Jofwu

The main thing that clicked for me, was the timeline of the gem archive. I think I've been assuming all this time that the tower was abandoned because it was failing. If it was mostly abandoned BEFORE the failure (before BAM's capture) then we're left with a pretty solid excuse for why the archive makes no mention of the Recreance. There's essentially two things that could have slowed the Recreance down. News about BAM (and whatever else was involved) needed to spread People/spren needed to be convinced that breaking bonds was necessary In a pre-spanreed world I suppose I would think that #1 took at least a few weeks? Probably most Radiants would have found out swiftly, with it taking longer to reach the Radiants who were more isolated. Though I do wonder if the Oathgates may have already been closed off at the time? You still had the Skybreakers, so the loss of the Windrunners isn't soooo prohibitive. But active Oathgates definitely would have helped. If they were closed it would have made things harder, and it would explain why any Radiants at Urithiru weren't among the first to find out... Point #2 is hard to say. I do tend to think it must have been pretty compelling though, for EVERYONE to ultimately agree. (And in so timely a manner that NONE of the unbonded spren in Shadesmar ever found out what was going on. Even without deadeyes they'd be interested in news about all the Radiants in the world breaking their bonds.) BUT there are clearly SOME gems that post-date the beginning of the Recreance. The observations about the Sibling, in particular, don't seem like observations that were made within just a couple of days of BAM's capture. So if there's not a great reason to explain why they didn't find out for (at least) a few weeks, then I have to assume that not EVERYONE was immediately convinced to join in.

Dalinar isn't as extreme about this conviction as he pretends to be, in my opinion. Dalinar's actions effectively result in the death of innocent people on a daily basis. They're at war. By continuing to fight against Odium and the Fused, he is getting innocent people killed whether he likes it or not. Yet he fights on. His morality is not as black and white as he appears in that passage. But there's an even deeper flaw to this argument, in my opinion. If Gavinor, or any child, accepts the role of Odium's champion... they're not innocent anymore. They just joined the enemy forces that Dalinar is actively at war with.

Alright, I sketched all of this out and I feel like it all clicked for me. I'm sure others have thought it through this way already. Curious if there's some hole that I'm missing... Let's set the scene... The False Desolation is ongoing. There's some friction between Radiants and the rest of the world. Lots of infighting between the Radiants. The Sibling is increasingly frustrated with humans. Melishi begins working on the node defenses to help them... But it's too little too late. The Sibling has a falling-out with humans (RoW-69) in general and "banishes" them (RoW-40). That wording is a bit strong, because they don't seem to have kicked the Radiants out the door... But they were able to get the ball rolling. Some humans thought it was a bad idea, but the Radiants went through with it anyways. The tower began to be slowly abandoned... Somewhere amidst that setting, the Radiants began recording the gem archive. Note how MOST of the records seem rather trivial. The Recreance hasn't started yet. Then a group of scholars works out the idea of ending the war by capturing Ba-Ado-Mishram. This gets recorded in the gem archive, and they head off to do it. The moment BAM is imprisoned, the singers bonded to BAM lose their Identity and Connection; they become the Parshmen. The spren of Roshar are also impacted however, as an unintended consequence. It's unclear if all spren could immediately tell, but they probably at least felt something? In the Sibling's case, they lost the ability to produce Towerlight. At this point, several things happen in a relatively short period of time, though it's hard to say how short. Foremost is the start of the Recreance. Something that we don't entirely understand drove a large group of Windrunners to break their oaths at Feverstone Keep immediately after BAM was captured. They and their spren believed that this was necessary to present some terrible thing from happening. They left their spren behind and walked away. It's unclear why they did it this way... But they had reasons, and those are ultimately irrelevant for my purposes here. The important thing though, noted by Weiry on Shardcast, is that the spren were locked as Shardblades and thus didn't appear as deadeyes in Shadesmar. (until the dismissal trick was discovered at some later date) So nobody realized that these unbonded spren were "dead" in an unanticipated way. Meanwhile, over in Urithiru, the tower suddenly fails to work right. Now, the Sibling has been withdrawn from humans for quite some time and the exodus from the tower is probably mostly complete at this point. At first the stragglers assume this is the Sibling trying to shut the door on their way out, but then one of them does some research and has reason to believe there's something else going on. The Recreance has begun, but it's very recent. A few days have passed, maybe a few weeks? They still haven't realized that something is wrong. The Sibling is maybe the only one who could have told them, but she is withdrawn from the humans. (and may have been going into a sort of hibernation, per RoW-40. Not clear what Melishi knew and what was going on with him) Those were some of the final entries in the gemstone archive, so it's not surprising that the Recreance is mostly unaddressed. The Radiants had practically abandoned the tower at that point after all. It's not clear how long the Recreance may have gone on. To make educated guesses on this I think we need to know more about WHY they were making that decision. Was it some conclusion that they all individually but inevitably came to? Were the Heralds and/or Skybreakers slowly convincing people to do it? Did it happen as a trickle or in big waves? Hard to say. The only real limit on how long it lasted, as far as I can think, would be the issue of non-bonded spren finding out the truth, which they seemingly never did. The fact that their friends and family weren't popping up as deadeyes helped. But I have to think they would have found out the truth before long. I can't help but assume there was fairly regular communication between the realms at this point. In any case, a few weeks seems plenty reasonable to me.

No, that's not how glyphs work. It's a single glyph, representing a single idea. (plus we know the glyph for "storm") For the rest I just ultimately disagree that Navani made any kind of commitment to be "second in line" for leader of the Radiants. Further, I don't think the Bondsmiths necessarily had (or have to have) a monopoly on the position. There are ways to be a uniter without being a monarch.

Which glyph are you referring to, Dalinar's? We don't have a glyph for "tower" and I didn't mean to say that the glyph on the banner matches another known glyph. Just that it appears to be somewhat of a tower-like shape. Doesn't appear so, to me. It's got a line in the middle, doesn't have Tension's "y" shaped thing phonemes. K-phonemes flipped around. Yeah, I definitely don't think that would be right for his character. Dalinar isn't really on the front lines any more in RoW, and he's trying to pull back even more. So I don't imagine the role of "King of the Radiants" would or should be a combat role.

You know, I started wondering this too, but that idea is so ingrained in my head that it's hard to wipe away the slate and theorize on those lines. The thing that stuck out to me was actually the chapter numbers of in-world WoR. There's a structure to the book, if you read it in order so those aren't meaningless. And if you look, I believe ALL of the epigraphs clearly related to the Recreance are from chapter 38... But that one you cited about Melishi is chapter 30! There's two other epigraphs from chapters between 30 and 38 which have no strong relation with the Recreance. I really like this idea... So they capture BAM, and that does something to the Sibling and the spren. Tower stops working right. Fighting apparently continues as they decide to abandon Urithiru. And then SOMETHING flips the switch and triggers the Recreance. The problem is, the whole point of capturing BAM was to deprive the singers of forms and Voidlight. Everything seems to indicate that the capture is all it took. Even the Kalak epigraphs suggest the capture one was what messed everything up. Maybe there's a way to reconcile it, but if so I'm having a hard time seeing it. Would love to see someone take this idea and run with it though, just to see if they work out something that makes sense.

I mean ENTIRELY pre-Recreance. The alternate theory is that some of the records were made after it began. (and before it ended, obviously) I don't agree with that. For all we know they made these records over the course of a century. Doubt it. My point is just that everything being in one archive doesn't give us any clues about how much time the archive covers. If anything I tend to think the entries suggest many weeks or months going by. Abandoning the tower can't have been a decision that was made lightly. Even if it was, the entries suggest they spanned the course of residents being evacuated, and I don't imagine that happened in just a few days.

I don't see any issues with the WoB about the timeline on Parshmen enslavement. I imagine there were several years where the humans were still completely afraid of them. Some probably avoided them. Some probably hunted them down and killed any they could find. I can easily see how it would take a decade before people got comfortable with the idea that they weren't immediately dangerous. And I can see how it would take longer still for someone to realize they could be trained to take orders fairly well. I keep failing to keep track of all the details for the timeline on the Recreance... But my gut feeling always comes back to the idea that the gem archive is all pre-Recreance. It's hard for me to imagine all of this activity described in the gem archive (which clear lasted over the span of weeks... probably months, if not years) without ONE mention of the Recreance. We are obviously just getting a selection of them hand picked by Brandon, but... that omission would be rather odd to me. The easy answer is that they aren't talking about the Recreance because it hasn't happened yet. But... yeah, then you fall back on the timeline with the Sibling's functionality failing. And they repeatedly attribute their loss of functionality with the loss of Towerlight production... And THAT makes me flip the other direction. Because I don't know how to explain this really well either. And I guess it's easier to imagine Brandon coming along and saying, "Okay, the Recreance is a lot more complicated than you thought. Let's clear it up finally," than to imagine him dropping some random comment about how the Sibling sort of shut off the first time to drive people away... and then... actually lost some of the functionality they were pretending to lose the first time later. For a while I was toying with the idea that maybe the Sibling's functionality was in decline BEFORE the capture of BAM due to Honor's decline. But this is a bit convoluted and doesn't really solve anything.

This is rather obscure, and it is very likely that the number is "intentionally converted" for the reader's sake... But from Oathbringer 108: This comment by Peter suggests to me that there are 200 "Rosharan degrees" in a circle: If that's the case, "two hundred ten degrees" is a bit nonsensical.

What Smye said.

I've had this very thought. The premise of Honor proposing the champion duel involved the fact that he would take that deal because he has been hurt before. (I think Stormfather says that in OB?) Now we see Taravangian, with no prior experience, thinking it's a terrible deal. I could definitely see how he is prone to taking a risky mistake that leaves him open to an attack because he isn't properly afraid.

Theory people are waaaay scarier than mods.

I always thought this was clearly referring to the others' blood. Lin was stabbed by the other guy, and then took the guy's knife and killed him with it, if I'm not mistaken. Plenty of blood in the room.

I'm also betting Stormlight 5 happens mostly within the 10 days. I think we'll get the contest/climax in Part 4 with a Part 5 that's all falling action, epilogue-y type stuff, and a bit of setup for the future books. Alternatively... I definitely think there's a chance that the contest goes off the rails, particularly because Odium has a loophole in mind. I could definitely the champions meeting for the contest and then... something happens which invalidates the deal and makes the contest void. If Brandon goes this route. I suppose the contest (thus the end of the 10 days) would probably be in Part 3. Because you'd need more time to deal with whatever happens next. Kaladin and Szeth can easily do whatever it is that they need to do in Shinovar within 10 days, and get back to Urithiru. They need to get back because a big piece of this arc is about tracking down Ishar, so Dalinar will need to be involved with whatever happens there. I bet they open the Shinovar Oathgate, so getting back (or bringing Dalinar out there) is easy peasy. I'm assuming we will get some kind of Kaladin-Moash showdown during the climax. Shallan and Adolin are harder to predict because we don't know where Ba-Ado-Mishram is... But we've got plenty of Windrunners for travel, a Jasnah who can pull them out of Shadesmar at any location, and Shallan has a Seon that can be used to communicate with them from Shadesmar. They should have no problem getting to wherever they need to be in a day or two. We still have the unresolved plot point of all the deadeyes outside Lasting Integrity, so I wouldn't be surprised if Part 1 is about resolving that and setting up Shallan's next step, and then Part 2 is Shallan going after Ba-Ado-Mishram. I don't really feel like Shallan needs to be present for the contest, so that could very likely drag on into Parts 3/4 with BAM being released during the contest. (If we take the "things go off the rails" approach, maybe this is part of why that happens.) I dunno... We've seen the books take longer in the past... Stormlight books usually span about 2 months I think. But it feels like this is usually done for development purposes. We need time for the characters to experience change. Kaladin could have gone from the Honor Chasm to saving Dalinar in the next chapter.... It just would have been terrible storytelling because you couldn't believe any of the character motivations involved. In Oathbringer Part 4 Brandon could have given Kaladin some Stormlight and had them fly somewhere to skip the Shadesmar travel sequence. He didn't because we needed time to process Part 3 for ALL the characters, and to do some Shadesmar worldbuilding. But this is book 5. We're done with most of the character and plot development. Rhythm of War Parts 3, 4, and 5 take place over something like 22 days. No particular reason Brandon can't have the story hit the ground running at full sprint.

Stumbled into this from the "Taln didn't break--Chana did" thread. And yes, this was absolutely my impression as well. Honestly, seems like I was under this impression even before RoW? But RoW made it very clear to me that Ishar must have tweaked the Oathpact in some way. We got the mechanics of the Desolations explained more clearly than ever. We learned that the Fused are able to come back to Roshar even if they die during a Desolation. The only thing that stopped them from doing this was the Heralds returning to Braize. All of them. Or else all the Fused slip by and a Desolation starts all over again. Taln alone shouldn't have been enough to do this, with the Oathpact in its original state, I think.

In the distant past, when the Heralds were fresh, there were centuries between Desolations. So maybe 300 years passed without anyone breaking and then suddenly one day in year 301 one of them couldn't take it anymore. Why would someone never break for 300 years and then crack in year 301? I don't know exactly.... But that's precisely what happened regardless. So why shouldn't Taln, the strongest of the lot, do the same thing on the scale of millennia rather than centuries? This just doesn't strike me as something so odd that I require an alternative explanation. Yeah, I was saying that their apparent lack of caution makes me wonder if this mechanic stopped functioning when the Oathpact was adjusted to put the burden solely on Taln.

The timeline on Taln is unclear I think. Seems like there's a vague WoB about him showing up maybe a few months or weeks before the arrival in Kholinar? I have been under the impression that the Heralds generally showed up on Roshar immediately after one of them broke, and that it took some time for the Fused to get there. Not certain what my basis for that is though. As for the voidspren.... I've never been quite sure what to make of them. I don't think Ulim's presence implies much. He was there before the Everstorm too--heck, he was even around before Shallan killed her mother--so I don't think there's any basis to link Ulim's arrival with the Oathpact that strongly? Nale knows exactly who Ulim is when they meet on the night of Gavilar's assassination, but he doesn't say, "WTF, how are you here? Did Taln break?" I'm under the impression that Voidspren have been able to escape from Braize all along. It's just... hard I guess? I read Ulim's point there as just a small lie. He IS outright lying to her there, about the praise and rewards she will get. The point of the Everstorm seems to be more about restoring the singers than anything else? And the Everstorm didn't arrive until after Taln apparently broke, right? At least, not in the Physical Realm. So it suggests the Everstorm WOULD have been a bypass... but then a Herald broke anyways and they didn't need it? ...or... maybe it only needed to build up to some degree in the Cognitive Realm to some extent before it could serve as a bypass? But if that's the case again Ulim is lying because the bringing the thing into the Physical Realm was irrelevant to starting the Return. And I'm skeptical regardless because then why didn't the Fused start showing up until after? Basically, the sequence of events doesn't make much sense to me if the Everstorm was a workaround. I would have expected Fused on Roshar before Taln arrived if it were. Or else it was a workaround they didn't need because a Herald coincidentally broke a few months before they needed it?? Just seems odd.

I don't see Moash being redeemed, personally. I guess I feel like there would be more indicators of this path for him, if that were the case? He just seems like a full-on foil for Kaladin at this point. He's there to show us who Kaladin would have been if he made different choices. I could see Moash being regretful in the end. I could see him recognizing that he made bad decisions and feeling bad about it. But I don't know that he has it in himself to go much further than that. I could be wrong. I LOVE the ties you made to Gollum, @Rainier. Very well said. I actually compared Moash to Gollum myself the other day, in a different way. One of the themes in Lord of the Rings is the idea of evil being it's own undoing. (Some elaboration of that on point 5 here.) I've been wondering if Brandon will do something similar with Moash. Have his own fear, thirst for vengeance, regret, etc. be the thing that results in his demise. Partly because I can't see Kaladin directly killing him. (see the changes to the end of WoR) Partly because I can't see Moash directly killing himself. (too dark) And partly because I think it would work really well with this whole dichotomy we see with Moash and Kaladin. Moash thought his path was the only way, but in the end his path was what destroyed him.

I guess I should have said that I disagree that there's any "weird questions" like this, as the OP calls them. It doesn't seem weird to me that Taln broke, that Shallan's mom could have happened to be associated with secret organizations, etc. etc. I don't see why Taln not breaking has anything to do with him feeling late? He's never broken before, so how does him not breaking this time explain lateness? I don't follow the logic there. I've always interpreted the "too late" thing as just... the world is screwed in a different way this time and there's nothing he can do about it. Oh! I guess maybe you're arguing the Everstorm thing? Like he didn't realize the Oathpact would be circumvented until it was too late? Maybe... Feels weird to me because it's not like he could do something about it regardless. If he returned to prevent the Everstorm then... the gates are open the normal way. And I'm just generally skeptical that the Everstorm circumvents the Oathpact. Not impossible though. Regardless, my issue with the original theory is more with the whole "Chana is Shallan's mom and the Desolation is due to her" thing. Right. Because they get to come back and there aren't any consequences. If Heralds get sent to Damnation, and risk restarting the cycle of Desolations, when they die... I think they would be a heck of a lot more careful. Granted, you could always argue that "they're insane and not being as careful as they should be."

I'm skeptical of the theory for a few reasons... The short version is that we have a simple answer that makes sense, so I'm going to be skeptical of a more convoluted explanation without compelling evidence. Taln claims that he failed in the TWoK epilogue. Stormfather says he broke in the OB Aharietiam infodump. Taln acts super broken. You get the idea. All of these could be mistaken, sure. Or they could just be the simple answer that we have no reason to question. Ulim claims in RoW 73 that "the humans found some way to pin the whole Oathpact on him," and Leshwi says the same thing in RoW 14: "They somehow found a way to shift the Oathpact to depend on a single member." And I think we know that it had to have been modified in some way. We were told that if the Heralds did not all return to Braize then a Desolation would start again, right? They ALL needed to be there to seal the path to Roshar. This suggests to me that Ishar did something so that Taln would be the only one that mattered. And if he did that, I think it casts a bit of doubt on the idea that another Herald being sent to Braize would change that. I'm also a bit skeptical that the Heralds can die and be sent to Braize? I'm not entirely confident in this because I'm not really sure WHAT would happen if they died.... If they could die in the past, in their prime, I suppose they are certainly able to die NOW. But their confidence is really weird to me... I'm particularly thinking of how little fear Jezrien had when Moash stabbed him, at first. The man had ZERO fear of dying. Could a Shardblade even kill a Herald so easily as Shallan killed her mom? And are we sure they would still get sent to Braize if they did die? The assumption that they could be killed by a Shardblade and that this would send them to Braize is super reasonable... But it does strike me as an assumption, I guess. And most significant to me is that when Dalinar visited her, she claimed that it was the first time she made a personal appearance in centuries. I feel like that's pretty concrete evidence that Dalinar was there first. (and of course he went after Gavilar died)

And what better way to do that than as head of the Radiants. I hadn't considered that. That's a really interesting idea.

I don't think it's unreasonable to associate the epigraph with what happened at the end of TWoK. I mean, heck, it could be just saying "Kaladin needs to accept he's a Radiant and pick up a spear to save Dalinar." All stuff that happened. The point of my long-winded rambling post is really to draw the connection between the epigraph and Kaladin's chapter icon. And if there is a connection there, I don't think anything we've seen so far is good enough. Partly because Brandon is saying we don't know enough about the icon yet. Partly because I think the connection between the the Battle of the Tower and the icon is very weak. I mean, if the spear had the Kholin glyphpair on it or something, that would be one thing. A single tower glyph and an actual crown feels different to me. I DO feel like it's in line with Kaladin's arc. I can't imagine Kaladin continuing to hold spears on the battlefield after book 5... But I also can't imagine him settling down for a quiet life as a mental health therapist. Shouldering him with the burden of leadership feels right, and I think he'd be good at it. This is incredibly flimsy evidence I'm presenting. It's more a "what if" than some theory based on strong evidence. So I don't think your emotional reluctance is invalid at all, compared to my argument. Tower as a symbol of the Radiants. Crown as a symbol of leadership.

I don't know how much of this is my own original thoughts at this point... I'm sure some of it is coming from others, but I've forgotten who exactly, and where. In any case, I've referenced these ideas a few times in the last few months so I wanted to write them out in one place. Behold, the great mystery that is Kaladin's chapter icon: We know that this symbol isn't without meaning. ALL of the character chapter icons show something related to the character that's not particular hard to figure it out. (well, most of them--Taln's still has a bit of mystery to it as well) Obviously with Kaladin's we have some spears, but there's got to be more to it than that. Brandon has essentially confirmed that there's something of significance in it that we don't know about yet: So let's break it down. What are we looking at? It's got 5 spears. Four down below and a fifth sticking out further. The fifth one has some kind of banner tied to it, with a glyph that's somewhat obscured. There's also some kind of circular ring shape. Not quite a crescent. Lastly are some sketchy lines all parallel to the spears. It's hard to tell what these are meant to depict. Perhaps the lower four spears are meant to be indicative of Bridge Four? Seems like a reasonable notion, but not much more to say on that. It's important to note that we don't know what the glyph is. We've tried to decipher it in the glyphs threads... But even knowing the glyph phonemes doesn't make "translating" glyphs very easy, and this one is hard to get a clear idea of. I could also swear that I've asked Isaac about the ring shape, I think at JordanCon 2018... Unfortunately, if I'm not imagining this then I never bothered to record it in Arcanum... I was interested in the idea because I wondered if perhaps it was depicting an eclipse. This would be odd, as Roshar's moons work in a way such that eclipses aren't a thing that happens there. But I recall Isaac confirming that it is NOT depicting an eclipse. Take it or leave it, I guess. I didn't give much more thought about this icon, after working through some of these questions in the past... Until after Rhythm of War. Somebody (I think on Reddit) was asking about the glyph here, and they wondered if it might depict a tower. And I think that's a pretty reasonable guess. To be honest, I had wondered in the past if it might be some kind of spinoff of Dalinar's own tower-shaped glyph. We see the Kholin glyph looks fairly similar to the one here, and the "khokh" of Dalinar's glyphpair is depicted as a tower. It would make sense that Kaladin might adopt some kind of Kholin glyph eventually, after he essentially joined Dalinar's camp at the end of TWoK. He was granted some land in Alethkar by the Kholins, in the Crownlands. Maybe there's a connection though. In any case, I do have to agree that the glyph looks somewhat tower-like. But Kholin/Dalinar connections aside, why would Kaladin pick up a tower-shaped glyph? Especially in the current setting of the books, where a tower has pretty strong ties to THE tower, Urithiru? Now let me dig up the TWoK Chapter 53 epigraph that I've referenced in this post title: I was never quite sure what to make of this epigraph. The "tower and crown" are part of Dalinar's glyphpair, so it always seemed suggestive of him to me. But then the spear doesn't fit at all. Many people take "spear" as a strong indicator of Kaladin, but I've never been happy with how he could have anything to do with a "tower" or a "crown". The whole "fallen title" bit could easily just refer to the Knights Radiant in general, or perhaps some role within their number. But then I got to thinking about what might happen in Stormlight Archive book 5... Many people think Dalinar will fall to Odium. I don't--some arguments here, but that's beside the point. Many people think Dalinar will reunite the pieces of Honor and Ascend, or something similar to this--I'm betting this. Many people think Dalinar will simply die. But NOT many people seem to think Dalinar will come out of book 5... the same person that he is now. And this makes me wonder who will take up his position as the King of Urithiru, and the leader of the Radiants. Now, I've seen some people argue (reasonably) that the Radiants don't need a monarch. It's not entirely clear what their leadership structure looked like in the past. I think it's possible that they will continue on with some kind of... representative democracy type leadership? But I think they are much more likely to pick out a primary leader to unite under. This is what seems to have naturally happened with Dalinar, and I don't see why they wouldn't want it to continue that way. So... if Dalinar is out of the picture, for one reason or another, who becomes the boss? Navani is the obvious first choice! She's bonded to Urithiru itself, after all. She's a queen. She's used to leadership. She's a bondsmith. Perfect.... But I'm just not convinced. I honestly don't really get the sense that Navani would WANT this job. She has finally embraced her scholar side. She finally has the opportunity to be the engineer that she has always wanted to be. She's knocking that job out of the park I bet. And it's a REALLY important job too! I just... can't believe she would be very jazzed to get pulled back into the world of politics. So who else do you pick? Jasnah isn't a terrible candidate, but she's already Queen of Alethkar so there's a conflict of interest here. The same one that pushed Dalinar out the door, practically. And I kind of get the sense that she doesn't want the authority of Queen of the Radiants either. And.... That's pretty much the end of the list I can come up with... Except for Kaladin. Kaladin who has single-handedly saved EVERYONE multiple times. Kaladin who is famous and respected by pretty much everyone. Kaladin who has been on the front lines of the war as well as at the top with kings and queens. Kaladin who easily has practically no political ties that bring a conflict of interest. Kaladin who was one of the first new Radiants. Kaladin who has remarkable leadership skills. Kaladin who has broad support among the lower class darkeyes of Vorin nations and no political baggage with others. Kaladin who is scarred from his time on the front lines in innumerable ways and who REALLY DOES need to step back a bit from the battlefield after this one last mission to wrap up book 5. Kaladin who is the de facto leader of the Windrunners--the order associated with Jezrien, who was a king and the leader of the Heralds. I think Kaladin is perfect for the job! So back to the Death Rattle... What could the fallen title refer to? Not entirely clear, but perhaps it refer to the leader of the Radiants? I'm not sure if it's "fallen" as some reference back to the Recreance and the Radiants of the past or if it's just referring to Dalinar dropping that title by one means or another. The associated of the spear to Kaladin is easy of course. The tower and the crown could simply refer to Urithiru and his role as leader/king of the Radiants. Could it be that this is precisely what we see depicted in Kaladin's chapter icon? Again, the spears are obvious. The banner bearing the glyph of what seems to be a tower--Urithiru, a symbol of the Knights Radiant. And the circular shape around the edge, representing a simple crown.