Odium's Scepter

[Lord Mist]

Is the Scepter that Odium has in OB the Moon Scepter? 

I know Hoid had it. 

[Quantus he/him]

Pretty sure not. The special thing about hte moon Scepter was that it was a "Rosetta Stone" for the various Selish magic systems, allowing somebody knowledgeable (like Hoid) to translate the symbols from one to another (He was trying to figure out how to give himself access to Selish Magics).  But I dont know that it actually Invested in it's own right, and it was definitely specific to Sel and the Dor, so I dont think Odium would have any need andor use for it on Roshar.  Not to mention he's been trapped and so hasnt been able to get back to Sel since the Dor developed. 

[Reginus]

Though Odium might have taken it with him as a trophy after his brief and devastating visit to Sel.

[StrikerEZ he/him]

20 minutes ago, Reginus said:

Though Odium might have taken it with him as a trophy after his brief and devastating visit to Sel.

That visit was at least several centuries before the events of Elantris and Emperor’s Soul. There’s no way that Odium could have taken it when he was on Sel, but it still be on Sel for Emperor’s Soul.

[Ripheus23]

Not helpful to point out but subconsciously this is what comes to my mind whenever I think of the Selish Moon Scepter:

... which has now caused me, due to the nature of this thread, to visualize Odium swinging it around and saying something like, "Hatred Star Power!" before pointing it at Honor and blowing Tanavast to bits, just so he can pick up the Pure Heart Shards and open the door for Ruin 90

EDIT: Now that I think of THAT, the vision of the Silence is a lot like Dalinar's vision of the end of the True Desolation (THIS IS THE SILENCE ABOVE AND BELOW THE STORMS!!!).

Edited January 15, 2019 by Ripheus23

[Pathfinder]

43 minutes ago, Ripheus23 said:

Not helpful to point out but subconsciously this is what comes to my mind whenever I think of the Selish Moon Scepter:

... which has now caused me, due to the nature of this thread, to visualize Odium swinging it around and saying something like, "Hatred Star Power!" before pointing it at Honor and blowing Tanavast to bits, just so he can pick up the Pure Heart Shards and open the door for Ruin 90

EDIT: Now that I think of THAT, the vision of the Silence is a lot like Dalinar's vision of the end of the True Desolation (THIS IS THE SILENCE ABOVE AND BELOW THE STORMS!!!).

I would have to dig for the WoB, but the moon scepter looks more like the chinese scepter, where it has a flat founded bulb on one hand, with a flat long piece, and then another bump on the other end. I think it was Jofwu who asked about it, but I could be messing up who the questioner was. Give me like 10 minutes and I will pull it up with coinciding picture

 

edit:

It was Botanica. WoB below

 

Botanica
How does the Moon Scepter actually look like? In what shape is it?

Now we have two understandings of the word "scepter" based on different ways of translation:

1) 杖: It shapes like a common wand/staff/rod/cane/stick, usually seen in Western countries. [Mainland translation]

2) 笏: It's kind of a flat scepter of Chinese origin, shaped like a tablet, usually held before the breast by officials when received in audience by the emperor. (Very rarely, the emperor himself holds it.) The officials can take notes on it. [Taiwan translation (I believe the translator once showed you around the Taipei Palace Museum.)] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaku_(ritual_baton)

Could you tell us which one is closer to the original design? Thanks!

Brandon Sanderson
It's not a Shaku, it's a Ruyi, actually. That's an excellent question, though. It does actually come from my visit to the museam, and while I'm aware of shakus, I hadn't heard them called scepters. But I guess they are!

Either way, I imagined it as the wavy shape of a Ruyi. (如意)

Botanica
Whoa what an amazing answer! Thanks so much for the explanation! I once thought of Ruyi when flipping through some reference materials and now it becomes canon! Hooray! Another question if you don't mind: (Someone just asked this a moment ago.) Why is it called Moon Scepter? Does (perhaps) one side/end of it resemble moon? [Full moon or crescent?] Or is it colored like moon? Or does it contain some moon pattern? (Also a fan art question, sorry ;P)

Brandon Sanderson
It has to do with the differences in religion between Shai's people and the Rose Empire. It is colored like the moon, but there's a little more to it than that.

Botanica
Ah, I see. Thank you! So what color is Selish moon when we look at it? (I suppose there's only one moon?) Didn't find any specific descriptions about its color in books. Can we assume it is similar to our moon?

Brandon Sanderson
I didn't say it was the color of Sel's moon...

Just kidding. It is, and there is only one. It's a pale white blue, a little more blue than ours, but similar.

 

 

Edited January 15, 2019 by Pathfinder

[Weltall]

10 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

That visit was at least several centuries before the events of Elantris and Emperor’s Soul. There’s no way that Odium could have taken it when he was on Sel, but it still be on Sel for Emperor’s Soul.

Way more than that, even. If you put the events of Elantris as far apart from Stormlight Archive as possible on the timeline within the bounds of the WoBs we have (the gap isn't 'thousands' of years and there's about a thousand years we could place on a timeline ourselves) that would still put it at maybe a thousand years before SA tops. Probably a bit less than that since Sixth of the Dusk was out at the time of that WoB and we know it's the latest work on the timeline to date by a fair amount. We know that it's been about five thousand (Earth/Yolen/Scadrian) years since Aharietiam and Odium was stuck in the cycle of Desolations long before that (and also needed time to hunt down Ambition after taking on D&D) so we're probably talking about six thousand years or more passing between his visit to Sel and Hoid showing up to steal the Moon Sceptre.

And this has been your daiily dose of Weltall Timeline Geekery, you may now return to your regularly scheduled discussion. xD

[Yata he/him]

During Odium's visit on Sel there wasn't even a land based division on magic. As this features of Sel come to be caused preciselly by his murderous acts there

[Subvisual Haze]

I thought it was a subtle indication of his pre-Ascension profession as a pimp.

[+robardin he/him]

I put this in another thread somewhere, but I think that (a) Odium is only able to do his splintering thing with the aid of another Shard, presumably Autonomy from what we've seen so far in the Cosmere (and I'm not the first to put that idea forward), and that (b) this scepter is somehow a conduit or token of that "power boost".

He uses the word "we" when reacting with shock to Dalinar's (temporary) Ascension to Honor ("No! We killed you!"), and perhaps even more tellingly, there's a WoB where Brandon describes Odium setting off on his Splintering Tour starting with Devotion and Dominion on Sel primarily because he located them the easiest, and that his real "top of the list" target was Ambition, who took more hunting down: He was afraid that this Shard that would rival him. And so he's like "This one is number one on the hit list. We're taking down Ambition." 

Obviously Brandon is phrasing this from Odium's POV, so the question is, who is or are the other parties in the plural "we" that Odium refers to? He doesn't use the "royal we" in speaking to Dalinar, Taravangian, or to any of his Fused minions, so it seems unlikely he'd suddenly use that very formal mode of speech when surprised, or in what appears to be an internal POV comment.

All Shards started out exactly equal in power, and Vin as Preservation had to pay a cost of her own destruction as a Vessel to do the same to Ati as Ruin, so it stands to reason that for Odium to go a-hunting for Shards expecting to survive, he has an edge. Represented in that scepter!