TheFoxQR

There is definitely evidence to believe Yelig-nar consumes you. Even Nohadon mentions it, iirc. Whether giving someone some surge is any kind of a security threat, I seriously doubt. But to each his own.

... but then why leave out just one Surge? Besides Yelig-nar seems to be granting all 10 at once.

Cryptics seem to be all about truth, and creative interpretation of truth. If Pattern was to somehow get to Arelon, would his "pattern" be cycling through the Aons? Do the Honorblades have names? Honor describes the future as a glass window, that shatters into smaller and smaller pieces the further you go. There are similar visual descriptors for how Renarin sees the future. And the Voidbinding Chart is supposed to be colored glass. Is there a correlation there? Were the Ire impressed by Raoden and what he was able to achieve? When a gem is attached to shardblade, the gem disappears and re-appears with the Shardblade. Living spren can take any shape, and are not restricted to any one shape. It is said a shardblade is made of Godmetal. Fabriels require forming physical structures around gems, and then trapping spren in those gems to channel the power. So, could a Radiant attach a gem to their living shardblade, and then summon it in the shape of a Fabriel? Can you have pre-trapped spren in separate gems, and then summon your spren around different ones in different shapes to quickly switch between several fabriels? Is Aluminium Spiritually neutral, and is Silver Cognitive neutral? Potential spoilers for future books:

You say this, but then Stoneward surges essentially mean they have an at-will stoneshape, except it works on everything. Elsecallers can make matter out of thin air, and just convert people into... not people. Jasnah literally just goes around calling #realityhax wherever she goes. Oh you think there's a supporting beam here? Nope, its now empty air. Oh I want to get up there? "Let there be Stairs!", and air became a stair. Oh you think you had a living breathing body? Nope it's just fire now. Lol no, I'm not saying you'll burn, I'm saying your body will literally transmute itself into fire and just puff out. Bubbye! Not to mention they can star-trek beam themselves from one place to another. Lightweavers should, in theory, be able to make lasers that burn holes into things. Potentially plasma too, since they do have Transformation. Skybreakers should be able to split the air as they fly to create thunderous sonic booms. And you know, they can divide other things too. I shudder to think what Releasers will bring to the table, with Abrasion and Division.

That would be weird, because then it means there are 11 Surges in total and that's just heresy. @cometaryorbit There is something interesting with atleast one Unmade - specifically Re-Shephir and Lightweavers. Lightweavers make Illusions with stormlight, where as the midnight mother weaves entities of pure the essence of midnight. Lightweavers need to understand or atleast somewhat connect with what they are copying, whereas the Midnight Mother seems fundamentally incapable of doing so.

But do they have to... ? The Fused orders are said to have only one Surge each, so I don't think there'll be 1-1 correlation. The KR orders and their Surge-pairs are all divided on concepts. Windrunners are all about leadership and protection of others. So naturally their Surges are Gravitation and Adhesion. (People gravitate to them and form strong bonds) The Skybreakers hunt the guilty and bring justice to them, so they have Gravitation and Division (they gravitate towards the guilty and punish them). The Lightweavers are all about creatively showing the truth (true art transforms and illuminates), etc. Could the Fused orders be divided not by concepts like these, but by cultural lines? Or maybe they could have to do with how much Odium has invested in them. The only reason I'm questioning this is this - Odium not utilising every resource that he can for aesthetic reasons doesn't sound right to me. There are 10 surges, so if he can grant them, why would he leave one out? If it has to do with Honor, than shouldn't he leave two out? One for Honor and one for Cultivation?

you can check out the Arcanum for all the things people have asked, and Brandon's replies to them.

That is the thing, isn't it? I've been wondering if the Radiantspren were originally Idealspren. So like, Syl and her kind could be leadershipspren, or the "urge to protect"-spren. And just as a firespren is attracted to fire, or a painspren to pain, a Leadershipspren would be attracted to good examples of leadership. The Singers need specific forms to be able to perceive and be good forms of leadership, before they can attract Honorspren like Syl. Similarly, Warform combined with Eshonai's own default personality and what she was accomplishing at the Shattered Plains was why she began attracting lightspren.

That is my suspicion - that to attract and bond radiantspren singers need to be in some form beforehand. So, for example, Timbre was first attracted to Eshonai when she was in Warform (or maybe it goes even further back), but was stuck in the physical and went to Venli later.

In one of the interludes, it is mentioned that the Songs list hundreds of Forms. I think they can bond any spren, (attracting said spren to bond woith is a different matter) so long as the spren isn't too sentient. It's... like their version of the bond can only support bonding to spren of up to a certain level of complexity. Beyond that, you need a Nahel Bond to bond with the spren, but this requires higher cognitive capabilities on both ends.

Coming from me, this might be a bit much, but mate, seriously. You might want to slow down a little bit. Or atleast give reasons for assertions.

It was about an older version of the Great Venn Diagram of Rosharan Magic (or GVDRM). Essentially, I hashed out this theory in its infancy, and I had a couple other questions I wanted to ask Brandon. Given that I've never had the chance to ask a question to him personally, I wondered if, just once, I could send him a dm. And he replied. The problem is, I asked him these when he was in Spain. And from the feedback here, I had the chance to refine the GVDRM significantly after I sent him the original version, as he wasn't using reddit much in between. I'm hoping by the end of this year I'll have had a chance to ask him if the new one's any better.

Honor and Odium would be pretty rad honestly, with Honor tempering the worst of Odium, and Odium allowing Honor to look beyond the word of an Oath and into the spirit of it. Plus, SMITE!!

I haven't heard of the bloodline thingy, can you give me a source? The connection requirement I understand, and that's sort of the whole crux of my argument up there. And for all the other stuff, I gave you my argument. It works within the magic system. If that isn't enough for you, and you still want to believe in something external and arcane which we can't understand/know because Brandon didn't give us the tools for, then go ahead.

I... don't know. I'm leaning towards there being a misinterpretation of that WoB. It seems a little bit of a stretch that only the Shaod allows you to draw Aons, when Soulstamping - on a different continent - can be done by anyone, even though technically it's the exact same magic, just one where people discovered patterns for the soul, rather than the physical. There is also a bit of a chicken and egg problem - if the Shaod is not dependent on the Aonic Equation of Elantris the city, why was adding the chasm line to it needed to fix the Shoad and allow it to complete? If the Shaod is required to draw Aons - period - then how did people discover the first Aons before the city of Elantris? It's like, one can't exist before the other. If the Shoad is independent of the city Aon, then nothing you do to the city would fix it. On the otherhand, if the fixing the city Aon fixed the Shaod, then there can't be a Shaod before the city came into play. The other thing is, Aons work the way they do because the Dor is in the Cognitive - ergo Aons should not predate the Splintering of Aona and Skai, when the Dor didn't exist at all. Hopefully we'll see.

Nope. That does not say Elantrians pre-clude Elantris. It says that Aons preclude Elantris, and to draw them in the air you need to be an Elantrian. However, the existance of Elantris the City, and the fact that Raoden's carving a chasm line worked, is that Aons don't necessarily have to be drawn in the air - they can be carved with intent, which anyone should be able to do. They just can't draw Aons in the air, without the extra bit of Dor constantly pumping through their spiritual veins. In fact an Elantrian is basically a pen, with the Dor their ink. The idea is pre-Elantris scholars created the Aonic Equation that is Elantris to make things easier for them, and the Shaod came later, as a side effect. Whether they knew that would happen or not is a different thing entirely. Or, you can maybe manually get taken by the Shaod, by putting yourself at the center of an Aonic Equation.

Hemalurgy requires metal spikes - this ain't that. Though I agree there are similar principles at play. And no, Radiantspren don't use the Highstorms. This is why Elhokar's spren was trapped - it crossed over when Elhokar was about to speak his Oath (or maybe a bit before), but then got stuck there without anything to anchor it back.

This would actually be extremely simple to do by any investiture that is cognitive heavy. Feruchemy has similar procedures, and that literally takes no investiture. In fact, Breadths seem by nature specialised to do stuff like this. In awakening, the command is a cognitive imprint, which the Breadths then try their best to emulate. You literally grant cognitive capabilities to whatever you awaken. It only makes sense that if you awaken yourself, the Breadths can add to or overwrite parts of your consciousness with practically no overhead. I have since asked a question to Brandon based on similar thoughts (in fact, when I originally had the idea, I didn't even remember Vasher doing this, my original theory was drawing on completely separate evidence):

My point exactly. What Odium seems to be doing in that sequence is using Nergaoul to induce a specific cognitive effect in the minds of Sadeas Amaram's men, and as a result of the nature of that state, his spren are able to take over. The Radiant Group in Shadesmar sees the spren Odium has prepared for this on that Shadesmar, which promptly start disappearing as Amaram's men's eyes start glowing red. The Spren of the Oathgate say that these spren have been using ancient pathways that they cannot stop - making me think that the pathways those spren use are the same as Radiantspren when they first go over into the physical, attracted to their Radiants, and the same pathways utilised by other spren to bond with the Fauna of Roshar.

Aha! Yes. And why is the Thrill red? Odium's own colors are Gold-Violet.

This statement is immensely frustrating on multiple levels. In fact, I've debated with myself if I should even answer it. You are looking at thing A, which is very different from thing B, and applying it to to thing B without understanding the underlying principles that make thing A and thing B work. First, it is not observed phenomena. The Shepherd Moons don't keep the rings from falling into Saturn. They maintain the shape of the rings. Second the scale. The Moons of Saturn are close to Saturn and close to it's rings. Third, the moons don't pull the rings away from Saturn. In fact most things about the rings (except composition) are contested. If a moon outside the ring could pull the inside of the ring with any significant strength, then it would completely mess up the outside of the ring. Shepherd moons demarcate boundaries mainly by pushing (which is technically only an effect of their gravitational pull, but still), not pulling. Fourth, Ars Arcanum mentions that nobody has directly studied the Gas Giants. This would be different if they were close enough to actually effect the orbit of Roshar, in which case they would be visible to the naked eye. Fourth - there are 10 Gas Giants. 10. flipping. Gas. GIANTS. If any of them could affect Roshar's orbit, RIP Braze. Or the Asteroid belt behind it, which is significantly lighter and closer to the Gas Giants. No to mention the Gas Giants' pull on each other. Fifth, in all of this, I'm completely discounting revolution times, or the minimum distance between two orbiting bodies in the same plane for the orbit to be stable. Go lookup the difference in revolution times of Mercury, Jupiter and Pluto. Roshar would have traveled several years before the closest of the Gas Giants would go around once.

There isn't much terminology for what I'm about to discuss, so I'm just talking about it in terms we do know - it might be hard to read because of that fact, but bear with me. If what I write here doesn't make much sense to you right now, come back after a couple of days when this statement is removed. I may have improved the write up significantly. Premise: Elantris is a simple Aonic equation made up of two Aons - Aon Rao (Spirit) and Aon Ela (Focus, Center) Aon Rao, when used in other Aonic Equations acts as a power amplifier. (Why? I suspect that amplification of power is a side effect, and the actual effect involves the spiritual realm somehow - it adds a sort of spiritual weight to any equation, making an imprint of the idea back into the spiritual - thereby increasing efficiency and thus output. A similar principle seems to be at play on Roshar with Lightweaver Illusions) The effect of the Aonic Equation of Elantris is to focus the Dor and to increase the power/efficiency of all other Aons drawn in it's vicinity. This effect is strongest within Elantris, and weakens the farther you go from it. There isn't an Aon Shao anywhere in or around Elantris - making me think that Elantris isn't a direct cause of the Transformation, but rather a side-effect of some other phenomena that Elantris causes. Let's doscuss the nature of Aons in brief. Aons are cognitive structures that allows you to make the right connections. As such, they have to include stuff that would be in the general background cognitive perception of the concept they represent. Thus, the Aon for Water uses the lake and the Aredell river to cognitively conceptualise water. Similarly, the Aon for wood incorporates the location of actual Arelene woods. Aon Reod (Punishment) look like a crown of thorns. The Aon has to conceptually make sense. Let's take a look at Aon Ela and Aon Rao in this sense. All Aons "pull" the Dor, and shape it. Aon Ela pulls the Dor to it's center. I'm asking you to think of this as an increase in pressure in the Dor, focused at it's center. Aon Rao serves one primary purpose - it creates a conceptual channel into the spiritual to the idea of the land of Arelon (as this idea is incorporated into the shape of all Aons), and connects all of the Dor in that land to the Ela drawn. This has an effect of creating a much stronger baseline pull in the Dor towards the center of the drawn Ela, increasing the "pressure" significantly. When any other Aon is drawn in it's vicinity, this existing pressure adds to the pull created by that new Aon, in effect pulling the Dor out much more strongly, thus increasing the power drawn out of that Aon. Keep this in your mind when you read Elantris next and the effects will make more sense. Everything on the Spiritual seems to exist in two forms - as ideas and connections between ideas. So there is an idea of every person, an identity of who they are. And then there will be literally thousands of two-way connections between them and all the different spiritual ideals conceptually connected to them. One such connection of import is their connection to the land of Arelon. This would naturally be strongest in those who are born there, but even people who are simply travelling there will form some level of connection to the spiritual ideal of that land. In other words, we can say that there will be a connection between the spiritweb of the person and the spiritweb of the land of Arelon - a channel of sorts. The Shaod could then be a side effect of this pressure. Kind of like how pressure beneath the Earth's crust will find weak spots and periodically explode outwards to relieve itself (the technical term for these is "Earth Pimples", but in the common tongue they have been called Volcanoes), the cognitive nature of the Dor, it's connection to the land, the Spiritual channel created by Aon Rao, and the massive amounts of pressure created by the Aon Rao enhanced Aon Ela will all combine to periodically push the Dor along the "strongest" spiritual connections that are connected to it and into the spiritwebs of individuals who are on the other end of that connection. This sudden infusion of the Dor will significantly warp their spiritwebs - an effect which cascades out into the physical. This is what they call the Shaod. Just like once a Volcano is formed, it takes much less pressure to push stuff out of it, once you get taken by the Shaod, your connection to Arelon has been immensely expanded. This makes it much easier for the Dor to be channeled through you. Does this make sense to anyone, or is the write-up too confusing? TLDR: Getting "taken" by the Shaod might be equivalent to the formation of a new volcano on the Earth's crust. Elantris the city creates and maintains a constant pressure on the Dor, which makes it easier for the Dor to flow through when the metaphorical tap is opened by drawing an Aon in the air. A side effect of this is that the pressure constantly wants to relieve itself, and sometimes it does so by flowing through someone's connection to the land. The result of this is the Shaod.

And tell me - what is Nergaoul?

That's... not how orbits work. It's not even close to how orbits work.

And that discounts everything I said how...? The 10 Gas Giants have nothing to do with the System set up on Roshar - one where cognitive entities can shape spiritual ideals to change their manifestations in the physical. In fact what I'm trying to explain there is why the Spren are so intensely Cognitive in nature. I'm not saying they define the Surge-pairs, or anything there after. The Surges and the Spren have to be two distinct things for their to be a one-many to a many-many correlation between the two. All I'm saying is the Gas Giants help nail down and then keep the Spiritual ideal of what a Surge is from drifting. This has nothing to do with the Heralds, the Knights Radiant or the Essences. Just think about it. Adonalsium "manufactured" the entirety of the Solar system for some specific purpose. Why would anything in it be wasteful/pointless? And planets live on a timescale that is irrelevant to any of our stories, so their function is probably never gonna be something that is important, or can even be proved beyond argument. It's not like you can destroy/change/temporarily remove a planet from a Solar System to see if this is the case.