Morsk

The food thing is so weird. Maybe it's just different flavorings, like sweet vs. spicy, and only the super rich are extravagant enough to prepare entirely separate meals? There's no way darkeyes have the resources for that. Modern people can be silly about food too though. At least in America, yogurt is not marketed to men. I haven't noticed if any food is never marketed to women, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few.

We know it's possible, because it's how the local Shard makes Returned in Warbreaker. I have the same feeling you do about Honor doing it to make Heralds, but we don't know that part. But at least it's possible.

I thought of mass-immortality schemes on Nalthis once, like a lottery for it or something. Eventually there'd be a lot of immortal people. Or if not that, families would pass down Breath to children. No one seems to. My best guess is everyone is pretty confident there's an afterlife because of Returned coming back, or even that Endowment sees the future and manipulates popular religious sentiment towards this end. Whatever faction was going to setup my 5000-Breath lottery scheme had a few Returned sent a few years before they got it started, and none of it ever happened. Several times, possibly. edit: Oh, another idea. All investiture brings some bias towards the Shard's intent. At 5000 Breaths of Endowment, people may be biased to give it away. (Sort of like vampires who could live forever, but are somehow biased to be full of angst, and walk into the Sun...) Living forever means continually deciding not to do that, and eventually they don't.

When trying to narrow down "Heralds that might look Makabaki / Azish", I realized that possibly every Herald has black hair and dark or brown skin, so it doesn't narrow it down. Taln does. Shalash does, if she's Baxil's mistress. Jezrien has the hair; I can't find the skin, but he's Shalash's father, so probably. There are some "maybe" Heralds in Words of Radiance: This could be some talent of the Makabaki people, and we only see it in Heralds because they share common ancestry with them.

I did make some wild accusations against the Cryptics. I'll try for something more hair brained next time though!

Maiming isn't that bad. We're almost certain Regrowth can fix it, because we know Feruchemy can.I'd rather see Adolin maimed and have a role reversal with Renarin though!

Well. I can always scrape up some awesomeness by throwing out Occam's Razor and making a dozen assumptions! Sloppy reasoning full of assumptions and wishful thinking: Resulting theory:

I also want Szeth to be a Herald, because I think it will be ironic if someone finally kills him, and he finally receives the eternity of torture he's expecting -- only it's the Herald afterlife torture, and he just gets sent back to kill more people. I have a theory.

Why are sapphires worth so much, if they only Soulcast air? Is it because they break in Shardplate?

On the Neshua Kadal thing, I think all the weird Parshendi tactics are due to biases and instincts in war form. They call it "war" form, but it sure looks like "tribal skirmish vs. other Parshendi" form. They won't commit unequal numbers, and always let the enemy retreat? That's not a war form. If everyone on your planet is Parshendi, this is a nice "feature" of war form that keeps them from killing too many of each other. It's a terrible way of fighting someone who really wants you dead. The form is terrible at fighting Surgebinders, so "Neshua Kadal" would be one of its instincts: don't do that, especially not wearing Stormlight. You'll just die, and the entire point of this form is to minimize causalities on both sides. Another Parshendi in another form needs to fight the Surgebinder.

But what if she's in Urithiru, and is afraid she won't be able to find it again if she leaves? My new idea though is that Jasnah teleports off with Shallan, and all the mentions of the two of them going to higher-class safety on shore during storms were to make it feel less callous when they abandoned the rest of the ship later on. It also solves the problem of travel being really boring, and gets her to the Shattered Plains faster.

I tried recording dreams once. I got stuff like this That's my best one. The others were even more pointless. I'm surprised my solution to googling a song without words made sense, and didn't involve teleportation.

Maybe the Sun setting on the horizon? It would explain the orange cast to the clouds too, if it's sunset. Also Kaladin will glow brighter if it's darker out, which will be more awesome.

"Creative" means something odd on Roshar, where Shallan draws creationspren by making photorealistic art. I'd expect something more insightful, stylized, or interpretive would be more creative, but that's not what gets the spren. Also, spren categorize into emotions, natural, and voidish. Creationspren don't fit easily, but in a setting where Transformation is a surge, "natural" is somewhat broader than the physical. Helping Cognitive abstractions into a Physical form could be what draws creationspren, and they'd categorize with other natural, Cultivation-based spren. After all, what gets the most creationspren ever is helping Pattern cross over. "I will create things that cannot creative themselves," is a bit goofy sounding, but I expect that's what it will be, if rephrased. It's what she did for Pattern anyway.

A sort of creepy thing is that Dalinar had some of that conversation with Navani, and Jasnah had something like it with Shallan, already. Dalinar thinks the Almighty was never God, but that there is a God. Jasnah thinks he's a powerful spren if he existed, so wouldn't be disappointed in Dalinar's knowledge. Is there more for them to say? If not...

I really don't like him. But I think he's part of some intrigue opposing the Ghostbloods, and they wanted him dead badly enough to send a Shardbearer. They'll try again, and almost succeeded the first time. If he doesn't take the Shards, he's all but guaranteed to die. So he fears for his own life, which isn't the most noble of motives, but explains how he could be driven to something so horrible. And rightly or wrongly, he believes his group's opposition to the Ghostbloods, and his place in it, makes it all for the greater good. I still voted that he's bad. The possibility that there wasn't some better way of handling the situation than cold-blooded murder is slim.

Maybe she'll be presumed dead but teleported. Old mentors may appear dead in fantasy, but they tend to come back from it, sometimes more powerful. The best way to avoid that convention is not to kill them. Or not to give them powers. When superheroes' parents die, they don't come back. But once characters have magic, they just won't die. edit: Maybe like this... Jasnah is presumed dead, but actually teleported to Urithiru and spends the entire book there. When they find the city in the end, she's already there and has read dozens of books.

I thought things in the Verified Locations for Unreleased Books thread were okay? But things people have to email Brandon for or check out of BYU aren't?

Thanks for posting this. It's nice to know that Rysn, Ym, and Eshonai are all in the first interlude set. I'd started to get the feeling that we knew too much, but I guess we've only seen things from the beginning.

Just how do you "rid yourself" parshmen anyway? Talk about euphanisms! It's ethnic cleansing at best, and only as long as others are willing to take them. Eventually there'd be no option but genocide. I bet fear of genocide of parshmen is what motivates Eshonai to finally take action. Her group risked a near-suicidal war against the Alethi to stop their gods from returning. But when they're risking the extermination of the entire species, she may say it's gone too far and invite the gods back.

Darkness' need to comply with justice makes me feel like the Heralds also swore oaths to get their powers. Maybe the spren didn't know about that part or how to add it, and Honor was inspired by Nohadon to reveal it to them. If the spren knew about the oath thing from the start, at least some of them would have been self-serving with it, "I will keep Cryptic secrets," "I will play with my spren when it's bored," etc. So something big must've happened to teach them about it or make it possible. Maybe it's about consensus like you said though, and spren normally disagree too much to get enough consensus to add oaths, but Nohadon persuaded them.

I expected this thread to be about Navani and Jasnah shipping Shallan with the wrong brother.

There's a theory that Devotion + Dominion is basically Nationalism. (KChan doesn't use the word Nationalism, but I think it's basically the same.) Let's hope no one finds a way to export it to Roshar.

I'm less concerned; they're talking about fiction, not people. I'd say it's more like "female character not interested in marriage = token lesbian", because "token lesbian" is something that happens in fiction, whether we like it or not. The more lacking a story is in gay characters, the more likely it is for a single "token gay" to show up, and if they haven't shown up yet, characters uninterested in marriage are one place to look. I agree with your analysis of Jasnah though. Us modern people are likely to say "If you don't like marriage that way, don't do it that way." But Jasnah's culture has a pretty stereotyped marriage, and you either take it or you don't. In a way Jasnah is terribly unlucky. Most Alethi who don't like gender roles can become ardents. Jasnah could marry a man who can read, even one that will cook for her. She could even continue her research. Except for the little problem of ardents being all about religion...

Brandon told us planets have souls. (It's answer #7.) I don't think anyone's asked him if the galaxy or cosmere has a soul, but if it does, that's my current bet for the God Beyond. We know raw investiture is somehow dangerous, because of Sel and the comment about Kelsier holding Preservation. So I think too much Spiritual "connection" absorbs everything into one being, while the Cognitive Realm opposes that by giving things individuality.