robardin

On a related note was thinking about this the other day: what's the most useless Twinborn compounder? A gold/gold Twinborn like Miles Hundredlives was obviously very powerful, despite A-gold being generally despised as pointless on Scadrial, because of what burning a feruchemical goldmind gave him free Investiture for. But what if you were instead double aluminum? You're an Allomantic gnat, but hey, with your Feruchemical ability you can burn your aluminumminds to nigh-infinitely Compound for... Identity! Woo-...hoo? But at least you'd be able to wield Nightblood longer than most people! So long as you had enough aluminum, anyway. (Which unfortunately, even in Era 2, is even more expensive than gold.)

I think it's not so much the "Oh no he'll drain me empty of Investiture if I draw it and I'll go poof" fear, as his realizing this is one of the few things in the Cosmere that could destroy him (where he is not even afraid of Jasnah's Shardblade) just by him being near it ("he would stay far, far away... in a different room entirely" is well beyond simply "he would not attempt to draw Nightblood"). I think this goes back to the other discussion of "Is Hoid a good person?", where there is a quote where Hoid himself declines to consider himself a truly "good person". So picture what Nightblood does to people who have doubts about their own goodness if he's just unclasped a little and in the proximate area. That's what Hoid is afraid of, maybe?

Technically this is what Nightblood would do even to a living person, too: draining their "spark of life" after all other sources of Investiture are drained. So far we've only seen highly Invested people draw Nightblood - either Vasher with over 100 Breaths in him, or Szeth holding Stormlight with infused spheres at the ready for more... I would think any normal human who drew Nightblood would quickly get "eaten". I also wonder exactly what Brandon meant by Kelsier "in his current state" (this WOB was from... right after the Oathbringer release?). A simple Cognitive Shadow in the CR, as he was in Secret History, or as one that's found a foothold in the Physical realm (as he would be as "The Sovereign" that we've not seen on-screen yet but for a short POV coppermind memory in Era 2)? Because if the Heralds, the Fused, and the Returned are also essentially Cognitive Shadows with Physical presence, we've seen that they can hold Investiture. In fact, Vasher is a Returned and thus a kind of Cognitive Shadow as well, and he can feed Nightblood with extra Breath (or Stormlight). So it seems a returned-to-Physical Kelsier who is still a Mistborn and can burn metals again should be able to safely wield Nightblood, assuming he had enough metal on hand... Right?

I was obviously (I hope) humorously exaggerating to make a point, but as Karger quoted, Hoid himself would not call himself a "good" person because in the pursuit of his as yet unknown goal, he is willing to let bad things happen to good people. Which is definitely not "good", per at least some people's in-world definition. Remember Teft's interpretation/explanation of "journey before destination" - "Protecting ten innocents is not worth killing one. In the end, all men die. How you lived will be far more important to the Almighty than what you accomplished". And there's no way someone like Kaladin would ever say, "If I have to watch this world crumble and burn to get what I need, I will do so." Of course not all Radiants would share this interpretation, and Hoid is in fact now a Radiant himself, if he's bonded the Cryptic at the end of Oathbringer as is heavily implied. But Hoid is self-aware enough to know that he's not what he himself would call a "good person", even if his goals are not for himself but for some kind of greater good (if indeed they are). I mean... In Mistborn, was Rashek a "good person"? As Sazed noted, in the end, he "ultimately had good intentions", and as Vin noted, was largely responsible for humanity being able to survive long enough to reach and live through the Catacendre. That doesn't exactly make him a "good person". Now Hoid's no Lord Ruler (is this the Cosmere equivalent of Godwin's Law? LOL), of course, but the point is essentially the same.

Somehow I had the feeling that was coming, and wasn't so much shocked/surprised as nodding my head like, "oh yeah, of course, awesome!". Maybe because I read Mistborn: Secret History literally the day before I read Bands of Mourning, since the two books were released on the same day and I felt like reading them in in-world chronological order. The first time I read Era 1, though... When Vin's body fell out from the mists and an disbelieving Sazed ran up to check, I still had no idea what was going to happen. By the Forgotten Gods! All the religions of the world that Sazed had so carefully and thoroughly preserved, to the best of his ability, then reviewed and rejected, one by one... They weren't all true. But they all had truth. Classical Scadrial geographical and star charts, anatomical and biological and color spectra, all encoded therein. Never. Saw. That. Coming. I stopped reading for a few moments, then went back to re-read it immediately, kind of like when I was 8 years old and read Charlotte's Web for the first time and had to read it a second time to really believe it. (Except this time I wasn't crying, at least not for sadness.) On the other hand, since his copperminds held verbally recited texts he learned via oral transmission from another, senior Keeper to store into his own copperminds while young, I'm never quite sure how that would give him the mental images necessary to project charts, or to see colors that no longer existed in nature. Maybe that part partly came from beginning to Ascend, as he could see "what had been done with the Power" by Rashek in modifying stuff.

The title is about "Mistborn Quotes", but the poll a selection of lines from Kelsier... Hmm. My favorite Mistborn quotes of the moment are from Era 2. I always liked Sazed as a mortal in Era 1, and the way he interacts with Wax is amazing. The first Pathian meditation/prayer we "see", from a Wax POV doing so in Alloy of Law: And no specific line or phrase, but when he gives Wax that red pill/blue pill kind of choice (left hand or right hand?) in The Bands of Mourning, that really hit me (paraphrasing, "It is not duty, though that is how you have seen it; it is but a different adventure" - and, bonus, "the understanding in His face was infuriating"). Vin's rant about the way that Kelsier and his crew lived, even as they planned a "skaa uprising" against The Lord Ruler, was among the most memorable from Era 1, after Kelsier dismissed Elend from consideration as a good man because he was a nobleman: "So are you! What do you think this is, Kelsier? The life of a skaa? What do any of you know about skaa? Aristocratic suits, stalking your enemies in the night, full meals and nightcaps around the table with your friends? That's not the life of a skaa!" It was exactly the slap in the face Kelsier needed and deserved. "You're no skaa - you're just noblemen without titles." "...Maybe I need to spend a little less time worrying about which noblemen to kill, and a little more time worrying about which peasants to help." Words a lot of people could stand to absorb, in a reality-adjusted context, in the real world.

Since this is in the Stormlight Archive forum, I'll stick to SA examples... In addition to multiple examples from the very powerful Kaladin arc in TWoK ("Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right... This is death I'd lead my friends to... Journey before destination. Death, and what is right."), what got me in the feels was the Shallan flashback in WoR, after her father refused to settle Jushu's massive gambling debts (almost one hundred emerald broams), and her other two brothers present initially refused even to offer their expensive gifts along with her own aluminum necklace to try to defray them, until she begged them to do so. And then, in true Shallan style, she didn't tell Jushu or her brothers what really happened. She simply said that Balat and Wikim had offered their knives to his debtor, and he eventually accepted.

Yes and THAT was the special, not the general case. God metals don't occur naturally at a Perpendicularity, like condensation; we have never see that. The liquid "pooling" is natural, however. The atium geodes formed at the Pits was not a passive action of Ruin but an active one of Preservation, and there was never a mechanism for lerasium to naturally "grow" the way that atium did. The Pits were "Ruin's Perpendicularity" on Scadrial and destroying them ruptured it mainly because so much of Ruin's power was concentrated there, I suppose. A very early WoB (from 2008) suggests that the dark lake that Alendi and his party encounter on the way to the Well of Ascension, as described in his log book, was Ruin's Perpendicularity, and that it still existed in Vin's time "but underground", which could mean "transformed into atium" (which seems unlikely, since that wasn't something Rashek did but Leras) or perhaps somehow co-located with the geode-forming Pits by Rashek (similar to how he rearranged the world to hide the Well of Ascension). I don't think it's quite right to say one can "get Investiture" at a Perpendicularity, either. It's simply a kind of indentation in the universe, which can then be used to portal to and from the Physical Realm into the other two realms. True, immersing into a Shardpool seems to have... Effects... Under certain conditions, but not the same effect as using or obtaining that Shard's magic; Raoden being immersed in the pool near Elantris didn't do very much. And I do not think drinking from the liquid at the Well of Ascension would have made one a Mistborn, though I could be wrong.

Hoid is a good person?! He has a Skaze, betrayed Shai to capture and a death sentence, and beat up Ghost Kelsier to steal half the world's supply of lerasium from Rashek! And who knows what he did to "Spanky" to get him as a means of transport to the Well of Ascension! Like you said, he tells Dalinar that Roshar can burn for all he cares. Then he visits Kaladin in the chasms while Bridge Four was stuck running every single bridge run in a slow death sentence, and... gives him a flute. Then visits him while he's imprisoned and under a potential execution order from the king, and... tells him a story. Sure he Awakened a dolly for an orphaned girl in Kholinar, but then he just foisted her onto another woman who'd lost her child, as if families can just be mixed and matched. And they were still all going to get brutalized and starved by the singers! That's "helping"? Pfah! He's a JERK!! More accurately, helping the mortals of the Cosmere live safer, happier lives is not what he is about. He's not about "protecting" or "uniting" or "preserving" people. He doesn't even really go much out of his way to advance such concerns, though he indulges in the occasional gesture - whatever his goals are supercede such things. Whether or not that is "good" remains to be seen and judged. The only thing we know is that he's got some kind of a geas on him where he cannot intentionally physically harm another person.

What? Really? I think you're confusing liquid "Shardpools" representing Perpendicularities of a Shard's power, versus "god metals" which appear to require conscious effort from a Shard to manifest. Atium was apparently automatically formed at the Pits of Hathsin in the Final Empire, but that was because of how Preservation set it up: that was the godmetal form of the significant chunk of Ruin's power that Lerase had splintered away to hide as a metal burnable by Allomancy, while engineering it so that Mistings, not just Mistborn, appeared who could do so. Lerasium was not known to be naturally occuring: there were two beads left at the Well of Ascension from the number that Rashek went about getting at some point after his Ascension, which no doubt tipped him off as to what it would do and where they were located. They didn't grow back the way the atium did, and per that WoB, they pre-existed Rashek's Ascension. Where and why and how Leras created them we don't know, except it was probably to enable Mistborn and stronger strains of Allomancy on Scadrial as part of his Plan, and Rashek snagged them to seed the "nobility class" of the Final Empire instead of having Allomancy occur more broadly in the general populace of Scadrial. As for other godmetals we've seen, or were heavily implied to be godmetals, they are: the "red spotted spike" in Bleeder (presumed to be "bavadium" as some kind of interference from Autonomy), the gold/white metal with a gemstone in the pommel Moash used on "Ahu" (presumed to be "raysium"), and the Solid Investiture metal of Honorblades and Shardblades being of Honor ("tanavastium"). All created on purpose and for a purpose.

Huh. Have you never seen the movie Predator? As for a Dysian Amian being super hard to kill, we've only seen two of them (not counting stray singleton hordelings) in POV descriptions: Arclo with Lift, and the smoking pile of dead "cremlings" in one of Dalinar's visions of Aharietam, the one where he sees Jezrien falsely telling the people that they'd finally won for good. So it's certainly possible to kill one and I'm not sure it involves hunting down each individual hordeling and smushing it.

That's cool that there's a WoB about that... Yeah I know it's not "Awakening" per se, but it's got to be Breath-based magic, in that I doubt someone holding Stormlight could erase their own memories just by having the right Intent and saying the right Command words. All the other Breath-based magic that isn't simply an inherent effect of having Breath (Heightenings) have been to Awaken things, and involve the transference of Breath, so it's very interesting that essentially, all Nalthians (with the minimal training that one could give to an upset child on the spot) have the inborn ability, thanks to their one Breath from Devotion, to alter or erase their own memories at will.

This is a very interesting passage, because it fits in with his comment later to Denth while dueling with him, when he says that he could make Denth forget the dark things he's done, if Denth wanted him to. "I know the Commands." I wondered if that meant that Vasher could perform a kind of Awakening-of-another-live-person to do the memory erasing, possibly requiring quite a bit of Breath; instead, on re-reading this particular passage with the traumatized little girl, it seems it's a Command that he knows and can teach another person with Breath to do to themselves, even the child who was unlikely to have any more than the one Breath she possessed from birth. And from Vivenna's perception that the girl's BioChromatic aura "flickered just slightly", the Breath isn't even used up. It just kind of changes state? This would be an altogether different kind of Awakening than we've seen in any other context. And also leads one to wonder, how does Vasher know this (or these) Command(s), if he hasn't tried using them already... On himself? And presumably one can undo it with the right Command, i.e., "Remember that which was forgotten" or somesuch?

No, Nalan Regrowthed him to recruit him for the Skybreakers, saying he had never seen anyone more worthy of bonding a highspren. That's not a "suspected Radiant" the way he hunted down Ym, Lift, and so on, who had already bonded another kind of spren, a bond that could only be undone by death.

I fully agree... All these hand-waving theories about exactly how and why Nalan and the Skybreakers might have treated Helaran differently than any of the other (several other) Skybreaker recruits, acolytes, squires, and trainees we've seen them do, are just that - making Heleran a very strange special case. Versus the much, much simpler explanation, that isn't even mind-blowing at all: Mraize was lying about Helaran being a Skybreaker acolyte. And eventually, perhaps even this November, we will find out why. There is also the possibility that Mraize himself was misled about that, and was writing what he thought was the truth to Shallan. But c'mon.

No, I thought that was Wyndle's speculation as to why Lift was able to see and touch his mostly-cognitive "vines" and climb on them in the Physical Realm ("Somehow, you are partly in the Cognitive Realm... it is the only answer I can find to why you can touch spren"). He then remarks on her ability to metabolize food directly into Stormlight (Investiture) as yet another weird thing about her. Her being "partly in the CR" surely also has to do with her "not aging" and being able to dance in and out of the Stormfather's visions for Dalinar (as she does when she pops in uninvited to his session with Gawx/Yanagawn, and is even able to take him with her to exit it when she wants to). Do we know if Lift had this done to her by the Nightwatcher before or after bonding Wyndle?

They're tinyspren. The more you look at them the smaller they get.

But you see, if there is any group who has "extra Shards" it'd be the Ghostbloods - as rare as Shards are on Roshar, the offworld Invested stuff we see casually arrayed in the Ghostbloods Conference Room A are even more rare. And as I just edited to add to my previous post, with the GBs we can't even be sure part or all of their goal (or some kind of a backup plan) in arming Helaran with Shards to attack Amaram wasn't actually achieved. As of right now I still think the simplest explanation is the most likely. And that is, that Mraize was lying about Helaran being a Skybreaker. Whatever else he was - maybe he wasn't a Ghostblood acolyte - I'm pretty sure that is meant to be an obvious lie to the reader. (While allowing the "there is always another secret" kind of twist where it's such an obvious lie, the lie is that it is a lie? My head hurts now.) So the only question would be, why would Mraize lie about that? (Maybe because letting Shallan know they sent her brother to his death might turn her even more off on them?) Your comment about "Hoid's interest" in Helaran is an interesting point, though. I always read that scene, where Hoid is "delivering a message" from Helaran to Lin Davar, was his "Fortune-based traveling" putting him in the right place and time to encounter Shallan the way that he did - not that Helaran was the primary plot reason for him being there, despite it being the immediate in-world reason for him being there. But Hoid does go on to tell her where Helaran is: "He is in Alethkar... Because that is where he feels he is needed, of course. If I see him again, I will give him word of you." Implying however it is that Hoid met Helaran, he interacted long enough to gain enough trust from him to be a messenger back to his family in Jah Keved. (Of course, Allomantic brass would help with that, as it seems to have in his talk with Shallan as well...)

When he goes for Ym he still first researched proof of a crime to justify it. And on the contrary, Alethkar has a well-defined legal system, even if justice can still be perverted - per Dalinar, Roshone was tried and found guilty and could have been held accountable for engineering the false imprisonment of Moash's grandparents, but as king, Elhokar opted to be merciful. And even the very embittered Kaladin expressed anger and shock that Amaram, after confessing in Dalinar's presence to murdering Kaladin's four squadmates to lay false claim to Helaran's Shards, would not be tried and punished for murder. It's really all stretchwork to come up with unknown reasons why he could have been a Skybreaker as Mraize said, versus simply concluding that Mraize was lying about this for reasons we shall find out later. Why would the Skybreakers try to kill Amaram? Let's guess at something unrevealed... Or, why would the Ghostbloods try to kill Amaram? This we also don't know for sure, except that we do know that they target him that way (Mraize telling Shallan Amaram was his "current prey", and then Iyatil trying to poison dart him with a blowgun). I mean, giving an "acolyte" something as valuable as a full set of Shards and letting him use them on "unauthorized missions" - does that sound like something the Skybreakers would do? Or even the Diagram? Or either group having "spare Shards" lying around to give to acolytes (when we saw Skybreaker acolytes in training, they were chasing escaped prisoners on foot)? (The answer is NO). I mean yes it's POSSIBLE, it just doesn't fit what we have seen of how they operate thus far. Versus the more simple explanation that Heleran was given Shards for the purpose of accomplishing a mission unknown to us, that involved killing Amaram, and without regard for the lives of anyone in between. Does that sound like something the Ghostbloods would do, based on what we've seen from them? (The answer is YES.) Shallan, the only person to have read Mraize's letter (other than Pattern, who said "there are lies in this"), doesn't know anything about the Skybreakers and how they operated. So she has to go on face value (similar to how for some time, she thought Amaram had killed her brother instead of Kaladin, having no reason to doubt his claim to having killed "the unknown Veden Shardbearer" himself). But we, the readers, do.

The problem is, when killing anybody - even the targets with newly formed Nahel Bonds - Nalan is always careful to get written authorization for the execution, and tells the target of their crime. He doesn't just show up and stab them from behind. And he expects his follower Skybreakers to do the same: when an acolyte cuts Gawx's throat to follow through on a threat made to Lift, he says that was "poorly done" and would be met with punishment later, because due process had not been followed (even though obviously Gawx was a lawbreaker, being a burglar caught in the act). So showing up on a battlefield with full Shards - leaving aside the question of if they have "Shards to spare", which I don't understand the justification? - to then silently slaughter a bunch of regular soldiers to get at Amaram, is totally not following this kind of MO.

I lik this sketch, except I don't think it's necessary to posit an unknown, non-Skybreaker group that wanted to kill Surgebinders when Shallan was a child. Easier just to say, must have been the Skybreakers... Except, why then didn't they come back to verify the job was completed? At one point I wondered if her mother had been an Envisioner and was attacking Shallan to "bring out" her Stormlight glowing/Surgebinding powers to prove it to her husband (not realizing that summoning a Shardblade was part of Shallan's portfolio already), but that doesn't fit how Shallan remembers the events. It also wouldn't explain why her "friend" was there that Lin Davar was fighting with to protect her.

1) What you summarized is exactly what "smells off" to me about the idea that "Helaran was an acolyte Skybreaker on a mission to kill Amaram with a full set of Shards". None of the motive, the means, nor the execution match what we've seen firsthand about why and how Nalan and the Skybreakers did what they did - plus, the idea that Nalan somehow mistakenly thought Amaram had bonded a spren seems ludicrous, when he seemed able to sense Lift "Investing" from metabolizing food at the Azish palace after draining her with a larkin and removing all sources of Stormlight (spheres) in the area. The Diagram might try to kill Amaram, yes, and we've seen they do have full Shardbearers in their organization a la Graves, but recruiting a new member and giving him Shards to go on a field mission? I guess this was before they found Szeth and his Oathstone, but still, that seems a bit off - though a more plausible group than the Sykbreakers. 2) Kabsal having no way of knowing Jasnah would be at Kharbranth is exactly why I think he must have been sent information by a Ghostblood in on the Davar plans. It's not explicitly stated in TWoK, but Shallan has been hopping from port to port to gain an audience with Jasnah, and knew that Kharbranth was her next stop - likely the Palanaeum. The very first time the word "spanreed" is used in TWoK is from a Balat POV that they'd gotten a message via spanreed that Shallan had succeeded, after several months, with "phase one" of the plan, and had been accepted as Jasnah's ward. Shallan has a spanreed herself, and is writing to Eylita later to communicate with her brothers, so it's easy to imagine she'd been keeping her brothers posted that way via spanreed on her progress the whole time: "missed her at Dumdari, but figured out she's going to Kharbranth next and will surprise her there". I'm sure the GBs would have a backup plan and had an agent (Kabsal or another one) ready to drop into whatever port might have been after Kharbranth, if that encounter had failed. But it feels like too much coincidence for there to have been a Ghostblood agent already in Kharbranth, waiting to execute a Jasnah-specific murder plan that also specifically required getting close to a ward. 3) Yes, the WoB about the Davar Soulcaster definitely having been functional largely kills the "second Soulcaster" theory. But it still leaves room for Luesh having been an "apprentice" GB with a "babsk" in the household or nearby running the operation. His "dying in his sleep" at exactly that time, with the GB pendant found on him only then (they never noticed it around his neck before and asked him about it in all those years?), seems way too much like a setup. Maybe that unnamed surveyor who always went with Luesh and Lin Davar to go "find" the marble deposits was the actual Ghostblood and Soulcaster user.

Ha, I couldn't figure out how to quote/respond point by point, then realized you might have been just quoting and deleting a ton of text with every point, and I was like nah. First, I'm not really serious about Wikim = Thaidakar, just thought that was funny as a possible conclusion to my line of thinking. Agree that Amaram didn't know about the Skybreakers at the time of Helaran's attack; however, I still think that GB's seem more like the kind of group that would have and then outfit someone with full a set of dead Shards to go and do something. As soon as I read Mraize's letter to Shallan about Heleran I felt like it was off, on that topic most of all, and Pattern's reaction jibes with my own (perhaps ultimately not for the same reasons, though). I went back and re-read the scene with Balat and his father, and you're right - that could have been the Soulcaster getting damaged: It still seems odd that a simple, non-Shardblade sword could break a Soulcaster fabrial, but we don't really know what their construction involves. IIRC Odium says that the Oathgate at Thaylen City can be restored if physically destroyed as long as the gemstones are intact, though a Soulcaster could be a different thing since they require gemstones to work in the first place (that are replaced with each use). What you describe as sort of a "sleeper cell, use your own initiative" setup on Kabsal's part seems more like how the Diagram operated (with Graves). I have the feeling the Ghostbloods are more tightly organized than that, given how Mraize refers to and defers to a babsk in Iyatil, yet is clearly in command of the others at his table (and feeling like he can guarantee something like saying "you no longer need fear our other members; they have been instructed not to touch you"), and the way they keep giving missions to Shallan and how they communicated and commissioned work to Tyn. The specific means might have been up to him, but the idea of "get at Jasnah through Shallan" couldn't have been something he'd think of without knowing she was coming to Kharbranth at the same time as Jasnah, and it seems unusually specific to prepare a poisoning method relying on a ward or proto-ward for access in that exact location without knowing about it ahead of time. And I don't think showing Szeth that he himself was a Skybreaker radiant (not just a Herald) was necessarily special recruiting - it could well be SOP for recruiting any new Skybreaker, since anybody else would probably think they were long dead along with the other Orders of KR. Giving him Nightblood, now, that was interesting - I think we'll find out more about that later - though it's hard to argue with Nalan's assessment that "I have never seen anybody more worthy of being a Skybreaker than you", and that Nightblood is the ultimate Skybreaker weapon. @RShara's WoBs tell me that the Soulcaster in Lin's possession was in fact functional at some point, OK, but I think Brandon is definitely leaving room for Helaran not actually having been a Skybreaker as claimed by Mraize.

EDIT: only after I hit the "post" button did I realize what a novella I managed to put together over a few days on this subject. So in the interest of TLDR (you can read the details below if you want): Luesh is the source of all the info Shallan and her brothers had about where the Soulcaster came from, and that it was now broken. Luesh was involved in coming up with the idea of Shallan seeking out Jasnah. Kabsal's plan to kill Jasnah in Kharbranth would only ever work if a trusted person, like her ward, provided plausible food access to Jasnah. Jasnah pointed out how even a successful theft of a genuine Kholin Soulcaster would have been an act of war against Alethkar itself (an insane risk). Ergo, the GBs via Luesh set up that whole chain of events. But, Luesh having a Ghostblood pendant instead of a tattoo is suspicious So is his conveniently dying in his sleep soon after Shallan departed Heleran being a Skybreaker with dead Shards never smelled right Amaram seemed pretty confident Heleran had been sent by Thaidakar and the GBs Pattern said there were lies Mraize's letter saying Heleran was a Skybreaker Therefore, I submit: Heleran was a GB, who recruited him as a member to gain access to the Davar household, where an Unmade was observed. Someone else in the Davar household (after Helaran's last appearance there) was a GB plant, in addition to Luesh, who was a BG wanna-be like Tyn acting on orders from a shadow Ghostblood in command. The "broken Soulcaster" was planted on Lin Davar for later discovery; the actual Soulcasting (which obviously had occurred) was done by another person with another Soulcaster (too much of a reach to speculate that it was done by a "native born" Surgebinder just yet). I think signs point to one of Shallan's other brothers as being that Davar Ghostblood Behind The Scenes... And of the three, only Wikim seems like a fit. And hey. Just who is Thaidakar anyway? Could it be Wikim Davar?! Nbody would be surprised if he could actually read/write on his own, right? ---- I know the theory that The Davar Soulcaster was a fake all along!! is a longstanding one (I found at least one thread on this dating back to 2012), but rather than revive that zombie thread, I thought I'd add a few thoughts along those lines with a new one. When Shallan first glimpses Jasnah's Soulcaster in TWoK Ch. 5, she thinks to herself that it looked just like the "broken" one they'd found in her father's coat pocket, that even after they'd had a jeweler repair it "no longer worked" - it was "damaged on the same disastrous evening that her father had died", implying it was the very coat he was wearing when he died. That would be the night he was poisoned and then strangled to death by Shallan with her necklace. Seems odd that that would damage a Soulcaster in his coat pocket, doesn't it? It's not like he was stabbed through the coat in a way so as to pierce the fabrial (Balat never came close to stabbing him with his sword), if indeed such an act would be enough to destroy a Soulcaster's function. It's implied that their house steward, Luesh, was the Ghostblood liaison - he arrived to their household shortly before their burst of fortune, was the actual Soulcaster (the one "trained to use the device"), who (claimed) it no longer functioned after the jeweler "repaired" it, and who "died in his sleep" after Shallan had left to try to steal Jasnah's Soulcaster. Only after Luesh passed away did "men claiming to be friends of our father" start visiting the Davar household and who knew he was dead, intimidating her brothers by "implying" they knew about the Soulcaster and "suggested strongly" that it be returned to them, where one of the men visibly bore the same symbol tattooed on his hand as found as a pendant on Luesh's body. On first reading TWoK, the bit about Luesh carrying the GB symbol as a pendant didn't seem particularly signficant, but after two more books, it does. When Mraize "welcomes" Shallan to the Ghostbloods, he notes that "you are required to get a specific tattoo, a symbol of your loyalty. I will send a drawing. You may add it to your person wherever you wish, but must prove it to me when we next meet." A tattoo that the visitor to House Davar bore on the back of his hand, and that Kabsal was found to have "on the inside of his arm". Shallan hasn't done this yet that we know of, but that's a separate topic; the point is that Luesh having it as a pendant (and not a permanent tattoo) doesn't quite jibe with him being a Ghostblood. So what pieces of a puzzle can we try to assemble here? Let's line up the known or implied events in chronological order: After Shallan's mother's death, her father Lin Davar grew increasingly cold, harsh, and violent, with red-gleaming eyes - which a WoB confirms was because he was affected by Odium, and her family influenced by an Unmade during her childhood. Helaran, the exiled "Nan" (eldest son), returns to House Davar to threaten his father with a Shardblade, demanding justice of him for his slain mother. Some time after this, Luesh arrives to join House Davar as the steward. House Davar starts discovering valuable new marble deposits suspiciously easily, when Lin Davar, Luesh, and a surveyor go out looking for them. Lin Davar boasts that their newfound riches will position him to claim the title of highprince, rejecting Balat's request to marry Eylita as "too lowly", and killing his axehound pups when he defies him. When he discovers his second wife Malise has been helping Balat with plans to run away with Eylita, Lin Davar kills her and contemptuously repels Balat's ineffective assault, shattering Balat's legs with a fireplace poker in a frenzy, upon which Shallan poisons him with blackbane tea and then strangles him with a necklace that he'd gifted to her. After Lin Davar is dead, they discover the Soulcaster in an inner pocket of his coat. They confer with Luesh, the trusted steward, what is to be done... Luesh admits to being the Soulcaster (person who used the device) in service to Lin Davar, but says it is damaged, and even after a jeweler repairs it (there must have been visibly broken links or gemstone settings), says he cannot get it to work. Luesh says dangerous people provided the Soulcaster, who will want it back. (Who else would have told them that?) Luesh is in on the decision to pretend Lin Davar was ill or in seclusion, while Shallan went to try to steal Jasnah's Soulcaster to replace it. As Jasnah points out at the end of TWoK this is a kind of insane idea from the get-go, since Jasnah's Soulcaster (if it had been real) would be a treasure of the royal family of Alethkar, and obviously absconding with it would be an act of war Shallan departs in her port-to-port pursuit of Jasnah, settling on Kharbranth as a likely destination for her. Somewhere around this time, in 1172, Helaran appears not just with a Shardblade but also Shardplate, to attempt to kill Amaram. After Kaladin kills him, when Amaram kills all the other survivors from his squad to steal the Shards, Amaram comments to an unnamed attendant, "why would Thaidakar risk this? But who else would it be? The Ghostbloods grow bold..." Luesh dies "in his sleep" soon after Shallan leaves, and a pendant with the Ghostbloods' symbol is found on his body. Some Ghostbloods start visiting the Davar household, clearly knowing Lin Davar is actually dead, and implying they expect their Soulcaster back "or else". Kabsal is a Ghostblood posing as an ardent at the Palaneum when Shallan arrives to Kharbranth to petition Jasnah in person. Kabsal meets Shallan while she is leaving a letter for Jasnah at her alcove in the Palaneum, asking her to reconsider her recent rejection. Kabsal gets friendly with Shallan over the next few months after she becomes Jasnah's ward, bringing fresh bread and jam to share with her. Kabsal dies while trying to kill Jasnah with "backbreaker powder" on the bread while providing himself and Shallan with the antidote in the jam. The Ghostbloods are likely to have known Jasnah was a Surgebinder. Certainly Taravangian having Jasnah Soulcast in his presence (where he could observe how she did it), under the likely pretense of his granddaughter being trapped behind a boulder, implies he, as the head of the Diagram, knew/suspected her nature and wanted to confirm it; so it is very reasonable to think the GBs would have as well, given that Mraize said she had "asssassinated a number of our members" by then. The Ghostbloods seem to have been able to plan ahead to use Shallan's possible role as Jasnah's ward at Kharbranth to place Kabsal at the Palaneum. The plan to get Jasnah to eat bread dusted with poison flour could not realistically have worked without a Shallan type individual as a kind of "Judas goat", as Jasnah could and did simply refuse to see any ardent: he only got Jasnah to (almost) eat some of the bread by having Shallan beg her to do so, in order to be polite to her friend who had been sharing bread and jam with her for so long. Assasinating a known Surgebinder presents certain difficulties, number one being their ability to heal with Stormlight. A very deadly and fast-acting poison consumed unexpectedly is not a bad idea. Yet Kabsal met Shallan in the Palaneum before Jasnah had actually accepted her as a ward, and her being there at all was kind of a crazy act of desperation with Luesh's contribution. It sure sounds like someone in the Davar household was a liaison to the Ghostbloods through at least the point of Shallan leaving on her crazy, Luesh-inspired, Jasnah-targeting mission. But was it (only) Luesh? And after she reads the letter in Oathbringer where Mraize tells Shallan that Helaran was an acolyte of the Skybreakers, Pattern says "there are lies in this letter". My latest theories: Helaran was not a Skybreaker, but a Ghostblood: Amaram was right. Mraize told the truth about seducing him "with displays of Shards and power", which sound a lot more Ghostblood-y than Skybreaker-y, doesn't it? Though Shallan's mother and her unnamed friend wanting to kill her own child in Shallan for being "one of THEM" does sound like a Skybreaker acting on a mandate to root out Surgebinders. Luesh was a Ghostblood wanna-be, kind of like Tyn had been, sent by Heleran so he could keep tabs on what was going on with his family. They only have Luesh's word that he was the one who had operated the Soulcaster, and that it no longer worked. Perhaps instead, there was another Ghostblood present who was actually operating a Soulcaster, who after Lin Davar's death, instructed Luesh to plant a fake one on him... Then killed Luesh while planting the GB pendant on him while making an escape from the household, or while blending back into the household. Why get close to Heleran and Lin Davar in the first place? Because of some kind of "influence of Odium" that appears to have settled around him. An Unmade, one we haven't seen in action yet, like Chemoarish, that the Ghostbloods sought to understand or to control, and perhaps encouraging Heleran's "passion" for vengeance against his father helped fix the Unmade's influence in that location. Per this line of thinking, then, who was The Real Davar Ghostblood (in the household)? The unnamed, undescribed "surveyor"? Kind of weak. One of the other Davar brothers, Balat, Wikim, Jushi? - We have Balat POVs, so pretty much not him. Jushi was barely rescued from being sold into debt slavery, that seems very un-Ghostbloody. Wikim... Hmm? Wikim.... A guys who's kind of like Renarin, if he'd been abused and raised in fear. I'm not going to go so far as to propose Wikim as the true identity of Thaidakar, but man that would be a mind-blower!

In another fantasy series, one more filled with political machinations and backstabbing family members, I'd absolutely agree with you; but here, I think it was more an illustration of how self-doubting Dalinar was about his visions, and his (justified) absolute trust in Adolin that his son was the right person to make the call about his being mad or not, and not to simply use the writ to seize power. And it's moot now anyway... Actually, as of the end of Oathbringer, Adolin already is the Kholin highprince, having refused the crown of Alethkar and with Dalinar giving the title up to take up the role of head of the Knights Radiant. (And also moot since Kholinar, along with most of the rest of Alethkar, is under Parshendi control...) As he says when they take Shallan's suggestion about settling the crown on Jasnah, "I'll be highprince [of Kholin], but not king." And then later, as Shallan reflects to herself on all the fuss and pomp surrounding her wedding to Adolin, and going over the gifts they'd received from "every other highprince" (except for Ialai) - Well, you're marrying an Alethi highprince; what did you expect?