Thought

I'd agree that the Parsh aren't voidbringers, or even active agents of Odium. We have a lot more evidence that they don't fit the descriptions than that they do. First, there's the meta-arguments, which have already been touched upon. It is too early in the series for a major mystery to be solved, especially without a try-fail cycle. Also, scholars have a poor reputation for being right the first time in Sanderson's books (think about how often Sazed got it wrong in Mistborn). And finally, we as readers know that Jasnah's information is incomplete. We know that the “paranormal” things she rejects are actually possible, probable, and effectively real. Her foundational premise about the world is flawed. If she's right, then it is by luck, not by insight. Second, Jasnah specifically ignores several bits of evidence that doesn't fit her theory. The voidbringers are said to suck in light: we haven't seen the Parsh do that. The voidbringers are said to be giant things, the parsh are not. The voidbringers are said to be fire and shadow, the parsh are not. The voidbringers are described as changing their shape, the Parsh are not. And so on, and so forth. Really, all we have is that the Parshendi (not the Parshmen) have stoney growths, and the voidbringers are said to be of stone, that they sing, and that their skin sort of vaguely fits the description of a quote that may or may not be about voidbringers (and, well, red and black and white could be described as flaming, burned, and ashen skin, although the records are quite clear that the fire is real). Third, as others have noted, if the Parsh were voidbringers, then people would have noticed back when they still knew what voidbringers looked like. Specifically, the 10 Heralds would have known. Why would 9 of them have taken off when they knew that there were still voidbringers on Roshar? They clearly thought that they had defeated the voidbringers again. Why didn’t they realize the difference? Why didn’t the Knights Radiant, who were still around, mop up if nothing else? And Fourth, we know that Sanderson did research on real world cultures for his book. I don't believe that there's been any confirmation of ancient Germanic culture being one of these, but that Parsh and the general situation shares a lot of similarities with the Germans and the Romans. The Parsh don't wear armor, Germans often didn't. The beards, of course. The fondness for strong alcohol (Szeth notes it in the prologue). Their non-standard tactics that work wonderfully for guerrilla warfare but horribly for standard warfare. Their barritus (the singing). The fact that some are trusted slaves of the "empire" while their brethren still fight on the outskirts. The similarities between The Desolation and Ragnarok. Their honorable actions. Even their assassination of a ruler. The point being, it seems unlikely that one legitimate culture would be the boogeymen in the closet. Sanderson's a bit too metropolotan for such. Which isn't to say that the Parsh have no connection to the Desolation. I suspect voidbringers are, essentially, body snatchers who modify their hosts, and that the Parsh are those who were released at the end of Desolations. That would explain why various creatures, like Thunderclast, seem to have fought on both sides: they were possessed.

I feel sorry for hate. It always gets a bad rap. It is a terribly powerful motivator, and can do quite a bit of good. The key is in hating the right things. Hate inequality, inaction, wrongs, etc. If anything, Honor strikes me as the proper counterpart to Odium. Together, they'd be proper motivation. That might explain why Odium's so focused on Roshar: Honor could be the shard he fears the most since it is the shard that would corrupt him the most. The problem there is that Odium doesn't play well with others. It is quite unlikely that at any point he shared authority with Cultivation and Honor. So, that quote probably doesn't refer to him.

Regarding Ruin and Preservation, keep in mind that, being Shards, we should consider them from a shardic perspective. Sazed, as Harmony, notes that Ruin was able to escape his prison in a surprisingly short period of time (Ruin also indicates the same thing). By Shardic standards, 2028 years is apparently not that long. Indeed, by human standards, that still isn’t that long (recorded history being about 12,000ish years long, give or take a few millennia, and humans themselves having existed for 2.5 million years. While there is no doubt that Ruin was effectively tied up during that time, the time frame itself was far less significant than is being implied. Although we don’t really know how much of himself Preservation put into people, we do know that it was enough to upset the balance between him and Ruin. But, notable, we also know it wasn’t significant to leave Harmony significantly unbalanced. Preservation was also out of the game for a similar period of time as Ruin, and thus, not a significant length of time. Honor’s an interesting case, because while he is now out of commission, it should be noted that for, apparently, much of the conflict with Odium, he was an open and powerful shard. He was occupied by the war, but that’s the exact opposite of being removed from play. Cultivation is akin to Honor, expect it’s still alive and cultivating. Odium’s basically in the same position as Cultivation. Bavadin appears to be entirely a free agent. The-third-shard-that-might-possibly-exist-on-Roshar, if it exists, appears to be as free as Odium or Cultivation. Endowment is entirely a free agent. Devotion is, admittedly, pining for the fjords. Domination is exhausted from a prolonged squawk. Only two shards were significantly impaired, and now with Honor’s death, three (we don’t really know if Honor-the-hostless-shard is all dead or just mostly dead). Of those limited, that is specifically because they’re fighting Odium. They haven’t been removed from play, but are currently in play.

Huh, you're right. I got the term from other people using it on the boards, but it isn't as common as I had thought. And I had been convinced that the Letter used the term Shattered instead of Splintered, but a-nope. Anywho, to try to keep things on track, the fundamental issue is that the OP suggested that all the shards were, in some way, tied up and couldn't respond. The two different types of splintering that we see (Odium splintering Devotion/Domination, and Endowment/Cultivation/Honor splintering themselves) are, at the very least, different on a matter of scale. However, these two different instances of Splintering were being conflated with each other in terms of implications. Sanderson has said that Odium wants to be the only individual at its power level. Therefore, we know that Cultivation and Honor, though splintered, retained enough power to be perceived as being equal enough by Odium, and therefor are powerful enough to still be relevant actors. We can reasonably extend this to Endowment, since its splintering is closer to the Cultivation/Honor brand, rather than the Devotion/Domination brand. The conclusion is still the same: the majority of shards we've encountered have been undamaged, and therefore we should expect that any new shards we encounter are likewise undamaged.

No indication it has been shattered, and as noted, the default assumption is that a shard hasn't been damaged. But you are quite right that we don't even know for sure if there is a third shard on Roshar (since Odium might be that third one). Hence my use of the word "knownish." Nine or ten, though, the majority of shards we're aware of haven't been damaged (as far as we've been given indication of). Just to keep in mind, splinters can be created in a manner other than shattering. So, when someone says that spren are splinters of cultivation, they don't mean necessarily that Cultivation has shattered. Indeed, we know that the spren aren't the result of a shard shattering, since we see them or their effects in Dalinar's visions, which were (mostly) before Honor shattered.

I agree with Reader, but that's a really interesting take on it, Campino.

@Happyman, considering how long it is taking for Odium to go about shattering the other Shards, I'm guessing that Shards can't travel at significantly FTL speeds. Or, at the very least, not always. The natural state of a shard is to not be broken, yes? So, being incomplete is the abnormal state, the supposition that is being put forward. As such, it isn't that we need evidence that the others are complete, but that we need evidence that a shard is incomplete. Currently we only have strong evidence of three of the knownish ten shards being damaged (Domination, Devotion, and Honor, in comparison to Endowment, Preservation, Ruin, Cultivation, Other-Roshar-Shard, Odium, and "Bavadin"). Not only do we need evidence that a shard has been damaged, but lacking that, simple statistics indicates that we should expect any given shard to be not damaged. As for Odium, while there is a whole thread about him being damaged, it really all boils down to a single epigraph line that may or may not even be referring to him. That's poor evidence for him, and further for an argument that all the shards are "spent."

Syl not liking the shardblades might be as simple as the mists curling away from hemalurgic spikes. If the two are being powered by different shards, even if those shards are on the same side, it seems likely that they "dislike" each other. Further, since we know that there's around 20 different magic systems at work in the Stormlight archives, it makes sense that we've seen a few by now. In turn, the difficulty of using surgebinding through shardplate could be akin to using allomancy on metal inside someone else (or, in this case, on someone inside metal).

For the OP, if the Nightwatcher is a splinter, or even a full shard, any thoughts as to what it might be? I'm tempted to go with Balance, since it evens out its blessings with curses, and it would help explain how Odium could hope to attack a world with 3 shards and get away with it (Balance would presumably not be able to directly combat him like Honor or Cultivation might be able to). However, that smacks of Harmony, and also Sanderson has probably played too many RPGs to want to bother with how uninteresting neutrality can be. Perhaps Justice, then (I think someone else suggested this a while ago). Still has that sense of balance, still might not oppose Odium until it has broken a "law," etc. I'm reminded of the Kandra. A people of Preservation, but powered by Ruin. Anywho, we know that at least one thing changed: the plate and shards stopped glowing when the Windrunners gave them up. If there was a change, then we may have already seen one of the other kinds of magic systems in the world: the glyphs that floated around the armor in one of Dalinar's visions. Near-Aonic magic might be used to temper the odius nature of the things.

Do we know that?

Random question: are the Nahel clearly defined somewhere as the symbolheads/truthspreen? People seem to be taking it for granted that they're the same, but I don't recall any link between the two.

I'd generally expect Bronze to be able to pick up pulses from any magical source. I think Sanderson had indicated that it could be used to detect Feruchemy, for example. Although, it is unlikely that a Shard's allomantic pulse would correspond to a non-God Metal. After all, while Vin clearly detects Ruin's pulse when he manifests, she doesn't note that it is similar to any other metal (indeed, if anything, it should have made her think of Atium).

Well, as I was introduced to it (by a ), when God created light in Genesis 1, that light was actually the Kabballah, a sort of cognitive blueprint for the universe. Actual light wasn't created until much later, when God started making the physical world (and thus the Sun, starts, etc).From what I've gathered (I've never directly studied it), this light of creation was pure and bright enough that one could see all of creation (and time) by it. Sin, however, threatened to shatter (eh? Eh?) that light, so God hid it within crude matter. The Sephirot are the ten signposts of rediscovering this light, as well as the ten attributes of God, which sustain creation (or ten vessels into which the light of creation was poured). I think there is sometimes some controversy here, as the Sephirot can be mistaken as individual gods, but are supposed to represent a modalistic manifestation of the one-God's intent. Oddly enough, in trying to find the 10 Sephirot, I've come across 11 (on wikipedia). It says that two of them are just two sides of the same, so they count at one. Anywho, they are: As should be expected, the Kabbalah is also based on the assumption that there are hidden meanings in the text of the Torah (even to the point that accent marks themselves are conveying important esoteric knowledge). Wikipedia has a lovely image of a Kabbalah, for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albero_della_Vita_di_Davide_Tonato.jpg Of course, none of this came from Issac, just to be clear.

For me, it was a series of crashes that tainted the rest of the book, rather than things being consistently bad. These were the sort of problems that I'm amazed got past Pullmann's alpha-readers, let alone his agent, let along his publisher. For example, when Lyra decided that she could trust Will because he was a murderer, that was so utterly ridiculous that I ceased to care about her. I liked the plot (and I hate not finishing a book), so I kept reading, but it is a significant blow, when the main character is no longer identifiable. Presumably, that moment didn't ruin the book for others as much as it did for me. I'm not really sure why, but there you go.

Ah, you're misunderstanding feruchemical basics, it sounds like. Copper isn't like steel. With steel, you can store half your speed. With copper, you can't store half your memory of something. It is all or nothing. And, when you tap the mind, you don't get back only half your memory of something, you get it all bad, permanently. Copper is binary. Thus, we should expect copper compounding to likewise be binary. It might increase the force of the memory, but once its been transferred, that transfer is complete and no longer needs to be powered. Compounding produces normal feruchemical effects, but it is fueled by allomancy. That, however, doesn't change the the actual effects are the same old feruchemical ones.

The flow of power is temporary, but the effects are permanent. You can use all that healing power at once, to recover ridiculous amounts of injuries. When the metal runs out, you are still healed. At worst, after the metal is gone, the memory would start to fade as normal.

I love the first book. The general setting is creative: just familiar enough to indicate it is a parallel dimension (or alternate history), while being different enough to make us question our own assumptions. The daemon, dust, compass, etc are all fun trinkets, for those of us who like trinkets, and keep us entertained. The villains are a little mustache-twirly, but for a one-book romp, it is fine. Lee Scoresby (and his Daemon) is a wonderfully likeable and charismatic character. Alas, the series went downhill from there. I'd go into details, but that would just turn into a long rant. However, to try to be brief, I think most my complaints can boil down to poor characterization: largely, individuals did what was necessary for the plot, not what one would reasonably expect a real person to do. The plot of the first book carried us most of the way, and the characters didn't do much that was too crazypants. The second book's plot worked well enough, but the characters detracted from it. Then the third book's plot was just falling apart. At that point, interesting characters could have helped, but even the one's we had (which had become even more ridiculous) were beaten down by nonsensical plot points. There was also some very unsavory moments of bigotry, anti-feminism, anti-humanism, and sexism, which were particularly irksome given Pullmann's own criticism of C.S. Lewis. Though, to be fair, I think most of these were inadvertent, the result the characterization problems I mentioned above, rather than actual malice. And in further defense, given the awards he's received, it seems that others don't find his characters as silly as I do.

I haven't found discussion, statements, or hints of this elsewhere, so I thought I'd share some information that I learned at the 2012 SD Comic Con: the glyph diagrams on the front and back inside covers were based on the Jewish Kabbalah at Sanderson's request. This information came from Isaac Stewart (who probably wins the award for the absolute nicest person ever), at the 2012 San Diego Comic Con. Specifically, I had asked him if the design was based on the Kabbalah, he confirmed it, and then added that Sanderson had talked with him about that very thing during development. It seems particularly interesting since the Kabbalah has the ten attributes (Sephirot).

The ever-charming Orson Scott Card has several Writing Class articles on his website. They're a bit old, but useful, particularly for those who would rather read articles than listen to podcasts. The link is: http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/index.shtml

Compounding vision doesn't given you two images of the same thing, nor does compounding health give you a second heart, or compounding speed give you more legs/arms. Everything only enhances what you already have. Thus, compounding memory should just enhance the memory, not give you more, assuming it follows the other patterns. Therefor, it is unlikely that compounding copper would give you 10 memories of the same thing. Likewise, compounding doesn't give a feruchemist something they didn't have at all before. Gold can let you regrow an arm you lost but, presumably, it doesn't let you grow an arm you never had. Thus, while a compounded memory might be vivid, it can't give you more information than there is in the memory itself. The solution, thus, is that compounding a memory just gives you a photographic version of that memory as it was contained in the coppermind. So, if you burned a degraded memory, you'll only get that degraded memory. If we keep in mind Kwaan's memory, this doesn't seem too bad. Kwaan's memory seems to have allowed him to remember information he put into his copperminds (the prophecies). Thus, compounding copper seems like it would probably give one abilities similar to Kwaan's.

Given how copper and bronze are described, as emitting pulses, I'd assume that it would be kind of like banging drums. One drum will produce a noise, but if you add a second drum, you don't magically make the sound twice as loud, you just make it more chaotic.

Perhaps Odium himself has been shattered, or splintered, or imprisoned in some way? Devotion and Domination seemed to be a bit at odds, so he may have been able to divide and conquer them. But on Roshar, Honor doesn't seem to be the sort to let one of the other shards fight Odium alone. Hence, there was at least a two on on (maybe a three on one). Odium was hurt, retreated, and had some of his power siphoned off. Rayse himself is still alive, but he needs to regain his power before moving on to greener pastures. Thus, the desolations. He's too weak to risk a frontal assault, so he's working through the creatures of the planet. The shardblades would be the most likely candidate for the manifestation of Odium's lost power. They are destructive and seem to help fuel "The Thrill," which causes one to hate one's enemies.

Depends on what one calls distinct. We have black and white. If there is merit here, then I'd expect red, blue, green, and yellow. Probably from there grey, orange, violet/purple (the latter of which is a non-spectral color, which is cool), brown, silver, gold, cyan, and magenta. Add in pink and puce (for Odium), and we're good to go with fairly common and easily recognizable colors. These aren't all prime colors, pigments, or even all spectral colors, but people tend to consider them distinct.

Clearly, they're calicos, the Roshar version of Inquisitor cats. Of course, that would mean that there are no parshmen, just parshwomen.

Also, the Tears of Edgli are used to make dyes, not to bleach things white. I'm not sure what color the flowers are, but it does strongly imply that they are a color. Personally, I favor yellow, but that is just because reading about the Tears make me think of sunflowers or daffodils. If the flowers have a color, one might well expect that color to be the Shard's color (again, if shard's have unique colors). EDIT: Spoiler to follow, but I also realized that Sadeas' shardplate was red (though his banner's color is green), and his actions, while not as crazy as, say, the Citizen’s, still seem focused on dominating.