Morsk

I've got two ideas. The first is that it's a built-in Radiant power that's not a Surge, like Kaladin's following the Highstorm in a dream, or being able to hold his breath. Kaladin's order has Inhilation as the body focus, which matches the breath-holding power. If Shallan had #3 or #4 for Soul or Eyes, the memory power could fit. (It's harder to match her attributes to those orders though. Most people think she's #6.) Another is that her mother asked the Nightwatcher for "a special child", and ended up with a curse so terrible she killed herself after giving birth. Or that dying in childbirth was the curse.

I think Mistborn shows us both self-replenishing and non-replenishing magics in the same world, and suggests some of the differences. So what on Roshar is permanent? The Nahel bond is permanent, and it's caused by a spren. If Stormlight isn't enough for Nightblood, spren might be.

Have you heard the theory that the Parshendi are the Dawnsingers? Maybe the Dawnshards were a gift to their race, to go along with their racial singing, comparable to the investiture given to Humans in choosing 10 Heralds. That leads into asking "What happened to the Dawnshards?" though. Maybe Odium corrupted them to make the Unmade, the Parshendi's dark gods. Oops...

Nightblood breaks all the rules we know for Breath transfer. If the reason is because he's powerful enough to be his own splinter powering his own personal magic system with its own rules, then I have no problem with him stealing Stormlight too. He'd be doing cosmere meta-magic, not Nalthis magic, and any Shard can fuel any magic system. I could be grossly overestimating him though. Maybe he just mind-controls people into consenting to Breath transfer, and his Cognative bond with them substitutes for the need to speak the Command verbally. That's not going to help him pull Stormlight from people. (edit: On the other hand, could Nightblood bond with someone as their Roshar spren? Scary...) Another thing: Is Stormlight interchangeable with Breath? I see Stormlight and the Dor as more pure energy, with Breath more like Mist. We don't understand the difference yet, but there does seem to be a difference. Highstorms and the Dor are dangerous; Mist is mostly harmless. Maybe the whispy white Stormlight inside a Surgebinder has been "converted" to the usable form though. Also if Hoid has Nicrosil Feruchemy, there must be something he can do to help convert Investitures.

The picture comes out as a broken link to me. I tried Firefox & Chrome both; it's just not there.

Humans acting against intent reminded me of part of a conversation between Shallan and Kasbal: It could be as simple as "Shards need humans as pawns," but it's also compatible with the theory here.

Brandon tends to write a mix of religion as a genuinely positive influence on people's lives, vs. religion getting corrupted and used for power. (I don't want to give examples, because it spoils a lot of character development in different stories, and sometimes plot.) But since this is a YA novel, we may have seen enough of the "corruption" theme when the priest denied Joel an inception the first time, and misused religious doctrines to rationalize his desire for convenience. I do think they're hiding something, but that most of their reason for doing so will end up good. Time is weird to chalkings; maybe choosing one day a year is important.

I think association of the Spiritual Realm with the afterlife comes from Roshar beliefs. Roshar is probably just wrong though, either that or it has a local mini-afterlife that isn't as final as what Brandon was talkign about.

Zombies? A line of chalk is actually an army of the living dead, microscopic chalk-particle zombies.

There's a thread about something "opposing" Adonalsium. Brandon revealed it in a Reddit AMA. I see something of a leap from "oppose" to "opposite". The words look similar, but they have different connotations and aren't always interchangeable.

I tend not to like programming-based magic analogies, ever since I tried to make sense of them in the Mage: the Ascension RPG years ago. (One of the factions viewed all magic as information science, but the writers didn't provide any details, so I was left to my imagination.) I gave up on it for reasons similar to Sanderson's Second Law. The programming metaphor makes anything possible, and gets boring. Every magic spell turns into "I need more access," or "I found a bug," or "I caused a hardware failure and exploited a memory error," or something like that. "Well there was a memory error, so that method that gets called when I wave my hand at people? It's calling something that makes them explode instead." It just seems too generic, and unlimited in its application, to be fun to me. I don't think it can be saved either, since the entire point of high-level programming languages is how generic they are. The hardware may do some very interesting things to give us RAM, but the programming language is deliberately isolated from the interesting details. So from the start, the deck is stacked against any attempt to make the programming analogy interesting. edit: Maybe I'm being a bit too pessimistic, since at other times I like to think of the Spiritual Realm as pure information, without the bother of space, conservation laws, and other pesky physical requirements. The way the Basic Lashing works with "spiritual gravitational bonds" isn't so far from a programming metaphor of "I changed a value and made it act funny." I just think it gets completely out of control if not subject to limitations, and that the Physical and Cognitive realms are real, and putting real limits on this stuff.

One of the biggest things that built resentment between WoT books was that we'd collect prophecies from (say) books 1-5, then book 6 would come out and none of them were fulfilled. Then 7 would come out, and none of them were fulfilled. It's very frustrating. Brandon's said he thinks most mysteries should be resolved after a book or two, not go on and on, but I don't know if he's motivated by the same frustration I'm talking about, or if it's something else for him. I like to think he's enlightened to longer series meaning "more plot", not "same plot, but slower and in great detail". So Shallan should discover Syl as soon as she would in a 3-book series, and after that Brandon will go on to make up more cool new things. I hope!

I'm undecided on whether the sheath is magical. It could be a side-effect of Nightblood having a sword for a body, that he tends to act like a sword, and swords are safe when sheathed.

The sheath is different; one is silver, the other black. It could just be a different sheath though. That's a great observation that both swords are long and thin. Hoid stealing Nightblood would be a great ending to the story in the Warbreaker sequel. Nightblood is too dangerous to leave around, but too cool to kill off. Adding it to Hoid's collection is the perfect solution.

I'm just warming up to this theory, although my reason is inspired by the Dalinar WoR reading so I don't know if this is the right place to get into it.

I agree this is very confusing. I read it as Shallan being unable to understand why a monster still loved her, and that she shouldn't return the love. It does make "murdered" a bit of a tease though. Probably the first thing everyone is looking for in Shallan's flashbacks is "Ok, how is she a murderer?" Then the word gets used, but it's not about her. Brandon read us an early draft. Maybe this is one of the things that will be made clearer before release.

Q: Who's that on the cover of Way of Kings? A: It's Dalinar and Eshonai. Eshonai is the female Parshendi Shardbearer who fights Dalinar and Kaladin in Chapter 68. She also appears in an earlier chapter, where Dalinar sees her across a chasm. That scene is the one on the cover. Source: Second Eshonai Reading. The reading is from Stormlight-2, so it's a spoiler for that book. Brandon explains the cover in the introduction, before he starts reading.

The Second Eshonai Reading has Brandon explain that she's on the cover. It's in the third paragraph.

Not really; I just thought it was bizarre Jasnah didn't react, and then hoser said Shallan communicates silently and I thought that was his reasoning. But I reread the passage, and some of Shallan's communication is definitely silent and in italics, and the "murderer" part is in quotes and spoken.

Ever since Brandon said Shardblades are inspired by fantasy art, including fantasy art in video games, I've thought Shardplate looks like this Or this, except with better head and arm protection in both cases. At some point I'll probably back off and be slightly less fantastic, since in the books the armor seems to veer on the realistic side, with the swords being crazy art with a sharp edge somewhere. But right now I find it entertaining.

I hadn't considered that Shallan communicates silently. On the other hand, she said "I'm a murderer," in front of Jasnah and Jasnah didn't hear it. Is that your reasoning?

That Epigraph is from Jasnah's notebook. So Jasnah did say it, but it's not part of a conversation from Shallan.

That's what I was thinking of, bias towards the intent behind the magic system by being so heavily invested with it, not Ruin's mind control. Marsh has a lot of spikes. There's also plain psychological bias. Marsh can't survive without the spikes, and they made him do horrible things in the past. He wants to think that's over, and that he has a reason for living and that the spikes are good. I see the book as Marsh being desperate to believe that, and desperate for the reader to believe it. He also must be lonely, and would find comfort in knowing others use Hemalurgy, although that's more likely to be unconscious. So, desperately conflicted tortured adult, or naive teenager!

Ok that all makes sense. I just wasn't sure. Everyone was changing their minds about Marsh to Spook and I couldn't figure out why! I'll try reading it again. I'm sort of stuck between it sounding like a teenager because it's innocent, and between Marsh being ridiculously biased towards Ruin intent from all his spikes into sounding innocent about what he's doing.

Yeah, there you linked to the transcript we'd both already read, where we both thought it was Marsh. But then people start saying a new reading "sounds" like Spook and I don't know what that means. Was there new audio where Brandon did a voice that sounds Spook-like, or read for longer and included more material that seemed more Spook-like? Or is it all exactly the same, but people just never considered Spook, and revisiting the old transcript with Spook in mind seems to fit if you look at it that way?