Horneaters and Southern Scadrians

[Ripheus23]

I almost necro'd a thread rather than post this new one, but anyway, here's my theory. Horneaters live near a perpendicularity, so at some point in their ancient history, some of them ended up on Scadrial. They pulled a Jah Keved and have descendants among the local fully-human population, who inherited some of the Parshendi bloodlines that the Horneaters have. These are the Southern Scadrians who are rumored to sometimes grow their faces into their masks, maybe due to some Identity metamorphosis (the masks are Invested and if the wearer "believes" long enough that the mask is part of their face, their residual Horneater sDNA kicks in and melds the mask into their face, or something; maybe it's a combination of Rosharan AND Scadrian sDNA, with the Preservation residue molded to the Honor/Cultivation influx to produce the full effect or what). Their Horneater heritage is reflected in names like "Allik" and a remark like, "I'm going to pretend that you did not just compare me to a common lowshipman [emphasis added]" (TBoM, pg. 334).

NOTE: Iyatil having Southern Scadrian heritage (in her ancestry, not directly) and being on Roshar, would not be so much of a coincidence, let us suppose, if the above were true. But it is not itself an article of evidence in favor of the theory.

Edited January 25, 2019 by Ripheus23

[Jaywalk he/him]

It makes sense, in a way, but I don’t remember Horneaters having the carapace-growing abilities that the singers did.

There was one instance in the Era 2 broadsheets about a visitor from another world, with a picture resembling a Shardpool. I heard a theory about the visitor being a singer. It could make sense, depending on the time gap between Stormlight 5 and Mistborn Era 2, that singers could be worldhopping to Scadrial and had enough time for interbreeding for the mask melding to surface by the point where we meet them in BoM.

This wouldn’t explain Iyatil, however. As far as I know, we haven’t seen any singer worldhoppers on screen. We simply don’t have enough information. They could have come through during Era 1 or before, or between the gap between Era 1 and Stormlight. That is, if they did worldhop in the first place.

Those are my thoughts! Sorry if it’s disorganized; I’m a bit scatterbrained, and my mind’s always racing.

[Pathfinder]

WoB say that the southern scadrialians were the Lord Ruler's control group if he messed things up with the northerners when altering them to survive the ash mounts, so the southerners were what the humans were like from the get go on Scadrial prior to the Lord Ruler. Now how they survived the ashmounts without getting altered, no one definitively knows. Also the listeners and horneaters seem rather adaptable while the southerners were rather not, given they almost died from the drop in temperature. 

[Gasper he/him]

I like this idea. The Horneaters manifest a different digestive tract than a baseline human such as an Azish or North Scadrian, so I would not rule out some ability to use latent Singer DNA.