Morsk

Someone noticed this on the old TWG forums, but it only got a handful of posts, never a whole thread.

I thought that perhaps Aona was expressing hope that Ati could retain his humanity, or that Ati took the Ruin Shard in the hope that he could make it less horrible. I really like this kind of speculation; I only wish we could find more evidence for it.

For "I began life as a thought, a concept, as words on a page," I got the idea that Midius in LoP is one of (the original) Hoid's illusions. Obviously there are a lot of gaps to fill in between that, and how he seems substantial in the LoP sample chapters, and even remembers a past from before meeting Hoid. But how else can someone begin life as words on a page?

This idea came from seeing names like Balance and Sacrifice suggested both for the Nightwatcher, and for the Silence Divine Shard. (I like the name Sacrifice more than Balance.) We know almost nothing about either of them, but they do feel similar. Also, the Silence Divine planet is in the same solar system as Roshar.

So I think this Shard fled Roshar to the other planet, and the Nightwatcher is a splinter it left behind.

Also, the price paid by the Oathpact is pretty terrible. It may involve the power of Sacrifice, not just Honor, or maybe not Honor at all. Honor's principle seems to be that you not do horrible things in the name of good, and asking the Heralds to submit to torture is pretty nasty.

One thing I can't work in, is that if there's any fleeing of Shards from one planet to another, shouldn't they be fleeing to Roshar? That's what the myth of the Tranquiline Halls suggests. I don't know what to do with that.

edit: I just learned Eri had basically the same theory a few months before I wrote this. It's nice to see I'm not the only one who thinks up crazy stuff like this!

Oh, I ended up deleting that post because I realized it had a cosmere factoid from an interview, and belongs in General Theories! I should go find a thread it can go in, or make one.

I took some notes when I read WoK, and looked back over them now to see if I'd guessed anything good. Almost everything I guessed was wrong or silly. (I thought the spren Shallan was seeing were Voidbringers, and they were trying to harvest the evil in her deceitful acts to create another Voidbringer from her soul.) But I did have this:

Chapter 42

Spren are associated with change. I think the soulcasters have captive spren in them. This also explains why fixing one doesn't work.

And I had some speculation that Shallan killed her father, but I dismissed it because I knew Shallan had the Shardblade, and that meant killing a Shardbearer, and I thought Shallan's father sounded like too much of a "weasel" to be a Shardbearer.

Dalanar pushed back to Book 5? Maybe Brandon is procrastinating how to write all the blurred out people and shhhhhshshhhhhhhh in his flashbacks, heh.

There should be a Shard of Explosions. Any magic system without explosions is instantly made better by the inclusion of explosions.

ishar has a long beard, and my theory was, the reason he asked szeth if he'd seen him is because ishar's likeness is everywhere in vorin alethkar. a little weaker bit of evidence is that dalinar's rambling's in dawnchant were also described as gibberish by people who couldnt understand it.

Also, the man was nearby a set of Herald statues, which Szeth passes just after walking past him. I see him as a Herald who wants to forget his past, and so seeks obscurity as a beggar. But this one night he drank too much and started rambling about it. I never could decide on which Herald though; I like the connection you found between Ishi and the beard.

I think it's the Lerasium. I don't see the "inter-series" trouble in Hoid mentioning that he took the bead in Mistborn-2. That's minor compared to his reveals about Elantris; the Elantris stuff led us towards speculation about Honor being splintered. "I took magic-granting contraband from another world, and am going to do something sneaky with it," isn't going to freak out a casual reader.

It doesn't mean Hoid is Mistborn. Brandon said that becoming Mistborm is what happens if you burn Lerasium "without knowing what you're doing". (I don't have the original source, but it's quoted in this post.) Hoid could have alloyed it with something from another world, to make himself a magic-user of some system we don't know yet. Or something weird with it related to "preserving" that we can't guess. If the only use for it were becoming Mistborn, I'd object on thematic grounds; Hoid as Mistborn just feels weird to me. But Lerasium having mysterious unknown properties works.