine

[Vortaan he/him]

Something I think that needs to be addressed... I don't know that the current Desolation can give us any kind of good model for past Desolations, in terms of the forces gathered or the triggering events. The Everstorm is something completely new, and it seems to me that the triggers for the Listeners to become Voidbringers had to be different. Jasnah's slavery model doesn't really seem to work given what we now know about Listener culture. Dalinar's visions have shown us probable thunderclasts, and those certainly seem to be voidspren, not Listeners. For all we know, Listeners prior to the current Desolation were more like special forces or elites, instead of the shock troops they appear to be now. 

 

As for population destruction, we also can't use Nohadon's Desolation as anything close to a baseline. 90% casualties are heavily implied to be the result of internal wars prior to the Desolation, as well as it's exceedingly long length. If previous Desolations had a smaller casualty rate, even something like 50%, that drastically changes the level of technology we could reasonably expect to survive Desolations.