tareth

Gavilar - To Die

The evil rival of The Church of the Stick would be some sort of following of Nightblood. "I'm better than a stick. I'm a sword."

When I first read the prologue, I was guessing Jasnah was going to have Dalinar's wife assassinated (it would be an interesting potential tie-in for Dalinar's Nightwatcher visit). But, rereading it, it's probably Elhokar's wife. "Spying on the wife of the heir to the throne," "I will arrange for one of my sister-in-law's maids to be released..."

I'm actually toying with the idea of Taln = Odium (meaning that Odium is pretending to be Taln). I'm not quite sure about this, and it would be a looooooong shot at best, but I like long shots. Very few people would know if Taln is actually Taln. Hoid is the only person who could tell who he is, and Hoid isn't always talkative.

Hmm. I can't imagine Hoid sticking around near Taln if this were the case, given that Odium is something that seems to actually cause him to fear for his life.

Q: 12. Are all the heralds aware that Taln is back?

 

A: If that person actually IS Taln. I'm not saying he's not, but he may not be who you would think he is.

 

 

@tareth, I believe the reason physical land corresponds to cognitive ocean and vice versa is because even on the smallest piece of land, there are MANY things with cognitive aspects. Take a beach - it's possible that every single grain of sand is an individual sphere in Shadesmar. Add some buildings and other non-animate matter (furniture, for example), and it's easy to see why Kharbranth, for example, would be an ocean. There are just too many spheres.

Furthermore, when Shallan Soulcasts the ship, she drops on what looks like ground made of obsidian. Devoid of cognitive aspects. Or, if you want to think of it this way, the entire ocean is a single gigantic cognitive piece; we don't think of oceans, lakes, and seas as a collection of drops of water, we see it a single entity. 

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say (or I did a bad job of explaining. Probably that). 

Let me try to expand a bit:

My thinking is that oceans of cognitive aspects/beads don't work like oceans in the normal physical sense. Instead of simply following gravity and collecting in, say, a basin, these cognitive beads are bound more by their relative position in the physical realm. 

Let's pretend for a moment we're standing over a flat slab of obsidian that spreads as far as the eye can see in the physical world. If you were to dump an oceans worth of water over it, the water would eventually spread out over this surface (we're going to pretend like dumping an ocean on top of obsidian wouldn't do any damage to it...). 

Now let's do the same thing in Shadesmar. Except, instead of water, we're going to pretend that a continents worth of cognitive beads materializes on top of us. Instead of spreading out over the obsidian, the beads are going to stay clustered around their relative positions in the Physical Realm. I sort of imagine the "ocean" of beads to look more like a very large cluster of bubbles bubbling up over the surface of Shadesmar.

Plus, the small minds she sees there, what she speculates to be fish, float beneath the obsidian surface.

 

This almost tripped me up, but the quote from the book (hardback page 119) is:

Smaller ones were scattered about her feet, dozens upon dozens, but so small she almost couldn't make them out. The minds of fish?

 

That doesn't sound like they're floating beneath the surface to me.

Anyway, again, my reasoning for all this is the way the oceans in Shadesmar look like they were drawn on top of an existing surface, which gives me this visualization of the oceans bubbling up over the obsidian instead of an ocean sitting in some continent sized basin.

Especially given the mountains underneath the Purelake. Which, except maybe for the center, should not be mountainy.

Was anyone else not entirely convinced that Darkness is actually Nalan? He didn't actually even say that he was--he just let Szeth draw his own conclusions. I mean, it's clear that the Heralds are capable of being selfish, giving up, and other human things, but Nalan going around and executing judgment on Surgebinders doesn't sound very Herald-ish. That along with giving Szeth (who's pretty crazy at this point) the most dangerous sword in the cosmere, just feels wrong.

 

I have no other evidence to support my assumption, but I think Darkness is probably somebody running around with Nalan's Honorblade and delusions of grandeur (or nefarious plans of his own) or a rogue Skybreaker just pretending to be Nalan to further his own ends.

 

Thoughts? Anything I'm missing?

He seems to be under the impression that letting Surgebinders run loose will bring on another Desolation (given what he says to Lift in the interlude). As a Herald, he would have a bit more knowledge of how Desolations work than I do, so, maybe there's justification for it? I don't know, honestly. Those are my thoughts, though.

I've probably been spending way too much time thinking about these maps, but here are a few things I've been pondering. 

I'm not sure if this has already been discovered, but I think I found a good candidate for the exact location of Urithiru on the Silver Kingdoms map:

This seems like the perfect place to me. It's directly between Tu Bayla and Triax in modern Roshar (which roughly corresponds to what the scholars determined from the height of the sun) and in the Silver Kingdoms era it doesn't sit within any particular nations borders (similar to Washington DC in the US, except with states instead of nations). There's also some really nice looking mountain ranges, and it looks plausible for Szeth to travel from there to Vedenar or Kharbranth in a relatively short amount of time (not really sure if he knew where to find Taravangian at the time). 

Also something that's been bothering me with the Shadesmar map that I haven't seen mentioned: it looks like the "ocean" representing Roshar has been placed directly on top of an existing landscape. It's like someone drew some mountains and then dropped the the outline of Roshar on top of it and called it a day.

So this has me thinking: what if that's literally how Shadesmar works? An existing landscape with these "oceans" of cognitive bead things floating above it?  It's definitely not a direct inversion, since there's mountains where the Purelake is. Maybe Shadesmar was something else before it became the Cognitive Realm? 

There's my idle speculation for the day.

I am looking at the old map and the new black and white map and the only thing I see different really is the misted mountains.

 

Also, I never realized before that Roshar the continent is in the Southern Hemisphere. Otherwise, I may be going nuts, and the map to focus on might be the colored one.

There's a couple other names that have been added in the color one. Berizhet, in Liafor. Zawfix, in Azir. But as far as I know these aren't particularly important. </shrug>

Not really important at all, but "The Misted Mountains" over on the eastern side of Shinovar made me smile.

EDIT: Also, has anyone ever noticed that Roshar looks like a sort of stretched and twisted version of Antarctica? I don't think it would take a whole lot of morphing to make this look like Roshar.

1. Did the Stormfather exist a separate entity prior to tanavasts death?

 

2. He is the "spen of the almighty" i.e. "I AM THE MEMORY MEN CREATE FOR HIM, NOW THAT HE

IS GONE." Could some of his super dickery be because the personality of the almighty is being overwritten by current perceptions of the almighty, which are rather pragmatic and self-serving?

And on the subject of the Stormfather:

Did all bondsmiths bond with him? This epigraph leads me to believe that the answer is possibly yes..

But as for the Bondsmiths, they had members only three, which number was not uncommon for them; nor did they seek to increase this by great bounds, for during the times of Madasa, only one of their order was in continual accompaniment of Urithiru and its thrones. Their spren was understood to be specific, and to persuade them to grow to the magnitude of the other orders was seen as seditious.

 

This might mean that the Stormfather could be bonded to multiple Bondsmiths, and would also imply that he was around (at least in some form) before Honor was splintered. Could other spren bond to more than one human?

Or were there, at one point, multiple Stormfather-like spren floating around before the Recreance? 

Did bondsmiths use shardblades?

This also might have something to do with whatever unique ability it was that let the Bondsmiths figure out how to "defeat" the Voidbringers.

Hmm, I've just read it some place, but I think the main reason is that he has nightblood. That doesn't necessarily point to that though... 

Given that Vasher is on Roshar, the easiest answer is that Vasher brought Nightblood with him and then Nalan ended up with it at some point after that. 

I think I read a topic yesterday, though, in which someone theorized that Nalan == Yesteel. The timing probably doesn't work for it, but I like this theory anyway.

After reading WoR I was reminded of this topic. I think 

 

 

refers to Syl when she was still trying to protect Kal from the highstorm in the chasms after Kal betrayed his oaths and most of her intelligence and memories were withdrawned from her:

 

 

So I guess death rattles are indeed predictions of future events.

The death rattle almost certainly refers to Kaladin defending Elhokar against Moash. Moash saved Kaladin's life in WoK, and the chapter Kaladin learns that Elhokar was responsible (albeit somewhat indirectly) for Roshone showing up in his home town (and also deciding that Elhokar needs to die) is named The One Who Killed Promises (chapter 62, page 746 hardback). 

"All is withdrawn for me" -- Kaladin is pretty beaten up in the scene, and has lost his powers.

"The storm responds" would be referring to what happens after Kaladin speaks the third oath. 

This is something a lot of people have discussed recently, and the evidence for it is pretty strong. 

EDIT: Here's one of those discussions.

Also (Mistborn/HoA spoilers obviously, hope I formatted correctly):

 

 

Q: The ending of mistborn was hidden in the first chapter epigraphs. Is there something similar to that in The Way of Kings

A: There are but they are hidden in different places. The last chapter of the stormlight archive is somewhere in these two books.

The wording of this answer made me think of the way the epilogue of WoT was described in the first book of the series.

I guess it really depends on what Brandon defines as "last chapter," because he was pretty explicit in saying that rather than "the end of the series". If epilogue and last chapter are synonymous (Wikipedia claims that it is, not sure how Brandon thinks of it), then I highly doubt the Hoid/Kaladin story works since that includes a whole lot of climax in it, and epilogues as a rule of thumb don't cover climaxes.

At the very least, I think the story contains a healthy dose of foreshadowing. Just not necessarily for the end of the series.