Alright so i'm new here... Hi
glad to see that i'm not the only one necro-ing this post, haven't been following the blog much in the past year and somehow missed that WoR was getting edited.. after reading the edits I don't really find that much wrong with them, both make sense to me and I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the issues people are bringing up... or rather the issues that were brought up a year ago lol
so as far as Kalladin stabbing Szeth in the wrist and letting him die whilst diving after the Honorblade instead:
OK, so Kalladin made the split second decision to not kill Szeth and instead went for the disarm (haha because he killed his arm, how has nobody made this joke?) some are saying that this would be impossible to do or at least really hard. I think the stormlight in him as well as his radiant status definitely gives him enough control and speed that he'd be able to pull this off mid strike plus this kind of thing always happens in books and movies where the protagonist is swinging a powerful stroke in anger and decides to stab the ground instead of slaying the enemy in cold blood so lets just let that happen.
Also of note here Brandon edited the book to say that Szeth let go of the bond to the weapon, this is my only question about any of his wording edits in the revision and it seems like this is only edited because someone else will have their sword hand sliced but not lose the bond in the future.
If I was Kalladin I would assume at this point that chopping his hand would make him drop the blade and maybe make it disappear, I would not assume however that this strike would remove all of the Assassin's powers and make him plummet to his death by highstorm. As he fell I would still be in shock over the whole battle and my head would be a little foggy.
Then the next part,
-Syl screams at Kalladin to get the sword
-I would immediately shake out of whatever I was thinking and dive after the sword
-She finishes telling him that Szeth broke the bond and he is nothing without it
-at this point he might begin to understand that Szeth can't save himself with his powers because the sword was giving him the powers
Even if Kalladin realized at this point that Szeth was going to die in the storm or from falling I think he would listen to the forceful command in his head telling him to get the sword and just trust that Syl knows what's up.
I think the other point of contention/debate during the battle is that Kalladin wounds Szeth several times in various places and then the book says that he (Szeth) slowed down and healed.
So I envision the Soul (as far as BS books at least) as lying in the spiritual realm on top of the nervous system in the physical realm.. So If I was to look at someone's soul it would look like those medical images of all the big nerves in your body perhaps with the exception being that it would have a big ball overlaid right where the heart is located. I think if you were to stab or cut any part of the soul it would have bad effects but It would regrow unless you severed the connection to a certain limb or severed the spine or if you stabbed the heart. This is all just to say that I think stormlight (just stormlight, no spren/living shardblade) CAN heal the soul as long as a portion of it is not severed completely from the body. This kind of works the same way as if you got wounded somewhere in the real world, if your shoulder got stabbed you could heal from that but if your foot gets chopped off you're not growing that back
The last thing I wanted to discuss was the wording BS used when he was discussing the ramifications of this change talking about dead shardblades not being able to heal the soul while living ones can, he also specifically says that Szeth can't heal from a shardblade wound with his powers in an interview.
So how i'm interpreting all this is that shard blades are made from the body of a god right so that's Honor, honor blades are also presumably linked in some way to Honor. I think the difference between dead shard blades and dead honor blades is strictly in the amount of investiture within the blade. I think both are "dead" so to speak as the living spren through the nahel bond formed the shard blades and the dead shard blades are just what the spren left behind when they died -a corpse- I think the honor blades are also now dead because Honor made them DIRECTLY from his own body and gave them to his heralds, so he was the "spren" that formed the nahel bond with the heralds. I think Honor's contribution to the magic system was surgebinding and that his physical portion of the magic system on roshar was the honor blades ,and through the honor blades, surgebinding.
I think to understand this we need to look back at Mistborn, Preservation's physical contribution to the magic system was the metal Lerasium ,and through this, allomancy. Also looking at Mistborn, when Preservation died allomancy didn't die with it. His contribution to the magic system stayed after his death as evidenced by the continuation of allomancy and the mists.
I think that part of Honor's influence on roshar was spren (I look at it as his version of the mists) and his influence on the magic system, surgebinding, continued after his death.
So basically my conclusion is that dead shardblades are dead because the spren for those shardblades are also dead and Dead honor blades are dead because Honor is dead. BUT Honor's power still lives, and because of this, spren still live in the world. I think the spren that form the nahel bond are actually still harnessing some of the power of Honor and because of this are able to grant the power to heal wounds from shard blades. I think this healing has a large part to do with the fact that the spren who are currently still alive and have formed the nahel bond KNOW that they are alive and think of themselves as spiritually whole from a cognitive standpoint whereas the spren who were part of the nahel bond and who are now dead, think of themselves as dead and as such know that they are not spiritually whole and cannot heal wounds to the soul.
WOW so that was a pretty epic first post if I do say so myself but i'm sure I got some stuff completely wrong and half of my points have probably already been posted or disproven somewhere else so let me know what you guys think
