Weltall

My question is, does this give us any more information as to how one might form a bond with a dead Shardblade? This is the closest we've seen to that happening so far.

Don't think so. Her bond was never dead (she thinks she could summon what we assumed to be an ordinary Shardblade before she started seeing Cryptics) so it's probably not helpful in that regard. We know that if you're the original Radiant, you just reswear the Ideals and mean it (or say more truths if you're a Lightweaver) so I don't think Shallan can help us figure out the 'something more'.

Though that brings up a related thing and I don't know if we have any Words of Brandon on it. He's said that Shallan is one step further on the way to Radianthood than Kaladin, so presumably she's spoken three truths at this point plus the shared Ideal, maybe more since she's supposed to have regressed and thus dropped a step or two down. But assuming that "I killed my father" and "I killed my mother" are her equivalent to the Third and Fourth Ideals of any other Radiant, what was her second, aka her first 'truth'?

Given the degree to which Terris blood has been diffused through the population in just three centuries, I could see the Harms' having some of it, unless there's some discussion of their heritage in Alloy that I'm forgetting which would preclude it. Though on reflection, if the Set's goal is to try to breed a new Mistborn, finding allomantic lines with no Terris ancestry would be the way to go about it. Guess we'll learn in the next book.

We know uncle ladrian said her kidnapping was a mistake.  So I don't think she has any powers.

He's also a lying liar who lies so he could say that water is wet and I'd want to check for myself.

Yeah, the Shards don't directly create the magic that they empower (WoB) so while Brandon might have deliberately created Hemalurgy to be a Cosmere-wide system, in-universe it's just a happy accident. Or Adonalsium works in mysterious ways or something like that.

Silver being non-allomatic is actually explained in the annotations, basically he wanted to use it but when he realized that pewter wasn't an alloy of silver he had to ditch it. I wouldn't read too much into Electrum being an alloy containing it though, because there are plenty of alloys that contain unrelated allomantic metals and it doesn't appear to have any effect on how they work or fit into the table. Brass and bronze both contain copper but only one is part of the pushing/pulling pair with that metal, bendalloy includes tin but is practically on the opposite side of the chart etc.

Shardplate is explicitly stated to work on different principles from the 'half-shards' that attempt to replicate its effects and appears to have a similar morphing capability that the shardblades themselves do so I don't think there's anything special about silver there. Artifabrians have reportedly been trying to recreate shards for ages and I'm pretty sure that none of them would have missed the idea of using the metal that looks closest to the existing shards as a base. And the thing that makes shardblades special is that they 'cut' in all three realms. And are spren, so any old silver weapon wouldn't have the same properties. That said, I don't recall offhand what the description of the half-shards says about them, other than 'bulky'.

Though whatever else may be the case, there's clearly a sense of silver being important in Roshar since the kingdoms of the time period of the Heralds and the Knights Radiant are known in modern times as the Silver Kingdoms.

Can there be Invested genre saviness? Because if so, Steris has it in spades.

Beyond that, it's certainly possible she's a misting or ferring and is either keeping it secret or doesn't know (the Set considered her someone worth kidnapping so the odds are quite good) it but we've seen so little of her so far. Hopefully that will change in Bands. And as an aside, I really really want to see how feruchemical chromium works.

Well, he already revealed that he changed the focus from Szeth as he was originally thinking to Dalinar (and has told us all the other characters getting their own flashback focus over the rest of the series) so I'm not sure it's much of a giveaway at this point as it is the title just formalizing that yes, Stormlight 3 will be Dalinar's book. Anyhow, he's stated that all the titles refer to in-universe documents. Apparently this means that Stones Unhallowed and Skybreaker are both texts, though we have a WoB that the latter is 'kind of a different one'. Since we're not getting Szeth's book for a while longer we might not learn what he meant by that until Stormlight 4 or 5.

Presumably there's a work of some kind out there on Roshar called Oathbringer. My guess is that Dalinar has read it (or had someone read it to him) and it inspired him to name his Shardblade that.

Realm would be my guess since whenever we have an annotation or WoB that someone/some magic system is particularly Realmatically aware it tends to involve the realization that there are the three realms, like when he talks about Forgery being unusually Realmatically aware and how Shai can discuss all three as a result.

Actually, we already have WoB that Hoid would find it very hard to kill anyone here which suggests he was telling the truth to Shallan and that Rock's belief that he's a 'god who cannot hurt man' isn't entirely incorrect. Which isn't the same as letting people die while pursuing his goals, per his conversation with Dalinar.

I think there are definitely going to be surprises we can't even predict at this point and while Hoid being an antagonist (even the antagonist) would certainly be one, I'm not convinced that's where Brandon's going. My theory is that he's searching the cosmere to find the right combination of shards or non-shardic magic that he can combine to the point that Snark Investiture is a thing, then he will use it to become God and rule the universe.

Didn't mean to imply it's a definite thing, just that if it happens it sure looks like it's pointing towards Adolin being the one to do it for the reason you bring up.

For some reason I read the "both of these strains of humanoids" part as referring to Herdazians and Horneaters.

 

Oh well.

My own interpretation is that he's talking about humans and Listeners and being very Aes Sedai about the former. We already know humans were around before the Shattering and the sixteen Shards so what he's really saying there is that the Listeners evolved independently (or were created by Adonalsium, maybe?) before the Shattering rather than being an offshoot of humanity. That's how I read it at any rate.

Prevailing fan theory seems to be that since Brandon has pointed out several times that it's possible, Adolin will figure out whatever is necessary and revive his current shardblade. Given how he already anthropomorphizes his sword, it really seems likely to be him more than anyone else. Which may imply that the Edgedancers are one of the orders WoB says would have been perfectly okay with his actions at the end of Words of Radiance.

Every possible twinborn combination and perk? No, just the metals and their uses in allomancy and feruchemy as I recall, plus some discussion on the mechanics of the Metallic Arts.

Which makes you wonder what the perk might be if not that. Probably a good question to ask at an event since it's unlikely to get RAFO'd (unless Brandon's planning to have another gold compounder in a later book) and might give us a better idea of how these perks work.

I wonder if Brandon has a list somewhere of all the possible combinations, or at least all of the really interesting ones that he might want to bring up over the course of the series. So many possibilities...

Sorry if it was unclear but I was being entirely flippant there on correspondences. Maybe I should get a Hoid emoticon for when I feel especially snarky.

"How would you catch an allomantic assassin?"

Aluminum-laced flypaper? I'll see myself out...

Okay, humor aside this is a cool topic so I have some thoughts. First, freuchemical chromium. We don't really know how it works yet but I have to imagine that if you have an investigator with that skillset, store enough luck and they'll eventually blunder into the solution to the case by accident, a la Nobby and Colon in Discworld. Doubly so if you can compound luck. Spotting the tiny bits of evidence you might have missed, making a brilliant leap of logic that turns out to be correct, that sort of thing.

Other than that, yeah, maybe a bronze Savant or a mechanical application of it could be used to sense some sort of unique signature, if such a thing is possible.

I wonder how the laws would handle the use of Rioters/Soothers in interrogations. Did it come up in Shadows of Self? Because we know that with a powerful enough allomancer, it becomes very hard to knowingly tell them a lie, as with Vin and the Lord Ruler. Once you get a suspect in a position where you could ask questions, that might come into play.

And less a hypothetical for our universe but one from an in-universe perspective... worldhop to Roshar, find a Skybreaker and ask them to do whatever it is that lets them sense guilt? True, we'll be well past the point in the story where we're going to see a Mistborn serial killer by the time that's really an option but I could see that kind of cooperation in the future of the Cosmere.

Darn, all of this makes me want Third Era Mistborn even more than I already do. Marasi, if you don't want your powers I'll gladly take them so I can get the books faster. Please?

Well, didn't Brandon liken the Aons and their modifiers to computer programming? So what language would Dakhor be? COBOL? Would Forgery be a manifestation of Javascript Investiture?

Well, that answers that.    Bravo!

There are various drugs that can cause skin disorders in the real world so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that on an alien world with who knows what substances, you can find a combination that makes someone look close enough to an Elantrian to briefly fool the general public. Remember that nobody really wants to touch an Elantrian so they're not likely to look too closely beyond the surface impression. Presumably Sarene still had a pulse but nobody is likely to tell her that she's not supposed to have one so I think we can overlook that. Now if there was some confirmation that she didn't have one, that might be good evidence that there's something magical about the poison but as it stands, I think it's easier to just assume it caused a temporary skin condition that faded away once the poison worked its way through her system, nobody outside Elantris wanted to look closely enough and nobody inside had reason to be suspicious.

Apparently he wanted to eavesdrop on Wax's chat with Harmony (in here) and we have another WoB that he and Wayne get along really well but Wayne doesn't have a clue what Hoid is. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that they get along; hopefully we'll see a bit of interaction between them in Bands of Mourning, if Hoid hasn't buggered off somewhere else in the meantime.

Given that I'm almost positive that's her on the cover (trying not to read any preview chapters) I think there's a pretty good chance she's going to be a much more prominent character in the next book. I hope so too because I liked her in SoS. She's like the living embodiment of genre saviness. Something is going to happen at our wedding so I'll plan for it. We're going to get held up in traffic so of course Wax will cheat and get us there with Steelpushing. It was all rather glorious.

It's kind of hard to be sure about Nale's Skybreakers. On one hand, he presumably knows lots of things we don't know and might believe that what he's doing really will keep a new Desolation at bay. On the other hand, everything we've been told so far says that the trigger for a new Desloation is 'one of the Heralds breaks under torture' with no input from Roshar at large needed and Nale should personally know that. And we have WoB that all the Heralds are to some degree insane so maybe he's convinced himself that what he's doing is for the greater good when really, he's just nuts.

I think it is likely they have always bonded with the Stormfather.

I wonder why having many more than three Radiants bonded to him was seen as seditious?

Could be a simple case of not wanting to put too much of a burden on the closest thing they had to a direct link to the Almighty? Or maybe there's something about the number three in the setting that predates the Vorin fascination with ten (related to the number of Shards in Greater Roshar?) or something else. Though I did interpret that quote as meaning that sometimes they might have had more than three Bondsmiths at once, just very infrequently so not sure.

This is a code that translates to "Hold the secret that broke the Knights Radiant. You may need it to destroy the new orders when they return."[4] The key is found in Pattern 1 of the Book of the 2nd Rotation, each letter is represented by the number corresponding to the first instance of that letter in Pattern 1, i.e. "h" is 11, "o" is 1, and "l" is 8.[5]

The secret is valuable in some way because it can be used to destoy the new radiants. So sure.. He may not need to recreate it... But the secret itself _is_ a weapon.

Yeah, whatever the secret is it's something that Taravangian thinks could break the new Radiants if they learned about it. How he knows what it is, is a really good question. Is there some dusty tome in his massive library that managed to escape editing at the hands of the Hierocracy? Pretty certain whatever it is can't be found in the in-universe Words of Radiance, even though it quite obviously talks around the subject in a couple of the epigraphs.

So Rock is now a Discworld troll? Hmm, maybe a combination of Cohesion and Division, since the latter sounds like the 'melt/blow stuff up' surge.

But I mean the time period before Aharietam. After the Heralds were chosen and before they betrayed Talenel. Do we know how long a Desolation lasts? Few years IIRC. So that's enough time for bonding a spren.

You still run into the problem that the Heralds are probably heavily Invested to the point that they can't bond a spren, or at least not very easily. And doing so would be kind of redundant unless it was to a spren that grants completely different surges, at which point you're also straying outside the bounds of what attract those spren to humans in the first place making the whole thing unlikely. And we have WoB that Kaladin with Jezrien's honorblade would only get a minor boost to his abilities so a Herald bonding a spren corresponding to the order they're patrons of wouldn't really accomplish anything either.

Having read Aether of Night and knowing that Brandon wanted to incorporate that system into Hoid's origin story in Liar of Partinel (whose sample chapters I haven't read yet), yeah, that could be where he got the name from. I doubt we'll know for a long time since the rewrite of Liar is waaaay in the future and any possible reworking of Aether would be even further along.

Edit: Apparently Brandon confirmed at a signing that whatever the black sphere is, we'll find out about it in the third book.

Apparently, Topaz was indeed a name Hoid once went by, named for a gemstone he wore. I doubt it's directly connected to the black sphere; sometimes a RAFO is just a RAFO. And now I'm trying to think if there are any other gemstones mentioned in the epigraphs. I think there was one that's considered a reference to a gemheart, at least.

http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/45901-shadows-of-self-byu-midnight-signing/#entry337201

I think that even setting aside the fact that the Heralds have to be more highly Invested than the average human (they're immortal after all) which would make forming a bond difficult, there's the whole 'betrayed their oaths and left one guy to suffer for thousands of years in their place' thing. I'm pretty sure that's something of a bar to gaining power from the anthropomorphic personification of honorable behavior. So I have no problems seeing why there aren't any spren trying to bond these people even if they could form such a bond to begin with.

And on the Honorblades, yeah, I'm certain there's more to them than 'Spren-less shardblade that grants surgebinding'. Kalak thinks of them as something beyond the power of a shardblade and at that point in time, having a shardblade and having surgebinding were linked so there's got to be something more there. And the fact that we were explicitly told the blade vanishes if the Herald dies and they had to be left behind to break (or not, seemingly) the Oathpact feels like it should be very important.