Arken Threadlurker

How he left Navani for the next half a decade:

Well, there is a WoB that says that soulcast corpses can be awakened relatively easily. It would go to figure that soulcast corpses would be useful for many other magical purposes, such as maybe a hemalurgical vessel? I wouldnt be at all surprised if Kel ends up on Roshar and binds himself to a soulcast corpse to use as a vessel, either through hemalurgy, a trick of gemhearts, or some other kind of investiture we havent seen yet. Also, its important to remember that the Ghostbloods also have a highly (perhaps most highly on Roshar) placed member from Southern Scadrial, home of a particular Soverign if I am remembering correctly. Also, Felt, an era 1 House Venture spy makes an apperance on Roshar as well, proving that the timing for characters from Kel's era showing up in the Stormlight Archive is completly doable, even without being a quasi-mortal cognitive shadow held together by a combo of sheer will power and the final act of a dying shadow of a god like our boy Kelseir. I have a feeling that at the very least, Kel is going to be a highly influential player in the overarching back story along with Hoid, Frost, Kriss and Nazh, and all the other worldhoppers. Im just sad that its gonna be another 20 years before we get a book starring all of these players at once, if we ever really do.

I'm not entirely sure that the opposing force is something on the level of Adonalsium. it just had to outclass anything the living people in the physical realm were capable of dealing with. It could just be another Cabal like the original shatterers, not necessarily an anti-Adonalsium. The main point I'm trying to shape my tinfoil hat into is that maybe they shattered Adonalsium not to destroy it or improve themselves, but out of some need to grant that power source awareness. It just seems that out of the Shardholders we've seen or heard spoken of, only Rayse seemed to be a genuine dick before the Shattering, and in any group of over 4 people there is always at least one dickhead. Ati and Leras seemed to be pretty good buddies, if not brothers or lovers before the power they took up changed them. Hoid says Tanavast was a fine enough fellow, granted that's Hoid so take it with as much salt as you'd like. I feel like they had a reason to take the power but afterwords things go horribly horribly wrong, and we get the current situation out of that. I'd probably be willing to bet that Hoid was the one who screwed it up too, and that's why hes going around trying to do whatever hes trying to do. He's sticking to the original plan to grant the full power of Adonalsium a mind. Again, no real concrete evidence for this that I can think of, it just seems like "16 dudes got greedy and stole gods power for the fun of it" doesn't really seem as nuanced as these things seem to be generally.

Aluminumfoil Hat Approaching: Originally Adonalsium might not have had an identity as we know it, an awareness. We also know of the opposing force to Adonalsium, only in that it exists. Maybe the original vessels shattered Adonalsium to take its power not so much out of greed but rather what they believe to be an urgent need to actively combat this anti-force in a way that a nonaware entity, regardless of its power, was incapable of doing. It could be building back up to all of the power being reunited in one vessel, granting the original power a sense of self it previously lacked.