It's been a super quiet week at the office, since everyone else has vacation time to use, which means I get to cosmere-dream!
Let's chat about Braize, perpendicularities, and the Oathpact, shall we?
All of the shards have shardpools, and our intrepid worldhoppers use those shardpools to traverse realms. Shardpools are perpendicularities, but I'm not entirely sure if all perpendicularities are shardpools. In OB, Cultivation's perpendicularity is revealed to be in the Horneater Peaks, and Dalinar recreates Honor's perpendicularity.
Where is Odium's shardpool?
Was Honor's perpendicularity closed when he died? Or was it sealed, bartered away, when the Oathpact was engendered to seal up Odium's perpendicularity?
Here's my thought: the Listener dead grew angry and refused to pass from the Cognitive Realm to the Spiritual Realm, and Odium smelled an opportunity. I think Odium's perpendicularity is on Braize, and it's how the souls of the Fused returned to the Physical Realm to bond new bodies after they died. There was no way to defeat the Listeners at that point - they would just continue to regenerate, reincarnate. The Stormfather talks about how the souls of the Heralds were worn thin by the time they abandoned the Oathpact. I think the Heralds were returned to Braize, to Damnation, but not on the Physical Realm - I think they guarded Odium's perpendicularity in the Cognitive or Spiritual Realm (not sure which, tbh), and that's how they held back the Desolations.
What do you think? Were the Heralds guarding Odium's shardpool? Were the Fused using it to cross between realms?