galendo

It's probably a bit of both. Brandon tends to write magic systems that mirror real-life physics, and no (useful) physical process is 100% efficient. So even if Nightblood's "eating" the Investure, he's probably not eating all of it. The black smoke that he bleeds is probably an indication of the Investure working its way back into the ecosystem. It seems to be magical in nature, after all, and it's pretty clearly going away from him. That's actually kind of a cool idea. It would explain what Nightblood's doing on Roshar, too. Granted the most likely reason is just that Vasher brought him and lost him somehow, but this idea definitely seems more clever.

Yes, but the thing to remember is that we're seeing Nightblood being used at times of...high activity, for lack of a better term. For most of the past several hundred years presumably Vasher hasn't been going around murdering random people. I'm pretty sure Nightblood spends something like 99.99% of his time in his sheath. Probably more. So sure, he might pick up a few kills here and there, but the main times of gain are when he's being actually wielded. Which are almost certainly few and far between. Possible, but the thing is that Nightblood just doesn't seem noticeably more powerful in OB than he does in WB. Of course we haven't seen a whole lot of him in OB, but he seems to behave about the same as he did in WB. So unless it was something that was done around the time of his creation (or at least, prior to WB...what was Vasher up to for the past three hundred years?), or unless eating an Unmade had less effect than I would think, then we need to look elsewhere. I'm guessing that he does. But the thing is, he's still got to be getting most of his Investure from his user. Referring again to when Vasher uses him in WB, he probably eats a couple hundred Breaths from Vasher in the time that Vasher kills...I forget but maybe a couple dozen Lifeless. If you were quick and careful you could maybe get it down to more of a 1:1 ratio, but most of the time Nightblood's eating more Investure from his user than he is from his foes (at least on Nalthis; I'm not sure how much Investure a Fused or one of those big rock monsters contains). Huh. That's a great connection, too. I haven't seen the Hemalurgy table, though it seems weird to me that there's a universal bindpoint, especially one as big and obvious as the heart.(why even bother spiking people anywhere else?), but if so then that's a great observation.

I think the point is more that a Shardblade is maybe two meters long while a bead of atium is a fraction of an inch. I can push over a model train easily but couldn't even budge an actual train, and the scale between a bead of atium and a Shardblade is probably similar.

One Breath will be much, much less than an hour of Surgebinding in most cases (though it's worth noting that some things, such as Shallan's illusions, can be maintained for a long time on minimal Stormlight). The only real measure of Breath/Stormlight conversion we have is Nightblood, but at the end of Warbreaker: I'd have to reread the battle at the end of OB to figure out how long Szeth had the sword unsheathed, but assuming it was also an unbroken "matter of minutes", then however much Stormlight he went through would have been equivalent to anywhere from probably a hundred to several thousand Breaths. Again, unfortunately we can't get a tight bound on this number, since at, say, 10 Breaths a second, one additional minute is a difference of at least 600 Breaths and probably 1000 or more. But the point is that a Breath can't be a whole lot of Stormlight, or else Szeth would have died pretty quickly after he lost Nightblood's sheath. We're talking something measured in broams, not in gemhearts.

This post is to theorize about Nightblood: how he was made, and why he's so powerful. Warbreaker spoilers ahoy! What we know about Nightblood's' creation: -- Nightblood was made by a group of scholars trying to make a Shardblade using Awakening (Warbreaker) -- At least one of the scholars had worldhopped to Roshar and seen Shardblades (WoB) -- His creation involved around 1000 Breaths (Warbreaker) -- "Something more" than just 1000 Breaths was required (WoB) -- Nightblood has grown more powerful with time (WoB) Now of course one simple explanation is that Nightblood started off with no more Investure than those 1000 Breaths -- barely a fiftieth of what the god-king has and probably not too far off from a Radiant spren, and grew stronger over time by consuming other Investure. In support of this theory, we know that Nightblood seems to get somnolent after being unsheathed, like a person after a full meal, and we also know that some creatures (like Larken) can eat Investure. This explanation falls a little flat, though, when we consider the sheer amount of growth required to go from ~1000 Breaths to "the most Invested object in the Cosmere". Nightblood doesn't get wielded all that much -- he can't, given the speed at which he goes through his holder's own Breath, so it seems pretty unlikely that he'd have the chance to eat the millions (billions?) of Breaths' worth of Investure required. Having Nightblood gaining power by taking others' Investure has another problem, too -- at least, if his Investure comes solely from Endowment. Endowment's Breaths are all about giving to another person, not taking from another person. If Nightblood were made solely from Breath, this sort of consumption would be antithetical to the nature of Breath and Endowment. But what if his Investure weren't entirely from Endowment? Minor Mistborn spoiler: But I would like to draw your attention to another Shard that is about taking stuff, at least if his injunction to Dalinar to "Give me your pain" and the subsuming of Moash's passion are any indication. Everybody's favorite Rosharan Shard, Odium. It's also worth noting that all of his Unmade are about destruction. Sja-anat corrupts spren, Yelig-nar consumes his users, the Thrill drives entire armies to destroy each other. Why is this noteworthy? Because Nightblood's Awakened Command is to "Destroy evil." It's time to jump off the deep end, folks. What if Nightblood were made not just with 1000 Breaths -- not even primarily with 1000 Breaths -- but using as its base one of the Unmade themselves? Sound crazy? It is. (That's why I entitled this thread Crazy Theory Time.) But that doesn't mean there isn't evidence to support it. First of all, note that there's at least one missing Unmade. One indication is from the chapter headings: Another possible missing Unmade is in the fact that there are apparently only nine of them, when what we know about Roshar suggests that there probably ought to have been ten. So take your pick, whether from the chapter headings or from the nine/ten discrepancy. At least one Unmade is unaccounted for. Second, note that Nightblood bleeds black smoke. You know who else bleeds black smoke? The Midnight Mother, one of the Unmade. Although my memory's not the greatest, I believe that the Unmade and their works are the only instance in all the Cosmere where we've seen black smoke, other than Nightblood. Third, remember that at least one and perhaps all of the Five Scholars had been to Roshar (at the very least, Vasher knows how to get there). Remember too that the Manywar was going on at the time too, leading to an arms race. We know from Warbreaker that there was an arms-race with Lifeless; and we also know that Ysteel, like Vasher and Shashara, knew how to make Awakened swords (presumably Denth and Arsteel did, too). So it seems at least plausible that there would have been an arms-race with Awakened swords as well. So you've got a group of people who've been to Roshar, have observed the shardblade/spren interaction, and who were in the midst of an ever-greater arms race. Investure's a lot easier to get at on Roshar than it is on Nalthis, and at least some spren can already turn into Shardblades. Plus, spren can be stuffed into gemstones for convenient transportation. Why restrict yourself solely to Breaths when you've got all that convenient Rosharan Investure just sitting there? It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch that one of them would have thought to stuff the biggest spren of all -- one of the mindless Unmade -- into a gem for convenient Shardblade repurposing. In this case, the thousand Breaths would have been more of a...modification to the Unmade's original drive than a true Command. Not mindless destroying, but destroying evil. And hey presto, that gives you one of the most Invested objects in all the Cosmere. It gives you, in short, Nightblood.

I agree with you that Venli would have made a good non-Fused villain. Personally I don't like the Fused as antagonists because they're basically faceless enemies without any background (though I assume this will change before the series is finished, since at least some of the Fused actually have names, and maybe eventually characters to go with them). I confess I haven't given much thought as to why Eshonai will get the flashbacks in book 4 rather than Venli, since Venli's flashbacks do seem like they would be more interesting. One possible reason is that by seeing certain scenes from Eshonai's point of view in the flashbacks, but by seeing them in Venli's point of view (as retrospectives) in the main book, we'll get two opposing points of view. It's also possible that Brandon wants to play Venli as an unreliable narrator and will use the contrast between the two points of view to hint to the reader that's what's going on. It's also possible that he wants to hide the mechanics of first encountering Ulim and/or the stormform voidspren from the reader, and that doing so would be difficult from Venli's point of view; but Eshonai would only see the results, not how it happened. We're just going to have to disagree here, I think. I do agree that Eshonai would have been forced to accept a Fused (like all the other remaining Parshendi), so I therefore believe that we'd have gotten the same "going into the Storm and opening yourself up" scene with Eshonai that we got with Venli. I just think the scene would have been stronger, though, mostly because it wouldn't have required a literal deus ex machina to save the viewpoint character from her own ignorance. Your mileage may vary, of course; and if the scene works for you then more power to you. But it falls flat for me. I doubt he felt the need to swap the characters until after WoR came out, when he realized how Jasnah's fake-out death had accidentally cheapened death in SA. At that point he probably thought that bringing Eshonai back would just worsen the problem, so not bringing her back and instead forcing Venli to play her role seemed the better alternative. I think doing so was a mistake, an example of the old adage that "two wrongs don't make a right", but I can see why he felt the need.

If you look at mortality tables, you find out that Brandon has...I think something like an 75% chance of living to complete the Stormlight Archive (aka, the only Cosmere story I really care about), assuming he continues publishing at the rate he has so far. Of course that doesn't take into account non-terminal accidents and illnesses that might inhibit his ability to write, or any additional slowdowns that may occur as he ages; so probably he has around a 70% chance of finishing the series. Maybe 50-60% for Cosmere overall. I'm not sure that worry is the right term, but I do take it into account. The primary way I do so is by never recommending the Stormlight Archive to people Brandon's age or older, even if it would be right up their alley. The reason is that if Brandon has a 70% chance of living to finish the series, and the person Brandon's age has a similar 70% chance of living that long, then the overall probability that a person Brandon's age or older is able to finish the series is less than 50%. I can't in good conscience recommend a series with under a 50% chance of completion.

The WoB you brought up is interesting but not quite compelling. Brandon only says the swap happened "later in the outlining process", which could mean outlining the entire series but could also easily mean outlining OB. He's outlining books 4 and 5 now, so I'm guessing he probably outlined OB after publishing WoR. Too late to go back and change things. You do make a good point about Venli's struggle with her Oaths potentially being more interesting than Eshonai's would have been. We'll have to wait until book four to find out if that's the case or not. I think Eshonai's outsider status (the only non-human Radiant) could've been plenty interesting, but perhaps we'll get enough of that with Rlain. A lot of the reason that I think Venli for Eshonai was a post WoR swap, though, is because of just how much better/more logical the Venli scenes would have been with Eshonai instead. I'm going to quote a bunch of my earlier posts on the topic rather than rewrite the arguments again, partly because it's been long enough since I read OB that my memory's getting a bit fuzzy: I think Brandon is too good a writer to have left in so many plot holes and scenes with insufficient foreshadowing if he'd had an entire book or two to work with beforehand (another way of saying that I think the scenes were clearly first designed/imagined with Eshonai in them, then adjusted to shoehorn Venli in afterward). But I'm with you in hoping that in book 4 Venli's scenes will better suit her character and be more interesting than Eshonai's scenes would have been. There's seven more books, after all. Perhaps Venli will get her chance to shine.

Somewhat traditional, but my favorite Radiant is Kaladin, followed by Dalinar. I like the characters whose honor and Oaths force them to make hard choices, and these two are at the top of the list. I'm still reasonably convinced that Dalinar (or at least the Stormfather) needs to die for the story to reach its full potential, but that's a topic for another day. My least favorite Radiant is Shallan and/or Venli. Shallan because she's a walking collection of bad Hollywood tropes (amnesia in WoK and WoR, multiple personalities in OB), belongs to the least interesting Radiant Order (no Oaths = less moral dilemma = comparative boredom), and is approaching Mary Sue levels of hyper-competence despite poor decision making. Venli because she's a clear hotswap for Eshonai (I'm about 98% sure that Eshonai was supposed to survive after WoR, and Venli was an unfortunate attempt to avert the "death is cheap" pattern established by Szeth/Jasnah in WoR) and because literally every scene in OB with her would have been better and/or more sensible with Eshonai instead. Pattern, however, is probably my third-favorite spren, so Shallan does have that going for her at least. Syl and Wyndle can duke it out for the top spot.

Way of Kings: 10/10. Hard to top this ending, at least if we're restricting ourselves only to the Bridge Four/Dalinar/Sadeas stuff (Shallan and Jasnah fell kind of flat for me) for all the reasons mentioned above by Joy, Xavier Iriarte, et al. Words of Radiance: 9/10. Another pretty great ending. A bit cheesy and reliant on cool one-liners rather than true emotional impact, though the impact is there as well. Not quite as great as WoK's main ending. Oathbringer: 6/10. This ending...worked. That's about all I can say. I might be in the minority here, but I find big, massive battles to be incredibly boring. Dalinar's ideal was great, but all the circumstances surrounding it felt pretty contrived and/or melodramatic. Nothing special here.

I'm going to quote from a post I made in another thread (https://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/65750-ob-the-timeskip-after-ob). The thread was technically about the time skip between Oathbringer and book four, but the thread meandered a bit so there's a fair bit of discussion about the book five skip as well. Here's the pertinent part from one of my posts:

I agree with @kaellok in that I couldn't stand Thomas Covenant and can hardly believe I read six books about him. I almost stopped after that scene in the first book, and in retrospect I kind of wish I had. Other than for a very brief period during the second book (which was actually not that bad on its own, as I recall) when it looked for a brief while like he might repent and grow a spine, the rest of the books were...not that great. I don't remember Lord Foul at all, really, so I can't comment on him explicitly. On the other hand, I see an awful lot of similarities between the Dark One and Odium: 1) Both are embodiments of evil and destruction 2) Who are both vastly more powerful than the heroes supposed to fight them, but 3) Both have been trapped in a prison by their polar opposite 4) Forcing them to rely on their multitudinous legions 5) Which are led by ancient, near-immortal supermen, 6) Who have the advantage of a world unprepared for their coming, 7) Because past actions by the Big Bad tainted the old order I can't really go much farther than that, because we're only three books into SA, but...yeah, lots of similarities. To weigh each one: 1) Dark One vs Odium: I'll give the nod to Odium here, because pure evil has been done so much before. So has pure hatred, too; but at least Odium has a personality. (+2 coolness points for Odium) 2) Another close one, but I'll give the nod to the Dark One here. Pure evil is just more threatening than pure hatred. (+1 coolness points for the Dark One) 3) The Creator vs Honor: Gonna go with Honor here, for the same reason as in 1) (+2 coolness points for Odium) 4) Trollocs/Mrydrael/Grey Men/Darkfriends/etc. vs. the Parshmen and I guess thunderclasts? Definite win for the Dark One's hordes of evil here, in both variety and overall coolness. (+5 coolness points for the Dark One) 5) Forsaken vs Fused: The Forsaken, by a mile. Partly because there's only thirteen of them, partly because each had his/her own personality, partly because learned ancients who sold their souls for power and immortality and who represent the apex of what the protagonists could ultimately grow to become are way more compelling than a bunch of half-mad dead Parshendi. (+5 coolness points for the Dark One) 6) The Third Age vs. Roshar. Definite win for Roshar here. (+5 coolness points for Odium, though I'm not entirely sure he deserves credit for all of Roshar) 7) Tainted saidin vs. the Recreance. Definite win for the Dark One here. Driving all your enemies mad and making them break the world is way more awesome than tricking some Radiants into abandoning their Oaths. The Recreance still doesn't seem believable to me, and it's nowhere near as cool. (+4 coolness points for the Dark One) On the whole, I think the Dark One comes out significantly ahead, at 15 coolness points to 9, and that gives Odium credit for the awesome worldbuilding that is Roshar, which almost seems to be a whole other topic. Take that out, and it's 15 coolness points to 4, which is an even more lopsided victory. Odium had better do a lot of digging himself out of this hole during the next seven books, or it's going to be the Dark One by a mile. (And I actually liked the confrontation between Rand and the Dark One. I found it much more satisfying that some purely physical confrontation. I had some issues with the last book, but the final showdown wasn't one of them.)

My thoughts haven't changed much. I think it was a good book, but not a great book. TWoK was basically 10/10. WoR was probably 9.5/10. At the end of WoR, I would have recommended Stormlight Archive to anyone younger than Brandon Sanderson without qualm. And I do mean pretty much anyone, even if that person wasn't really a fantasy reader. (I decided not to recommend it to older people not due to quality considerations but because of the unfortunate likelihood that either that person or Brandon himself will not live to see the story completed.) Oathbringer changed all that. It was probably a 7/10 -- still a good book, still a fine series, but not an auto-recommend unless the person actively liked reading fantasy. I won't go into all the reasons I found OB lacking here -- I've covered them enough at other points on these boards -- but for comparison, I think I've read WoK something like five times, WoR I think three, and OB...I think I got most of the way through a reread at one point, up to the yawn-tastic battle of Thaylen City; and I'll probably reread it before book four comes out, but I just really can't think of any particular scene or arc in Oathbringer that would make me excited to read it again, if that makes sense. OB was I believe Brandon's most successful release to date. I honestly wonder whether book four will be similarly big, or if a number of readers will just pass.

This could be true, but I see a couple problems with this argument: 1) Would ten Oaths really be too much? We're "using up" Oaths -- or at least Oath progression -- at an average of one per book. Seeing Kaladin swear his Shardblade-Oath was awesome. Seeing Lift swear her Shardblade-Oath was...fine? Nothing special, though. You only get that "wow" moment once per progression level no matter who swears the Oath, and those "wow" moments are contributing a heck of a lot to the series just now. I'm not sure where the "wow" is going to come from in the back half. 2) Would more steps really make the ones we've seen less meaningful? Would you have found Kaladin's scenes at the end of either WoR or WoK less meaningful if you knew there were seven/eight Oaths left rather than two/three? I don't think I would have. The "too much complexity" argument is more persuasive, but I see at least a couple of ways to resolve it: 1) Not every Radiant would have to progress all the way to 10. We've seen already that most Skybreakers stop at 3 or 4, and that at least some Windrunners had difficulties reaching 4. It would probably be important for narrative reasons for at least one Radiant to reach 10, but there would be nothing wrong with stopping most earlier, at wherever the story most needed them to halt. 2) There could have been 10 total Oaths, and each Order chose a subset of them. This would mean having some overlap between Orders, but we're almost there already. (There isn't really that much difference between "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves" and "I will remember those who have been forgotten", for instance.) With 10 total Oaths (or 10 total Ideals) and every Order sharing the first Oath, there are a minimum of 9C4 = 126 different combinations and a maximum of 2^10 = 1024 possible combinations (reduces to 386 if you want to limit each Order to a maximum of five Oaths). Surely there are at least ten interesting Orders in those combinations somewhere. There are probably more ways to resolve the complexity issue while still keeping 10 significant when it comes to Oaths, so I don't see the complexity problem as insurmountable.

Not a pattern exactly, but everything else magic-related reflects the number 10, so having the Oaths and only the Oaths reflect the number 5...it's not a pattern, but it is a break in a pattern, and requires some sort of explanation. (I mean, the explanation could just be that Brandon couldn't think of more than 4 Oaths for each Order, but that seems a little bit like a cop-out. Both as an explanation and as an instance of world-building.) This could be, but then the very WoB you quoted goes on to say that Braize is 9-centric. It seems a bit weird to suppose that the entire Rosharan system is 10-centric (10 gas giants, 10 surges, etc.) except for the one planet where Odium hangs out, unless Odium himself is the cause of this difference.

So we've seen that some Shards have preferences for certain numbers. Preservation likes sixteen, Honor likes ten, Odium likes nine, etc. I'm going to propose that Cultivation likes either four or five. On Roshar, there are a lot of magically significant tens: ten surges, ten gemstones, ten Orders, ten Heralds. Almost everything magic-related involves the number ten. But there's one glaring exception: there are only five Radiant Oaths per Order. How do we get just five Oaths? Originally I thought there must be more Oaths to discover (giving our Radiants something to work toward on the back five books), but that's looking less and less likely. How can we explain this discrepancy? Well, there is another Shard on Roshar...and the Oaths are, more or less, cultivating the Radiants toward their Orders' ideals. At first glance, one might therefore be tempted to conclude that Cultivation's "shardic number" must be five, because there are five Oaths per Order. But the first Oath is common among all Orders, leaving only four steps of progression. So it wouldn't be surprising if Cultivation's favorite number were four, either. (I also note that there's a bit of nice meta-reasoning in support for five, too. That the Stormlight Archive is planned as ten books seems very intentional -- but it's also broken down into two sets of five. Hmmm....)

This could be a possibility but not, realistically, until the back five books. Right now there is neither the time nor the need for such a development, and it'll take at least one book's worth of setup just to develop the need for the Radiants to do that and establish the possibility that they can. Don't expect such a development until book 6 at least, and more realistically book 7 or 8.

It could happen, but: 1) We've already seen Jasnah become queen. Repeating the arc with Rysn would seem...repetitive. 2) Why Rysn? Nothing about her suggests "queen" to me, particularly. She isn't even a Radiant, at least not yet. Though I will admit I (mostly) expect that to change. 3) The current queen is alive and well. Not that she couldn't die suddenly in battle, but we've already seen that with Elokhar. Repeating the arc with Fen would seem...repetitive.

Seems vaguely plausible, but I don't really see it happening for meta-reasons. Namely, if Brandon were going to actually play up the whole "something is wrong with the afterlife" idea, he had a much better opportunity to do so with the Knights Radiant, Braize, and the Recreance/Oathpact (basically, by making the KR go to Braize and get tortured along with the Heralds). So plausible, but not likely.

I hope you're right. I remember Dalinar was having some difficulties charging Kaladin, but I think I attributed it more to the effort of doing something new and the whole Thaylen City battle earlier, the same way that someone who ran a marathon the day before might be exhausted by a two-mile jog the following day. On the one hand, the super-boost does seem a lot like a scaled-up version of Kaladin's Oath-swearing, which is very temporary. On the other, Dalinar can certainly boost Radiants/gems on command, and in literally every other instance of Radiants learning their powers that we've seen, they start off clumsy and get better over time (generally way better), so I think that what we see Dalinar do for Kaladin is the very minimum that he'll be able to do in the future.

I agree that is what appears to be happening so far. Whether that's a good thing for the story or not is another question. My sneaking suspicion is that Infinite Stormlight Well Dalinar is going to get real boring real fast. Personally, I'm worried that he's already gone too far.

Yeah, I don't really see Kaladin switching sides any time soon in any believable way. He's all about protecting people, and Odium is...very much not. Heck, it's pretty strongly implied that the reason Kaladin couldn't get to his fourth Oath is because he just can't give up on protecting people. Although, now that I think about it, maybe it is possible. Think the bargain made with Mr. T, but on a bigger scale. "Hey, Kaladin, wanna protect all the people on Roshar from this senseless conflict? All you have to do is help me get free...." Though knowing Kaladin, he'd probably insist on protecting the spren, too, and then the agreement would fall apart. Anyway, as far as the claim that "one of them will destroy us", I'd take it with a grain of salt. It could be metaphorical. It could refer only to the Aimians, or even just one branch of Aimians. It could be speculation. It could be wrong. (It could just be good copy.) Be careful what you assume based on it, is what I'm saying.

The Ardentia is definitely aware. One of the ardents measuring flamespren in WoK wonders whether anyone's tried eating in Shadesmar, which means that they're aware of a way to get there. And judging by the Shadesmar scene in OB, it seems like you can't spend all that much time in Shadesmar without running into some weird and otherwise inexplicable things, including a bunch of Cosmere-aware individuals, spren and otherwise. I'm guessing if our Radiants had asked just a few more questions at the lighthouse or the spren city, they'd be aware of other worlds by now.

That and if you slip when you're using a regular knife, you've got a nick on your hand. Slip when you're using a Shardblade, and you're no longer a craftsman. See, I can totally picture a Sylshovel. I mean, she'd give Kaladin smack for it, but I'd guess Syl would be down for that, especially if it meant protecting people. And Wyndle didn't seem to object -- too much -- to becoming a Shardfork.