robardin

Oh, it might well mean "something". He calls Dalinar "Son of Honor" a lot, but even if he has only done it one or two times, has only ever referred to Kaladin as "Son of Tanavast". I find it interesting that Syl and Pattern refer to people by names, both their bonded human and others, but the Stormfather never does, I don't think? It's always "Child of this" or "Son of that" and maybe "the Windrunner". Not even ever addressing Dalinar by name, in talking to him? Yet the unbonded Sibling does so right from the get-go.

Ah, I see what you mean. Well what I wrote appears also to be true (I just double checked): he DOES call Kaladin "Son of Honor" in discussing his bond with Syl, and his "killing" her, in WoR. Doing a text search, the SF only ever calls Kaladin "Son of Tanavast" the one time: in OB Ch. 31, when Kaladin flies up into a highstorm as it tears into a town to plead with the SF to turn away from the unsheltered people below; and this after addressing him first as "Son of Honor": Unless you count in RoW Ch. 107, when the SF refers to Kaladin as "the Son of Tanavast" but to Dalinar as Kaladin plummeted through the highstorm diving after Lirin. In other words, the SF calls Kaladin "Son of Honor" more often, both to Kaladin directly and in reference to him to Dalinar, than he does "Son of Tanavast". I'd say it's more on the level of calling someone by different nicknames just for a little variety (after all, the SF never refers to humans by their name). (BTW, the phrase "Son of Tanavast" is used just on other time in any SA book: towards Dalinar, by Taravangian.) While there may be "something" to when the SF chooses to refer to Kaladin as "Son of Tanavast" vs. "Son of Honor", I also think it's a far, far reach to think that implies Kaladin is somehow the "Heir" to the Shard of Honor (based on calling him by the previous Vessel's name). Especially if you're drawing a parallel to Vin, when not her nor anybody else who later took up Preservation was ever called "Heir of Leras", so that's a double reach to me. Essentially, saying "Son" doesn't imply "Heir"; and referring to Tanavast vs. Honor, if anything is meant by the use of distinct terms in context, is LESS meaningful wrt becoming some aspect of the Shard of Honor if the name of the previous Vessel were invoked instead of the name of the Shard in question, right? Plus, in Oathbringer alone, the SF addresses Dalinar as "Son of Honor" a lot, lot more than he does Kaladin. If anybody's the "Heir to the Shard of Honor" it'd be the Bondsmith bonded to the biggest Splinter thereof, right? Which is why he has the right to make binding deals with Odium as regards the Oathpact?

No, I mean that one shouldn't take Kaladin-specific inferences to the Stormfather calling him "Son of Honor" when the Nightwatcher calls Dalinar both "Son of Honor" and "Son of Odium" in the same sentence. And if you give special weight to the SF using the appellation over the NW on account of now being a Splinter of Honor, well the SF also called Venli "Child of Odium". So it seems to me that both the SF and NW are free to throw both labels around, and neither is more than an opinion of the "big" spren as to the person's nature. I mean it's not like the SF calling Kaladin "Son of Honor" meant he was going to do anything special wrt Kaladin. Quite the opposite, he used the term in anger: first telling Kaladin to break off bonding with Syl, then in telling Kaladin he'd killed "my beloved one" and that "you shall not ride my winds again". Hardly the sentiment he'd express if he meant it as a special title for the Heir to the Shard he is a Splinter of.

The spren seem to call humans "child of" or "son of" a Shard as a way of implying their intent, the way they see it. When the Nightwatcher approaches Dalinar in the valley, she addresses him at first as Son of Honor..., and then follows with, "Hello, human. You smell of desperation. ... What is it you wish of me? What boon drives you, Son of Honor? Son of Odium?" Similarly, where the Stormfather calls Kaladin "Son of Honor", he calls Venli "Child of the plains. Child of Odium." when she enters the highstorm to release Ulim from the gemstone that Gavilar gave to her.

I read Oathbringer in the shortest time of any of the first four SA books, but that's a little deceptive because I'd already read several of the Dalinar flashbacks in the Unfettered II anthology, as well as having read the weekly early release Chapters at Tor.com as they came out. Put together, that amounted to something like a third of the final book. TBH I think that killed my enjoyment of it the first time through. Interleaving Dalinar's flashbacks in their properly placed sequences in OB gives moments like him suddenly remembering Evi's name and What Really Happened at Rathelas emotional punch, but instead of re-reading those flashbacks when I encountered them, I just skipped them the first time through "to get to the stuff I didn't already know".

You have to give the Epic a black eye. ... With certain associated conditions, that is. ... And one baby zebra.

This, plus they gain experience that never goes away. Kaladin will live a mortal lifespan, but Leshwi (except for having turned away from Odium) has had thousands of years of fighting practice against Windrunners and Skybreakers alike. In fact, that's one of the reasons the Fused are increasingly insane - that's all they've done for thousands of years of physical existence on Roshar. Talk about battle fatigue! Jasnah pointed this out at one of the early Team Radiant meetings in Oathbringer, that one way to defeat the Fused that was within their physical means to (try to) achieve would be to genocidally eliminate every living "parshman" host. No hosts, no Fused. First, she'd suggested that they try to find more Heralds (than Ash and Taln, who were in their custody in Urithiru), then to kill them with the goal of sending them back to Braize to re-kick-start the Oathpact seal. "Perhaps they can still prevent the spirits of the enemy from being reborn. It's either that, or we completely exterminate the parshmen so that the enemy has no hosts... In the face of such an atrocity, I would consider the sacrifice of one or more Heralds to be a small price." This horrified Kaladin, and clearly had never been the strategy of any previous Herald or Radiant forces, but it is in fact the choice the Heralds themselves had made originally, isn't it? "Our only hope [other than sacrificing the Heralds to torture] is to defeat their armies so soundly that even if their leaders are constantly reborn, they lack the manpower to overwhelm us." I mean, we know the Fused were "a thing" before the Heralds were - the Oathpact was in response to Odium creating them, when they "switched" to his side as the humans turned to Honor. (Or did the humans only turn to Honor after the Fused came about, as well?) And there were no Radiants to help the Heralds at first, either - it was Heralds leading humans, versus Fused leading the singers. Now, put yourself in the position of those Heralds; it could well be that they realized they could not permanently defeat the Fused with the Oathpact, only cause an indefinite stalemate, at the cost of their agony at the end of each Desolation. Why would they agree to that? Because the alternative was genocide. Unless the deal or the game were changed. Say, like some new discovery as to how to perma-kill both Fused and Radiant spren and remove them from the board, or some kind of contest of champions binding the actions of a god that Odium seems to think he sees a loophole in, to his advantage.

Exactly - it would be well beyond the scope of a "Young Adult" novel (and thus out of line with the first two books) I think Evershore had the biggest jaw-drop moment for me in the entire series. Sure, in true Sanderson style, there WERE hints and foundational groundwork descriptions about Detritus: its relatively small size, its lack of surface water, and the "platforms" surrounding it (the entire planet) that indicated the ancient human creators had imbued it with a LOT of protections and offensive firepower, including linking up to form a shield between them... And when it was revealed how taynixes powered the really OP stuff, and hey, the planet "just happens" to have internal caverns full of them and their food sources, and then they found they could teleport the platforms with the taynix to BAM come to help in the defense of another planet... And is also the source of the DDF's graviton "GravCaps" flying tech... Maybe it SHOULD have crossed my mind about, well, maybe the ENTIRE PLANET is a flying fortress - a Life Star, if you will, as opposed to a Death Star, or at least a fortified ark. But it didn't.

?! Unless that's very recent, that would directly contradict what he's said before - that while aethers as a magic thing was fully worked out as a Cosmere component, and pretty much the same as described in the unreleased work Aether of Night, pretty much everything else about AoN is on the scrapheap if it hasn't already been raided for other Cosmere works. He might write different "Aether" books in the future that would become Cosmere canon, and yes aethers as you may have read about in AoN would work the same way, but that is not the same thing at all as saying "Aether of Night is now deemed canon".... If it were, it would be released, no? (At the least, would be publicly downloadable or readable the way Warbreaker is?) Let's see... The Arcum yields this WoB from recently as Oct 2020 (just over a year ago), Note that I myself have neither obtained nor read Aether of Night so I don't know what "the Shard plot" refers to, but I'd say if he considers a putative publishing of AoN requiring completely removing something Shardic, and that he's not even decided if aethers would (still) predate the Shattering of Adonalsium, I would say that's very far from saying anything therein is even close to canon except for the magical mechanics. Maybe you confused LLT's comment in that WoB as being something Brandon said, instead of being the question directed at him? He did kind of beg the question, in the original meaning of "presupposing an expected answer in its phrasing", by leading off with saying that AoN "could be canon with slight changes", which to me it doesn't sound like Brandon himself agrees with at all.

We canonically (especially in-story) know next to nothing about Yolen; aside from unpublished works, which canonicity is subject to change, most or all of what we "know" is from a collection of random WoBs (which are under similar caveats), notes or comments from Khriss as it being an original, pre-Shattering world suitable for a benchmark basis for all Shardworlds that is now "shrouded and hidden somewhere in the cosmere", and a few bits of physical evidence suggesting it's still a reachable (and return-from-able) place post-Shattering: Frost's receiving and replying to Hoid's letters (who we know to be a dragon still on Yolen from WoBs) The branch displayed in the Ghostblood trophy case Well, it could just be a really, really old artifact, I suppose... Mraize being surprised and delighted at his Azish cavalryman's suit being cleaned of aether stains, which is apparently really hard to do He had to go there in person wearing the suit for that, one might imagine, unless aether is now off-Yolen somewhere as well Zahel (Vasher) showing Kaladin a trilobite-like fossil in his possession which is implied to come from Yolen I think that's all?

Interesting, I would rank them as Words of Radiance > Rhythm of War > The Way of Kings > Oathbringer based solely on the number of times I've re-read either specific passages or the entire book - but in general it's pretty close. Of all of them, the two I actually found myself rather disliking on first read, for one reason or another, were Oathbringer and The Way of Kings. In the case of TWoK, I picked it up and started reading it 2-3 times before pushing through around the halfway point when it "got me", or perhaps when I got it. We are dropped in medias res not just into a sprawling epic fantasy with a lot of obviously "setup of unknown things to be revealed later" like in the Prologue, but a very alien world that you sort of have to pick up the context along the way. And I had so many mental objections or questions. Everything liviing on Roshar is like a crustacean or mollusk? (Which image I find a bit repelling, like Hoid does when he later complains to Kaladin about having to recast his tale of a chick and a bunny rabbit for him as "a piece of wet slime and a disgusting crab thing with seventeen legs"). But it's not an ocean world, it's a world of regular (and unexplained but normal to the inhabitants) "highstorms"? Does that mean they do, or don't, have "regular" storms along with the highstorms? Are they regular, or not - they can mostly, but not entirely, be predicted? Oh and wait, there ARE some "normal" creatures like horses and chickens? What about trees, which are described often; if plants have adapted to the highstorms to curl up and whatnot, how is it they have wood and ships and so on, because trees can't do that? (And anything that bends to lie flat to the ground and later stands up, how would that be hard enough to build with?) The main POV characters took a while to identify with as well. A mopey, betrayed slave in Kaladin, just getting further and further beaten down. That's not fun to read... A spoiled, scheming young woman aiming to pull off a heist, OK, ... An even more spoiled and wishy-washy king and his uncle general who's seeing things and may be going crazy, even he thinks so, plus his two sons, plus his brother's widow, and this guy Sadeas who seemed like a hero helping to protect the king from assassination when we first read about him, but quickly seems like a schmuck - and they're all the ruling group of the country... And the non-human people they're fighting against, the "Parshendi" or "listeners", they have multiple forms, more than two genders, "gemhearts" (like the chasmfiends?), "spren" (what exactly are these things?), etc., etc., it was a LOT to take in. I had no idea where it was going, and no one or two likeable characters to latch onto for the ride coming out of the gate. And after such a detailed, suspiciously expository self-dialog from Szeth in the opening scene about using "the Three Lashings" to do stuff, which I re-read a few times to make sure I got what the mechanics were about... nothing more like that again. For over a hundred pages. Hundreds! Why did I just do that? So yeah. I got through the first 3-4 chapters or so of the book and put it down the first time, got through about a quarter of it the next time, and finally just said to myself "Trust Brandon" and pushed on through... And then when they hang Kaladin out in the storm "for judgment", that was the hooking point. As for Oathbringer, I made what I now consider to be a mistake of reading all the Dalinar flashbacks pulled out of context in anthologies like "Unfettered", months or years before OB was released, and then skipped or rapidly skimmed them when I encountered them in the novel. I think that ruined the pacing for me quite a bit. And at first I was really annoyed by how Lopen reached the Second Ideal - I thought it was way unfair that it was being played for laughs when it should be an epic thing. Only later did I realize the Stormfather wasn't capable of pulling a practical joke on Lopen, and in fact what Lopen was doing at the time was significant. On re-reads I find OB satisfying, and of course, TWoK "makes sense", though reading all the POVs of Dalinar and Navani dealing with Sadeas and the other highprinces politically still feels like the worst slogs of reading, say, Dune and the scheming between the Great Houses. But then... Of course! Then shall we...? Yes! Words of Radiance has no epic moment? I can't imagine a more epic one than Kaladin's reaching the Third Ideal and Syl's "return". I also found (and still find) Shallan's initial interactions with Kaladin and Bridge Four extremely amusing. Especially when they arrive to Dalinar's camp and her two attendants are Vathah and... GAZ. Oh, that was fun to imagine, Kaladin's eyes bugging out to see Gaz there, at that time, in that place, backing away furiously down the hall he came in. And even funnier in that it was from Shallan's POV, who has no idea of the past between the two. And Gaz STILL can't help addressing Kaladin as "Lordship" at first! LOLOL. In fact, I was impressed that Gaz even remembered Kaladin's name to correct himself, as nobody in Bridge Four used their names originally, and Gaz certainly doesn't ask for or use their names individually when assigning them to bridge squads. I'm not even sure when he would have learned his name. Maybe overhearing the other members of Bridge Four addressing him? EDIT: I just went to re-read that scene and of course, Kaladin had just given his name to Shallan as "Kaladin" a few moments earlier, as Gaz started trying to escape Bridge Four. It's almost certain he didn't even know Kaladin's name until that very point!

"A sudden and calamitous ruin?" Ruin? RUIN? Is something intending to try to winnow Harmony back into Preservation and Ruin?

The Fused are "immortal punching bags?" LOL. I give you rep for that line alone! Firstly, they DO kill Radiants - though you are right, we have not seen that happen to a POV or "central" Radiant yet. But as others have noted already, that has something to do with the nature of epic fantasy storytelling... Still, at the beginning of WoR Kaladin reflects on how he falls apart at reports of Windrunner losses (deaths), and of course Yunfah the honorspren "free agent" became so because the Radiant he'd been bonded to before got killed. And it's clear that Sigzil was about to get killed, but was spared in respect in reciprocation for Kaladin's gesture of respect/mercy to a Heavenly One earlier in the same fight. So it's happening. (Though the "mutual respect" thing going on with them and the Windrunners unnerved Dalinar, because war isn't a game.) In terms of being a visible, on-screen threat, we haven't seen the Fused "in action" as much because like Shardbearers, they "can't hold ground", which was their primary goal upon first being awakened by the Everstorm - taking ground. They are really meant to be Radiant Killers, or Special Ops types of forces (like the one sent to get the King's Drop at Thaylen Fields). Or more precisely, the "gods" to lead the singers against humans in the way that the Heralds were supposed to rally the humans in a Desolation. When we do see them in action, they are impressive: we saw Leshwi and two or three other Heavenly Ones easily take out not one but TWO full Shardbearers in Graves and Moash. After catching them by surprise, true, but that was part of the plan. And the same group of flying Fused later casually terrorized the Wall Guard at Kholinar in Oathbringer, where Kaladin was the only one ever to have taken one of them down (because he was familiar with Lashings and could summon a Shardknife). Despite being so much more powerful than the city's defenders, though, they couldn't conquer the city by themselves, nor were they meant to - only to soften up the human resistance so the ground invasion force of singers (and Moash) could take the city more easily. Finally, the Fused are only now approaching full strength in RoW - many "brands" had not even had any (sane) ones awaken even by the battle at Thaylen Fields. (And that's another thing: however many immortal Fused there are, an ever-shrinking proportion of them are actually functional. They've "come back" too many times.) In terms of comparing a Fused to an Inquisitor of the Final Empire (a "stock" version, not a later, Ruin-enhanced Super-Marsh type model) as a standalone threat, consider this: a Radiant is much harder to kill than an Allomancer, even a Mistborn, and we've seen a Mistborn (Kelsier) take down an Inquisitor (Bendel). But the Fused do kill Radiants. Therefore, a Fused (at least the more combat-oriented kind) could likely take down an Inquisitor in a cage match. (Especially if those Stormight-draining daggers they have in RoW would leech away metal reserves!) That said, you're 100% right in terms of the relative menace of the two. Fused may be more powerful, per se, but in the context of their world/storylines, Inquisitors are... Creepier. I mean, they have SPIKES DRIVEN THROUGH THEIR EYES THAT COME OUT THE BACK OF THEIR HEADS.

Huh. I have been pronouncing it Scandinavian-style "Yorgen", but "Jasnah" I thought was with a hard J, "Jazz-nah". Are those the audiobook pronunciations then? "Djorgen" and "Yasnah"?

Haha, I'm almost exactly a year late to have the same thoughts, LOL

Yes, if Taravangian had "got better from being mostly dead" just in time, a la Wax and Szeth, via the power of Ascension, his healed body would now be the Vessel in... Wherever it is that Shards carry their Vessel until it's disgorged upon releasing it/dying. At the same time, the two are not logically equivalent ("if p -> q" does not equate to "if q -> p"), so there not being a Taravangian corpse next to Rayse's could still have a third explanation... For example, Harmony was able to heal Vin and Elend's body physically but they lacked that "restored string" to the Physical Realm (because they both had wanted to "move on"); a healed body doesn't mean there is a restored tie to it. ...But it's still a clear break in the parallel with Kelsier, whose corpse definitely remained behind while he was Ascended as a Shadowy Vessel, to be used by OreSeur and TenSoon to mimic him. It's not like a shadow that Ascends "slurps up" their former body to put in Shard Vessel Storage as a side effect. I guess plot-wise, Taravangian being killed by Szeth served not only as a way for Szeth later to believe the disfigured body he found upon regaining consciousness(?) from the explosion(?) but also to add the critical "anger" element to his emotional stew of Passion to Connect to Odium. That part is not yet clear - what it seemed like from Szeth's POV. He pushed Taravangian up against a wall and said this time, he was killing of his own volition and the life he was taking was Taravangian's, and stabbed him not with NB but his side knife... Then we see Taravangian, after Ascending, perceiving that Szeth "had climbed to his feet and sheathed Nightblood" and assumed Rayse's unrecognizable remains were those of Taravangian from him having "somehow" drawn the blade. He'd know that getting cut/stabbed by NB wouldn't (typically) leave any remains at all, and that drawing the Blade without enough Investiture to feed it would "eat" the wielder (he could feel it almost happening to him at Thaylen Fields), but he's never seen that happen to someone, so, it's plausible for him to assume that that's what it would look like. But what happened to make Szeth loose his footing? Was there an explosive force pushing out and a burst of light from the Ascension, like when Kaladin swore the Second Ideal while rescuing Dalinar? That's for a different thread, I suppose.

No, I don't mean Kelsier as Thaidakar, or even a ruthless schemer... I mean the part where both Ascended to take up a Shard of Adonalsium, after being physically killed. In Rhythm of War, Ch. 113, Taravangian dies BEFORE Ascending, and does so not while (mentally) in the Physical Realm (where Szeth was), but in a "bubble" of the Cognitive Realm manifesting him, Odium, and somehow also Nightblood: Meanwhile, in the first chapter of Mistborn: Secret History, the newly slain Kelsier - killed by a backhand blow and then a spear-through by The Lord Ruler - enters the Cognitive Realm and encounters (what's left of) Preservation, who informs him: "Your ties to the Physical Realm have been severed. You're a kite with no string connecting it to the ground." Is that not the "snap" that Taravangian felt in the Cognitive Realm? The severing of his "string" tying him to the Physical Realm, as his body was killed by Szeth? Meanwhile, later in Chapter 4 of Secret History, Ruin taunts Kelsier not only for not knowing what he's doing with the power of Preservation, but that he's fundamentally flawed as a Vessel for it as a Cognitive Shadow: Wasn't The Recently Deceased But Definitely Dead Mr. T in the same situation as Ghost Kelsier, then, except that instead of Ghost Kelsier requiring a "Connection bomb" to force the Shard of Preservation to accept him as the Vessel in Ascending, Ghost Taravangian was considered "perfect" by the Shard of Odium? In counterpoint, we have also seen "the newly dead" get revived with Regrowth or similar Cosmere healing magic, if done quickly enough: Szeth at the end of Words of Radiance - though apparently his soul isn't quite "fully stapled" back to his body - and also with Wax in The Bands of Mourning, where he "died" and had a chat with Harmony in the Cognitive Realm before Marasi pressed the Bands into his "dead" hand, and Harmony gave him a kind of "red pill uplink" to the Physical Realm to allow him to tap the massive goldmind to do a similar instant-mega-healing. So maybe, Ascending at juuuuust the right time after dying, can still "heal" the death and enable the Vessel to be considered as having "ties to all three Realms." (Also possible: Ruin was taunting Kelsier with a lie, as he was occasionally known to do. But I must say, that does seem pretty sound logic wrt Realmatic Theory.) But part of me wonders if that, too, was part of Cultivation's long game. Taravangian internally exulted over her that "you have no idea what you've done", but come on. Culti's been around a LONG time, even before Ascending (she's a DRAGON), and has proven to be both incredibly subtle in her manipulation and extremely deep in her understanding of people's inner natures. She probably foresaw that Taravangian would be "overconfident" as Odium, and making sure he Ascended as a Cognitive Shadow would be an easy way to build in a check on The New Odium, something which he has yet to realize.

So... They're cytonic mistwraiths, if you will? LOL Anyway, having just read Cytonic, Sunreach, and ReDawn this week (I must say, I enjoyed those novellas way more than I expected to do... And I had expected to enjoy them!), something else about the taynix struck me. (Is ReDawn material supposed to be spoilered? This thread started by bringing up Sunreach...) Just in case, I'll do it. Whatever their "echo" behavior is, I think suggests a deeper mechanism that is psychically cytonic. Which fits in with their apparent surface mindlessness being some kind of hobbling effect.

I would think the answer is obvious. You want 10,000 Breaths as soon as possible? There happens to be such a living being already on Nalthis with such a stash: Susebron, the God-King. OK, he doesn't know the "secret Command / Intent" needed for one God King to pass Peacegiver's Treasure to the next one without killing himself; that's something the priests only teach the GK right before it's necessary to make the transfer. And even if he did know how to do it, why would he give it to YOU? But that's the classic heist setup. You have one year to somehow fake yourself (or a proxy) as the next God-King, get someone to teach him the Command, tell him it's time, and waltz off-planet before anybody's the wiser. I suspect Kelsier could plot something out. Too bad he was killed by the Lord Ruler, though. Ha. Ha. Ha. Let's get the ball rolling: the hand-off of the Treasure happens either when the GK has a natural born child (not sure how often that's happened), or an infant Returned is found and brought to the Court of Gods (the usual "sign" - every what, 50-100 years or so?). Seems like the latter would be easier to fake - not that it's easy, but certainly easier than getting Siri to (apparently) get pregnant with, and then to deliver, your intended Breath mule. Which mule needs to either be yourself, or one that is 100% going to then pass that Breath on to you. So who or what to use as a simulated infant Returned? Someone really small of form with a Lightweaving illusion slapped on? A Feruchemist (or medallion-enabled Feruchemist) with a really massive atiummind who can keep filling it to stay at infancy while around the GK? And then, using a Scadrian "Excisor", store the Breath in an object in an Identity-free way. O Sovereign Where Art Thou?

What was it Brandon said, unambiguously, as far back as right after TWoK? "Do not believe anything a Herald tells you. Ever. They are all insane." There are like 40 full Windrunners with Blades. Every Order has Radiants. Have we seen Heralds "go lucid" so often? Two of them reside(?) at Urithiru; wouldn't this have been noticed? Taln would have said something besides his broken mantra? Or if it's just Ishar who "is sane when an Ideal is spoken near me", well Navani want particularly close, unless it requires a Bondsmith ideal, and is a Spiritual effect so physical distance didn't matter... In which case, one of the two Bondsmiths should go. And finally, Ishar was sane enough to tell Dalinar this for what, one minute? If he could reset the Oathpact with his Honorblade so quickly, why not do it instead of yakking during the window of sanity? It all smells like a trap to lure Dalinar (who he evidently intended to "come to him in Shinovar"). Why there? As my daughter would say, "Sounds pretty sus."

Yeah I have to say, I tried to come up with a semi plausible in-world explanation like "maybe Notum just mean forefather!", but he gave his entire pedigree generation by generation from an honorspren by the Stormfather after the Recreance that began with his great-grandmother, so there's just no deadeyes in his family tree what with it being a single line for spren. Meanwhile, Ico was another ship's captain from Oathbringer whose father was a deadeye from before the Recreance... Albeit a lightspren who had care of that deadeye father in his ship's hold. So it's not even just that Brandon "confused Notum with Ico", more like "Oops, he thought that bit about Ico's backstory was Notum's and as an honorspren deadeye, of course he would be in Lasting Integrity". UInless a comical sidetrack dialogue were imagined as head-canon. "Your father, Notum? Didn't you say you were the great-great-grandson of the Stormfather himself, of a line he started long after the Recreance, after the death of Honor?" "Ah, well, I was thinking of this honorspren in Lasting Integrity who I spent a lot of time around while growing up." "One you were as close to as your father?" "Closer, even! He was more of a father to me than my so-called real father ever was!" "Even though he'd been a deadeye since the Recreance four generations before you." "Yes. My father was really, really distant, you see." "..." "Honorspren humor. It takes too long to explain to humans. Probably a bad time for it. It's because of the abuse I just endured as a captive. Anyway, about your deadeye fighting back-to-back with you against those humans..."

Well, if the God King passes on Peacegiver's Treasure to the next God King and then "lives out their life" somewhere, that implies the former GK is still supplied - in secret - with the "one breath per week" a Returned needs to survive, until such time as that one gives up their Divine Breath. With Treledees and all the other priests slaughtered in the Pahn Kahl rebellion from within the Court of Gods, who's going to know where these "secret Returned who need upkeep" are? Maybe the previous God King isn't around any more anyway? Dying of "Breath starvation" due to nobody knowing their situation would be rather anticlimactic for someone who was once revered as a living god.

I like these points a lot, especially the combination of Progression on another person which is of limited use after an injury is too old, and the person has "internalized" it in some way Cognitively. Imagine if resetting or dressing a wound a certain way allowed the person to "regain hope" enough for Progression to work on it better, which would allow him to surgically adjust it further towards full healing, and so on...? And as for Lirin using Abrasion ("slickness"), imagine if he bonded an "enlightened" cultivationspren, having been touched by Sja-anat the way that Glys and Tumi voluntarily underwent. What would the "part-Odium" version of Abrasion become? We saw Renarin's (and Rlain's) Surge of Illumination become internal in effect, showing the Surgebinder visions instead of creating illusions for others to see; what if the "slickness" granted by an enlightened cultivationspren were also internal? That sounds maybe a little too much like Connection manipulation, though.

Upon seeing a billboard for the new live-action movie of Clifford the Big Red Dog the other day, I couldn't help but think to myself, "Man, to get that big without heart failure, Clifford must have a gemheart." Then I wondered, are chasmfiends "giant versions" of smaller Rosharan creatures that developed a gemheart to get large, or the other way around? Which came first in their development or evolution? Does the gemheart coalesce inside the creature (like how we grow teeth in our skulls), or does the creature have to ingest some kind of gem seed early in their development (like an oyster forming a pearl around a grain of sand)? Like, if you raised an axehound the right way, "gemhearting" it at a particular stage, could it grow to Clifford size?

True, the only clue about that we have is Mraize referring to Thaidakar as Iyatil's master... Which doesn't necesssarily mean "direct supervisor" master