Yezrien

In Soviet Roshar, surges bind you. (Terrible, but... Soviet Roshar.)

This is clearly the correct answer.

I've always kept them on, and used the flaps as bookmarks. But this thread is making me reconsider.

Where would be the fun in that?

Could a power line support a person's weight without snapping? Lamp posts and manhole covers might be safer. If I was an urban planner on Scadrial, I'd just install the spikes in the ground at regular intervals. That way coinshots won't be tempted to litter, or cause random property damage.

Adolin challenged Sadeas to a duel, and Sadeas postponed it for a year. But Adolin found a way to resolve things in a timely manner. Maybe Amaram has a date with Torol Sadeas. In the Beyond. We should be on the lookout for characters who physically resemble Amaram; their days might be numbered.

Stormlight? Are these gemlike veins a stormlight power distribution grid? Is it me, or does Urithiru look more like a spaceship every week? With enough stormlight, could it blast off to Braize or Ashyn? This story definitely seems meaningful, and I think @Hyarmenatan nailed it with the Shinovar connection. But no one is talking about that scarf. It's not essential to the story, but it's featured very prominently. Either it's a metaphor for something important, or it's awakened. Definitely a spren of Odium, but I think it's premature to assume it's an Unmade. It could be, but it could also be a generic footsoldier. There could be dozens of these things, invisible to non-radiants, spreading violence and mayhem all over the world. How many unsolved murders happen every year in a large city? Two major persons of interest are very close to Marat: Tezim and the Nightwatcher. There's a lot in that region we don't understand. But, glancing at the map, I can't help but notice that the Valley seems surrounded. It's got Marat, where the voidbringers are massing, to the south; it's got Azir, which is negotiating with them, to the west; and it's got the whole "gone dark" area to the east. Something's up, I think. The Nightwatcher has something the enemy wants.

I like this theory. The Ghostbloods could be a huge organized parody of epic fantasy cliches. They have an evil chosen one with an evil mentor, following evil prophecies along an evil hero's journey. Mraize's scars could be deconstruction of Harry Potter's scar.

I'm surprised no one's done this yet. It's a great idea. I could see it working like Risk. Each player is a highprince, moving armies from plateau to plateau. And you can choose your bridge type. Dalinar's big chull-drawn bridges are slower, but carry more men, so they're good for huge assaults. Sadeas's slave-bridges are faster, but can only transfer a few armies at a time. The number of armies you can field is determined by how many gemhearts you collect, since it takes gemstones to soulcast food. The Parshendi would be a neutral faction. Functionally, Parshendi are the HP of a gemheart. And it might cost a few armies to take certain plateaus due to "Parshendi skirmishers." This might make the game horrendously long, but you could have a highstorm every 10 or 30 turns, destroying all Alethi units on the plains. You have to retreat to your warcamp before the next storm, or you lose armies.

@Aleksiel, the quote about "connection to the spiritual realm" makes me want to reconsider a little. Maybe replace "cognitive antenna" with "spiritual antenna." Listeners predate the Shattering, but we don't know if they've always had the rhythms. They may have, and I wouldn't be surprised if the old rhythms come from something pre-Shattering, like the highstorms do, but the new rhythms seem very Odious to me. And the comparison between the rhythms and allomantic pulses is very helpful. Thanks for digging up those WoBs.

This is a theoretical model I've thought up to help visualize what's happened to the listeners. This is all theoretical and highly metaphorical, but I think it helps explain things. The way Parshendi attune the rhythms has always reminded me of radio. They change rhythms the way a car radio changes stations. What if we assume that the underlying mechanism is analogous? A radio uses a metallic antenna, which receives incoming electromagnetic waves. We know the Listeners are closer to the cognitive realm, and they seem to hear the rhythms in their minds, so let's assume the rhythms are “cognitive waves,” emitted by an unknown source somewhere in Shadesmar. So the listeners receive these waves using cognitive antennae. Imagine every listener has an antenna sticking straight up from the top of their head. But it's an invisible mental antenna, a protrusion of the mind, existing only on the cognitive plane. Now imagine a shardbearer riding across Shadesmar, holding a shardblade out horizontally. He would slice off the antenna of every listener he passes. And since shardblades slice the soul, these antennae will never grow back. The victims will be permanently unable to receive the rhythms, which apparently also prevents them bonding spren and changing forms. And since this change is on the sDNA level, it becomes hereditary. Now imagine a shardblade the size of Roshar, sweeping across the entire continent and antennectomizing the entire listener race. This seems to roughly describe what someone (Melishi?) did all those years ago. The Parshendi, Eshonai's ancestors, escaped this fate by (the equivalent of) chopping off their own antennae with a butcher knife. They chose dullform, a faulty form with a stumpy, barely functional cognitive antenna. It leaves them almost as crippled as the rest of their species, but the damage is (cognitively speaking) only skin deep. Their cognitive antennae are too short for the megablade to slice, so their spiritwebs are undamaged. They retain the innate ability grow an antenna, attune the rhythms, and change forms. It just took them a while to figure out how. The Everstorm has now invested the Parshmen of the world with stormlight (or voidlight), allowing them to regrow their cognitive antennae the same way Lopen is regrowing his arm. Their souls and minds are whole again. Stormform, and presumably other voidforms, hear 'new rhythms,' unknown before their transformation. This implies that these voidforms have a different kind of antenna, which receives different wavelengths. The new rhythms and the old rhythms might be emanating from two different sources, perhaps one Cultivation-related and the other Odium-related. My guess: the sources are perpendicularities. Listeners are attuned to one of them just like Vin was attuned to the Well of Ascension. (Burning bronze approximates the function of a cognitive antenna.) Thoughts?

To clarify, I did not mean evidence that it was human. Only that it is often described as a conscious being with agency. The Shardic intents probably formed its personality, and the shattering has been referred to as "killing" Adonalsium.

I'm worried that Mraize is misleading us. What if there's an Unmade in Urithiru because the Radiants trapped it there, in a gemstone? Shallan's "solution" might be to release it, and unleash a new horror upon the world.

This weirdness must be important. I want to say the clouded glass will work like a viewscreen, allowing long-distance face-to-face communication. And the discs are miniature oathgates that allow individual Radiants to move quickly around Urithiru.

The Alethi language is inspired partly by semitic languages, which is bound to produce some similarities. I never made the Aladdin connection, but Kaladin has always reminded me of Saladin.

My mental image of Kaladin will never be the same.

If you mean Cephandrius, the answer is yes.

There's plenty of evidence that Adonalsium was a person, who is now dead. If that's true, he was probably the most invested person ever to have existed. And if that's the case, shouldn't he have left an extremely long-lasting cognitive shadow? Shouldn't the ghost of Adonalsium be haunting the cognitive realm to this very day? (presumably trapped on Yolen, the way Leras was on Scadrial.) This seems like an obvious question, but I can't find any WoB on this topic. So I'm posing the question to all of you on the Shard who have been in the fandom longer than I have. Has anyone ever asked Brandon this? Does Adonalsium have a cognitive shadow? I know this would probably get RAFOed, but I'd like to know if the question has been asked.

Bridge crews?

I'll be doing it. I've never finished before, but maybe this is my year.

I was looking at some of the new WoK annotations, and I found something that might be relevant to this conversation. But it's extremely speculative, and based on old non-canon materials, so it might all be meaningless. I am not offering this as proof on any theory. It's just a speculative interpretation of some of the old materials.

The simplest explanation (although probably not the correct one) is that all unsealed metalminds start with a fullborn, probably the Sovereign. He stored his identity in an aluminummind, allowing him to fill other metalminds without imprinting his identity on them. He would then fill a nicrosilmind with (for example) his powers of feruchemical aluminum, nicrosil, and brass. Any average Scadrian could then pick up that nicrosilmind and do exactly the same thing, creating several weaker duplicates of it. The problem with this is that, assuming there are no feruchemists among the southern population, their entire civilization can only produce a finite number of these metalminds before the original infusion of investiture runs out. But it's cool to think that every unsealed metalmind, including all those little medallions, contain sDNA from the Sovereign himself. Does any of this make sense? It's been a while since I read BoM.

For me, being part of this community has only enriched the reading experience, because it extends that experience beyond the books. Whether it's theorizing to explore the mysteries of the cosmere, or just participating in this weird and wonderful fandom, being part of the Shard means getting a lot more from the books than just a great story. It's like the books are the physical realm, and the Shard is the cognitive realm. It's a crazy, chaotic world made up of our thoughts about the cosmere. And like the cognitive realm, it's full of connections, revelations, and encounters with strange people.

It's like we're seeing the rise of new parsh-nations, each the shadow of a human kingdom, inheriting that kingdom's best qualities. It's like a new form. The form that Kaladin saw was not what the Listeners call "warform," but it did look combat-oriented. Like Alethkar itself. Maybe this new form is Alethform. And the one that negotiates is Azishform. And the one that sails is Thaylenform.

That was my assumption too, since that's how Chinese and Japanese sounds are normally Romanized. But Brandon pronounces it like "Shei." Nonsensical pronunciations... a timeless quirk of the fantasy genre!