Subvisual Haze

Let's tie it all together with the very important missing piece. What reason would Nale+Heralds have to ruin Szeth's life like that? Nale's driving singular mission for thousands of years has been to destroy or neutralize any surgebinders not under his direct control. Anyways, after reading through Szeth's chapters closely, it became apparent that there are a lot of clues in Szeth's chapters that before he was exiled, not only did he have the Honorblade, but Szeth had already bonded a spren and possibly even become a Radiant. So, BUCKLE UP! So we establish the general order of gaining powers for Skybreakers. The important point being, that the 3rd oath requires the Radiant to bond with a spren. Yet, when Szeth asks if he needs to be paired with all the other rookies: After the first trial at the Purelake, Ki accepts Szeth as her squire letting him swear the second oath and we get this blurb: Szeth seems quite confident that he could choose to swear the 3rd Ideal very quickly! But how would he know that a spren would be drawn to him and bond with him so quickly? Perhaps he has already done this before. Next we cut to the aftermath of the second Skybreaker exercise: Szeth did perform well enough in the contest to draw the approval of the Highspren. He even glimpses 2 of them briefly as slits in the air. He hasn't had nearly enough time to form a bond with one though! Nale's interruption here however implies that Szeth could have indeed sworn the oath at this point. Coming at things from a different angle, we also learn that Szeth is no stranger to voices speaking into his head. And after the battle he finally swears his Third Oath. Mash it all together, and we're given the clear impression that Szeth knew he could immediately swear the 3rd oath because he had already bonded a spren. One that spoke to him in the distant past before everything went wrong. Poor Szeth. He probably bonded a spren long ago and tried to report it to the people in charge, sound the alarm that the Radiants spren were returning and the Voidbringers were soon to follow. Unfortunately Nale as part of his "Kill or Ruin any Unauthorized Surgebinders" Campaign, probably stepped in. Likely Szeth was such an upstanding citizen that there was no legal reason to murder him, but by being declared Truthless by his people his nascent bond with his spren was terminated and the spren in question went into a dead/sleeping state like Sylphrena did in WoR. And now for the real kicker: we don't know for certain that his first spren was necessarily a Highspren. What if, for maximum tragedy and irony, the most famous Truthless in the world was on the path to become a Truthwatcher?

When we speak a language, we do subtle things with pauses, emphasis and modification of surrounding vowel sounds to distinguish close consonants from one another. Strip out the vowels and our ability to emphasize subtle differences between sounds is largely lost. As an example, during the battle at Thaylen city Adolin meets a Thaylen soldier with the fantastic name of "Kdralk". Say that name out loud, then change the D to a T and say "Ktralk" out loud. If you can hear a noticeable difference you have fantastic enunciation skills .

Ohhhhhhh Crem. It was right there the whole time. "What we've done was wrong. That creature carries my lord's own Blade. We shouldn't have let him keep it." The phrasing here is critical. Past tense and plural. Kelek+Nale previously did something that Kelek now believe is wrong. Not something they're actively doing at present time (if indeed they were involved in orchestrating the assassination). Couple that with this little thought from Szeth in Oathbreaker confirming that he did indeed possess the Honorblade before being declared Truthless: The Heralds collectively (at the very least including Kelek and Nale, probably several others) were directly involved in Szeth being declared a Truthless and exiled.

1. - Thanks, brain fart on my part. I meant Sunmaker there, not Dawnsinger. Too many compound sun related nouns 2. - Yep, and I think that giant cache of Shardblades and plates was quickly "secured" by the Shin.

It's simple logistics. Roshar is a big honking place, and highstorms kick over any effort at developing traditional infrastructure. With the oathgates being inactive and only a couple honorblades giving a few people access to flight/transportation, Roshar suddenly became a much much larger and isolated place post-Oathgate closing. It makes more sense for the Shin to carry out quick wars or raids against their neighbors for shards than to march across half the continent to do the same. The only way to keep an army deployed long-term on Roshar is through massive reliance on Soulcasters for food and shelter construction. While the Shin seemingly have no issue with outsiders using soulcasting (to trade them unmined soulcast metal), I think they shy away from abusing those powers themselves. Otherwise why wouldn't they just soulcast their own metal for use? I think timeline wise this makes great sense for the Shin wars occuring pre-Sunmaker. Earlier I had assumed the reason shardblades are heavily concentrated in Alethekar and Jah Kaved was due to certain orders like the Windrunners being based in Alethekar, thus the Recreance left a lot of blades behind there. That might still be partially the reason, but I think the Shin gobbling up Shardblades on their side of the world also is a great explanation for the dearth of Shardblades in the west. Even better, this helps explain why Iri isn't overflowing with Shardblades, despite the implication that the Recreance event at Feverstone Keep occurred there (dropping hundreds of sets of blade and plate on their soil!). Storms, by selectively poaching shardblades from their neighbors like the Azish, but not the more distant Vorin kingdoms, the Shin actually enabled the Sunmaker's conquest by setting up an exploitable imbalance of power!

In books the Shin invasions sound like a thing of the modern era. When Dalinar mentions his intent to unite all of Roshar, Adolin thinks Based on the purge of historical records pre-Hierocracy by the Ardentia, and (possibly) the order these events are listed offhandedly here, I'd place the Shin invasions shortly post-Recreance, possibly even during the same timeframe as the Hierocracy. Speaking of Shin and invasions, The old Way of Kings Prime chapter on Szeth/Jek had one blurb that caught my eye. Obviously the story has changed enormously since that draft and this isn't even close to canon, but I do like the idea of the Shin being a slumbering military giant restrained from war by their own sense of honor.

I think the top angular stroke of letters (as can occur on N/M, R, S, H, Z) specifically can be flexible and rotate to point the "wrong" direction. Probably some sort of stylistic thing. The text on the border of the map of Thaylen City just omits the top stroke of the N/M entirely to allow the column of letters to pile beautifully together like Tetris blocks. The weird starred letters I'm not completely comfortable with either...but I think in the two cases I identified if the letters were written "correctly" they would crowd into other letters. The N/M in the left column would break the margin if written "correctly", and the possible "R" in the right margin would poke into the neighboring "K" if written normally. I'm still kinda baffled what the first letter is on the top column immediately to the right of the divide. If we reflect the top stroke it's almost an "H", but with an extra stroke in the middle. H L J P/F T/D = ????? I personally think T/D are just one letter in Thaylen, and it was an earlier coincidence that lead us to interpret them as two distinct letters. It would match an overall pattern of Thaylen not differentiating similar consonant phonemes. Knowing that Thaylen writing doesn't specify vowel sounds, and that spoken Thaylen sounds like sounds being smashed together, it would be extremely difficult to distinguish a "t" sound from a "d" sound. Specifically, the fortis and lenis pairs of certain consonants are probably treated as single letters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Consonants . Our P/F is probably P/F/B, although we haven't really run into any "b" sounds yet.

Taravangian - Machiavellian Kaladin - Sisyphean Gaz - Lilliputian Dalinar (young) - Choleric Evi - Phlegmatic Adolin - Sanguine Renarin - Melancholic Jasnah - Smexy

As a vertically read language, I think it would be a good rule to assume vertical orientation should always be maintained in letters. Ignoring those p/f examples, every other letter always keeps it's proper side up in this image (S, R, N/M, K). So that got me thinking, what if those upside down p/f letters were actually a different letter entirely? They could be a highly stylized "J", kind of halfway between the Thaylen and Alethi phonemes for "j". That would also let us finally find Sja-Anat's name in the border! I think you solved the bottom with "Darkness", and the top is a mess, but I kind of like these guesses for the side columns: The single stroke phonemes still confuse me. In the Southern Frostlands map, this largely corresponded to "W" (wind, shipwreck, shallow, new) sounds, with a single instance of "V" (cave/cove) sounds. These markings cluster so much at the end or start of columns though, I wonder if they're just a start/stop sign for reading instead of actual letters though.

I'm kind of hoping Brandon just rips off the ending of Granny Weatherwax in Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad (spoilers obviously)

No, I think they're fundamentally bound by certain rules regarding memory and truth that they can't break. Their minds and memories don't even touch on certain concepts until their Radiants discover them, at which point they're completely familiar with them. Syl does this several times, remembering a past event or details of a new skill only after Kaladin finds it himself. I imagine the Nahel bond was specifically designed this way to be a brake on a Radiant's acquisition of power post Ashyn Surgebinding disasters. Lift and Wyndle's situation is an exception to this rule.

No idea about illumination, but Phobos is visible with the naked eye as a 1/3 size moon. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/20071127-caption.html Phobos and Deimos are about 21 and 12 kilometers (13.0 and 7.5 miles) in diameter and orbit Mars with periods of 7 hours, 39.2 minutes and 1 day, 6 hours, 17.9 minutes respectively. Because Phobos orbits Mars in a shorter time than Mars' 24 hour, 37.4-minute rotational period, to an observer on Mars' surface it would appear to rise in the west and set in the east. From Mars' surface, Phobos appears about one-third the diameter of the Moon from Earth, whereas Deimos appears as a bright star.

Is Nomon in a geosynchronous elliptical orbit above Urithiru with its perigee at midnight and its apogee at noon? From the clock image it appears to peak in the night sky right around midnight. The map of the Roshar system also gives a relatively simple orbital shape to Nomon with its perigee appearing exactly on the far side of Roshar relative to the sun. edit: no, wait, duh the moons are spinning the opposite direction. But I do think passing over Urithiru at noon and midnight would make sense in an artificially designed solar system.

Since you've done such great work compiling textual sources on our moons, I would recommend adding the Roshar Solar System image from Ars Arcanum. I've snipped out the little part with Roshar and its moons: I don't think this image is designed to be perfectly mathematically to scale, but I think in the rough sense the positioning of the orbits matches a lot of what you've deduced. I'll refrain from drawing any conclusions since I have to look up Keplar's laws to reminds myself about elliptical orbital speeds every time

Could Shallan referring to Mishim as the "slowest" of the moons merely refer to the fact that it's the last one to appear in the night sky? Or is she and Roshar much more astronomically advanced than we give them credit, and knows that Mishim has the closest orbit and the slowest transverse speed?

Brilliant! Well done on the clock theory! I think others have made the connection between the 3 circles in the endpaper artwork and the 3 moons, but that it was a clock somehow eluded us. Now that you mention it, it seems almost perfectly obvious, a circle with gem colors corresponding to numbers evenly spaced around the outside. My brain just seemed to always glance over the fact that Jes/Sapphire (1) has always been near the 1 o'clock position on the double eye symbolism. That Roshar has a 20 hour day just makes this feel ironclad. Does this mean the little sub-circles inside the polestones on the Vedel Endpaper are quarter-hour time markers? I always felt stumped what the point was of those tiny circles. I'm eyeballing 0:45 Salas 3:00 Nomon (looks a little before 3:00 on the Vedel image, a little after 3:00 on the Jezrien belt buckle, so 3:00 seems close enough) 7:25 Mishim Also, Salas needs to really blaze across the sky. Szeth mentions the Shin believe in a "hateful hour", the darkest period of the night occurring between Salas setting and Nomon rising. So, Salas would set around 2:00, giving us 2:00-3:00 as the hateful hour?

The main underlying problem is that Shallan is incredibly emotionally unstable and just getting worse. She's split her own personality into 2 distinct personas: "Shallan" and "Veil" (I view Radiant as more of a temporary mask to preform a specific function than a full personality). "Shallan" is the proper, respectable, demure, and formally dressed one who contains all the characteristics that Shallan thinks Adolin desires in her (and society/her Father have told her to be). On some level she does wish to be "Shallan", but that's not her true and whole personality. "Veil" is the flirty, adventurous, backtalking side of her with a quick temper and blistering wit that loves being tsundere with Kaladin. Adolin is wrong at the end when he says "Shallan" is the true personality. It's not his fault though, as Shallan clearly wants him to believe "Shallan" is the true her, and Shallan herself wishes it was true. It's not true though. She's both "Shallan" and "Veil". The fact she can't stop "Veil" from leaking through isn't surprising, since "Veil" isn't just some temporary role or mask, it's a fundamental part of her personality, just one she wants to deny so she can play at being pretty perfect lighteyes lady for Adolin. "Shallan" without "Veil" is kind of boring and demure, but it's who Shallan's father wanted her to be, and who Shallan thinks Adolin wants her to be. "Veil" without "Shallan" is rather foolish and also kind of a jerk when interacting with Kaladin (all of the snark, with none of the kindness to balance it out). She'll never take control of her personas in this current state, like Wit suggested, until she accepts both "Shallan" and "Veil" are the real her. Oddly though, Adolin liked the pre-Oathbringer integrated Shallan just fine. Her current "Shallan" persona never would have played "hard to get" to keep Adolin's attention, or made jokes about bodily functions inside shardplate. Ultimately it all comes down to Shallan. She's lying to herself and Adolin about who she really is. Also there's no reciprocal trust. Adolin confided in her his darkest secret (killing Sadeas), but Shallan continues to resist sharing...anything with him, out of fear it will make her appear less desirable to him. Shallan wants Adolin to love her, but presents a lie out of fear of losing him, Adolin wants to love Shallan but doesn't understand her on a fundamental level because she won't let him. I think they will eventually work it out, just because Adolin, like his mother, is such a nice and caring person. They won't have anything like a stable relationship though, until Shallan gets herself in a better mental place. Kaladin's ship seems to have sailed. He might previously had made a good match for Shallan, but he's accepted that she chose Adolin. To a large degree he just isn't extremely interested in romance at the moment. He might be a good friend and emotional confidant for Shallan, but I can't see Brandon Sanderson having his protagonists carry out an adulterous relationship no matter how "well matched" they were.

Physiologically it sounds like a sudden release of Dopamine into the Nucleus Accumbens (the reward center of the brain) causing a temporary euphoria. This natural reward pathway is the foundation of habit-forming behaviors both natural (music, food, sex, powerful emotional events) and artificial (opioids, stimulants, nicotine, alcohol etc.). It sounds a little disturbingly like the nod and buzz opioids give. We already know that using stormlight/magic gives the user a temporary buzz of elated emotions, heightened energy and focus, and dulling of pain. I think this deep inner warmth sensation is just a "larger dose" of the same interaction with investiture. Instead of just burning the stormlight/metal, heroes in these cases are interacting with the pure concentrated investiture of a shard itself. For Dalinar specifically I think this is him drawing closer to the presence of the Honor shard. He hasn't quite fully ascended (rather apparent since his body hasn't been vaporized and he isn't a planet spanning consciousness yet), but he's slowly drawing closer.

We're repeatedly told The Sibling is "asleep", had some past connection to Urithiru and that Stormfather wants humans to leave them alone because they've hurt them enough. An incredibly conspicuous giant spren that regularly performs a weird magic thing on local humans seems about as likely to be The Sibling as Vivenna is.

I got the impression that most of the Listener's material possessions were scavenged from the ruins of Stormseat/Narak. We still don't really know what insanity shattered that city and the plains, but I wouldn't be surprised if a couple Shardblades were left behind.

Adolin has a mostly-dead shardblade though. His extreme focus is necessary because he's trying to issue a complex command to a zombie spren that he has a limited connection to. SwordSyl is a fully sentient creature that can instantly vanish, reappear and instantaneously change shapes in real time with Kaladin's thoughts due to their close bond. He hasn't thrown her at an enemy yet because he doesn't really like to kill people, but doing so would be hideously effective.

Kaladin is a nice person who doesn't like killing or hurting others. Even if Kelsier attacked him he'd probably be trying to disarm or escape his opponent and would shy away from killing blows. Trying to fight unfairly or dishonestly would even run the risk of damaging his bond. Kelsier is a borderline sociopath who fights to win and can be utterly ruthless to achieve his goals. I love both characters, but my money would always be on Kelsier. He fights dirty, he fights to kill.

I like it. I've had similar thoughts, and now I'm leaning towards thinking some variation of "I will kill if necessary to protect the innocent". This was a very heavy theme for Kaladin back in Way of Kings, but has been put on the back-burner a bit now. I want to say Kal had multiple conversations with Syl and internally with himself about the topic. Yep. Lirin thinks of the world in 2 groups: those who save lives and those who take them. Kaladin leaves for war on the assumption that he can protect others as a "Watcher on the Walls". A third option, ones who kills to save. When he becomes briefly hopeless feeling mid-book, he takes a more cynical view: you can't kill to save, the actual 3rd group are the powerless victims of lighteyes. So we have: killers, healers and victims. Eventually Syl helps him come back around to trying to protect again, but he never quite resolves his central question of "Can you kill to save?" I think thematically it's very important going forward. Kaladin freezes during the battle of Kholinar, and Bridge 4 flat out abandons Thaylen City before a battle because they're still deeply morally conflicted about fighting in a war. Kaladin also kind of froze in past battles when his friends have died. Kaladin even has a flashback to his drill sergeant about not wanting to kill. It's clearly a question that they need to confront at some point, because they're kind of half-soldiers at the moment. Their ability to "protect" others is going to be extremely limited if they have so many moral qualms about fighting and killing.

More and more I'm thinking vowels in general are a trap. There's a scene in WoR when Shallan is looking at very old maps and Pattern "reads" some of the Dawnchant script. I think it might offer some clues about Roshar languages. To me this strongly implies a couple important points that we've been bumping into in the various scripts: “The scripts are derived from one another” Although Roshar has many varied language families, the various phoneme scripts show clear links with one another. The various writing systems probably all evolved from a common Dawnchant source. Letters over time can converge or diverge in various descendant languages (Thayley may have consolidated consonants, Alethi probably added new ones) You see a similar pattern in the real world with Phoenician, whose written alphabet influenced other written languages as unrelated as Greek and Hebrew. “The h sound can be for any letter,” Shallan said absently. “We write it as the symmetrical letter, to make the word balance, but add a diacritical mark to indicate it sounds like an h so the word is easier to say.” "h" sounds and such seem to be linked to diacritical marks. At least in modern Veden languages, this may not be a universal point though. I do think there's a connection there though. “Behardan, you said? Maybe Bajerden . . . Nohadon himself.” Going back to my "vowels are a trap" point, look at how Pattern has guessed the wrong vowels for every spot in "Behardan" vs "Bajerden". I think this either means a single letter was used for A/E (but our new script doesn't match that, in fact "E" only occurs as a variant of the "i" phoneme in Aleth), or that Dawnchant was an Abjad alphabet, meaning it wrote out only consonants, leaving the reader to estimate the vowel sounds. I think the latter is true. In real world the earliest alphabet (Phoenician), and some other Semitic languages like Hebrew lacked written vowels, which were only later inserted by scribes into written documents. It would make more sense to start from a written language without vowels and later evolve in vowels than for a written language to lose existing vowels. I think Thayleh, with its lack of written vowels actually preserves that Abjad characteristic of the Dawnchant. Other languages like Alethi and this strange script we're looking at now, likely had to create their own vowel letters (hence the easy to miss and sometimes variable shapes in glyphs). I think our new script is an "in between" language. They've added ~2 vowel letters and rely on diacritics to distinguish them. Alethi glyphs and women's script has continued this evolution by giving a distinct symbol for each vowel. If true, vowels are a trap. Modern Roshar languages are largely "guessing" at the correct vowels to insert in the Silver Kingdom names. We probably shouldn't get too hung up distinguishing those sounds. Sorry to say I have almost nothing to add to figuring out the Mythica border. In true test taking style, I decided to just skip the hard problem and do the easier one first "A Survey of the Great Thaylen City" also contains an artistic border of Thaylen letters. This one is much easier though! For the most part it is just one endless repeating pattern. Start at the top left and read downwards, when you hit a corner just turn the page and keep reading downwards. Behind Door #1 we have the pattern repeated on the left and top margins. Letters flip horizontally on the bottom and right border, but vertical orientation of the letters always remains constant. With one exception you can start at the top left corner and read your way down and counter-clockwise infinitely. Door #2 shows the horizontally flipped pattern (starting with a terminal H from the previous margin). Our five repeating letters are T/D, H, L, ?, H. The fourth letter doesn't match any our of existing Thaylen letters perfectly, but by process of elimination it seems very likely that it is a stylized N (leaving off the first stroke of the pen to maintain a very compact and margin aligned block of text). This gives us Thaylenah. Nothing too shocking, but we do have one little Easter Egg at the bottom of the left column, breaking up our otherwise endless loops of THLNH Hmmm, ZKSTRT...I wonder who could have put that there. Alas, none of these nice conventions seem to apply for the Sja-Anat Mythica border. Letters are flipped upside down seemingly at random there, and there doesn't appear to be a nice starting point to make sure you're always reading the document in the correct direction. I don't think starting top-left and reading counterclockwise helps to make that image any easier to decipher.

Yes, I would call our two base vowels "A" (weird v above c shape. almost like a musical quarter rest?) and "I" (shaped like a asymmetric "V"). English is awful with vowel pronunciation and names as a consequence of the great vowel shift. In just about every other language in the world though the name we give to the letter "E" ("ee") is a sound produced by the letter "I". Take for example the word intrigue. Both "i"'s in that word are actually making the same sound. The first "i" is just a shorter version of the second "i". Try pronouncing the word and stretching or shortening either "i" sound to confirm to yourself that they are in fact the same sound. This is how I'm currently spinning our vowels: I~ = intrigue , seen in Rishir, Iri, Aimia I` = intrigue , seen in Shin Kak Nish A~ = obey , seen in Sela Tales, Aimia (not 100% certain on this one, but everything else sounds even more goofy) A` = father , Natanatan and too many other examples to list. Not too surprising I suppose when your God was named Tanavast, that you would heavily use this sound in your holy city names I feel pretty comfortable on those, but the versions with the < and > symbols are bit trickier. I< = Only found in Alethela . Might indicate a short-e sound? I'm still messing around if this might actually indicate the following letter has a stop/aspirate? A< = Many examples. Makabakam, (Valhav), Sela Tales. I'm kind of torn in a couple directions on this one, but I'm almost certain it has something to do with aspirated consonants. k, b, p, t, d, Yeah, an aspirate is just a puff or breath of air. "h" would be the correct letter in English. We insert them into words without thinking about them following weird rules we don't think about in the English language. They vary a lot between dialectics and very commonly get dropped from words over time. Greek for example doesn't even have a letter for "h", its presence is indicated solely by breathing marks over an initial vowel. They frequently appear before a vowel at the start of a word or after certain stop consonants in English (k, p/b, d/t). For example the word "pin" has a short aspiration between the "p" and "i", but the word "spin" does not. Oh, could it just say "vev" (as in spelling out the number "four" from Bridge 4)? There's kind of a stretched "v" phoneme shape on both sides, while the triangular tip of the spearhead in the middle would correspond to the "e".