Nebelskind

19 hours ago, Random Bystander said:

I really want to see where [redacted] is. You know, Hoid's [redacted]?

Surprisingly, yes, I do, and I agree haha.

10 hours ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

I interpreted "only one line of it is completely broken" as meaning the line was completely severed and gone, which would be Jezrien's nonexistent line.

Me too. Like, Dalinar saw 8 lines, one intact (Taln) and 7 weak, and realized “there should be 9 visible, but there are only eight, so only one is actually broken.”

2 hours ago, Ookla the Unnamable said:

I mean, just look at him. He hums, pauses, then agrees. That's basically the equivalent of me saying: "uhhh . . . sure."

Also, Pattern hums when people around him lie. He also hums other times, but that’s one consistency. Maybe he does it for himself sometimes?

On 11/29/2020 at 0:08 PM, Karger said:

She knows he exists.  Mraize is checking to see if she knows anything else.  I agree Shallan is actually a pretty terrible liar for a Lightweaver.

I think she mostly lies to herself.

hopefully her sneakiness gets better after reabsorbing Veil and her spy knowledge. For all of a year, but still.

So after letting the revelations from Rhythm of War settle in my head for a few days, and reading some of the discussion on here, I had a thought about the “Lord of Scars.” 

Rather than Thaidakar literally being Kelsier, is it possible that Autonomy/whoever Trell is is coopting Kelsier’s authority or one of his many cults in the same way that Trellism appears to have been coopted in Mistborn Era 2? That would make a few things make more sense to me, and seems to fit the MO of “Trell.”

Known problems with this theory:

The description of someone with a “similar ailment” to the Heralds doesn’t seem to fit anyone but a Cognitive Shadow. Unless Autonomy wants Kelsier off Scadrial as well, which could be happening I guess.

Also, Wit/Hoid seems to think it’s actually Kelsier, from what he told Shallan, and he seems to be actively undermining the Sovereign’s attempts at secrecy in Bands of Mourning, so it kind of seems like it might just be him. But I thought this was at least worth mentioning, since Hoid is not omniscient and could probably be fooled by, say, a Shard on occasion.

So given those issues, this is probably more complex than the facts need to actually be. I do still like the thought that maybe they’re involved or related to each other in some way. I can’t see Kelsier, as we knew him, just allowing a foreign influence to invade Scadrial (in the form of Trell) if he knew about it, unless he was okay with that power’s goals somehow.

On 11/26/2020 at 6:29 PM, Debarra said:

It certainly seems possible he'd do that. It also looks like a cool as hell symbol abstracted like it is so that's a plus.

I wonder does Mare play any sort of role in Surivorism?

They seem to venerate all the crew members (and Elend) with titles like “Counselor of Gods” and “The Last Emperor” and stuff, but I don’t actually recall seeing one for Mare.

On 11/26/2020 at 5:26 PM, ftl said:

So, now that we have pretty good evidence that Thaidakar is Kelsier, it prompted me to take another look at the Ghostblood's symbol.

https://coppermind.net/wiki/Ghostbloods#/media/File:Ghostblood.svg .

Could it be a stylized image of a marewill flower? Do we know how many petals the flower has?

That is a really cool idea. Like a flower turned to thorns

On 11/20/2020 at 5:29 AM, Inquisitor #5 said:

 

Interestingly, the existence of anti-lights implies the possibility of anti-shards as well.

Yeah, I haven’t even really wanted to start theorizing in that direction, it opens up so many options. Too much for my brain to handle right now haha.

it also brings up the question, is there an equivalent Anti-Investiture for every power? And does it exist in every form of the power? Like, anti-Atium, but also a metal?

8 hours ago, Stormtide_Leviathan said:

I don't think the unmade correlate to specific surges. The one that bonded with Amaram granted all of them, for example, so that seems off if it was tied to one specific

That is a good point. Is it possible that the corruption made it do that, though, instead of...whatever it was originally supposed to do?

Another point to consider is how Ba Ado Mishram figures into this. If binding her somehow ruined more than just the Parshs’ Connection, but somehow messed up everything on Roshar, to some extent (like Kelek says), why would that have happened? If she was something else before, like one of these theoretical spren, what would she have done/still be doing or tied to that would permeate the whole planet?

On 11/22/2020 at 5:25 PM, signspace13 said:

He wasn't acting. He made a deal for a contest of Champions with Dalinar, and although he never explicitly broke his word, he dithered on it for a year, never setting terms and avoiding Dalinar. That, combined with his loss of the tower, made the power work against him.

Oh, very cool idea. Maybe that’s not even just his power that would have done that, but something about the Shards as a whole. He said he’d keep an agreement in spirit, but he was trying really hard not to do so, so that could be breaking him away from his power if that’s something that the Shards have built into them as a rule of divinity, or whatever.

If Frost is a Shard, which I’m not sure he is, then no: Hoid’s letter mentions the deaths of Devotion and Dominion as if Frost might not have noticed it. 

Harmony mentions in RoW that some Shards are hidden from him. So there’s a least a chance that the Vessels do not become aware when something like this happens. However, Odium does know that Harmony exists, and has merged two Shards, so there’s some level of awareness.

I’m not sure we know this for certain either way, but those are all the things I could remember that seemed related

On 11/22/2020 at 1:31 PM, ftl said:

In story, those scenes served to reinforce Nightblood’s power. It closing the perpendicularity and denting the honorblade was needed so that when it was used to stab Rayse, there is some previous buildup. Targeted at the readers who HAVENT spent years debating all the broken things Nightblood can do. It served an important story purpose.

Excellent point! I didn’t realize that part of it at the time. Killing Rayse would have been out of kind of nowhere without that sort of buildup.

And, to be clear, I didn’t mind the perpendicularity thing being there like that! I just thought of the WOB before I realized the actual story reason.

11 hours ago, Mason Wheeler said:

I asked Brandon this question two years ago, and he RAFO'd it.  Well, I read Book 5, and I found out!

That part of the scene felt almost like it was there just to answer this! Szeth didn’t even need to do that, it was just like Brandon wanted us to see it happen.

I think he was treating him along mythic lines. I think Moash, having given up his ability or will to choose, might actually see Kaladin this way, now. Someone who is everything Moash could have been.

I also think it had to do with Moash wanting Kaladin to give up on his own, not just be killed. To admit Moash was right.

and now I never want to type Moash’s stupid name again haha.

4 hours ago, Spinner16 said:

At first I was on board when the Fused starting building their own version of Urithiru. It really seemed to add to the theme of a parallel arms race. But Brandon really lost me when he named it Urithitwo. That part was just silly.

Actually almost spit out my food laughing at this one, nice!

1 hour ago, Knight of Iron said:

Perhaps so, but I'm leaning more towards the immortality and inability to cause harm probably had something to do with the type of Dawnshard Hoid had. I think Rysn has a different one, and that any effects will be different.

Immortality and inability to cause harm to living things reminds me a lot of Preservation, and what Rysn has seems to be the opposite of that. So instead of immortality, short life? Either way, she didn't know what she was signing up for.

Maybe she won’t be able to stop changing, or settle down. Adventurous spirit kind of a thing

12 hours ago, Kinolee said:

These are demands "on a level no person could ever manage alone" -- a single person would not be able to handle wielding this combined power.

I actually interpreted this differently. I think it means that the Command and Intent are so powerful that no mortal could manage to have that strength of will/governing force when directing the power, but if a mortal becomes a Dawnshard then they *can* do those things because they’re basically co-opting the divine Command’s intensity and directing it to their own wills.

i do like your classifications! I think the “Care” one makes sense as a grouping; whatever it would be called, those seem to fit together well.

4 hours ago, Ashbringer said:

... which implies that what we saw in the battle was just Nikli. The youngest Sleepless.

...oh great!

That interpretation makes sense to me. I wondered how they were able to hurt and kill them, so the terrifying implication is that a Sleepless can control (be made up of?) hordelings of various sizes, which seems obvious but I hadn’t thought it worked that way. I had it in my head that they were a swarm of little guys, and all had to be about the same, but if there’s *that* much variety they could do all kinds of things.

20 minutes ago, teknopathetic said:

It has to be a command though, so something like Unite or Bind. 

You’re right, that makes sense. I guess “change” works both as a command and an identity, so I wasn’t thinking of that. 

Maybe just having a lot of Investiture makes you more sensitive to things like that? I know there’s some discussion from Brandon about each Breath bringing you closer to Divinity, and that’s why your color sense etc gets better, so maybe a Dawnshard is just so much power it has a similar effect

7 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

Dalinar had also seen words that glow and give off light. Is Unite one of the Dawnshards (maybe a splintered one Odium thought he destroyed or Unmade?) 

This would make the “we killed you!” line make a lot more sense to me. Adonalsium is dead, but Odium sees its/his Command being expressed in Dalinar. 
 

of course, I feel like Odium should have known about Dawnshards, but I still like the idea

I had that thought just a minute ago. I feel like Change and Unity would be pretty good Dawnshard candidates (from the little we know so far), but I’m not sure when/how Dalinar would have picked his up. 
 

Granted, I’m not totally sure how Rysn became one either, and it was shown from her point of view.

It is really fun to see everyone's guesses in the light of the new information, though.  A few of y'all were pretty spot on!

And for the record, I'm going with Moash being Odium's second choice.

Ah okay, that all makes sense. I had read those, and I kind of suspected that was it but I couldn't remember where it mentioned that. Thanks everyone!

I'm looking for some help on something that a friend noticed. So at the beginning of WOK, as far as I know, Taln had his Honorblade in Damnation (or however that works) and Szeth had Jezrien's. But when Taravangian tells Szeth that Kaladin must have one of the other Honorblades, to convince him that Kal isn't a surgebinder, my friend I just talked to says that Szeth replies with something like "One of the other seven?" which seems to imply that the Shin only had 8 total (and gave him one). I don't have any of my SA books with me right now, so I can't check any of this to be sure. How many blades do the Shin/Szeth have at the start of WOK, and if it's only 8 (including Jezrien's), do we know where the last one is?