robardin

Interesting. Because we have seen highly Invested people before, one would think to the level of about the Second Heightening at least (deeper color sense, perfect pitch), not notice these things. Unless a Third Ideal Radiant holding max Stormlight isn't as Invested as the Second Heightening? Seems impossible! Or maybe there is a difference between "holding" Investiture like Stormlight, which is temporary and leaks away; having it "on tap" like in a metalmind; or "streaming" it like burning metal with Allomancy, versus "having" it the way Breath sticks to one's soul?

Yes, the "four inset from each of the four" pattern sounded like four Commands (Dawnshards) over-arching four Intents (Shards) was being sketched out. And the fact that Rysn how exhibits Heightening like benefits (but not healed her legs) I thought suggested some kind of link with Endowment; and of course it fits with having come through Cultivation's Perpendicularity, as well (though that could be coincidence).

The problem with that is, why would there be TWO Dawnshards on Roshar if there are four total in the Cosmere? Then again, Honor "raved about the Dawnshards" (plural), saying the Radiants would destroy Roshar with them as they had done with Ashyn... Maybe Roshar had one originally, and Ashyn another and now there are two? (And the one from Ashyn is the one that was brought through the Peaks and was placed, or left, in Akinah?) And Dalinar has somehow attuned to another Dawnshard that was left where it was last used to turn Natanatan into the Shattered Plains? (The opposite of "UNITE") But then why would Honor say it'd be the Radiants - not the Heralds, who had abandoned their Oathpact anyway - be the ones to "destroy Roshar with Dawnshards"? Something to do with why the Dysians forbade Rysn from forming a Nahel Bond?

The Dawnshard appeared to be contained in something referencing the Sixteen Shards around the perimeter. They pre-dated the Shattering of Adonalsium, and were used to effectuate it... And where the Sixteen Shards represent divine Intent (literally, WoBs and Arcana entries refer to Shardic Intent), the four Dawnshards instead represent divine Commands. (So that means... The Four "Commands" were external to Adonalsium all along?) The one came to Roshar via the Horneater Peaks - the one that Rysn has now taken into her - is CHANGE. (Which is different from Ruin's or Cultivation's Intent? Or is there a reason that Command came through Cultivation's Perpendicularity?) Pretty awesome that Huio turns out to have an extremely erudite vocabulary in his native tongue, he's just bad at learning other languages! Didn't see that one coming! And his Third Ideal basically being something like "I will put my Stormlight-exhausted life on the line to protect Lopen's, even if he was just being a total pain in the shells as usual" was great. As was Lopen's once again being about self-awareness. Interesting that this Dawnshard appears to have given Rysn some kind of Breath-like Heightening. I don't think it's a facet of "any old Investiture" because we've seen extremely Invested people in other Cosmere works, like Jasnah and co. basically having Max Mortal Stormlight Levels at Thaylen Fields, and they didn't notice anything like deeper color, sound, and taste (or maybe they were too busy fighting to really enjoy something)? That's definitely setting something up.

I got the book at 10PM my time. My .... bed time *sob* So very sad that I shall not sleep

You can also just email to yourself, which is what I did In your Kindle settings is an email address for the device, like [email protected] You email the .mobi file as an attachment to that email address, subject is irrelevant Wait a few minutes for Amazon to send you a confirmation email that it has been received and uploaded to your account, then do a sync operation And voila! eBook in your Kindle library!

I think there was another very long thread analyzing who the kandra on Roshar is likely to be, and the inescapable conclus

Well, it does have a certain bite.

Oh yeah, I thought this was surprising as well, and speaks to significant "off-screen time": how naturally Kaladin's parents interact with Syl. She must show herself to them all the time, probably while talking about Kaladin, too. They only ever had boys (Kaladin and Tien, and now Oroden); at some level they must feel like they've kind of acquired a daughter (if not exactly a daughter-in-law) in Syl!

Yes, the descriptions of odd protuberances and passages that didn't seem to have any human purpose read like organic internal type things to me. But a corpse? Tsk tsk tsk, look who knows so much! It so happens that Urithiru and the Sibling are only mostly dead! Yabbut I don't think Roshone "owned" Hearthstone. He ran it. Just like the house he moved into had not been Wistiow's personal home but the designated dwelling of the appointed citylord. And Hearthstone was of low enough importance that its citylord would agree to marry his only child to a darkeyes, albeit one of very high nahn. For argument's sake, let's say Wistiow had lived another 5-10 years, the Final Desolation never happened, Kaladin had completed his training in Kharbranth to become a surgeon like his father, and the apparently agreed upon union between Kaladin and Laral took place. Do you think that would have made Kaladin citylord of Hearthstone upon Wistiow's passing? Or would a "real" lighteyes have been appointed to replace him, as happened with Roshone, while Kaladin and Laral would make their way in the world like Kaladin's parents did, as a high nahn family?

I am not sure what "overthinking" I am doing, except to note that normally, a new citylord (or here, a citylady) for Hearthstone would not be something the ruling monarch of Alethkar would bother with. Then again, with so many people gathered at Urithiru, why not. I am suggesting that the importance of Hearthstone seems to have risen from what Kaladin had realized on his return there was "not important enough to have stewardship over any of the highprince's lands"; and that Roshone, as its citylord, was "only a first point of contact with surrounding villages". As such, Roshone - and now Laral - would most likely only have been of the sixth dahn, as that is what Dalinar suggested Kaladin do as a fourth dahn Shardbearer in Oathbringer ("Just make sure you have a good steward, wise scribes, and some solid men of the fifth and sixth dahns to lead the towns"), and Hearthstone is a backwater. The "steward" would be higher ranked and span multiple towns/citylords, and then that steward would report to someone like Amaram, who reported to highprince Sadeas. And that that importance - at least with respect to Dalinar et al. - has more to do with Kaladin's ties there than its location. Kaladin's "lands" don't encompass it, as it is in the Sadeas princedom, and his own lands given to him as being in the fourth dahn were "on the south fork of the Deathbend River" on the way to Kholinar, with six or seven villages in it. It was convenient to use that as cover to extract The Mink, as it was close to the Herdazian border and they could use the excuse that it was Kaladin's hometown (with his parents there) as a premise for the evacuation. But it shouldn't stand up to scrutiny. I was surprised the Fused didn't give more thought questioning why Hearthstone, of all places, was worth evacuating as one of the first uses in the field of The Fourth Bridge? Concluding that the Mink (who they were searching for in the area) was part of it would be natural, but surely it'd have been easier to send just a few Windrunners to meet up with him somewhere in secret and fly off, rather than to mingle him with refugees in a town that would then be evacuated en masse by air? Yet they seemed to have anticipated such a thing, because they had that whole "Surgebinding Supression" fabrial set up in Roshone's home.

Oh, and about Laral becoming "citylady" after the passing of Roshone: that doesn't seem like it'd be high ranking enough to warrant meeting with Jasnah, Queen of Alethkar. Something else going on there? I mean, think about this: who and what had been the "chain of command" between Hearthstone, a backwater town fit for exiling a disgraced lighteyes "where he couldn't do any more harm", and where Kaladin only realized how unimportant Roshone's position was in the big picture after he returned as a Radiant? Up the line was Highmarshal Amaram, and ultimately, Highprince Torol Sadeas. Both of who are now disgraced and out of the picture (dead, in fact). Ialai had taken up the title of highprince (highprincess?) but she, too is dead. Hearthstone was deemed worth a special evacuation, one personally attended by Dalinar and Navani in their one and only flying barge, accompanied by a slew of Radiants. Yes, in part that was because of wanting to extract The Mink, but also because it was special to Kaladin, it would seem. And maybe more than that? I'm not suggesting Laral is about to become highprincess Sadeas or something - for one, that would mean they'd been thinking of bestowing that on Roshone before he was killed, and that seems very unlikely - but there is a vacuum that will need filling, and I suspect Laral has it in her to impress people with her will and determination in short order.

Yes, a typo with "ston" and also earlier, with the phrase "more freer and more open". It's either "freer and more open", or "more free and more open" - "more freer" is not correct, or at least awkward. (Is there a way to report these?) As for Lirin - I agree, this was The Wrong Way to react for Kaladin, but at the same time completely in character. To Lirin, a dedicated pacifist, Kaladin is the Prodigal Son twice over. His son who was lost to becoming a killer, and then who died with his other son fighting in a war; then miraculously returned to him alive, only to still be even more of a killer to him, a Shardbearer. And now... His son is truly returned to him! If he'd had more time to think about it from Kaladin's perspective, he might have restrained himself. Maybe. It's just too genuine.

Well, I don't think Kaladin being a surgeon is going to "stick". Kaladin thinks he should become a surgeon again after "giving up the spear". And interestingly, Arclo referred to him as "the surgeon" Surgebinder the Sleepless were watching from afar (one would presume). But Ka's reaction is more "resigned to the default course" than enthusiastic. "I always knew I'd come back to this" is not really embracing it. He also never actually said it. He let his father say it, after dodging raising the topic because he knew what his father would assume, and then agreed with him.

Good points all, but especially the bolded ones. The "fixed in number" thing about the Fused (and I would imagine, the Thunderclasts) is strongly implied. The Fused all know each other by name and pattern for many millennia now. Many of them - maybe not a majority, yet - are now insane, to different degrees: some to the point of inaction, others simply "going off the rails" like how Leshwi views the Pursuer and Raboniel as having done. Similar to the Heralds'... Enheraldment?, it seems like the Fused were all created at the same time. Yet the Fused must have come first, before the Heralds formed the Oathpact, as you point out that the main point of it was to be able to hold back the Fused on Braize in between Desolations. And as evidenced by the False Desolation, it's not like the "parsh" didn't continue to resist and to fight without them; they were simply without immortal leaders with many lifetimes of experience, and without their power of Surges and Thunderclasts, until such time as one of the Heralds "broke" and "their gods" were able to return to them. And both Fused and Heralds being "Cognitive Shadows" in nature must be linked both to the mechanics of their immortality, and to how they function (or no longer quite function) as time goes on.

Egad. Because if she really thinks logically about utilitarianism - and she is a very logical scholar - she might reach this conclusion!

I definitely don't see the Fused as "polar opposites" to the Radiants; you only need look at someone like Leshwi to appreciate that, as one of the ones who are still sane, and reflects on how far most of the Fused have drifted from their original motivations/selves in terms of what they're willing to do. By and large they're caught up in just wanting to finally win at all costs - but they weren't originally like that, rather they were mostly originally like she is now. When Raboniel speaks of how the humans haven't yet learned "the power of oaths" I don't think she is referring to oaths that the Fused themselves have made: "The bond" = the Nahel bond, which she knows (or thinks she knows) something about "the deep mechanics" that the current crop of autodidact Radiants do not, and "the power of oaths" I would think is something of the Nahel bond, of Honor. Or perhaps of massive fabrials involving sentient spren, like the Oathgates are - ever wonder why are they called that? You might say, because it requires a Radiant of the Third Ideal with a living Shardblade to operate them - but Odium also said that his forces would be able to use/repair the one at Thaylen City if it were accidentally destroyed by Thunderclasts, so long as the gems were recovered. Isn't that interesting? And this is before they had either Malata the Diagram Dustbringer in hand, or Jezrien's Honorblade that the Diagram managed to steal. "The nature of the tones of the world" = not just the rhythms of Roshar, but something that ties in with "cymatics", the formation of great cities like Kholinar.

I had not made that connection, actually. Well done!

They have a Shin in custody, who if they asked, would tell them he had trained with most if not all the Honorblades in their possession ("Szeth had trained in all ten Surges"). So a question of, "Hey, what have the Shin figured out about using the Bondsmith powers of Ishar?" actually could have an answer without sending someone to Shin who manages to come back. Ash says that the Shin "had legends... prophecies about the coming of this Return." So when they made Szeth Truthless, it wasn't denying that there would be one... Just that it hadn't happened yet? That seems flimsier. Skybreakers have been "harrying Azir", requiring us to keep "dedicating forces" in that region. Forces... Of Windrunners? Who else could hold off flying Radiants? Or is the Mink correct in that they are only there to serve as a distraction?

Just Plate, or Full Shards? Or has Dalinar given Oathbringer to Cord? Because Rock was taking the full set of Shards he won from Amaram back to the Horneater Peaks. (That would be the Blade that Heleran had wielded.)

Indeed, and when Shallan "regressed", so did the Nahel bond (and Pattern all but "died"). And as has often been the case with these bonds, the Ideals are in part expressions of how the particular Radiant views either the world or themself, as we see with the variants on the Third Ideal of the Windrunners. So perhaps it depends on how the Skybreaker in question views the Crusade's original purpose and relative completion. We see that Skybreakers become Masters only at the Fourth Ideal (which from what we see in Skybreaker training is the level at which they can take on squires), but we've only seen one Fourth Ideal actually declared: Szeth's Crusade: "I will cleanse the Shin of their false leaders". This could be interpreted in different ways: physical elimination of the "false" leaders who had (knowingly) proclaimed the Desolations ended, Nahel bonds a thing of the past, and condemned him to being Truthless for saying otherwise; or, exposing and casting down their leaders as misled (perhaps by Nale himself!). Or yet other ways. So it'll be interesting to see how Szeth goes about completing this "to the satisfaction of his highspren". They seem to allow technicalities, so it doesn't have to be something as extreme as "kill them all!" as a superset solution, if it turns out Szeth discovers that there was one particular person or subgroup genuinely misleading all the others. (Like what if it was ultimately something Taravangian engineered, who knows the Shin language, by somehow corresponding or otherwise manipulating them in order to "maketouseaTruthlessCanwecraftaweapon" as Floorboard 17 paragraph 2 of the Diagram conceived of?)

As @Halyo_Alex said, that probably wasn't his Fourth Ideal. After all, to be "completed to the satisfaction of one's spren" would require a goal with a verifiable end, and an eternally ongoing type of "mission to prevent" can never be deemed over except in failure. Though it does raise a few interesting questions... Starting with the Nalan-specific ones: he says he is the only Herald to have "eventually joined their own Order", and Ki the Master Skybreaker said during Szeth's induction that no Skybreaker "in centuries" has reached the Fifth Ideal to become the Embodiment of Law. But Nale later demonstrated that he had. Which means he "joined his own Order" at least centuries ago. While his progress was probably extremely rapid (even faster than Szeth's was), at a minimum he reached the Fourth Ideal at about that time, if not significantly longer ago. So, when did that happen, his bonding a highspren to "join his own order"? His abandoned Honorblade disappeared from Shin "a long time ago"; I would imagine that could be linked to his becoming a Skybreaker himself, because abandoning the Oathpact at Ahrietiam seems like something his highspren might well have "died" over, had he joined the Skybreakers before then. And why else would he "go back" to take up his Honorblade, if not because in some sense he felt he'd renewed an Oath with respect to it (and it being the Skybreaker Honorblade)? By his own account, he worked for "thousands of years to prevent another Desolation" after Ishar warned him of the danger of other Radiants "upsetting the balance now that Honor is dead". (This is at the end of OB Ch. 121.) That implies he took up his mandate to eliminate non-Skybreaker Surgebinders only after the Splintering of Honor. Did he have a hand in engineering the Recreance, while holding the Skybreakers back from it? That would have been a masterstroke. Perhaps that was his Fourth Ideal! And more generally for the Skybreakers: what if the the Crusade objective later proves to be incorrect in basis, is discovered to have been incompletely achieved, or even undone (whether or not the Skybreaker might have prevented its undoing)? Does the highspren "die" as with an oath violated, or does the Skybreaker have to do a patch job? Is the Nahel bond regressed to the Third ideal?

Right. So... Why would the Stormfather, being aware of the Oathpact being broken, still want to forbid spren (particularly honorspren) from bonding with humans again? If it's death by oathbreaking by human hands or splintering by Odium, at least go down fighting? With him trying to wash away the Alethi army before the Battle of Narak, I guess you might say he hoped to forestall the Everstorm by making it a default victory for the Parshendi so they wouldn't have to do it?

Well the WoB that is usually referenced on this may not mean quite what some people take it to mean, in my opinion. Even though he basically says, it means what you think it means, he also hedged with the squidgy word "technically" to lead off with. So yes. The "power of Ruin" is somehow involved in what makes Nightblood special, and not in a general "a magic thing in the Cosmere created to destroy necessarily reflects Ruin". Some people think this means that there is somehow atium alloyed with the steel that was in Nightblood; others note that the Cosmere Timeline places Warbreaker between Era 1 and Era 2 of Mistborn, (...oh, and I just realized this is in the general Stormlight Archive forum, so out of respect I'll spoiler the info here that references Big Reveals of Mistborn...) As for my take, ask me on a different day and I'll give you a different answer. I like both angles!

What I mean is, imagine something which first became physical in the Cognitive Realm - my example of the ship that was built from raw wood in Silverlight. A ship built in the Physical Realm has a bead in Shadesmar, which is the realm of thought and concept, which is why spren live there/originate from there. Objects develop an identity that deepens with time, an identity as given to it by sentient beings thinking about it, as we see when Shallan has to convince things to change to Soulcast them. They don't just resist changing, they argue back. This is also something of the Cognitive Realm. I would think that a ship built in Silverlight would not have a Shadesmar bead if and until it were pushed into the Physical Realm - that would be the "reverse scenario" of something physical, like one's clothing, "replacing" the bead version of it in Shadesmar if the wearer were to gate through as a living being. So what would that "new bead" be like? If the bead has an identity and memory of "being a ship" the way that The Wind's Pleasure did, despite there never having been a "Shadesmar bead" version of it before, doesn't that imply there was a Cognitive version of it all along? If the relationship between Shadesmar and the Physical Realm is akin to that of objects casting a shadow on the wall, then what does it mean to be a shadow of a shadow, or for something to be real in the shadow world?