Lewis Nethur

Sorry if this has been previously discussed, but I couldn't find it on the forums or the Coppermind. I was thinking, Skimmers can manipulate some aspect of their weight/mass/density to, for lack of a better term, become weightless. I can accept that, however, what strikes me as seriously odd is that Skimmers storing "all" of the weight/mass/density that they possibly can don't float in air; IE: Skimmers' buoyancy remains unchanged when they're storing/tapping. A helium balloon isn't "weightless", it's just, on average, less dense than the atmosphere around it (at sea level), causing it to accelerate upwards. I feel like it would have been commented on at some point if Wax could float into the air (without steel pushing or jumping) by simply stripping naked and storing iron. Further, I would suppose that would mean that, despite not being able to "dive" into a body of water, due to being weightless while naked and storing iron, he would still tend to "float" at the same depth once submerged? Do we have any in-book scenes showing Wax walk on water? If Wax went to Roshar, where the atmosphere is less dense, would he not be able to become completely "weightless?" So what does this all mean? At its simplest, this means that, despite the fact that the volume of fluid displaced by a Skimmer is unchanged while they are storing iron, the buoyant force exerted on them by the fluid they are displacing decreases in direct proportion to the amount of iron they are storing. On its face, this seems like it makes absolutely no sense to me; it would be like two wooden barrels floating at the same depth in water despite one being empty and the other being filled with lead. Does anyone have any insight on how this conundrum could be reconciled? Every explanation I've come up with has seemed contrived or absurdly convoluted and I feel like Sanderson has a pretty solid track record for not making in-book physics behave in silly or unexplainable ways.

They were made from some type of template (I believe it's implied they are at least genetically similar to some people on Yolen), then distributed on a planet according to the whims of gods who can command the location of the planets in a solar system. I don't think there's any reason to believe that Ruin and Preservation would feel inclined to make their distribution of people, cultures, and races reflect normal biological and social evolutionary laws of distribution.

The Lord ruler could riot and soothe better than anyone. he probably just rioted the emotions like earnestness and desire to please, while soothing his victims desire for self preservation and fear of punishment, which would result in a tremendously magnified physiological response from a person if they lied. Heart rate, blood pressure, pupil response, shakiness of tone, flushing, or twitching are all involuntary ticks that can indicate lying, albeit with dubious accuracy under normal circumstances. if you can wildly manipulate and control a person's brain chemistry to amplify these things though, and increase your power of perception to super human levels, it's totally reasonable to expect you could detect lies. a 1000 years of practice probably helps too...

Some very important points: Scadrial, the planet, literally didn't exist before the shattering. it's flora and fauna didn't evolve, they were...intelligently designed...-shutters- Normal evolutionary laws don't apply on Scadrial, it's ecosystems are all artificial and haven't been left alone long enough for meaningful natural selection to take place.

Wow...That would be a hard-learned lesson...I like it, but I'm not really sure it would fit the pattern we've seen so far. In the scenario you propose, Kaladin would almost certainly have to explicitly violate the oath before he figured it out and learned the words. That would be like if he trained up one bridge crew, then in an act of cowardice, allowed them to die while he hid from the parshendi arrows, before he trained up bridge four and decided he would protect those who cannot protect themselves. Still, have an upvote for originality and drama! I'm very interested in what Renarin's Oaths are going to be, or if he's even said any of them yet. I'm thinking maybe something along the lines of, "I will share my thoughts with others, even if they're unpopular." He sees the future (apparently), and seems to be pretty bright and dedicated, but his social problems have a tendency of getting in the way of him effectively communicating with others and contributing to the war effort. He's going to need to learn to function in a role that may often place him in the forefront of criticism, hostility, and the desperate need for answers and guidance, and some magically binding oaths might be a good way to make that happen quicker.

I got the impression that Kaladin's mother's musings on spren were more like folk-knowledge than an informed critique on the nature of existence and cosmere physics. Spren showing up when "something changes" doesn't actually tell us much, because everything is always changing. It's a neat and interesting idea, but it fails to identify why spren only seem to show up when relatively specific things change in relatively specific ways.

Wow, thanks for the love everyone! @Demiandre to elaborate a little more on my opinions concerning Admiration-spren: I believe admiration is a relatively simple sensation, relatively uniform in how it is experienced by individuals of diverse backgrounds, experienced with some measure of frequency in just about every person's life (maybe not every day, but definitely not once-in-lifetime), while also being a pretty intense sensation usually brought on by a powerful or moving experience. It's not fleeting, but it's also definitely not omnipresent either. Every person doesn't admire the same things, but there are still some pretty common themes in what is admired and how admiration is experienced. It's not unusual for entire groups of people who hear a heartfelt/moving speech or who see a truly wonderful work of art report feeling the same "chill" run down their spines in unison. Admiration can actually be observed as a detectable release of chemicals in the human brain (much like intense anger, fear, passion, or shame) that is fairly uniform between individuals. I concede that you could probably safely get away with substituting in an Anticipation, Awe, Glory, or Passion spren in place of an Admiration-spren in many situations. However, I do feel like I can admire something intensely without feeling awed by it, or even being particularly passionate about it. I've had similar musings on things like Reverence-spren or Joy-spren and find their apparent absence slightly disappointing...So yeah, there are definitely some spren that I think ought to exist that apparently don't...Then again, they could just be rare; I think Sanderson made excellent use of the unveiling of Passion-spren to concisely highlight and augment the scene between Dalinar and Navani. Spren open up a whole new literary device by which the author can, through introducing only a very small amount of new information (like silver snowflakes popping into existence), completely change or wildly intensify the emotional tone of a scene, all without getting bogged down in countless pages of describing how loud everyone's gasps were, or how much someone was pulling on their braid in irritation (wheel of time reference, sorry). I could definitely see a less careful author falling into the trap of abusing or overusing the mechanic, so I definitely appreciate the slow and sporadic spren reveals, rather than just dumping a whole slough of them into every scene. Anyway, that's my two-cents on the matter.

Interesting...I had previously assumed the broken one was either the storm father or Odium. Two knitpicks: first, the death rattle came from someone of partial iriali descent and it doesn't sound religiously charged in my opinion. second, Adonalasium made and invested in a lot of worlds. There's reason to believe Yolen may have been even more heavily invested in than Roshar. That said, I like your theory. it would be interesting if true, but there doesnt seem to be much in the way of supporting evidence. have an upvote!

Note too that the stormfather had already begun to bond Dalinar before Dalinar spoke the oaths, and well before the stormfather had consciously agreed to accept the bond. The stormfather literally pursued actions that can reasonably be considered murderous toward Dalinar while they were technically bonded to some degree. (IE: sending a storm to kill Dalinar during the Weeping...) I believe WoB is that there are multiple spren who would self-identify as Honor-spren and consider other spren to be "less" of Honor than they are. Syl is just the first one to appear on-screen. We technically don't have any objective proof that the spren of windrunners are in fact the most closely associated with Honor as far as I'm aware (please, if you know of a WoB to the contrary now's the time to interject.) Since Radiants werent created intentionally and possess two surges apiece, I think it's highly likely that none of them are purely of either Honor or Cultivation; they're all some crazy mashup resulting from millennia of war and the repeated splintering of enormous amounts of Investiture.

I think it's extremely unlikely that the Shin are descendants of a specific order of the Knight's Radiant. They are a genetically distinct race on Roshar in that they are the only one to have not evolved the epicanthic fold typically associated with Asian ethnicities here on Earth. IE: their eyes are round and everyone else on Roshar has almond shaped eyes. This type of evolution takes a significant amount of time. IIRC, humans are not a native species on Roshar. Considering the Cosmere's timeline, it's barely possible for this type of racial distinction to have developed even if the Shin isolated themselves from the other settlers of Roshar from the moment of arrival on Roshar. If they had only splintered off within the last few thousand years the distinction would be unlikely to be significant enough to encourage such pervasive and easily identifiable physical differences. Now, remember, I said barely possible, not impossible, Authors always have wiggle room. All that said, I think it's a safe bet that the Shin are literally just the descendants of the people who have historically lived in the narrow region between the two mountain ranges that provide sufficient shelter from the hellish weather of Roshar to support some semblance of a temperate Earth ecosystem. They haven't migrated much because they don't have to, they don't marry outside their valley often because crossing mountain ranges to meet girls is hard, and their eyes are shaped differently from other inhabitants of Roshar as a result of gradual natural selection resulting from the radical differences in their environment from the rest of Roshar.

Obviously this is just speculation, but I propose that spren are more-or-less limited to appearing for relatively simple and easily defined emotions or sensations. The emotion/sensation spren that have been observed so far include: Anger, Anticipation, Awe, Exhaustion, Fear, Glory, Hunger, Pain, Passion, and Shame. These sensations are, in my opinion, each relatively simple, easily expressed, personified or just relatively consistent in how they are experienced and perceived between individuals. Feelings and sensations that are fleeting, multidimensional, unique to each person, experienced in a multitude of different ways by a single person over a short period of time, or necessarily accompanied by a whole suite of other emotions/sensations, would therefore be less likely to produce a spren. Love. Where do I even begin? A single person can easily feel a hundred completely unique and independent forms of love in a single day with little if any appreciable objective overlap or consistency between them. Love for one's grandmother, wife, and side-chick shouldn't draw the same spren, so I think it's appropriate that they don't. I'd further propose that spren whose appearance would be highly likely to draw numerous other spren, regardless of the situation, would be unlikely to achieve the sense of identity and individuality required to materialize in the first place. Drawing a lust-spren or an imminent-intent-to-commit-a-violent-crime-spren, would probably draw immediate negative attention to a person, resulting in shamespren, angerspren, or a whole host of other spren, to come flooding in for everyone with a line of sight. People would be unlikely to commit the collective cognitive resources toward personifying these types of sensations to result in a spren in the first place due to this conflict. I totally think adoration-spren ought to exist, I don't have any argument here, it's pretty much a hole in the story as far as I'm concerned. Adoration (perhaps admiration would be better?) is, in my opinion, a pretty simple, pure, and relatively common emotion. It might be prone to attracting glory spren in an individual if they were specifically receiving the adoration/admiration I guess, but I feel like that is a pretty flimsy excuse for this particular feeling/sensation since adoration and admiration don't need to be directed toward individuals. Also, recall that really, REALLY negative spren may very well exist and just not have been seen yet if they belong to Odium. I'm thinking hate-spren and contempt-spren, but things like lust-spren and disgust-spren might be capable of sowing enough discord with their appearance that Odium would be inspired to unleash them on the people of Roshar...

Not necessarily. We saw firsthand how easily Kaladin ended up in a situation where he had few if any viable honorable paths, leading him to temporarily break his bond. If they were maneuvered into the right circumstances and faced with the realization that nothing they could do with their powers would be honorable, the windrunners could be honor bound to lay down their arms and forsake their powers.

Everything I'm reading here seems to at least tacitly agree that there are a multitude of valid ways for Adolin to bond his blade that would be consistent with past observations about his character, internally consistent with cosmere physics, and in line with supplementary information supplied from q&a with Sanderson. As always, there is wiggle room for the author to take a different direction; that'd be his prerogative and I'm ready to support it. However, as far as speculation goes, I think we can agree to applaud OP for a rock solid contribution. I think we've been supplied real evidence that Adolin might (keyword being might) have already begun a Nahel bond with a dead blade, using specific events. That's huge in my mind, the specifics are almost a non-issue.

More than just being present, from their overheard conversation, it sounds like they were aware that the assassination was going to take place and had deliberately chosen to not stop it, despite indications that doing so would have been well within their power. IE: Gavilar wanted to bring back the voidbringers, and somehow was going to, and the Heralds were like: "...Naaahhhh...Let's go ahead and not do that, we like not being tortured..."

@junior I agree at least partially with your guess that Shardplate is an outward manifestation of a fully completed bond. The question at hand is: How could one revive a dead shardblade. WoB have suggested that one would essentially need to replace the dead spren's lost connection, ie: build a bond with the spren that closely resembled the bond it had when it "died". We have confirmation that this is an incredibly difficult feat, and serious suggestions that we shouldn't expect it to happen often if it ever even happens at all throughout the course of the series. I posit that, since shardplate is a part of the Nahel bond, it may well be instrumental in reestablishing the lost connection. I would also think that if the Radiant who carried Adolin's blade had sworn all of their oaths already, he would probably need to swear all of them before his blade came back to life, which would probably be more difficult than attracting a new spren. Now, there's a super easy way out of this requirement: Sanderson could just write in that the spren inhabiting Adolin's blade was betrayed by a Radiant who had only spoken the first oath or two. We don't know for sure when each spren gets the ability to manifest as a blade, some orders might have gotten their blade after a single oath, and Adolin has in his possession a book that has the first oath written down for him. TLDR; Adolin has access to knowledge of what the first oath of the KR is, and his blade may very well have belonged to a trainee Radiant who had only spoken the first oath (or first couple oaths, whatever, doesn't matter). A bit of a stretch, but revival could easily be within his reach.

So, I was thinking, during Dalinar's vision of the Recreance, we see a bunch of full Radiants in shardplate abandoning their oaths. But, we know that each order had some manner of hierarchy and means of training new Radiants; people didn't just bond a spren and instantly get their blade and plate, there's a whole oath swearing and personal growth process (and I wouldn't be surprised if the Dustbringers had some hazing rituals ). Now, it's possible that at any given time there weren't that many trainee Radiants, but there still ought to have been some during the Recreance. I guess for the sake of lack of evidence I'll assume that they chose to abandon their oaths as well... So my musings basically amount to these: 1. What happens to a spren that is betrayed before it assumes the form of a blade? It seems like Syl was returned to the SR, but still remained somewhat conscious? Granted, it's unclear if Kaladin fully betrayed his oaths, since it wasn't exactly what he did that drove syl off, but what he said, felt, and intended. The whole thing was really a big communication problem rather than an intentional betrayal. 2. It would probably be tremendously easier to revive the "dead" shardblade of a trainee Radiant since their bond, being less complex, should be easier to duplicate/replace. (I'm looking at you Adolin!) Still insanely difficult, but probably less technically complicated. 3. Who the heck could possibly convince a bunch of trainee super-heroes to give up their powers? (I don't actually expect an answer for this one, just wanted to underscore how screwed up the situation must have been for the Recreance to have happened in the first place.) So thoughts?

I believe they're one of the off shoot races from combined human and parshendi DNA (SDNA?) like herdazians. I believe there's an old WoB that states that humans and parshendi can't breed though, so how Aimians were created is technically a mystery. I'd agree that if Aimians have gem hearts, parshendi would probably have them as well...disecting corpses is pretty unpopular outside technologically advanced societies though, so maybe no one noticed that parshendi have gem hearts, I mean, why would you disect a slave?

It would certainly help explain why the heck Aimia was scoured in the first place. They seem to have the ability to heal at an accelerated rate to some extent, which, in the cosmere, typically requires investiture. I like the theory, I'd rank it at least a little above "crackpot."

Interesting, I initially assumed Edgedancer because of the Radiant's abilities in the fight but for some reason Dustbringer never occurred to me, though I admit it fits. I've never heard this theory proposed, is there any in-world reason we should associate red-glowing armor more with a Dustbringer than an Edgedancer, or is it just because glowing red armor wouldn't align well with the typical battlefield medic abilities held by Edgedancers? Not trying to discredit the theory, literally just curious.

There are some in-book hints about these character's identities but they weren't meant to be easy to find, so it's perfectly understandable to miss them. For example, the epigraph of WoK chapter 55: Describes Shallash going around destroying artwork that depicts her.

Awesome theory, but I do feel like one thing is missing for Adolin to be able to "revive" his blade: The original owner's shardplate. I'm assuming plate and blade are linked in some fundamental way, otherwise...a Radiant might be able to manufacture plate by bonding and unbonding the same spren over and over, which would be silly. I'd therefore assume that you would need to revive the dead plate as well as the dead blade; how plate could be revived however is a question we won't be prepared to answer for probably another 2 books though, based on WoB indicating that we won't be seeing how Shardplate is created for a while yet. That said...in Dalinar's vision of the battle in the Purelake...I believe he meets a female Edgedancer and pointedly remarks how close a resemblance her armor bears to Adolin's...hmmm.... Further evidence, coincidence, or red herring? You Decide!

If I had to guess, the repeated number thing that occurs on shardworlds is essentially just a way for the Shard holder to pat themselves on the back for building/ruling over a world and to help inspire religions. Shard holders have Godlike powers, it only makes sense that they would want to be thought of and worshiped in like fashion. Either that, or it's to troll in-world scientists who aren't cosmere-aware.

@king of nowhere Thanks for the alternate explanation, I hadn't heard it before. The primary issue with the Lagrange point theory as I understand it is that the distance the moons would need to be from the planet would require them to be absurdly bright, and/or unusually large and low density to function as moons in the traditional sense. I believe someone did the math at some point and showed that the moons would have to be radiating light, not just reflecting it in the scenario I proposed, granted, I can't reproduce the calculation offhand. Your method doesn't seem to suffer this flaw.

1) I like this theory of a 20 hour orbital period (Rosharan days are 20hrs long fyi). Roshar has 3 moons that appear to rise and set at the same time each night. If you can reconcile this phenomenon with the theory you'll have a good start to changing minds from the conventional wisdom in the community that the moons exist at Lagrange points and Roshar has a 20 hr rotational period. Note first that Roshar has no axial tilt or precession. 2) Earthlike creatures (ie, pigs, horses, minks) and world hoppers breathe the air, so it probably isn't tremendously different. That said, it probably is a little different, and between Roshars smaller size and (according to conventional wisdom) more rapid rotational period, the pressure changes would be very significant (which could contribute to the creation of high storms and would be really hard on arthritis). 3) I think this has been answered well already. I'm pretty sure Isaac Stuart gave an exact circumference of the planet once. Between the 3 moons and the weirdness behind the shape of the continent (which is believed to have been deliberately created by Adonalasium in the distant past) any oddities in the planet's density can be easily explained away.

Kinda nitpicky I know...