robardin

LOL, I love how you just switched to the first person in the middle of this. That "suck some crem" really came from the gemheart, didn't it! The fact remains, though, that very few people of any eye color are likely to become Radiant, or even squires, relative to the population as a whole, even if a lot of people are going around trying to force the issue. And more are more people will probably try as well. But what happens to the "washout" would-be Radiant or Radiant squires? Let's say there's an allowance for Disgruntled Farmer to do Kaladin's four-week Windrunner Tryout Camp, and they don't advance. Not too many of the other orders have explicit trials (the Skybreakers appear to do, but they're actually fighting FOR the Voidbringers right now), so now what? You need to eat, your family needs to eat, and all you know how to do is to till the land.

I gave this an upvote, for sure. At the same time, I feel like the OP was less a legit question about SA4 with an unusual new nickname and more a setup for this line, based on the foreseen objection... Which raises my hackles a bit, because you know, seeing the future is of the Unmade.

In Oathbringer, Kaladin himself notes that there isn't time in this crisis to overturn the social structure, as he reluctantly instructs and entrusts the well-being of Hearthstone to Roshone (and Laral, who speaks up for the citylord). And yet, with numerous darkeyes or former slaves becoming Radiant or Surgebinding squires (Teft, Lopen, numerous bridge squads, Vathah and perhaps Gaz to follow), not to mention female Radiants, society is certain to get far more fluid and meritocratic. Still, at least for the foreseeable immediate future of the Vorin states, it's likely that a "special case" darkeyes (who can draw Stormlight) will essentially get "promoted" to lighteyes status (they immediately start addressing Kaladin as "Brightlord" after he summons a Sylblade as his eyes bled to blue), but the run of the mill 6th or 7th nahn farmhand is pretty much gonna stay that way. That's what I meant by there being "pushback" for a wholesale upending of the system, even from some darkeyes. Nobody would likely dispute it if someone like Gaz, a despised and pardoned deserter of the sixth nahn, if he became a Radiant(!) or just a Surgebinding squire to Shallan, should get some kind of special consideration (exactly what, would remain to be worked out). That doesn't mean people of nahn 1-5, much less lighteyes of any dahn, would suddenly regard all 6th nahn folk in general in a significantly better light. We've seen that "Citizens" of the first or second nahn even have a special respectful term of address for them, and probably enjoy being the top of the darkeyes heap. Similarly, the large body of low dahn workaday lighteyes enjoy "at least" feeling superior in certain social contexts (if not economic) to successful Citizens. They will be heavily invested in maintaining some of the structure that has kept them on some kind of top. We've already seen Dalinar and Kaladin thinking to themselves along these lines, but I really don't want this to become a major element in SA 4-5. I'm hoping (expecting) Brandon to do most of the societal seismic shifts off-screen in the generational gap between SA5 and SA6.

Oh, I don't doubt that Dalinar's "Team Radiants" will ultimately prevail. I'm just saying that Vorinism has been seen to be profoundly embedded and influential. Many or most of the world's most prominent scholars are Vorin ardents, all the male scholars for sure, and many of the female ones too (as seen with the ardents who had the breakthrough in figuring out the Eila Stele). And the entire caste system, distinction of masculine/feminine arts, and the safehand thing, are predicated on Vorin teachings. For sure, the basis for Vorinism as they knew it is going to be largely overturned. That doesn't mean the framework will go down easily. There is a lot invested in that framework, and it's not like they have a ready made alternative to it other than chaos. There could be pushback even from darkeyes on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Imagine you're someone who just spent a ton of money on buying up a rank of nahn, you'd be pretty put out if suddenly nahn and eye color didn't matter at all any more, and oh, you don't get your money back. I don't expect (and certainly don't want) Brandon's focus to be on this sort of thing, otherwise the Stormlight Archives could spiral like the Star Wars prequels into a mire of socio-poltiical developments. But something should happen with the leaders of the Vorin church in the next book or two, even if it's showing some kind of total collapse and how Alethi society attempts to deal with it. One neat solution would be like with Mistborn, between Eras 1 and 2. Just put the whole transition as happening in the story gap between SA5 and SA6 and skip on the details, just like what happens to evolve the obligator/priest based worship of The Lord Ruler into Sliverism doesn't need a lot of fleshing out except "and that's what happened to that particular belief system".

Generally I would agree, but there's also the fact that Jasnah was already a "reviled heretic" in their view, and they'd just excommicated Dalinar the Bondsmith... AFTER he declared himself a Bondsmith at the head of the refounded Knights Radiant, AFTER the Everstorm and Return of the Voidbringers, and AFTER the Assassin in White was proved to have been carrying Jezerien's Honorblade, which Dalinar had in his possession. So I don't think the Vorin Church is just going to fall into line here, just because two of the Heralds are now with Dalinar. After all, how could Talenelat be a darkeyes? What influence they continue to have on Alethkar's society remains to be seen, but they are quite intertwined with a lot of the social fabric. If they wanted to make trouble with the people, riling them up to reject these "new Radiants" as dangerous heretics who probably created these pseudo-Voidbringers themselves or something, they'd have a lot of support, especially away from the center of things Radiant. Don't underestimate how much people cling to long-held beliefs in the face of physical and logical evidence to the contrary... We see that all the time in real life. Also curious was Dalinar's noting the ornate gear the curates wore who came to excommunicate him. From who he fled by Oathgate. My suspicion is that at least one Herald is behind the Vorin Church's dogma.

Niiiiice. There's a more intersting angle to having Jasnah be the Queen of Alethkar, though, than her being a woman. It's that she's a Knight Radiant, and openly so after the battle of Thaylen Fields. What is that going to be like for the Vorin Church, and what would its disapproval imply for the sitting Monarch, if anything? (Setting aside the fact that much of Alethkar, including its capital at Kholinar, is under Odium's control...)

I thought Elhokar was seeing a spren when he described the "shadows" following him around, and hoped he would become a Radiant of a type we hadn't seen yet, with a redemptive story arc. I was holding out for Willshaper. Well, that almost happened. Storming Moash.

Fair point, there is room for highspren to be less repelled by deadspren Blades than other spren. But pragmatically "understanding why people use them" and accomodating a bond with them are different things. Renarin couldn't stand the touch of a deadspren Blade in the dueling arena after he had bonded Glys, and for Kaladin, simply touching one results in the "awful screaming" in the head and so on. Same thing with Dalinar, immediately after he bonds the Stormfather. I don't think a person CAN bond a livespren and a deadspren blade at the same time. So why give one to a candidate for later bonding a highspren? Even if you explained that aspect away, it still doesn't pass the pragmatic "resource management" test: why would the Skybreakers give a full set of Shards to an "acolyte", who clearly couldn't use Stormlight yet? Even if their attitude towards their existence and use allowed for it, the Shards would still be immensely valuable, and at best, Helaran was a "squire" when he attacked Amaram - and one far enough away from his master Skybreaker that he couldn't use Stormlight. In which case, why would they entrust so valuable a resource on a mission to a low-level recruit and NOT send his master, at least to retrieve the Shards should he fall (as he did)? It makes no sense. The routine answer is that Helaran was put in some kind of "Auxiliary" category of "someone who can do our dirty work without the strictures of the local laws that we would place upon ourselves", if that kind of loopholey MO would fit under Nale's guiding principles. It might. But considering how he slapped a Skybreaker squire for killing Gawx without the proper authorization from the local authorities, it seems odd that him setting out to murder Amaram while killing a number of darkeyed soldiers from Kaladin's unit on the way, without any such authorization from Amaram's highprince Sadeas or the King (the only ones who could possibly order his death in Alethkar), would ADVANCE him in standing with the Skybreakers. And anyway: if he was loaned Shards by the Skybreakers in such a role, or by any other "secret organization", wouldn't they have made sure to be able to get them back?

Perhaps. But I didn't say Herleran was an Envisager, only that it was an interesting idea that Lin and his first wife (Shallan's mother) may have been Envisagers, and that I didn't think Helaran got his Shards from the Skybreakers. In any case, what we do know of the Envisagers is very limited, to the group that Teft outed to his citylord. There could have been more "chapters" elsewhere. That clearly doesn't mean that Heleran was also an Envisager, nor that they provided him with the Shards. In fact, regarding the Helaran Question, that's the weakest link in any of the explanations - why would any of these groups give him both Blade and Plate? The Plate could have been "on loan", but we saw that the Blade was bonded when he summoned it to threaten his father, and that it was a "deadspren" Blade from the way it appeared after Kaladin killed him. That he was a Skybreaker "acolyte" given a deadspren Blade makes no sense; every spren we've seen abhors them as abominations, so the Skybreakers keeping a cache of them around seems unlikely. And giving one to bond (not just to "play with") to an acolyte when Szeth cannot even use Stormlight until being promoted to squire by swearing the Second Ideal until after passing a test with no powers at all. If any outfit would be very clear about the meanings of the rank designations, it would be the Skybreakers. I mean, we all know there's a "missing piece" to this story - Pattern more or less said so. But I think it's worth noting that it's not limited to the fact that Helaran's story (as told in Mraize's letter) doesn't stand up to scrutiny; neither does the account of what was going on the day Shallan killed her mother and her associate.

But even that could be considered consistent with his Shardic Intent, eh? It's been mentioned a few times that Rayse "wished to become" this particular Shard, and that one of the reasons he Splintered instead of absorbing the Shards of the several other Vessels he's killed is because he doesn't want to change that Intent, which he feels "matches him perfectly". And yet, we have it from a WoB that he's very essentially lying even to himself about that Intent. "He bears the weight of God's own divine hatred". And self-hatred is a thing, too.

One thing the OP raises that has been in the back of my mind for some time, though, is exactly what is in the metalminds in the Bands of Mourning. Wax mentioned that he could have refilled all the metalminds with Compounding, and that would apparently include the nicrosilminds that stored the Allomantic abilities (I guess a single band of nicrosil could be overloaded as a metalmind for all 16 Allomantic powers, otherwise there would need to be noticeably more nicrosil in the "spearhead" than anything else). That would suggest including a nicrosilmind for A-aluminum, which would be pretty useless on its own (or worse, considering what the Bands represent), except to use to burn an aluminummind to compound Identity. What the heck would that mean? And does that mean the Bands already contain metalminds filled with Identity and memories (a coppermind)? What memories might the Sovereign have chosen to dump into the Bands? Maybe an "instruction manual" on how to create unkeyed/unsealed metalminds? Otherwise someone using the Bands to Compound would, by default, refill the Bands with keyed metalminds, effectively "locking" the Bands for personal use.

I always wonder what a 1% status bar might indicate for a writer like Brandon. It could be anywhere from "the book will be 1200 pages and I've now fleshed out the 12 page prologue, so, 1%", or it could be a non-empty file with just Stormlight Archive 4: "TITLE???" by Brandon Sanderson, (c) 2019 in the upper left, like so many of my own papers/stories would remain for days or weeks on end back in school. ("Hey, it's more than 0, so I guess it's 1% done!")

Thanks for providing independent corroboration that this was the content of a reading at this 'Con, otherwise I might have suspected (however briefly) that the OP was an April Fool. Heh. Now that would've been a good one to pull.

Mission accomplished, then. I hadn't considered the Envisagers as a possible group but it would kind of make sense. We don't really know what the Envisagers had planned for anybody they actually got to exhibit Surgebinding powers; all we know of them is through the childhood memories of Teft, of people unsuccessfully trying to trigger them in themselves or others via trauma. Teft remembers them "believing" in the Immortal Words and desiring the return of the Voidbringers, Radiants, and Old Vorinism (similar to the Sons of Honor), but there could have been more. After all, Teft also didn't expect the citylord to summarily execute the entire sect, as if there were something on record about the sect and its goals that he didn't (and still doesn't) know. (Perhaps the citylord was in the Sons of Honor, or a Ghostblood?) It could still fit with my idea that both of Shallan's parents and the mysterious friend were all part of some previously shared plan of Stage Two: What To Do If We Discover One Of THEM, which Shallan's mother was labeling Shallan as being, and her father was resisting it, for her sake. I could see the Ghostbloods recruiting Lin Davar afterwards as someone who "knew about and has gotten involved with this sort of thing", especially after the Envisagers were all but wiped out due to Teft's exposure of them. And I think it's clear that Helaran knows what Shallan was doing with her drawing coming to life off the page. Which definitely raises questions about his allegiance and the provenance of his Shards - I don't think the Skybreakers story holds water.

Yes, this is what I was going to say about feruchemical savantism as derived from Compounding a never-ending net-positive source of a given attribute. I don't think Compounding is the danger per se, so much as the constant tapping. If Wayne were to gain a medallion for A-gold, he'd be able to compound temporarily and could just shunt it off into a couple of rusting big personal goldminds, take off the medallion, and enjoy his new goldminds at his leisure (as he did with Kelesina's enormous and unkeyed goldmind). How does Miles tap his goldmind while asleep, though? Didn't we settle that one couldn't do that unconsciously, such that TLR and Marsh also have to be constantly compounding/filling/tapping a bronzemind for wakefulness in order to do the constant compounding of an atiummind for youth? Or is one aspect of his infinite F-gold healing himself of the damage from never sleeping?

I'm guessing it has something to do with why wielding a bonded Shardblade (either through a live Nahel bond, or a gemstone "simulated bonding" with a deadspren Blade) bleeds one's eyes to a lighter, glowing (if living spren) color. Somehow the nature of of what Surgebinding does is reflected through the eyes, and a Shardblade is kind of like the power of Surgebinding made material.

I hope so. Because that's the single most glorious thing he did with the Shardblade, in the sense that nobody had ever done that with a Shardblade before, and almost nobody else would ever do or have done that with a Shardblade. BTW, is it just me or does it seem like Dalinar threw in the additional clarification that his offer of its exchange "for the bridgemen" to mean "all of the bridgemen, every one you have in your camp" to have been a last minute throw-in? His honor and his pledge to Kaladin demanded he get Bridge Four freed, and surely the Blade would have done that. But at the last minute, some part of him thought "you gotta get more than that for a storming Shardblade", with maybe a tinge of "man Sadeas is brutal with his bridgemen", except that he'd known that last bit all along. He should've asked for the bridges themselves, too! (Actually it seems like he did, or was able to argue that "they aren't bridgemen without their bridges", because Bridge Four and Thirteen and other crews talk about their bridges in a way that makes it clear it's the same exact one as the one they used to carry for plateau runs for Sadeas.)

Which is the subtitle of his in-world work. "Oathbringer: My Glory, and My Shame". What he did to get the Blade, and what he did with it once he got it. I wonder if there is a chapter in there with his POV of giving it up to ransom all of Sadeas' bridgemen. That would be interesting.

I think the real answer is, "that one got by the editors". Heh. But yeah, the in-world justification could simply be "translation error", as in what you are reading on the page in real-world English is meant to be a translation of what "really" happened on Scadrial. This is one of the Original Conceits of Fantasy Writing in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The Professor goes into great detail in one of the Appendices about how he "translated" a place name like "The Brandywine River(1)" as his attempt at conveying how the Hobbits turned the Sindarin Elvish name for it, Baranduin, into a pun involving alcohol in their native language, Bralda-hîm. So when Breeze talks sarcastically about making a second career of providing floral bouquets to weddings, that's supposed to stand in for "the plant-based decorative cultivation of the Final Empire associated with festivity and would require an entire paragraph in an explanatory appendix to explain, so, flowers it is." I'm pretty sure I've read some essay or annotation of Sanderson where he adheres to this model (which is conveniently also an excellent boilerplate excuse for things like this). (1) Footnote: I was about 30 years old when I learned there was a real Brandywine River in Delaware, while planning my first family vacation as the head of a household and deciding to stop at Longwood Gardens to break up a drive from NY to Washington DC. I kept joking about hobbits like Sam Gamgee secretly working the grounds.

Between this and @SwordNimiForPresident's suggestion of stamping a blank book with the book you would/could have written, and my idea of that book being a Ten Awesome Ways To Make Better Essence Marks Faster, which you then read and used to modify the Better Forger soulstamp... In theory, every Forger capable of making an Essence Mark should have one of these. Nights, it might even be the most likely scenario for discovering the difficult and dangerous technique in the first place. Just picture it, the First Soulstamper sitting there amid a collection of expertly Forged objects, and wondering if she could be so reckless as to soulstamp herself. "Well," she reasoned, "Nobody has ever done this before, so we don't really know what it would involve. But maybe if I'd started trying this stuff out a few years ago, I'd be much better at it already, and would have written the notes in this here notebook..." *Forges the very plausible notebook* *Reads notebook* *Makes first Essence Mark*

Whoa... You just blew my mind! What if that book were a primer on making Essence Marks, and it was only on reading that book that I learned the craft in the first place?

So what does the audiobook reading of Nightblood sound like? Is it the same reading in Warbreaker as at the end of Words of Radiance or in Oathbringer? Me, I hear a somewhat childish or androgynous voice, like a 10 year old boy that could just as easily be a 10 year old girl on the phone. Because Nightblood reminds me very much of a 10 year old with a short attention span, a poor grasp of time, gets bored, annoyed, amused, confused, etc., but one that also has a WMD at hand occasionally remembers to DESTROY EVIL. THE EVIL MUST BE DESTROYED!!!

Remember, an Essence Mark does not let you step into another life in another timeline. It's the opposite - kind of like [spoiler for Reckoners] in the Reckoners books - you are overlaying a version of yourself that could have been had different choices been made into your present reality (but unlike burning A-gold, a version of your conscious construction). So creating an Essence Mark of "the me that finished writing that book I started 5 years ago" may help you understand what it would have taken to do so, but doesn't answer what your life would then be like today, nor is it likely to help you do anything in your current situation. It might summon whatever version of you would have had the stick-to-it-tiveness or stroke of genius or whatever that you lacked at that time, with a memory of what that book turned out to be in your head, sure... But not a physical copy of that book, or the income money or a fan base or publishers or editorial staff who know about that book, etc., anything that might be a real world consequence of having written that book. The only thing that's changed is yourself. Now it is more than just an "it's all in your head" type of thing, because your physical form changes to match, kind of like how tapping a goldmind or using Stormlight for healing is "remapping" the Physical form to the Spiritual ideal of a person. But it's not like Shai's warrior version who was adopted by the Teullu people, named Shaizan, and trained in their ultra-secret and deadly form of martial arts, could then actually walk over to the Teullu and be recognized, though they'd be astonished by her knowledge of their language and ways. And creating an Essence Mark is an act of creation itself, not revelation. Shaizan is the version of Shai who was adopted and survived a deadly training regimen, because that was the outcome she was building towards. Had that actually happened IRL, there is a high probability, maybe even the most likely one, that she'd have died before completing the training. So you couldn't start making an Essence Mark with the idea of finding out what would have happened, where at the end you get to say so that's how that book would have turned out!, rather you'd be writing a plausible fanfic of your own life, and that would basically include writing the book you didn't write so that you could make that alternate version of yourself write it. Not word-for-word, but at least in outline, I'd think, for it to be plausible (as books don't just write themselves).

Yes, but you wouldn't make one based on "seems like it'd be a fun or interesting life", rather "this is someone I NEED to be on occasion". So making an Essence Mark of "if I were an author" wouldn't be very useful, unless that version of you knocked out books in under a day, and you think that ability was going to be key to your future as opposed to a kind of role-playing made real.

The point of an Essence Mark isn't to temporarily live a what-if alternate life you might have had, but to have different skills and appearance as the situation might demand. After all, a "professor" version of myself wouldn't ACTUALLY have a tenured position at Large State University or something. Shai chose her alternate selves very carefully in that regard, creating highly capable versions who able to fight, to communicate/understand, and to go to ground in both the city and the wilderness. For use in our so-called "real" world, if I had a similar set of four Essence Marks commissioned, I'd go with a somewhat similar set, except that I don't foresee needing much hand-to-hand combat skill if I am limited to four of them: 1 - A wilderness survivalist type, which I actually have close to zero ability in; if a massive solar flare caused a breakdown of civilization I'd go cannibal or starve to death within days. But not this guy! 2 - A multi-lingual interpreter. It's very plausible that had I focused only slightly differently in my life I could be fluent and literate in 3 or 4 different languages, so an EM version of myself might up that count to 8 or so. 3 - Someone with medical training and experience in emergency field work, a la Kaladin in TWoK. 4 - A "hands on mechanical type" experienced in using and working on cars, motorcycles, airplanes, etc., with an added side of MacGuyver-like ability to cobble together emergency makeshift solutions where necessary. A skillset that would plausibly extend into general "shop ability" like you see on MythBusters, and to fix stuff around the house.