Smidge

1. Brandon has said before that unlike Mistborn / Scadrial the magic in Stormlight was made to come from people's actions rather than genetic factors. Link. 2. I think you're dead on here. Wyndle's comment tells us that at least some spren can make a choice who to bond. It makes sense that any honorable people of influence would have a spren choose to bond them.

*Gasp* But human transmutation soulcasting is a taboo! Szeth has already done something functionally similar in lashing people into the sky. I wouldn't be surprised if Brandon actually does something similar with transportation - he pulled some fun stuff with Gateways in WOT after all. This all depends on how transportation functionally works of course, but I won't be surprised if there's some teleport cheesing towards the end of the Stormlight Archive.

Soulcasting air -> fire might also give a similar result. Especially with Jasnah's ranged soulcasting thing. damnation OP Soulcasters. Soulcast the air inside someone's lungs into stone/fire/water/oil/whatever to drown them. Depending how tension works (does it strengthen as well as stiffen?), maybe you could make a thread or wire stiff to aid in garrotting someone, or hang it horizontally for people to run into and break their legs or neck. Or just stiffen someone's clothes so they can't move.

I do enjoy the idea of Szeth-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-son-Kholin. I'm imagining him gradually deciding he's dishonored his grandfather, then great grandfather, and so on until the reveal... But I think I prefer my way with the Elhokar/Szeth ship. Imagine: Hello. My name is Elhokar Kholin. You killed my father. Prepare to... Marry me? (I hope no one takes this seriously )

Nah, Kaladin becomes a Knight Kholin when he marries Jasnah. Also Shallan marries Adolin, and Lift marries Renarin. No need for secret parentage. Things could get tricky though if Szeth bonds a spren... I guess he'd have to marry Elhokar? Awkward. -- There's so little to go on about Dalinar's wife. I could see her maybe being part of a secret society, which could give various people motive to kill her. If she was murdered though I feel we'd have heard about it from Adolin, so if she was actually killed it must've been made to look like an accident or natural causes. I'm gonna throw out a completely wild guess though and say she was actually a Herald, and faked her own death.

Remember that childhood fear of swallowing watermelon seeds growing a watermelon inside your stomach? Childhood fear, meet progression! Though it seems to work by making things exposed to its light grow, so this might involve sticking a hand down someone's throat.

The king's soulcasters do their work at night or otherwise try to stop people from watching their work. It's generally assumed this is because they want to keep their work and methods secret. Maybe also to hide the appearance of the soulcasters themselves. What if they have a more practical reason - it's harder to soulcast with a lot of people watching? Soulcasting takes place in the cognitive realm, which is effected by the minds of people in the area. Could a lot of people watching an object anchor it more the way it is?

Speaking of torture, with abrasion you could completely coat a room to make it completely frictionless, then throw someone in there. They'd just keep sliding around bouncing off the walls forever! Actually air resistance would slow them eventually... So just cover the person completely instead. They'd slide around forever and never even be able to stand, never sleep 'cause they're always bumping into walls. Actually it might not even be that impractical to make someone's arms and legs frictionless to stop them going anywhere... unless they could worm themselves around using only their torso. Plus I imagine it would be hilarious watching them flail their limbs around trying to get up. If you want to weaponize abrasion, here's something for if you're in an enclosed room: get a ton of small objects - spheres would work well but you'd need a lot. Make them completely frictionless, then scatter them on the ground. They'd keep bouncing/sliding around, and if anyone stepped on one they'd slip. It's like the superpowered version of scattering marbles.

As everyone knows, pocket sand is already a devastatingly effective weapon. Now imagine if you were to add a full lashing to the sand as you threw it. Not only would your enemy be blinded, but they would have grains of sand stuck to their eyeballs - ouch! And however they might try to blink it out, it wouldn't go away until its stormlight ran out. Maybe you could also use both a full lashing and basic lashing to make the sand float in mid air like a deadly eyeball landmine. Anyone else got any ideas for unconventional uses of surges?

It could just be that Calamity chooses the powers that it gives people rather than there being any sort of rule to them like there are with weaknesses. So Nightwielder could be explained just by Calamity thinking it was a neat idea to give a guy with a fear of sunlight the power to block out the sun (perhaps because with any other powers he'd be a pretty lame epic with an obvious weakness).

Yep, from what I've read of the genre this sort of limitation is pretty common. Without these limitations simple powers can become overpowered and broken, eg. Steelheart could instantly kill anyone by turning them to steel, Regalia could use the water inside people's bodies to tear them apart from within. A large number of powers become instantly lethal without this sort of limitation, so the options are: - a bunch of cool powers aren't included in the story because of what they could do when used effectively. (the lame powers approach) - they are included and it isn't explained why no one ever uses them to insta-'splode people (the stupid plot hole approach). - some handwaving is done where powers can't be used this way. This is what we got. We may get some story explanation later eg. whatever Calamity's motives are in gifting powers means it doesn't want that sort of thing to happen so doesn't let it.

Has anyone considered that maybe the stick has a good point? Maybe being a stick is better than being fire. Maybe being a stick is better than being a lot of things. Haven't you ever in your life thought: "Gee, I'd much rather be a stick right now"? I thought so. Perhaps stickyness is the ideal state of being. When one reaches Nirvana, they become stick. Instead of asking the stick to become fire, we should be asking if we can become stick. Join the cult of the stick my friends!

I really don't like the 'shardspear' theory. Assuming one were to work the same way as a shardblade (as you describe) it would be far inferior to a shardblade, in some ways worse than a regular spear... Spears are mostly thrusting weapons not slashing. With a shardblade a dozen armoured people can be killed in an instant with a single wide slash. With a spear equivalent you could kill 1, and only if you hit them right in their spine. And if you hit somewhere else it'll just disable that part of their body, whereas with an actual spear a stab to the femoral artery for instance will take out their leg as well as cause a lot of blood loss, death if they don't get it treated. While the idea of Kaladin getting a unique weapon that he already has mastered is cool in theory, in practice a shardspear would really suck.

There are other explanations for Darkness knowing things besides being a herald. He wouldn't be the only character - we still don't know how Szeth knows the things he seems to know about lashings / voidbringers. There are other immortal characters floating around (Axies). Who knows what the old magic could do regarding knowledge or immortality. There's secret societies floating around (Ghostbloods, Envisagers). There's the dreams Dalinar gets - if this sort of thing isn't unique Darkness could be getting his info from there. It's certainly possible Darkness is a herald, but there are definitely other possibilities as well and it's hardly the sure thing some people are treating it as. All the heralds being characters in book 1 is another misconception that seems to be getting thrown around a lot. I think this comes from this Brandon quote: Mentioned or shown. Obviously all the heralds are mentioned in the book, we know all their names, after all. And 4 are shown that we know - Kalak, Jezrien, Taln, and very likely Shalash. Also they are all quite literally shown in the chapter heading pictures. This quote is not saying that every herald makes an on-screen appearance in book 1.

I suspect pairing fabrials are strongly limited in the force they can transmit probably relating to stormlight usage / gem size. They are after all being used only for lifting feathers at present. It probably takes a gemheart to lift something as heavy as a sword. Presumably they use up stormlight to operate so energy isn't actually gained by any manipulations. Also as far as how the positioning works it's probably relative to the planet - that's how time bubbles in alloy of law work.

Brandon's next magic system will be powered by bad internet comments. The more downvotes the more powerful... the world is ruled by trolls.Actually is this our world? It might explain a lot...

It seems everyone is jumping the gun here and assuming Renarin sees a radiant spren... Another possibility is it's a spren he sees during his weakness periods, which like deathspren or drunkspren are only visible to those in certain states.

I support this theory - see: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/2108-can-windrunners-make-shockwaves/ If nothing else, without any extra usage the pressure surge is very underpowered (practically useless for windrunners), and underutilized. There's a lot of cool usages you could get out of a 'pressure' power, it would be a shame and a complete waste of potential if there's nothing more to it. In any case, they may not be described to us so far because all we've heard of so far is the lashings, and the other powers are not described as 'lashings' because they're not actually 'lashing' anything.

I was wondering if we've been taking for granted how ridiculously obedient Szeth is. It seems hard to believe that level of complete obedience would be followed by all the Shin Truthless... Sure they might be very obedient, but to the point where they'd weep while following orders to kill innocents? We know something different than a nahel bond is going on with Szeth to give him his Windrunner powers. Via the nahel bond like in Kaladin's case, people attract spren via some 'honourable' quality. Could what's giving Szeth his windrunning powers (special shardblade or otherwise) do the reverse and gift/bind/influence him to some 'honourable' quality? Then again, maybe that's not likely as it could take away from his characterization, but I thought the idea was worth throwing out there.

My interpretation/guess was that Szeth took up a shardblade because he believed the voidbringers were coming back. Shin become truthless for carrying a weapon - perhaps justified in their culture if the only use is against people but not if they need to fight voidbringers.

You are aware there's a mistake in the ars arcanum and #2's attribute should actually be just/confident and #5's learned/giving?

I doubt we'll see another 'both shards choosing the same champion' situation in Stormlight simply because it's already been done before. I think it's more likely that Brandon will do something different this time, either no champions or different champions. Although we do have 3 shards on Roshar, would Cultivation also get a champion? Or would the ideal 'good' champion be of both honor and cultivation? Could be interesting.

I doubt they're trying to kill her for her research on the voidbringers - Kabsal doesn't learn from Shallan that she's researching them until fairly late in the book after he's already tried to get her to eat a lot of bread. It doesn't seem that they really know much about what she's researching so killing her to prevent her learning something seems a bit farfetched. The Ars Arcanum bit about radiant powers was supposed to be an in world thing that Jasnah wrote, right? Perhaps research into the radiants got her killed. Maybe the ghostbloods even suspected that the big thing she was researching was the radiants. Would Jasnah being killed while in a foreign kingdom cause any problems with the Alethi? Would fault or the failure to protect her fall to Taravangian? Could be some sort of way to start conflict or a war... Or there's just stealing her soulcaster - since she wears it always it would be hard to get it from her while she's still alive, and killing her stops her coming after them for it or identifying them. Jasnah does suggest to Shallan that Kabsal will ask Shallan to steal the soulcaster, so it seems that people have tried to steal it before. Plus there's the whole heretic with a soulcaster angle. Kabsal did seem to actually be an ardent and she could've just been killed to silence her for that. Or they knew her soulcaster was a fake and they were silencing her about revealing that.

Yeah, I think I heard in a recentish interview or something whilst he was still working on WoT that he was already done with the Stormlight 2 outlining and just needed to actually write the book (then of course edit/revise/etc). Perhaps new ideas or something since then have him making some changes or additions to the outline and hence it's at '75%'? In any case I'm glad he's finally working on Stormlight 2, the ridiculous amount of setup at the end of WoK have left me very anxious for the sequel. Seriously basically every character gets a sequel hook and then Taln appears. That sort of thing should be illegal

Yeah it seems like binding their hands would stop them summoning a shardblade, but even if it doesn't, surely by keeping the person completely bound up to restrict movement there'd be no way they could actually manipulate the blade into freeing themselves. It would be very unpleasant, but ultimately it should be possible to keep someone with a shardblade captive. Though how Szeth could actually be captured is hard to imagine... With a shardblade and stormlight he could cut and fly his way out of any sort of trap, he has the sense to retreat when he can't win and can fly away if he needs to, and unless Brandon uses that dumb hollywood 'if someone takes a head blow they fall unconscious' there isn't exactly an easy way to subdue someone as dangerous as Szeth. Though I wonder at the effectiveness of putting a full lashing on a net or sheet before throwing (or basic lashing) it at someone - it'd stick them all together and even if they tried to cut it away, the pieces would still stick to them. Short of tugging at it until the stormlight is overcome or a lot of careful cutting I don't think anyone would free themselves of it easily, provided it had enough stormlight to take a while to run out with people pulling at it. Heck, this might even be a good way of dealing with people in shardplate, though they're really strong so it could take a lot of stormlight in the full lashing to be able to hold for a while.