robardin

The Dawnshards were a rock band formed by four of the Heralds that featured enormous fabrial-driven speakers and subwoofers that could literally crack the very ground when cranked up to 11. They were later repurposed as Oathgates. Tanavast was a big fan - he positively raved about them! Though his comment to the Stormfather about how "Man, the Dawnshards can really tear the roof off this place" appears to have remembered by him a bit too literally. The only mystery is, which of the four Heralds were the Smart One, the Cute One, the Quiet One, and the Funny One?

Whoa, not sure where you get this image of what the Surge of Abrasion and its use in combat from an Edgedancer would be like, but Lift is only unpracticed at it, which the Fused (and Szeth) are not. As Nalan himself said to Lift, as one who has seen many an Edgedancer in action in his time, Bowling ball? I wish I could get my ball to move like that!

Honorblades are still something one bonds - Szeth gives up the bond as he falls from the sky, and was seen in the first chapter of TWoK to use Stormlight and Surgebinding even without the Honorblade in his hand. So for Taln's Honorblade to truly be taken away from him, doesn't that mean he'd have to have released it (as the other Heralds had done in the Prologue of TWoK)? When he falls unconscious at the gates of Kholinar and his Blade doesn't disappear, is that supposed to imply he's unbonded it (either after re-appeared on Roshar, or in that very moment of falling insensate)? Or is it possible his Honorblade is still bonded to him, and he could summon it if he wanted to, but he's just too "out of it" to do so?

Indeed, but that is the sort of person who would be tied down with responsibilities to people he presumably cared about. Not the kind who usually goes off worldhopping when such a possibility is not commonly known, unless recruited or sent as one...

That's right! He must've left by Harmony's Shardpool(?)!

Since Nightblood remembers people like Vivenna, and her sword is conscious enough to feel people out who draw it, do they "recognize" each other? For that matter, does Nightblood recognize or talk to spren? Now that Szeth is of the Third Ideal, what if he draws NB while also summoning his Blade? Or even if he doesn't, but his spren is simply around?

So, the Felt who's a scout for Dalinar and already in his service when he visited the Nightwatcher, by then married with an Alethi (?) wife and in service long enough to be so close to him (unless he's got a way to secretly boost Connection?), is confirmed to be the same Felt who worked for House Venture in Mistborn. We have various WoBs that he's kind of a lone wolf among worldhoppers, who has associated with a number of groups without staying on as a committed member; that even during the Final Empire he was somewhat cosmere aware; that he was born shortly before the events of MB1 (he's not a time-dilated worldhoppers who returned to Scadrial and got caught stranded when Kelsier shattered the Pits); and that he survived the Catacendre in the cavern under Kredik Shaw, in something of a leadership role. Per the Coppermind's Cosmere timeline, the events of TWoK on Roshar are only a little earlier than the events on Scadrial during Alloy of Law, Mistborn Era 2, by about a dozen years. Which in Scadrial time, is about 330 years after the Catacendre. So how long did Felt stay on Scadrial before hopping off? And doing what? He must have stayed long enough to be influential enough to get a town named for him in the Roughs: the opening scene of AoL, when Wax and Lessie have that crucial encounter with Bloody Tan, is in a "dead town" that had been prosperous until twenty years back when a clan of koloss moved nearby. A town called Feltrel!

It is amazing that he has plotted out a story arc that will take him, in the end, from ages 30 to 74 to get published. (The writing, of course, began earlier.) Talk about having a plan for one's "life's work"! And... He's 5 years younger than me. Storm it, I'd better live long enough to finish reading the Cosmere! Time to hit the gym and tighten down on the diet!

Heh, now that would be interesting. I already suspect Adolin's "partial bond", or bond with a remnant spren in Maya ("mostly dead is slightly alive!"), granted him Stormlight healing at Thalyen Fields. It would be amazing if he doesn't get any Surges until some time of maximum bonding with the remnant-of-Maya, and he gets a moment of being able to use Regrowth, just a little bit... And he instinctively uses it to heal Maya, resulting in a kind of feedback loop. As he heals her ever so slightly, she's able to give him more and deeper Surgebinding, which allows him to heal her further, and so on.

It'd be great if the Adolin/Maya semi-bond, that was formed on its own (whether because of Adolin's nature, his having visited Shadesmar to see his Blade's cognitive form, or whatever else), could only become "fully operational" with a Bondsmith's input, but that's completely different from saying a Bondsmith could do that for a large scale upgrade/recruitment effort of Shardbearers. There's no reason at all to suppose that your typical Shardbearer on Roshar is at all aligned with a Radiant spren (one that that spren might have chosen, given the choice), while it seems like that is the case with Adolin and Maya. I think it'd be awful if a Bondsmith (Dalinar or otherwise) were able to say something like, "hey, you there with a Shardblade, come over and Imma Connect you up to Radiancy with the revived spren of your Blade!"

That point about the Inquisitors making metal vials with Steelsight is pretty interesting, but yes, we have not just WoB but an in-work, in-world description of Steelsight being used to identify metals - well, Ironsight, as it was about Ranette the gunsmith when Wax and Wayne go to see her for the first time in Alloy of Law, offering her an aluminum revolver taken from the Vanishers to examine: "Ranette stepped forward. She was a Lurcher, and could recognize most metals by simply burning iron."

Very well done pic. You even got Elhokar's blood on his spear tip, did you? Grrr!

True, but I also found reading it that way broke up the pacing of the book that made me think it was disjointed until a re-read or two later. I decided that if they did that again for Stormlight 4, I would resist reading the Dickens-style chapter releases, and just wait for the full novel to be released. Fortuately, I swore no oaths, and no spren need die should I renege.

I would be OK with this as well!

I find I'm so excited that I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a Sanderfan can feel: a fan in the midst of a journey whose conclusion is uncertain, but who savors it above the destination. I hope Szeth goes to cleanse the Stone Shamans of the Shin, and finds that their sins are not so black and white. I hope to see how Lopen, who seems not to hate, forms his Third Ideal of the Windrunners. I hope the Purelake is as magical and warm as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

I think it's clear that Maya is forming some kind of bond with Adolin, despite being a deadeye. She's certainly not as dead as other deadeyes. She acted of her own volition to defend him against a Fused in Shadesmar. She knows her own name. She tells Adolin her name, via a mental link in the Physical realm. She comes to him in fewer than 10 heartbeats. She warns him of an incoming Fused. And it's strongly suggested she enabled him to heal with Stormlight (unconsciously) in being able to "gather himself" to stand and then to walk out of a storming collapsed building. "Gather himself" from what he'd been sure had been shattered bones? Right. When asked about this before Oathbringer came out, Brandon had said such a thing (reviving a "dead spren" Shardblade) had never happened before, and would require some unusual circumstances... One of which might be the current bondholder of the Blade meeting the spren in Shadesmar, which you have to think has never happened before. That said, I don't think Brandon will do something as "obvious" as "Mayalaran woke as from a long sleep, having regenerated the missing parts of her cognitive soul, and happily bonded the person responsible for her return to sentience, becoming cultivationspren and Edgedancer as it was always meant to be with the one who brought her back". That's too easy. Whatever the future has for them, it's going to be interesting, and I don't want to get too invested into what I hope/expect to happen, except that I expect it NOT to be the above. My personal POV on this: A spren is a cognitive being, and forming Ideals with one links into that spren's cognitive "soul": It embodies a multi-layered concept, and a Radiant links up to a deeper core layer of the concept with each successive Ideal. To be a deadeye Blade, at least the Third Ideal of five was achieved, so having that part of a spren ripped out and made permanently physical (the remains of the broken oath) is like ripping out 60% of the spren, with the other 40% or so the zombie-like deadeye figures in the CR we see in Shadesmar. (Living Shardblades, like when Syl or Pattern are summoned as weapons by their Radiants, fully transition to the Physical realm and are 100% of the spren, explaining why they glow and stuff where dead Blades do not.) I don't think cognitive beings can "regenerate" or "heal", as in to recover what was lost. BUT, what I think is going on with Adolin is that he's bonding to the 40% remainder of Maya, which required someone bonded to her Blade to also think of her as a spren (no other Shardbearer of a dead Blade on Roshar even knows that's the truth behind the Blade), to wish to have a bond, AND be someone that would under other circumstances also be someone she'd want to bond with. And now that bond, kind of like grafting a sprout onto the base of a pruned root that's still alive, is extending that "40% of Maya" to being 50%, 60%, climbing back towards being a full spren. But not toward a 100% tally of the cultivationspren she had been. She's going to be "plugged" in the way that a spren normally plugs the cracks in a Radiant's soul. Basically, Adolin is patching HER cracks. As she approaches fuller sentience, she's not going to be a cultivationspren, so much as a cultivationspren base with a layer of... Well... Whatever Adolin thinks a Radiant could or should be.

So that's what Nightblood looks like? And one of those "Tears of Edgli" flowers?

I've always thought that compounding copper would allow one to dump memories into a metalmind while also retaining it in one's mind. Imagine burning a coppermind while tapping it and storing the memories into another coppermind => that coppermind becomes a copy of the first one, while you also retain it in your head, possibly to create yet another coppermind with the same memories. It would explain that unsealed coppermind coin/medallion that Hoid threw at Wax's head, which earlier Devlin Airs had said he'd seen others like it circulating around New Seran shortly before. Imagine if you could cut memory medallions like RCA cut vinyl records.

I assumed he meant the one about "letting the blade slip" on the throat of a child, possibly the darkest DR we've seen so far in Stormlight: I hold the suckling child in my hands, a knife at his throat, and know that all who live wish me to let the blade slip. Spill its blood upon the ground, over my hands, and with it gain us further breath to draw. (TWoK Ch. 57) It's not clear that either Oroden or Gavinor would count as a "suckling child"; Gavinor at least is a toddler (around 3 years old?). Oroden is something like 1 years old? So maybe?

The Fifth Ideal (of five) of the Skybreakers is known; they listed all five Ideals to Szeth when they enrolled him as an acolyte in Chapter 90 of Oathbringer: Skybreakers don't obscure their Ideals, since the highspren will be the one to adjudicate when the Radiant has embraced it correctly at a Spiritual level and is not just mouthing the words. While the advancing in Ideals we see from Kaladin (Windrunner) and Lift (Edgedancer) has required moments of self-discovery and personal growth, and Shallan's Ideals are Truths about herself that she admits to herself that she'd been denying, a Skybreaker's path is not one of discovery but of readiness. The Fifth Ideal is the Ideal of Law, basically that the one the Skybreaker will follow as the source of truth as per the Third Ideal (which Szeth has settled on Dalinar for) is him/herself. Curiously, while Nale himself is the only Skybreaker of the Fifth Ideal to have reached it in centuries (meaning he's the only one around right now, as an immortal Herald), he still adhered to the local laws while hunting down Ym and releasing Lift when a revived Gawx-turned-Prime voided the writ he had for her execution. So his own mandate, to himself, includes the parameters that he continue to respect the local laws of wherever he is - he's not quite a Judge Dredd "I Am The Law" figure. And Brandon has commented that that is something that could be different between Skybreakers.

I don't care for audiobooks myself, as I read text FAR FASTER than a natural speaking pace would be, and always have, and if get confused or excited about a passage I just immediately rescan it, while jumping back the right amount of time on an audio playback seems like it would be tricky. (And Sanderson works get a lot of such "wait, what was that?!" types of moments, especially towards the end!) One thing I've wondered is how audiobook readers treat the use of font/text size for some indicators in the book text. Like how the Death of Discworld SPEAKS IN ALL SMALLCAPS. Or the Stormfather, for that matter (since we're talking about Oathbringer). Do they use some kind of reverb effect and a James Earl Jones filter in an audiobook for that?

Yeah, it would be way too Standard Trope for my liking (YA audience notwithstanding) for Skyward 3 to feature a cytonic mind-meld between Spensa and Brade that ultimately gets her a Darth Vader Turns On The Emperor type of climactic redemption scene. As she herself said at the end of Starlight, Brade doesn’t consider what Winzik was setting up to be eliminating humanity... Just the group on Detritus. There are multiple other human “preserves”, including wherever she herself originated, that will continue. Meanwhile, she’s being offered a position of power by Winzik. Who knows, maybe part of that plan is to free up more human cytonics like herself as a kind of Praetorian Guard to him, and that Brade considers that a huge step up for humans in the Superiority social structure that it’s worth the sacrifice of one minor human colony that nobody will miss (though she did seem to flinch/regret it a bit now that she knows someone from that world in Spensa, it didn’t stop her).

Yeah, when I first read the name Yelig-nar I thought of Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth from The Dunwich Horror.

Journey Before Destination. You. Cannot. Have. My. Pain!

OK, so thought experiment - if Devlin Airs was meant to be a cameo of another fantasy writer hero, who might he be? Roger Zelazny? I was going to speculate about him being with the GBs, but I'm going to be careful about spoilers for other Cosmere series in the MB forum now :).