robardin

I don't fully question Helaran having gone a-seeking "justice" from the Skybreakers, believing his father to have murdered his mother. Though his understanding of what Shallan is doing with her drawing seems to counter any kind of Mission he believes himself to be on from the Skybreakers while waving around a Shardblade ("kill Surgebinders"). Of course, we only have Mraize's word so far that he was trying to kill Amaram because of him being a suspected Surgebinder. Maybe the "mission" he was given the Shards for was something else that Mraize either doesn't know or is purposely clouding. What I question is how Shallan could have escaped the Skybreakers' lethal intentions after her mother and her friend died attempting to kill her, if that (a) was indeed their goal (b) because they were Skybreakers, because as we've seen, that doesn't fit with how Nale does business. And stopping to argue with her husband about how "she's one of them!" (assuming "she" is Shallan, the context-free use of "them" whose meaning is clear to both speakers). That strongly suggests she expected their intentions to be in complete alignment. All three of them. Conclusion: they were all three part of some group, and Lin Davar drew the line at going after Shallan. Whether that means they were all Ghostbloods or some yet-unknown group remains to be seen.

So Mraize's letter to Shallan in Oathbreaker Ch. 40 has a lot of stuff about the Sons of Honor, the madness of Heralds, and the nature and mission of the Skybreakers, all of which we've seen separate corroboration of. What doesn't ring quite as true are the bits describing Shallan's family. There's already a thread speculating about the true allegiance of Helaran and the source of his Shards. But what I've begun to wonder is exactly what group was behind Shallan's mother trying to kill her as a child? That group evidently knew there was a Surgebinder in the Davar household, which is why Shallan's mother and her "friend" tried to kill her as a child. That fits in with the Skybreaker mandate as we know it to have been at the time. So... Skybreakers, as claimed by Mraize, who thought he was the one "attracting a spren" in the Davar household, so tried to make him a Skybreaker? That doesn't fit with what we know actually happened, right? This was Shallan's "true memory" of the events that constituted her (re-achieving) the Third Ideal: Shallan then killed both her mother and her "friend" with her Patternblade. If they were Skybreakers, as Mraize claimed, how is it that Shallan then continued living unmolested for years with her father and brothers? Surely the "friend", if he had been a Skybreaker, would have had his failure to return and report noticed. And Nalan doesn't seem like the giving-up-after-one-underling-failed type of guy. Also, her mother's first action was not to go after Shallan directly, with her "friend" as backup or supervisor, but to confront and argue with her father, as if they ought to have been on the same page with this conclusion, with him being difficult about an unpleasant but necessary task. So either her father had also been a Skybreaker, who broke with them over this matter of killing Shallan and then somehow covered it all up such that they never followed up again, and then switched over to the Ghostbloods (perhaps for protection against the Skybreakers?).... Or they had ALL been Ghostbloods, with a reason at the time to want Shallan as "one of them" dead, whatever "them" indicated, and that her father managed to recast events to the GBs in a way to suggested "mission accomplished" or to convince them to take another tack. "She could be valuable to us in the future", or "I will keep her Light suppressed", or some such. Mraize had early on admitted that killing another Ghostblood, even a senior one, "is not forbidden, but it is hardly encouraged", and that "your family has a long history of involvement in these events." He also seems to know that Shallan Davar is a Lightweaver - and not a Truthwatcher, the other Order that could spin illusions to mask herself as Veil - by commenting on her being a living Soulcaster. And Helaran? the last time Shallan ever saw him, he'd returned to their house with a Shardblade, and did and said some interesting things (Words of Radiance, Chapter 19). He sees Shallan drawing, and notices that almost against her will, she began sketching "bodies, facedown, on the floor", as the charcoal seeped out of the texture like blood. He doesn't freak out, but crumples it up quickly and tells her, "Draw plants and animals. Safe things, Shallan. Don't dwell on what happened." He knows what she is doing and what it can do or represent. "We can't have vengeance yet... Balat can't lead the house, and I must be away." Vengeance? He blames his father, and not Shallan, for their mother's death. Right? But, he also doesn't want to kill Shallan. Hmm. He confronts his father with "his crimes", calling him a "vile corruption upon this house" and a "murderer" while putting a Shardblade to his chest, to which his terrified father replies, "You don't know what you think you know. Your mother --" And then as Helaran leaves, he says to his father, "Try not to ruin too much while I'm gone. I will come back periodically to check." Ruin what? This is still consistent with them both being Ghostbloods. A Family of Ghostbloods. Once. Who had some kind of mandate that his father derailed, but not completely. However, it does read like Helaran had gone "above and outside" boundaries known to Lin Davar to gain the Shardblade. The Skybreakers? Maybe? Or, perhaps, Shallan's mother was not coming to kill her, but to do something else with the knife. Like to carve the Ghostblood triple diamond symbol on her or something? That's a bit more of a stretch.

Helaran may or may not have been an acolyte Skybreaker, as claimed by Mraize. I tend to think not. Why would they have "dead" Shards on hand, when as far as we can see, living spren find them an abomination? Or do highspren hot have such a reaction? We also see other Skybreaker acolytes from Szeth's POV, and they certainly aren't being given Full Shards as part of their testing. (Szeth being given Nightblood is obviously an exceptional special case, but he was kind of "pre-ordained" by Nale himself.) And given what we've seen it takes to impress Nale... What did Heleran do, exactly? But here's another thought that may lead to a better idea about Helaran: what group was behind Shallan's mother trying to kill her as a child? I think that is one of the biggest lies in Mraize's letter. That's a related but tangential line of thought, I'm going to start another thread on that topic (there doesn't seem to be a current one)

Obviously an Allomancer would not be able to create an Essence Mark, as that would require someone from MaiPon on Sel to do; but as we see Shai do, it's certainly possible (though very difficult) for a Forger to create one for someone else. So it occurred to me that it should be very easily plausible that a Lurcher might have turned out to be a Coinshot, or any other kind of Misting, though "full upgrading" to Mistborn status would be a lot less plausible. They already won the sDNA lottery to be an Allomancer, so to speak, and have a stronger Spiritual Connection with Preservation than most other poeple; only the specific expression of that would be changed, where that connection point happened to lie, right? And if some types of Allomancers are indeed "naturally" (Harmonically) more rare or more common than others then maybe it'd be easier/harder to make a Mark to alter someone to that use that metal. For Twinborn, I'd think there'd be a crossing type of effect that made it more than twice as hard to change both metals instead of just one. Still, imagine if Wayne could stamp himself to be a gold compounder for a bit, changing just his A-bendalloy to A-gold, fill a bunch of goldminds, then go back to normal. He'd sure like that! But such a change would only be effective while the Allomancer was on Sel, wouldn't it? Where Allomancy would work, but he'd have to get there first. I once asked if Ashravan could leave the Rose Empire with his Essence Mark, or if it was bound by location to be close to MaiPan or the Rose Empire - or if maybe he could travel freely until it was time to re-stamp himself, at which time he'd have to be in the Rose Empire for the stamping to work. I couldn't find that thread again in a search (I probably misspelled his name or something). But I think the consensus was that he maybe could travel to the Cognitive Realm that way, but physical travel was likely limited to the Rose Empire? Based on there being a WoB of some kind that Forged goods like vases or furniture would not keep their form if removed too far from the Rose Empire. Still, it's kind of fun to imagine someone temporarily but regularly swapping powers without resorting to hemalurgy.

Well Hoid does dye his hair black while posing as Wit, though he is described or seen as white-haired elsewhere on Roshar (swimming out of the depths of the Horneater Ocean, jumping into the mouth of a greatshell, etc.). Maybe he's not dyeing the hair, it turns black under certain conditions when he reverses himself in some way! LOL. (No way.)

True, I suspect Copperclouds often become savants just like Seekers do; but I would think that day-to-day that means more of an efficiency thing than a strength thing. In other words, without being aware of the need to burn at a >1 multiplier when an Inquisitor was in the area (or might be), they would just be adept at either increasing the coverage of the cloud or making it last longer on the same amount of copper as the expression of their savantism. Most of the "flaring" of copper (which has to be consciously done, not as an unconscious reaction) would happen when they know or suspect an emotional Allomancer was working on them, to couteract the flaring of brass/zinc from the other guy.

Yes, and I suspect an Allomancer flaring copper would still block out a double-Seeker of ordinary generational strength (didn't spike a lerasium MB/Seeker). But how often would a Smoker even think to flare their metal, except to extend coverage by area rather than concentrating the defense in a smaller one? We do see Kelsier flaring copper to improve the shielding against the Lord Ruler's massive Soothing, but that's a very special case. Yet another reason to keep the double Seeking nature of some Inquisitors on the down-low.

There were 16 original Inquisitors, according to Ministry doctrine (as quoted by Yomen, anyway), and there were probably only about as many later on as well. Marsh killed several outside the throne room by removing their linchpin spike while they were resting (and not suspecting one of their own), and later, Vin and Elend kill three between them before she takes down 13 of them while she Ascended (except for finishing off Marsh, the only one left). Perhaps there even can only be 16 of them, and Ruin created enough to make up the tally to fill the gap left by Marsh's little murder spree. I think it's also as simple that even a hemalurgically doubled Seeker or Mistborn would still have to concentrate pretty hard to pierce copperclouds. Vin could do it (even without realizing about her earring), but she had to focus to do so, when she already had an idea that someone was using Allomancy in a given area and flared her bronze to Seek it out. A more general "sweeping" or passive type of Seeking probably wouldn't be enough. A lerasium Mistborn like Elend could possibly passively pierce Clubs' or Vin's coppercloud, even without a spike, and almost certainly TLR himself could.

Whoa, that particular annotation never sank in properly until you bolded it for me. They don’t realize it, but the Lifeless are far more aware than everyone assumes. Clod in this book is a foreshadowing of that... Where we elsewhere learn that Clod is a reanimated Arsteel, one of the Five Scholars that went way back with Vasher and thus also a Returned (in life). Now remember that the way Vasher dealt with the Lifeless horde set upon the Idrians by Bluefingers' machinations was to send his stone-bound golems to destroy them. Unlucky.

Oh, Sweet Harmony. I guess we should be glad that ReLuur the kandra was not named LuNaar or GibBuss to further this awful "ha ha they don't get it in-world" effort at punning.

Well put. Or as I like to think of it, Kelsier is kind of the inverse of Ralph from Wreck-It Ralph, where as the villain of a cabinet-style arcade game, he gets reassured at one point that "just because you are a 'bad guy' doesn't mean you're a bad guy." Kelsier? He's definitely a BAD guy, like John Shaft (shut yo' mouth!); he's a complicated man, but no one understands him but his <brother?>. That doesn't mean he's a "bad guy". But it wouldn't someday preclude it, that's for sure.

The whole "interference" thing about why mixing genes for Allomancy with Feruchemy resulted in Ferrings or Twinborn highlights something else, too: that a "Fullborn" like Rashek is extremely unnatural and could only happen when a full Feruchemist ingested a lerasium bead or effected a direct Spiritweb twiddle while Ascendant, then de-Ascending back into a mortal. All of Rashek's oppression of the Terris and attempt to weed out Feruchemy for hundreds of years via extremely controlled "breeding programs" that isolated the Terris bloodlines from those with Allomancy, actually served to keep (full) Feruchemy alive, even as it made Feruchemists much more rare than before.

Marsh made a comment about how Harmony, by his own rules, had to allow for Marsh to have a different opinion on things like giving Marasi the hemalurgic notebook that Spook had written, even though he's easily capable of taking full control of Marsh at any time, Ruin-style: "Harmony has particular views about how things must be done. I do not always agree with him. Oddly, his particular beliefs require that he allow that." And those "particular views" differed exactly on the topic of passing that information on, which the kandra later relay (that in Harmony's view, Spook shouldn't have written that book, nor Marsh brought it back to light). But he then also comments that Wax "is doing my brother's work, and that is something I feel inclined to encourage", which is intriguing to look back on after Wax's talks with TenSoon and Harmony in the next two books. Does that mean that Kelsier had previously acted in a Wax-like role of "the Ruin's Hand of Harmony", as TenSoon described as being how Harmony viewed him in Shadows of Self? Or that Marsh was in cahoots with Kelsier (and apparently still is at least in sympathy with) in doing some kind of work that Harmony disagreed with, but felt compelled to allow? In any case, based on their past mortal friendship, I would like to think that at Harmony at least has eased Marsh's constant pain from the hemalurgic spikes. Not sure what that would entail, but c'mon, he's a DOUBLE GOD, hemalurgy is "his power" how, as would be "preserving" him from the pain of it, right?

Yeah, and constant pain from the spikes, as he described at the end of book 1 after Vin offed TLR But it does seem like Marsh has not only kept his spikes, he's replaced the one he was missing when Sazed Ascended (the one missing eye spike that Vin pulled out that he was still missing when he killed Elend), and he may even have acquired a spike or two he didn't have before (presumably by harvesting them from dead Inquisitors, as ghost-Kelsier had noted to Spook that they had a "little pile of Inquisitor spikes and nothing to do with them").

Yeah I had been assuming it was Honor until I wrote that post, then I suddenly realized that "the Parent" could mean either non-Odium Shard on Roshar. Hmm.

His being able to renew spheres with Stormlight wasn't a one-off thing he was able to do at Thaylen Fields; afterwards, he also "overcharged" Kaladin for his flight first to Kharbranth, then to where Skar and Drehy had hidden out with little Gavinor. When the Stormfather commented that no previous Bondsmiths he'd bonded with had been able to do this, Dalinar noted that he was something new: "Honor's remnants, your soul, my will." Odium counts him as having Ascended, and he had formed Honor's Perpendicularity. (And presumably does do every time he renews spheres or overcharges a Radiant with Stormlight, if on a lower scale.) So is he "Honor Enough" now to count as The Parent who locked the Oathgates from the Cognitive side? Or was The Parent in question another Shard (Cultivation)?

Ah, "Nalan's hand!" Nice. It's interesting how sometimes the Vorin version of the name is used, like with "Kelek's breath", but it's stll Ash's eyes and not Shalash even when used by Alethi Vorinists, (A quick check and Shallan seems fond of that one, and Amaram says it when commenting on how riveted Adolin is by his first glimpse of Shallan when she arrives at the warcamps in Words of Radiance.)

It's not very suprising nor without precedent in human societies, especially in Asia and the Middle East where certain fundamental tasks are "always" done with the "proper" hand, and it's not even a question of "but I'm left handed". Since before you could remember you'd have been taught and trained to do those things with the right or left hand, that all. Examples: in East Asian countries using chopsticks is traditionally done with the right hand, and children are taught to eat with them very early on with the right hand. Mostly you see left-handed Westerners or other people who learned to use chopsticks after learning to write using chopsticks with the left hand, or people doing it to accentuate being different. This is partly for practical reasons; when seated in a row as on a bench, someone using the left hand to eat will bump elbows with their neighbor's right elbow, as the standard way to eat rice or non-soup noodles is in a small bowl held up in the air with the left hand, not placed on the table, and using the right hand to wield the chopsticks to move the food as short a distance to the mouth as possible, to avoid dropping it. It's not never, though; people joke about "dueling with a lefty" while eating seated next to one, so people must have seen or experienced it at some point. And it's not particularly mean-spirited, like the lefty is made an object of ridicule, more like a head-shaking at how this person was not "pruned" properly by their parents or teachers and were let to be a slightly square peg in a round-holed society. Same thing with writing: it is heavily enforced for children to learn to write Chinese characters with the right hand, as calligraphy is prized and stroke order and directionality is formalized, and using the left hand will produce "weird looking" strokes. At least with the traditional brush and ink type writing; this is probably much less of a big deal now with ballpoint pens and computer keyboards, but the cultural reinforcement is still there. It would take a fairly "liberal" or permissive schooling for someone to have been allowed to learn to write with the left hand since childhood ("going lefty" at some point as a rebellious thing being something else). And then there's the "left hand taboos" in India or the Middle East, where one eats and shakes hands with other people strictly with the right hand, because the left hand is used for personal hygiene. To eat food with your left hand would immediately seem disgusting, and to extend one's left hand to another person highly offensive.

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a vacation is just a vacation. Nah, I'm sure she was there as part of her Voidbringer research. I do wonder what special tidbits (or false trails) may have awaited her there, given that its ruler is a mad Ishar.

It compuslively annoys Ash to hear people swearing by the Heralds, especially her. But what do people say in Roshar, in Dalinar's time? We've heard the interjections Kelek's breath, Ash's eyes, Taln's palms... Presumably these are traditional phrases of some kind and people don't also say Ash's breath, Kelek's palms, etc., and it feels like they're based on assonance and an associated virtue/strength of the Herald. Ash = Herald of Beauty = eyes, Taln = Herald of War = hands, substituting palms for the assonance, Kelek... well, who knows what was so special about his breath. What about the other seven Heralds? People swear by Jezrien by conflating him with the Stormfather, but I can't think of any swears we've read for anybody else. Not even Ishar, "the Herald of Luck", who as such you'd think would get invoked quite a lot in wishing for good luck, or cursing one's bad luck after the fact. So if we were to try to come up with one- or two-syllable assonant "swear phrases" for the other Heralds, what would they be? I'll start... How about "Nale's hair?" Because "Nale's nails" is awful.

From the not-at-all real advance copy of The Lost Metal that I totally have not had a look at:

"A relationship between two Knights Radiant is likely to accomplish a more equitable union," observed Shallan's "Radiant" persona. Maybe she was more right than Shallan realized. Even without Surgebinding, simply holding Stormlight has many physical effects involving endurance and speed. Remember how badly Skar got shown up in the encumbered running exercise when the rest of Original Bridge Four had squired up, excepting him and Rlain? And in general, using it is nearly involuntary: it takes an effort for a Radiant NOT to draw in available Stormlight when under stress. So, unless it happened with no infused spheres around and no Stormlight already held, it seems like Radiant on non-Radiant action could be rather one-sided.

Hmm. I thought in most of the visions Dalinar heard Honor as a voice, but at the very end of The Way of Kings, when he realizes the visions were basically one-sided playbacks and not the interactive conversations he'd thought he'd been having, he also appears to "see" Honor for the first time: No mention of carrying an object, but again, the clothing is exotic/strange to the local viewer. As for how Odium is described as dressed in Oathbringer: the first time we see him "on screen", it's in Ch. 56 when he enters one of Dalinar's visions of Feverstone Keep and the Recreance after he used it to pull in Yanagawn in for another chat: And elsewhere in Oathbringer, from Dalinar's and Venli's POV and others, Odium is desribed as holding or tapping his scepter "like a cane." Somehow I wouldn't be surprised if it was the kind of cane with a sword hidden it it, eh? On quick perusal (and eBook search), I didn't find any description of Odium's "clothing", though, only his face and his cane. He appears at Thaylen Fields as a gold-and-white-marbled "ancient parshman" with "a regal scepter he carried like a cane" and later, when Amaram brings him the aluminum sheath for Nightblood, with a "golden carapace"; and later to Taravangian as a 20-foot tall colossus before shrinking down to normal human size. Both times only his face or features are described, his hair and beard, plus mention of the scepter... Always the scepter.

"Hey, Vatwha. Look over there... Do you think that's that Taln guy with the Radiants? Should we report this to Hnanan?" "Who?" "C'mon. Taln. Talenenat? The Herald of War? The one we'd just been torturing for over FOUR THOUSAND YEARS until this Desolation?" "Ah! Never did remember his name." "Never... What... I mean that wasn't even the first time for him! There had been like a hundred previous times!" "Yeah, well, I just kind of focused on the job at hand, you know? Cut here, pull that out, burn burn burn, jab jabbity jab, and so on. It's not like I wanted to get to ENJOY that sort of thing. You have to compartmentalize to stay sane, am I right?"

It's also interesting that it's an object associated with the Shard in its Cognitive form. In general, it seems like the "human facing" projection that a Shard creates is modeled on their original Physical form, as confirmed by how Harmony appears to Wax, which is the same as how he's described while a mortal man in Mistborn Era 1. We see Harmony appear dressed in the traditional V-patterned Terris robes, more or less (though each stripe was like a strata in time in the CR), but we also see Ruin and Preservation appear dressed in garb that likely matches what they habitually wore before Ascending, unless they make an effort to form a different image (Preservation is described as wearing clothing that looks strange to Kelsier when he first meets him in Secret History). But of the Shards we've seen "in person", we've only seen two who carried around a talisman of sorts: Preservation with his knife, and Odium with his scepter (which form he does play around with a bit). Ruin didn't seem to have one, nor Harmony, nor Cultivation.