Leyrann

5 minutes ago, powerfulmoss said:

Small thought while reading this:

We have seen a few new spren since the Everstorm, including Gloomspren, which could be partly of Odium. The Gloomspren at least must have been previously present in the CR however as Syl mentioned that she used to hunt them.

Perhaps the everstorm somehow unlocked the spren of Odium from the CR as well as "healing" the parshman, or perhaps the two are connected.

"Kaladin looked up and noted an unusual spren whipping about. Long, grey, like a tattered streamer of cloth in the wind. It wound around him, fluttering. He’d seen its like only once or twice before."

Kaladin has seen them before, so they existed before the Everstorm as well. That said, they can still be related to Odium, as they aren't introduced in the first two books (so we as readers haven't seen them before), and that might very well be why they are rare and hunted by other spren.

13 hours ago, Stormsurfer said:

Jasnah never died.

7 hours ago, FiveLate said:

And the listeners to which the original bonds were also 4 gender and neither of Honor nor Cultivation but pure Uncle Andy.  One of the listener songs talk about how many of these spren abandoned the listeners in favor of the more "meaty" humans. 

Whatever was trapping the listeners into Parshman form has obviously been broken by the Everstorm.  The same device (plot not necessarily physical) could have been limiting or trapping the yellow spren.  If that was the case, the yellow spren could be pure Adonalsium spren and actually be more neutral than odious in intentions. 

Syl also just says him.....to which we implicate Odium, but it could be Adonalsium.  The yellow spren also states that her mind are less discerning, willing to bond with listeners or humans.  We know many groups of spren went to the humans, but not all.  Those groups that did not all go to the humans might have been switch hitters picking either.  

Honor and Cultivation both pervaded human culture, but listener culture predated their arrival.   By shifting to humans, the spren might have aligned themselves more with Honor and Preservation.  

I have never really liked the association of voidspen and voidbringers directly to Odium since Odium is anything but a void.  A void being an emptyness and divine hatred being anything but empty.  

What is these yellow spren are Voidspen, but in the seance that they are empty of a Shardic intent.  Odium would have no issues with simply taking over I would think if there was a way to divest his Investature later.  Eshonai shows free will is not needed.  Honor and Cultivation intended to Invest Roshar, which could have been the reasons humans were brought to Roshar in the first place.  To woo the voidspen to Honor and Cultivation initially via the humans away from the Listeners.  The Hearalds could have been a stop gap measure to place fairly large amounts of Investiture into the Rosharan system quickly.

I have to say I really like this idea, also because Brandon sure does like his twists.

Indeed, Odium doesn't have much to do with 'ceasing of existence', so to say; after all, if there's no sentience, there's no hatred (literally: "The Shard's intent, Odium, means two things: the feeling of strong hatred, and that which provokes hatred from others." (from coppermind)). He cannot provoke hatred from others without there being people around, and he cannot hate anything either; it gets kinda boring to hate giant rocks or balls of heated gas, after all. Additionally, just look at Sel; the Shards are splintered (though, again, not wholly gone, with seons and whatnot), but the world still exists.

"Void" in regards to Adonalsium, however, would actually make quite a bit of sense; after all, with Adonalsium shattered, is there not a void left behind in the 'place' he occupied?

The Stormfather literally says this in reply to Dalinar asking why he would attempt to destroy them (by summoning the highstorm) after sending the visions:

Quote

You failed. The Everstorm is here, and the spren of the enemy come to inhibit the ancient ones. It is over. You have lost.

He would not say that if the Everstorm had come before, because then he would know that it was not over yet. Additionally, as other people also pointed out, Tanavast, nightform, the Diagram etc all predict it, which can all be considered reliable sources to predict the future, meaning we can have several sources without requiring the Everstorm to have been there in the past. Odium can simply have designed it long ago, but not been able to get the Listeners to make it happen until now.

1 hour ago, Yata said:

The Stormfather existed before Honor's death so he can't be Tanavast's Shadow.

As Honor died, his Shadow merged with the Stormfather and inherit his Connection and probably his memories.

In the Regard of the Highstorms, they predate the Shards' arrival on Roshar and they were Invested from before H&C's arrive

I also asked this question over at the Q&A board, but where do we know from that the highstorms regard the arrival on Roshar? I haven't been able to find a WoB on it, though I have to admit that I'm not experienced at searching.

Simple question - Has Brandon Sanderson ever told us how old highstorms are? I was looking around a bit because I had a theory, and I found two different questions that both implied they were there before the Shards arrived (one straight up said that there was WoB on it), but I could not find where Brandon had actually said that.

EDIT: Got answered here.

Not that I think it likely, but what would those hints be?

3 hours ago, frozndevl said:

I believe Honor's cognitive shadow merged with the Stormfather, or some such.

Isn't it that his cognitive shadow is the Stormfather? To me it felt like the highstorms haven't always been there, but only came 'after' the shards arrived, maybe as something to counter the Desolations? I don't have anything to back it up though.

Coppermind isn't really helpful on highstorms either, but we do have confirmation that they are Invested. Maybe they were made to provide the stormlight? Or to prepare for the Everstorm? Just imagine what would happen if an Everstorm would hit a planet not used to powerful storms every few days... There'd not be a single building left standing. Roshar did much better, even though the storm came from the wrong way.

4 hours ago, Grythe said:

Assuming it is the first desolation involving a storm..

In previous desolations Odium used stone as a conduit for investiture (the thunderclasts). The storms seem to be associated with investiture through Honor's influence (the stormfather and Syl being mistaken for windspren). I wonder if the significance of a storm bearing voidspren is that after splintering Honor, Odium is able to invest in Roshar in a similar way to Honor, having taken in some of Honor's power (i.e. Via the storms). Given that Odium's intent is against Honor's it may mean his Odium controlled Honor investituture happens backwards in the physical realm (backwards highstorm).

I think the events Jasnah is referring to are earthquakes. I'm referencing 2 quotes from Dalinar's visions in WoK.

A desolation preceded by an everstorm implies the worst desolation yet because it is a combination of Odium and Honor's investiture. This might be what Hoid is alluding to. 

Odium doesn't want to pick up any power of the other shards, however, as he knows that would change the way he himself would be, and he does not want that.

http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=675#12

I'm curious, by the way, where the connection of Odium with stone comes from. I haven't seen anything that points one way or the other, but many people here seem to think it quite likely, so I was wondering if someone could point me towards some theories or something.

3 minutes ago, specialNEDstark said:

You bring up an interesting point. I didn't see it at first but you're right, why is the answer to this one question generating so much attention with all the other insights we've gleaned from OB so far. The identity isn't important at all. The one thing we can be certain of is the Prologue was written at the end of the story, or close to it. The author speaks in a way a historian studying past events might. Time, for me at least, to put this question on the shelf for now and pay more attention to the dozens of other new mysteries. 

While I agree that there's enough other stuff to talk about, I do think that there's no reason to stop thinking about this subject. I mean, we're here to figure things out before they're revealed, right? Does it then matter if they're important for the story, or only if we managed to get the answer earlier than Brandon intended? I would argue the second.

4 minutes ago, Blacksmithki said:

I'm sorry, the part about the author saying he/she is not as intelligent as her readers makes you think it's Jasnah because she knows that she is most often more intelligent then others? Is that a typo? I'm sorry I'm just not sure if you think it is or is not Jasnah.

That is a typo. It was supposed to be "most likely not Jasnah".

8 minutes ago, Argent said:

We don't know. Much about Jasnah will be mystery until she gets her own book.

I wouldn't want to say that. If she were to find her way to Urithiru sometime in this book, she would most likely explain a lot to Shallan and Navani, and we'd probably get to see that explaining too.

That... is actually a very troubling idea.

I doubt that it will happen, however, even if only for the very simple fact that Navani is still alive. There's no way that Dalinar isn't going to realize it if she were to slap him in the face, for example.

The new chapters say "I am no philosopher, to intrigue you with piercing questions. I am no poet, to delight you with clever allusions. I have no doubt that you are smarter than I am. I can only relate what happened, what I have done, and then let you draw conclusions."

The third part mostly, to me, indeed says that it is most likely not Jasnah. Though she's probably not going to walk around like "I'm smarter than you", she does know that it is typically the case. I have no idea who it then can be, though.

On 17-10-2017 at 11:12 PM, shawnhargreaves said:

Spoiler

 

I don't believe that Syl is omniscient.  We know that her memory is only slowly coming back, piece by piece.  And if my theory is correct that Odium has been influencing both sides of conflicts on Roshar throughout its history (as opposed to fighting directly as one side of a simple good vs. evil battle), that means he was deceiving spren as well as humans and listeners.  Back in the days of the Radiants, tricking humans would have meant tricking their spren as well.

Not entirely sure I believe this part, but I can't help wondering if there is any correlation between the Recreance and the old Radiants realizing they had been misled in this way?  "OMG, this entire conflict is not what we thought" seems like the kind of discovery that could lead to such a drastic decision...

 

Yep, and this is exactly what we saw happen to Eshonai.   But I think it's too simple to be the whole truth (probably not even most of the truth).  It doesn't fit with the feel of the latest Kaladin chapters, or with the various hints that the real enemy is not who we think, or with the scale of carefully foreshadowed and yet surprising twists that I've come to expect from Brandon, or with things he has said in the past about disliking the fantasy cliche of an "evil race" opponent.  Looks to me like he is going somewhere bigger, and to my way of thinking much more interesting, than "not evil race, but possessed by evil forms".  That would really just be a layer of window dressing on top of the evil race cliche...

 

Are we sure the Everstorm is of Odium rather than Cultivation?

We have two shards fully invested on Roshar, plus Odium interfering but primarily based elsewhere.  And two storms, going in opposite directions.  One per local shard makes a lot of sense to me.

In terms of what we've seen the Everstorm do, so far we have a lot of blowing things about, plus releasing the listeners from slaveform.  I'm guessing that involves some kind of spiritweb healing, aka. regrowth.  Where's the Odium in that?

(aside: I will be very interested to see whether Pattern can sense highstorms and/or the Everstorm...)

The main reason the Everstorm seems scary is that we saw it get summoned by really scary listeners who clearly had some bad possession stuff going on.  But we haven't seen it do anything comparably scary since then, and the freed listeners aren't scary at all  (completely unlike the ones who summoned this storm).  I think Odium's plan goes something like:

1. Trick humans into being scared of listeners
2. Use a small number of possessed listeners to summon a storm that releases all listeners from slaveform (in a very visible and scary way while humans watch them do it)
3. Trick the now intelligent listeners into blaming humans (it doesn't matter whether rightly or wrongly) for their prior enslavement
4. Everyone fights = Odium wins

So far we have seen mostly the human side of all this, which means we are seeing exactly what Odium wants the in-world humans to see, and are drawing the same conclusions he wants them to draw.  But I'm convinced there is more going on.

 

 

I very much agree here. An evil race is indeed not a Sanderson-thing to do, as he tends to create much more three-dimensional worlds. Of course, there are (original Mistborn trilogy spoiler)

while the Listeners, I am pretty sure, have not been created by Odium. I cannot actually find a source for that, but it is both logical (they're clearly sentient, and Odium would most likely not give up power for that) and I do believe I've read Sanderson confirming it just this week (though in an older interview).

On 18-10-2017 at 8:09 AM, Erunion said:

We have every reason to believe that this Spren is of Odium. It is described as such by Syl, it can sense the Everstorm, and it’s behaviour is extremely suspicious. In addition, we already know of cultivation-Spren (Wyndle). 

Edgedancer spoilers: 

  Reveal hidden contents

The storm as shown in Edgedancer is pretty clearly very very bad. Silent, red lightning. Deliberate destruction. Parshfolk with glowing red eyes. It convinces Nale that another desolation has come. 

I like some of your bigger picture stuff. I definitely feel that Odium is manipulating people. 

 

One thing to consider - some Spren are closer to Honour, others closer to cultivation, but some are also in-between. Is it possible that some voidspren are on that same spectrum? Some Honour mixed with Odium? Others cultivation mixed with Odium? Others still pure Odium? In which case this particular Spren could be only slightly Odious. 

This is also an idea that I really like. According to the coppermind page, spren are "powers of creation" (https://coppermind.net/wiki/Spren), which gained sentience due to human intervention. This would imply that they are not directly created by Honor and Cultivation, and have merely gained their characteristics over time because Honor and Cultivation were around. Odium, however, has also been around - so maybe, we should not be looking at a line, but instead a triangle, where sprens can be at a corner (100% influenced by one Shard), a line (influenced by only two Shards) or somewhere on the inside (influenced by all three shards). Hope that makes sense to everyone, but otherwise I'm happy to clarify.

EDIT: To expand upon this, I came across a question asked to Brandon before the release of WoR (http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=747#5), which says that all the spren we are running into (but only in the first and maybe second book) are of Honor and Cultivation. I'm not sure wheter this is intentional or not, but Brandon is excluding later spren, which might include spren that are part Odium and part Honor/Cultivation.

As I only finished the Stormlight Archive (including Oathbringer chapters) just this week, why is Jasnah considered an unlikely author of the preface?

(by the way, totally unrelated, but I'm fascinated by the member reputation titles. What decides the title someone has?)