galendo

My favorite theory on this: There were originally 16 Godspren: the Stormfather, the Nightwatcher, the Sibling, Cruciarch, the nine Unmade, and three others we haven't met yet. Depending on what happened to the missing three, this would also explain why trying to increase the number of Bondsmiths would be considered seditious: it's not that one couldn't theoretically bond a broken spren (Cruciarch, or presumably one of the missing three) or one of the Unmade, but it definitely wouldn't be good for the potential Bondsmith's outlook or sanity. (I'm also partial to my personal theory that Nightblood's origin accounts for one of the missing Godspren/Unmade; but even I have to admit that the theory, no matter how elegant, is unfortunately probably incorrect. Though if I were writing SA, that would totally be the explanation I went with.)

Welcome to the Shard! We're glad to have you! Unfortunately, I've got to pick at your evidence a bit. The Shin sailor from the rattles saw the future, but so did all the other people who saw deathrattles. There's nothing to suggest that the Shin are special in this regard. The "Shin man" in the Cognitive Realm...have you read any of Brandon's other works? I don't want to spoil anything, but there are some hints that that person not only isn't from Shinovar but isn't even from Roshar. To make a long story short, it's plausible that the Shin have access to future sight in one way or another since they definitely have access to the Honorblades, perhaps the missing Shardblades, and who knows what else (though I think you could argue fairly convincingly that they didn't see the whole Desolation thing coming), but we don't really have any evidence that they do. It's an interesting idea though, and we're glad you're here to share it.

I think the idea is not so much to get Rayse to drop his Shard but to answer the question of "okay, how do we deal with this now-Vesselless Shard of Odium" once you kill him. Having a single person pick it up would be a big problem in the long term, because eventually the Shard will twist the vessel (as we know happened with Ati, who per Hoid was very nice originally). Neither is having it just sit unattended, waiting for someone to come pick it up a good idea, and splintering it (and having as a result a massive number of splinters of Odium running around) isn't ideal either. But with a large group of people you could potentially stretch out the corruption out a long time. Perhaps indefinitely if the ex-Vessels have a chance to heal up in the interim between releasing the Shard and picking it up again. Actually, I could see such a situation functioning rather like the Oathpact: a group of like-minded individuals coming together to solve the Odium problem, each sworn to bear the burden indefinitely, one suffering while the others recover. Unfortunately I also see it ending like the Oathpact: as a bandage on a gaping wound, delaying the inevitable but not fixing the problem. Because any solution that says "we'll just keep this going indefinitely" is eventually bound to fail.

I could be wrong -- I'm not completely up on all the latest and greatest WoBs -- but I'm fairly certain that the Nightwatcher was created pre-shattering.

Ugh, please not Navani. I like her best in small doses. Here's keeping my fingers crossed for Rlain.

Another possibility (which I consider more likely), is that you don't hear screaming from Shardplate because the spren that form the Shardplate aren't dead. It has nothing to do with whether they can't talk or aren't sentient or are a different type than Radiant spren, and everything to do with the fact that although they're trapped in that form, they aren't dead (and don't seem to mind being 'trapped').

My own interpretation is that anyone born in Kharbranth, past or future, would be included in Odium's "protection". He explicitly promises to spare the city, and if he were to wipe out the next generation, he would be destroying the city just as surely. But as for Kaladin, I strongly suspect that while Hesia and Lirin might be under Odium's "protection", Kaladin and his brother would be out of luck. True, we don't know Kaladin's birthplace, but I feel like there hasn't been enough foreshadowing for him to be born there. For Hesia there is, IMHO, but not for Kaladin.

Among main characters, Kaladin is still my number one overall, with Dalinar in number two. Adolin is a fairly distant third.

So one possibility that no one's pointed out yet is that the Honorblades did provide massive amounts of Investiture, but only while the Herald was holding it. In which case shutting off the Heralds' invincibility would be a (comparatively) simple matter of disarming them. Admittedly harder to do with Jezrien or Ishar (might literally require dis-arming them), but still well within the bounds of possibility for a thunderclast or Fused. This would also explain why the Heralds didn't have or need Plate. No need to protect the body when you've got massive Stormlight healing, and Plate probably wouldn't much help an Investiture-filled being grip its Blade any tighter. Might even make it worse, if the Stormligiht-granted strength was more than the Plate-granted strength.

Personally I don't find the new version to be as good as the old version, but part of that might be because I read the old version first, though honestly I think the older one flows better and makes more sense in context. Kaladin's fighting for his life against a known mass-murderer who knows more Windrunner tricks than he does. That's not the time to hesitate or show mercy even if he thinks that Szeth's surrender is genuine. I also think a main reason for the change was to eliminate one of the three "fake deaths" in WoR, which are still casting their long shadow over the series. Unfortunately I think the change doesn't really work in this regard because there's no realistic way that Szeth survives the fall. Yes, the reader doesn't see the body and maybe I'm biased from having read the old version first, but his resurrection-after-supposed-death still seems fundamentally the same as Jasnah's or Gawx's. Personally I think that if one were editing WoR, the best way to "undo" one of the three fake deaths would be to undo Jasnah's. She still has to disappear during the ship scene and Shallan has to believe her dead (too much of the book would need to be rewritten otherwise), but adding a brief interlude scene of her and Ivory fleeing through Shadesmar and explaining why she can't get back sooner would go a long way toward mitigating her fake-out death. The longer she stays missing, the more the reader wonders if maybe she's really dead after all and the more of a fake-out her sudden return is. A two- or three-page interlude could largely fix this.

Does anyone know why January 1 is the deadline for publishing in 2020? As opposed to, say, early January or Jan. 8 or something? I mean, clearly the whole proofreading/editing/publishing process takes time, but I'd think that especially this time of year, taking an extra week or so to finish up would dramatically decrease the time pressure he must be under. I doubt the in-book art even gets started until much later. He's still in rough-draft mode. No use commissioning art for a scene that might need to change before publication.

A gun probably wouldn't work. Too many small moving parts. On the other hand, a Shard cannon seems quite possible and effective. One of the issues with cannons historically was getting them strong enough to not blow up in their users' faces. This wouldn't be a problem with a Shardcannon. Another issue with cannons was portability -- they were quite heavy and difficult to transport. That also wouldn't be a problem with a spren. (The ammo itself is another issue, unless you get a second spren to form the cannonball.)

I'll bite. Why do you think that the fletchings couldn't be made out of metal? I'll admit that Shardmetal as we've seen it doesn't seem very flexible, but I would expect that sufficiently thin strands would be somewhat hair-like. Heck, from what we've seen about spren's ability to change their shape, I suspect the spren could grow, retract, or curve fletchings as needed, granting a minimal sort of guidance/course correction for the "arrow".

There doesn't really seem to be a valid, well-supported love interest that will be happening in the next two books. Not that it's impossible, but I'm kind of hoping that it doesn't happen. Brandon is pretty bad at writing romances, so two books in five probably isn't enough time to do it well, and moreover Kaladin doesn't particularly need a love interest to be an effective character. I can't think of a single character (other than Syl) who I think could be developed satisfactorily as a romance option by the end of book five. After the time-skip will be a different story. While presently the Oaths provide plenty of character development, that won't really be the case in the back five, so there will be more need for interpersonal character development -- and romance is the primary interpersonal character development for good reasons. Therefore I'd be somewhat surprised if we didn't see some Kaladin romance in the back five. Lift seems like a promising candidate, but I would note that after a ten-year time-skip and with five full books to build and introduce new characters, pretty much anything at that point is fair game.

Do we know that Honor had bad futuresight compared to Preservation? And more to the point, do we know that Cultivation has bad futuresight compared to Preservation? Because I'm pretty certain that if Tanavast was trying to make a plan based on foretelling the future, he'd be a fool not to get Cultivation's take on the same.

So I'll caveat this by saying that I think there are flaws with the explanation that we've been given for the Recreance. I don't know if it's because some information we have just isn't accurate (Honor's visions, for instance) or if Brandon thought he was doing a better job than he actually did, but the Recreance just doesn't work as it's posited now. With regard to your specific objection however, there are possible explanations. One possibility is that the spren simply cannot make such an oath. We know from Oathbringer that the Stormfather couldn't stop the storm from blowing even if he wanted to. Spren are bound to do certain things as part of their nature, and it's possible that one of those things that Radiant spren need to do is seek out Radiants to bond. Admittedly it doesn't seem like this is the case, as there appear to be plenty of Radiant spren in Shadesmar who aren't actively seeking a bond, but perhaps they're only better at delaying the inevitable. Another possibility is that even if the Radiants made a pact with their spren, there were other unbound spren who would not have been party to such a pact and (especially if they hadn't heard Honor's raving) mightn't have agreed with it. And even if you could get every single spren alive at the time to agree, there's no guarantee that the children of those spren, born thousands of years later, would feel the same obligation. Of course, it's not like the Recreance fixes these problems, either. It didn't wipe out all the Radiant spren, didn't account for future spren births, and just generally seems like an idiotic reaction to Honor's rantings. At best, it kicks the problem several centuries down the road, at the cost of not even being able to explain to future Radiants the danger that they're in. But there is no rational way to explain the Recreance, unless you find "mind control by Odium" to be a reasonable explanation.

In case it's not clear from all the comments above: read Oathbringer before you read more on this site. Glad to have you and all that, but there are too many unmarked spoilers that could potentially decrease your enjoyment of the next book.

Actually, there's one other point to keep in mind: summoning a spren as a Blade requires more than just a basic Nahel bond. The Radiant must advance his bond by way of oaths, and only after his advancement reaches a certain point can the Blade be summoned. And as I recall, deepening the spren bond requires the participation of both the human and the spren. It's entirely possible that a voidspren bond eschews the progression system entirely and doesn't have a way to "reach" the greater level of connection required to summon a Blade. As I said before, it could go either way, and until we get some firm evidence all we can do is speculate.

I guess I'm just saying that there's a lot of fine-grained interpretation going on in the original post, and most of it seems...unsupported? Unsupportable? Impossible to really nail down one way or another. For instance, But yellow-gold is also the color of Odium. So does the yellow-gold smoke refer to the Bondsmiths or to Odium? Or for another example, I have no idea how you even reach that conclusion, other than by a very loose association with the word "radiant". There is no reason, as far as I can tell, to suppose that the towers represent anything concrete rather than a general Tower of Babel- or Icarus-type allusion about the dangers of pride, perfection, and reaching beyond one's grasp. It just seems to me that you're building a complete house of cards and thinking that the structure is much more secure than it actually is.

I dunno. Not to rain on anybody's parade, but it kind of seems like you're trying to reach for analogies that just aren't supported. I mean, sure, that's one possible interpretation, and I agree that the moons and their colors have something to do with the Shards, but I'd hesitate to draw too close a parallel. There isn't a strong correlation between Hoid's other stories and any literal events we have evidence for, so there's no reason to take this one too literally, either.

I think he's asking, could someone bonded to a voidspren summon that spren as a Shardblade? My gut answer is yes, because that seems to be the way the magic works on Roshar. But there isn't any firm evidence either way, as far as I know. It'll depend on what Brandon Sanderson has in mind.

This explains Ulim's arrival nicely. As further support, we also know from Eshonai's interlude that the Parshendi learned to trap spren in gemstones from the humans. (Boy, Gavilar really messed things up there, didn't he?) I think you're dismissing this possibility too easily. The Rosharans only need one habitable world, and it doesn't really matter if it's already inhabited or not. The Alethi are no strangers to taking what they want, and an invading army with scores or hundreds of Shardbearers would cut through, well, any defense that any planet could muster. In fact, that could be exactly why he's so interested in moving spren between worlds -- because a Rosharan invasion without Shards is at a disadvantage wherever they go, but a Rosharan army with the hundreds of sets of Blade and Plate that Gavilar knows must exist from the Stormfather's visions is an entirely different matter. In fact, at this point it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Gavilar interpreted Honor's cryptic "Unite them" to mean "Unite all the scattered sets of Blade and Plate that my Radiants left for you so that you can lead your people to glorious victory over a new world." Both Honor's visions and the Stormfather's comments, if Gavilar is conversing with him, can easily imply that there's no way to save Roshar. So if you can't save Roshar, well, better go conquer someone else.

I'm leaning a bit more toward Venli flashbacks, because Eshonai is dead and Venli really needs some kind of character development that isn't just her reacting exactly the same way that Eshonai would react. Personally I'd have rather have had all Venli from the beginning, or have had Eshonai not get hotswapped with Venli; but if you're going to swap the sisters you might as well commit to the swap. That being said, I don't care that much either way.

It sounds like Gavilar might interested in leaving Roshar. It's a reasonable conclusion to reach, if you've been having visions about how horrific the Desolations were even with the Heralds and the Radiants and talking to the "You're All Gonna Die" Stormfather. They're talking about going somewhere, and Braize clearly isn't far enough. Or perhaps they're hoping to get reinforcements from somewhere. Also, what was the first thing the Parshendi asked about? Maps. Though in all honesty, I suspect it's just an unimportant detail. A dispute over who owns what land sounds like exactly the sort of thing that the Alethi and Vedan use to fuel their conflicts.

So I just finished rereading the three SA books and I've noticed a few things that seem...odd. Since people here like odd things, I thought I'd share. They might just be typos or other continuity errors. They might be me misunderstanding a scene. They might be non-obvious hints about how the magic or the society functions. Ranked in the admittedly quite subjective order of most likely to be an error to most likely to hint at some future revelation, I offer the following observations: 1) In WoR, the chasmfiend's eyes don't burn. Kaladin kills the chasmfiend with a Shardblade to the head as it's swallowing him. The creature dies so fast it doesn't even clamp its jaws shut in its death throes, which means it has to be dying from instant, Shardblade-induced death and not natural damage. But its eyes don't burn. I thought maybe that chasmfiend eyes don't burn, but nope -- the chasmfiend's eyes in WoK burn as expected. Then I thought maybe for some reason a Shardblade through the brain wouldn't cause eyes to burn, but again no -- in one of Dalinar's flashbacks, he kills Highprince Kalanor with a Shardblade "straight through the face", and Kalanor's eyes also burn. This seems very much like an error to me. 2) Spanreed ruby replacement. In OB, When Dalinar and co. don't hear from Kaladin as expected after he jaunts off to Hearthstone, Dalinar and Navani get worried, but not too much because "he'd likely run out of infused rubies." This implies that one can replace one ruby with another in a spanreed. However, this seems to directly contradict the Ars Arcanum, which claims that the process of creating a spanreed "requires splitting the original ruby. The two halves will then create parallel reactions across a distance." If this is correct, then one should not be able to simply swap one ruby in a spanreed out for a different one. Also, as a Radiant, Kaladin should be able to infuse any gem with Stormlight assuming he has any left at all, so claiming that he'd "run out of infused rubies" should be akin to assuming that he'd run out of Stormlight entirely, which is an even more worrisome situation. Therefore Dalinar's shrugging off not hearing from Kaladin because he might have run out of infused rubies seems like an error. That, or I'm really confused about how fabrials/spanreeds work. 3) Rlain doesn't see Lopen's spren. I might be off a little bit on this one, but there's a scene in the chapter "Alone Together" where Rock is helping everyone come to grips with the fact that things are changing faster than they like. Everyone, that is, "except Lopen, who had snuck away from the group and for some reason was lifting up rocks on the other side of the plateau and looking underneath them." Now I took this -- and stiil take it -- as a hint/foreshadowing that Lopen is interacting with a spren the others can't see, satisfying her curiosity in the same way that Kaladin did with Syl before their bond got far along. And this would work great, except for one thing: that this scene is told from Rlain's point of view, and if there's one member in all of Bridge Four who a spren shouldn't be invisible to, it's Rlain. If my interpretation of Lopen's motives are correct -- and if anyone can come up with a better idea, let me know -- then I don't see how Rlain could reasonably be unaware both that Lopen has attracted a spren and that he's interacting with one. Something seems a bit off here. 4) Dalinar speaks of an "old general's trick" that can't be all that old. When Dalinar goes to visit Azir, he refers to using a spanreed for communication by "[flipping] the reed on and off to send signals, an old general's trick for when you lacked a scribe." However spanreeds are only a couple decades old, as near as I can tell. Evi uses one to ask Dalinar what to name Renarin when he's born (eighteen and a half years ago), but I think that's the earliest mention. This isn't necessarily an error, since I don't think there's a hard date on spanreed invention and "old" can be relative, but it's still a weird turn of phrase. Can spanreeds and fabrial science be older than they appear? If so, why did it take them so long to go from spanreeds to other modern fabrials? 5) Renarin sends Stormlight into a wall with physical effects. When they discover the gemstone archive in Urithiru, Renarin causes all the drawers to slide open by "sending a surge of Stormlight through [the wall] that extended from his palms like twin ripples on the surface of a pond." Knowing that Truthwatchers shared a surge with Edgedancers, on my first reading I figured he was using Abrasion to make all the drawers spring free, but nope -- Truthwatchers have Illumination and Progression. The thing is, neither Illumination nor Regrowth seem like they should have much of an effect on a stone wall. Also note that I don't think we've ever seen Stormlight forced into a non-gem object without invoking one of the Radiant's Surges. This leaves several possibilities: 1) it's a mistake; 2) Renarin's and/or Truthwatchers' Surges are weird and can somehow interact with a stone wall; 3) Stormlight can do stuff to objects independent of the Surges. I don't know which of these is correct, or if there's some other explanation, but it seems worth pointing out.