Sunblesser

not to mention that the shardblades are all relics of the knights radiant, and thousands of years old. whereas it is entirely possible that there are tons of unnaccounted for shardblades, seeing as how dalinar sees near two-hundred of them on the day of recreance, while in his own time, he knows of less than one hundred in all of roshar. @CrazyRioter obviously the details of shallan killing her father could be tweaked a bit, i like the idea that she conked him on the head. but my scenario doesn't have to rely on her brothers knowing anything about the shardblade, nan balat could have just seen it and wanted anyone but shallan to pick it up.

i think it's easiest to say 'how szeth became a surgebinder', since surgebinder is a catch-all for those who can control the surges, and the orders of the knights radiants are all made up of particular types of surgebinders

h'okay, so, here's what i'm thinking: one of shallan's flashbacks is happening, she's happily sketching away when she decides she wants a nice iced tea, or something, it's not important. she goes into the house and hears yelling, cringing to hear nan balat and her father arguing. the arguing descends into the sounds of screaming and fighting and shallan rushes into her father's study to see him beating nan balats leg with a chair. or something, again, not important. scared as hell/damnation, she finally decides to do something and takes a sword off the wall, intending to draw her fathers attention away from nan balat. holding it before her, she yells, "Father! Leave him alone!" he turns around and, in a rage at seeing his daughter holding a weapon, comes toward her. unthinking, shallan squeals and.... stabs her father in the chest, damaging his hidden soulcaster. he falls to the ground, and a shardblade condenses from mist to land next to him. nan balat is in immense pain, and screaming for his brothers, and as they enter, they see shallan standing over their father's dead body, holding a glistening shardblade.

too bad szeth couldn't make it into suvudu's last cage match

totally. raoden just about killed himself and galladon with his first aon that worked

so the origins of the modern aonic people are uncertain... i wonder if they were even aonic before they came to elantris. since the aons have a geographical connection to the area around elantris, i would be surprised if they'd used the same aons as we see in the book. i'd bet that even the first of them to become elantrians would have had to proceed through trial and error to figure out what they could do. but that's a little ot. i do like the idea of the original elantrians being killed off in the backlash of the splintering of aona's shard. the idea that elantris was just sitting their waiting for the immigrants who became the arelish never sat right with me. plus, we really have no idea how long ago odium visited sel. it could have easily been in the prehistory of the arelish peoples, wherever they came from.

well, i can answer one question at least. marsh's atium comes from the kandra at the end of HoA who is trying to buy supplies with it (stupid seconds). he burns a little of it during his fight with elend, and he tells elend he got it from a kandra. not sure how much atium that was, but if marsh does have a way of doing the immortality trick, it's plausible that he had enough to survive the three hundred years until AoL. i think at one point, marsh states that he'd been given at least twenty new spikes, which i take to mean twenty spikes on top of the ones regular inquisitors got, which is enough spikes to have nearly all the powers, i should think.

are they not the ones who migrated from the east to find elantris already standing?

i'm really interested to see how dalinar's character will develop without his shards. it's interesting because dalinar has been acting honourably for a long time now, but he has no spren. we know syl hates the shardblades, or at least dislikes them, maybe now that dalinar is de-sharded, he will attract an honorspren? i'd really like to meet more of them. super-cool sidekick idea. not even really a side-kick, the nahel bond is more like a partnership.

Which he could have prevented or even survived, had he chosen to. He chose to die

a good theory. the constant reference to adolin's turnstile-style romances was always kind of confusing to me. i first just thought of it as some minor character development between dalinar and his two sons, but i like the idea that there's more to it. his words in the epilogue reveal that taravangian is remarkably well informed concerning the shattered plains. wouldn't be surprised if this is the case.

Well if there are ten unmade, I would look to the ten fools to find clues as to their identities. Both of them seem like the opposites of the heralds. The ten fools as the theological opposite, and the unmade as the literal

for some reason, yelig-nar, and the two references he gets, gives me the impression that he, and the unmade, might be something like the inchoroi from bakker's second apocalypse. the mention of the 'wails of those he consumed', even the name 'unmade' shares an aesthetic with the meaning of inchoroi which is 'people of emptiness'. it's interesting, because if sanderson is the light side of brilliant characterization, awe-inspiring plotting and worldbuilding, and unique and thought-provoking religions and magic systems, then bakker is the dark side. the dark, dark, dark side. the unmade definitely sound as though they're voidish, and the opposite of what surgebinders would be about. honor binds things, odium unmakes them. this would still be distinct from ruin however, as unmaking something is quite a bit different from breaking something down into smaller and smaller pieces. it's a reversal, and this fits with odium's intent, because if you hate something through and through, i think you would be trying to take it completely out of existence, as if it never were. you would want it to be unmade. in this, it is quite a bit more devastating and unstoppable than ruin, which accounts for why hoid would consider it the most dangerous and terrible of the shards. the unmaking of things is probably odium's ultimate goal, but before you mention it, this doesn't preclude odium doing hateful things in the interim. like torturing heralds in fire and brimstone for thousands of years while they wait to fight against your minions, hopping around killing your old rivals, and just generally being a twat. edit: ruin is a rational, calculating destruction, and odium is an irrational, savage destruction.

Thus, shardholders Aona, Skai, Ati, Leras, and Tanavast are dead. Good idea to make that distinction, though I'm not convinced that honor is splintered. It's a possibility, but I'm reserving judgement pending new info.

actually, i don't think size was mentioned as an issue, other than having to be light enough to be carried. what the soulcasters needed were stones that had natural variability, which were easier to soulcast into food. as for the OP - military section, Kurkistan addressed most issues regarding the feasibility of soulcasting bridges and fortifications on the plains. i'd just like to point out that such undertakings would likely require elhokar to either take direct control of the entire war effort, or appoint someone as high prince of war (wink wink, nudge nudge). i think maybe you could be of great value advising dalinar on the best strategy to pursue, tortellini. another thing you have to consider, however, is that the parshendi have been relatively quick to counter any new tactics employed by the alethi. if you soulcast the permanent bridges to stone, the parshendi might just come along during a highstorm and soulcast them into smoke, and you've just lost some valuable raw material. you would have to place permanent guards on those bridges, housed in highstorm proof guardhouses, or maybe even make covered bridges. it'll be interesting to see how dalinar goes about this in the second book. edit: just wanted to add that i think the reason the war on the shattered plains is so poorly run is a direct result of the highprinces way of thinking. pooling their resources is so abhorrent to them, they feel justified in sacrificing efficiency.

and i hope it's over, because it would be awesome if i was right about ishar being in the prologue. however, the way peter first replied makes it seem like there is only four.

yes, but how? did they send a note? or did they say, strut off with gavilar's shardblade held high? szeth says they fled the scene and tossed away his oathstone, though, so the latter doesn't seem very likely quite the mystery, what happened to gavilar's shards. i remember being shocked during my latest reread when i realized that elhokar didn't have gavilar's shards.

interesting idea about the spren. the function of the angleheads, or 'truthspren' seems to be to grant access to shadesmar. trapping them in a gem could take away the need to offer a truth in order to be allowed into shadesmar, making it just a matter of offering the stormlight in your fabrial to the spren of whatever you're trying to change. this would still make soulcasting a conspiracy of sorts, perpetuated by whoever it was that first figured out how to trap truthspren. which could be whoever founded the ghostbloods, or perhaps one of the heralds (just spit-balling with that one). if truthspren were trapped in fabrials to create modern soulcasters, then i wonder if other kinds of spren, such as honorspren, could be trapped to create fabrials that grant windrunning powers, and if that's what szeth's oathstone is. either way, they're kind of starting to seem rather sinister, when considered in that light.

and it's just coincidence that they're all ardents? i don't think that would be very likely. there's too many soulcasters around, enough for over one hundred thousand people to be fed by them at the shatterd plains, for them all to be like jasnah and shallan. part of this series concerns the re-emergence of the powers of the knights radiant, and it would be at a cross-purpose to have such a large group of knights already there in the background, imo.

Just wondering how everybody is pronouncing this word. I started out thinking it should be said A-hari-a-sham, or A-hari-eh-shem, or something similar, but then i remembered that in Alethi the sh sound is made by a single letter, so unless the word derives from a different language, the -tiam ending would be pronounced as it is spelt. Brandon says that he doesn't often worry about proper pronunciation of in-world words, but with this one i think it would be interesting to hear how the author pronounces it. it seems so awkward to me that i keep thinking there must be a trick to pronouncing it.

whew, that was a lotta reading. so many of your questions are RAFO things, i think, you might have to live with some delayed gratification here. i've replied in bold where i thought i could help clarify.

Brightness Hashal (the lighteyes whose husband commands the bridgemen after lamaril's death) calls it the War of Reckoning. don't know if that is an official name, or just informal nomenclature that's used around the camps.

i take the idea that the heralds have gone insane from brandon's pitch for the series. it was either in the brandonothology or on his website. though he could have changed his mind since then, it seems to me that the Heralds would have been headed toward madness already, as CrazyRioter says, and the thousands of years spent walking roshar couldn't have helped.

it just seems to me that putting the drunk in there and having him speak so cryptically would be a weird thing to do if there wasn't more to it. of course, maybe i'm the weird one here. just cuz i don't think hoid would be - or even just act - drunk, doesn't mean he wouldn't do it, if he had a good reason.

true that Kuri. Brandon does an amazing job of basing his magic systems in science, but at some point, the only answer there can be is "It's magic, bitches!"