mdross81

Necro-ing this topic in light of a WoB from the 6/16/22 spoiler stream: Barring any squirrelyness here about it being Azure/Zahel instead of Vasher/Vivenna, this WoB eliminates the first two possibilities that came to my mind about who the Diagram interviewed. I believe that the only other former bearer we’ve seen on-screen is Nale. I can’t put my finger on why but for some reason it still just seems unlikely to me that Nale was the source of the info. This WoB could lend some support to the theory that the “criminal” that Azure is chasing is not Nightblood or Vasher but someone else who held Nightblood and/or brought NB to Roshar. Or perhaps the former bearer Taravangian mentioned is the Nightwatcher? Or some as yet unknown person who took the Nightwatcher up on the offer she made to Dalinar of “A sword that bleeds darkness and cannot be defeated.”

This is the best interpretation I’ve seen of how the the weakened Oathpact and the Everstorm intersect. I’m curious what you think of Ishar’s plan to “reset the Oathpact.” Seems like, under your interpretation, “resetting” would have to include finding a way to seal away or get rid of the portion of the Everstorm that has crossed into the Physical Realm on Roshar. Edited to add additional question for @Child of Hodor I agree that no Herald needed to break to allow the Fused to come to Roshar via the Everstorm. But what are we to make of Levian being brought back “the old way,” (i.e. directly by Odium) in RoW 116? I’m your view, would a Herald have needed to break to allow for that? Because that was the method that the Oathpact prevented from happening.

Yeah, you’re not wrong on any of these points about the “Stormfather” and Gavilar doing things without a bond, that we only ever saw Dalinar and the Stormfather do post-bonding. I don’t have any great explanations. Could be that it’s possible to develop a sufficient Connection even without a bond. Like maybe Dalinar could have gone in and out of visions at will, had mental conversations, and allowed the Stormfather to see into buildings before bonding him. But because he was approaching Radiance and was able to bond the Stormfather early in the process, we never got to see that. Or maybe after getting burned by Gavilar, the SF just decided not to allow any of those more advanced features until he saw whether a bond was feasible.

I’ve enjoyed this thread a lot, but I must admit I’ve come down on the side of it actually being the Stormfather. I can’t imagine any other entity that could both present the visions and allow for starting/stopping them at will without a highstorm. And it seems like the SF and Gavilar continue the same conversation both in and then out of the vision so I don’t think we’re dealing with two different entities. The italics speech is consistent with the way SF speaks directly into Dalinar’s mind. And the switch to small caps after Gavilar shows his true colors, to me, represents the SF pulling away from Gavilar and reverting to speaking the way he speaks to every other character (which includes Kal, Venli, Eshonai, Syl, Lopen, and Navani and the wedding guests). Appearing as a shimmering figure has happened with Dalinar, both in the visions and at least once in the physical realm (RoW 107: The Stormfather appeared beside him, moving in the air alongside Dalinar—a rare occurrence. The Stormfather never had features. Merely a vague impression of a figure the same size as Dalinar, yet extending into infinity.) The making a new Herald thing is weird, but explainable. Either as the SF just letting Gavilar think that was the plan, while actually planning to make Gavilar a Bondsmith and then having Gavilar make new Heralds. Or as the SF trying something other than bonding a human as a first attempt given he doesn’t seem too keen to be bonded. It makes sense to me that the SF would notice a Herald dying, either because he’s a remnant of Honor who was a party to the Oathpact, or because - as evidenced by the frost - transporting a Herald to Braize involves a significant amount of Stormlight used very quickly, and that Light would come through the storm or the SF. To the extent we see a different demeanor later with Dalinar, I think that is just the SF taking a different approach after things didn’t work out with Gavilar. The Stormfather works very hard to slow roll explanations - particularly controversial ones - with Dalinar. He likely knows that Dalinar would have been raised in the same Vorin-steeped culture that ultimately made Gavilar unsuitable and wants to take things slower with reveals that challenge Vorin orthodoxy. Remember also that Gavilar was working a number of different angles to find out information though, so he may have figured out more on his own that the SF then begrudgingly confirmed. I’m not overly concerned by the line about not trying again with a Kholin because desperate times call for desperate measures. The biggest thing that bothers me if this was the SF is the seeming lie to Dalinar in OB 38 when he says that in the millennia since Aharietiam none of the other nine Heralds have died and returned to Damnation. But he’s generally been reticent to share info about the Heralds for whatever reason. And may have just decided that it didn’t matter anyway since the True Desolation and the Everstorm had now come. So while I felt something off on my initial read, and I kinda wanted this to be another situation like Chana Davar (which I think @teknopathetic absolutely nailed), cards on the table: I think it is the SF. I’ve got a open mind about this though if y’all think I missed something or my analysis is off.

As I’ve thought about it more, I’ve come up with a possible explanation for the ripple of Stormlight through the SF when the Herald dies (though it’s based on this entity actually being the SF). Could be that the Herald’s soul is essentially Lashed to Braize when they die (Spiritual Adhesion?). Whatever the mechanics, it seems plausible enough that transporting the Herald’s soul to Braize requires the use of a large amount of Stormlight very quickly and the Stormlight comes from the storm, or from the Spiritual Realm via the storm/SF. Alternatively, we see an effect on the SF simply because he is a remnant of Honor who was a party to the Oathpact. This would explain the frost because whenever we see it, it seems to accompany the use of a large amount of Stormlight very quickly. One of these days we’ll get specifics on the mechanics of the Oathpact right?

No other scenes linking frost to the Stormfather. In addition to the times when Ideals are sworn and when Ishar makes the glyph, here are the other mentions of frost: Szeth’s clothes are frosted twice and the air is frosted once in the WoK prologue - each time it’s when he Lashes something (himself, the big chunk of wall, the balcony) WoK 56 - Oathbringer appears in Dalinar’s hand “steaming and frosted” WoK 59: first time Kal intentionally breathes in Stormlight from a sphere leaves his fingers crispy with frost: then frost crystallizes on his arm when he infuses a stone and sticks it to the wall WoK 62: frost crystallized on Kal’s arm as he uses Stormlight to heal an arrow wound OB 60 - Kal comes down out of flying in the highstorm crusted in frost (this one could be storm or just temperature related) RoW 6 - frost crackles on Kal’s uniform as he uses a great deal of Stormlight to heal a wound during a fight with Leshwi RoW I-4 - Moash is practicing with Jezrien’s Honorblade and thinks it’s inferior to live Shardblades because “It couldn’t change shape, and cost far more Stormlight to use, often crusting his clothing with frost when he used it too quickly.” Someone on Discord said it’s just Stormlight, and I agree that each instance seems to involve large amounts of Stormlight used very quickly. And in every instance other than the one in the prologue I get how the Stormlight is being used. I’m still left wondering why a Herald dying would cause a large amount of Stormlight to ripple through the Stormfather.

So this is a little bit of a tangent, perhaps, but I think this is probably as good a place as any to discuss. It’s about the bit in the prologue when the Herald dies: It’s the frost that got me thinking about where else we’d seen that. We’ve seen frost appear a number of different times throughout the series. It crops up when Szeth and Kal are using Lashings. Dalinar’s Blade is noted to be frosted once when he summons it in WoK. But the times I want to focus on are when we see frost appear while Radiants are swearing an Ideal. Specifically, we see frosted Windrunner glyphs appear for Kal’s third Ideal (WoR 84), Lopen’s second (OB 121), and Huio’s third (DS 18). There is also a burst of frost and power around Lopen when he swears his third Ideal in the Dawnshard prologue. So what’s going on here? Well, everybody’s favorite mad god-king has the explanation, I think. From RoW 111: So Ishar is telling us that when a Radiant swears an Ideal, they touch the Spiritual Realm and that’s also when we see the frost appear. Seems to me, given the frost in the prologue, that there is likely something similar going on mechanics-wise when a Herald dies (and presumably is returned to Braize). This perhaps explains Ishar and Nale’s misguided belief that Radiants swearing Ideals would potentially allow the Fused to return. From Edgedancer, chapter 9: And here’s Szeth describing it in OB 90: Mraize says something similar in his letter to Shallan in OB 40: And lastly, here’s Nale in RoW 77 responding to Venli’s suggestion that the Heralds’ actions had allowed Ulim to get to Roshar: Assuming that Nale is, in this last one, talking about the same concerns relating to Radiants, what I still don’t get is why a Radiant swearing an Ideal and touching the Spiritual Realm would create a Connection between Braize and Roshar. But I guess I just wanted to point out that the frost appearing in both cases seems to suggest that there may be some kind of similar underlying mechanics going on when the Heralds travel between Roshar and Braize, and when Radiants swear Ideals. The last thing I wanted to mention here, since Ishar features prominently in this thread, is that the one other time we see a frosted glyph, it’s Ishar’s doing. From RoW 98: Make of that what you will.

This might not be a lie though. It is possible the Stormfather just assumed it had to be Taln that had broken. It makes sense seeing as that had been the status-quo for 4000 years. I think anyone who was anyone assumed Taln must have broken. If it is a lie and the Stormfather lied to Dalinar, I wonder why he didn’t want anyone to know about Chana (or whoever) broke. Yeah, the bit about Taln breaking can be explained by SF making an assumption. But IF the SA 5 entity and the SF we've come to know are the same entity, there's another part of that same convo that could be a lie. (Full disclosure, I was gearing up to say it was DEFINITELY a lie until I realized there's some cagey language): There's ambiguity in that highlighted bit. Does it simply mean that none of the other nine has died? In which case the statement would be a lie if spoken by the same being as in the SA 5 prologue because that being definitely knew a Herald died. But, there's another possibility. This line could mean that that none of the other nine have done BOTH of those things: died AND returned to Damnation. If the Herald that died during the prologue did not, for some reason, return to Braize, then the SF could be the same entity as in the prologue and technically not be lying in this excerpt. To me, that seems inconsistent with the SF's character to be so tricky with language, so I put this as a point in favor of Stormfaker.

I'm actually looking back through at this right now and hope to present a fuller analysis (I'm through OB so far), but basically whenever SF speaks to anyone other than Dalinar, he does so either during a highstorm or during a vision and he speaks in small caps. Pre-bonding, SF spoke a couple of lines to Dalinar in plain text during the climax of WoR. Only Dalinar could hear it though, and after those first few lines SF switched to small caps. My hunch is that the plain text was before the highstorm the SF was bringing to wash everything away got close enough for him to speak as the storm. Once Dalinar bonds the SF, the SF speaks almost exclusively in italics in Dalinar's mind. To the extent the SF speaks in small caps to Dalinar once they are bonded, it's during visions and for the benefit of others there (such as Navani) whose minds he can't speak into. Dalinar, for his part, usually whispers out loud to the SF in plain text (I think he's described as whispering less when in the visions, presumably because there he's not worried about looking like he's talking to himself), but toward the end of OB Dalinar starts mentally speaking to the SF in italics at times.

I think there are probably a number of threads that mention this in some way, but I won’t turn down an opportunity to speculate on which DR might be tied Kal’s 5th Ideal. My money is on this one: Because you can make the case that each of his Ideals after the first involved a tower, crown, and spear: 2 - fighting on the Tower with a spear to save Dalinar (who I count as the crown) 3 - fighting in the Pinnacle with a Sylspear to save Elhokar 4 - jumping off the tower of Urithiru, the top of which could be referred to as a crown, and flying through the air (he’s described as “piercing the blackness like a spear”) to save Lirin

Though I know this may be blasphemous in the Stormfaker support group thread, the idea that this entity chose Gavilar because his ancestor stood up to the Vorin church, coupled with the entity’s disappointment that Gavilar still bought into Vorin doctrine rooted in the lies of Aharietiam, AND Dalinar’s eventual willingness to go against the Vorin church, does lend more credence in my mind to the idea that the entity in the prologue actually is the Stormfather.

I hadn’t considered Nohadon. Upon doing so now, I’m skeptical. Mainly because I get somewhat malevolent vibes from the idea of an entity that’s impersonating the SF and manipulating poor, stupid Gavilar. Whereas Nohadon has always come across as a good guy. But it’d be a heck of a twist. One line that I keep coming back to is this one: The end there: I thought … your family … What do y’all make of it? My initial thought was that maybe this had something to do with the idea that Navani and Jasnah would eventually be important players. But now I’m wondering if instead it’s a call back to Gavilar’s ancestor Sadees the Sunmaker who led the overthrow of the Hierocracy and questioned the ardents’ claims of prophecies from the Almighty.

Gotta say I’m with @Anomander Rake and @teknopathetic on this one @Frustration. The statement that the entity purporting to be the Stormfather in the SA5 prologue is not, in fact, the Stormfather is enough to constitute a theory. And @teknopathetichas undeniably offered a substantial amount of evidence in support of that theory. Is it a full fledged, complex theory? Maybe not because it’s a draft and we don’t have much more to go off of at this point. It’s more like a basic theory designed to spark discussion and speculation. As @Anomander Rake said, you may disagree with the persuasiveness of the evidence, but you can’t seriously say there is no evidence for the premise that the entity we see interacting with Gavilar is not the Stormfather. I’m not nearly as active on the Shard as you @Frustration (maybe no one is?) but I’ve been around long enough and read enough of your comments to develop an opinion on your style of discourse. I don’t know you and so wouldn’t presume that you intend this, but wanted to let you know that your terse comments simply poking holes in others’ theories often come across as rudely dismissive. And I think they push what should be fun discussion and theorizing about stories and characters we all love into the realm of argument. So maybe we cool it on the semantics about whether or not something constitutes a theory and just let folks have a discussion.

I'm still not sure which side I come down on, but it does seem really odd that he doesn't "rumble" even once. Almost every time we've seen him speak, he has rumbled - either by speaking in a rumbly way or simply rumbling in response like a grunt. Which kinda suggests to me that Brandon just always has that rumbly quality in mind when he's writing the SF's lines and therefore uses that word frquently. And it's notably absent here

That's about right. I can't say for sure, but my sense is that a slim majority thinks it is the Stormfather, and that he either outright lies, or at least lets Gavilar believe things that are incorrect. That camp writes off the odd behavior/language of the Stormfather in this prologue as being part of a rough alpha draft. Others have suggested that we may be seeing the Stormfather at some times, but Tanavast's cognitive shadow at others. Of those who lean Stormfaker, I think Ishar is the most frequent suspect. The biggest knock on this theory seems to be the view (based on the Prelude) that the Heralds cannot sense the death of another Herald in real time like this unless it's a permadeath like with Jezrien. The counter is that Ishar, as the forger of the Oathpact might be a special case. The other suspects that I think I've seen a lot of people suggesting as the true identity of a Stormfaker are Cultivation, or one of the Unmade (Sja-anat in particular comes to mind)

It’s for sure a cool theory, and one I’d like to see Brandon asked about. I’d imagine you could avoid a RAFO if the question were focused on the underlying mechanics. Something like “Is a Biochromatic host always required for Awakening? Or can you Command the Breath itself without an object to serve as the host? If a host is required can other Breath(s) serve as the host?” I hadn’t thought much about this before your post, but having done so now my take on Awakening is slightly different than yours. I don’t know that it’s accurate to say you are Commanding the Breath instead of the host. To me it’s more like the Breath forms a temporary bond with the soul of the host, and that bond gives the host the capacity to be Commanded. The Command is given to the object as modified by the Breath. But that’s just my sense. Your idea would open the door to some really cool possibilities though if it’s correct.

Here’s a WoB that’s maybe-kinda relevant to this discussion. So, a couple of things here. One, regular Biochromatic Breaths (as opposed to Divine Breaths) that are not being used to Awaken are already in the physical realm, just in gaseous form. So the spren comparison - where Investiture is pulled from the cognitive into the physical and becomes a Shardblade (or fork or whatever) - is not quite the same thing. Making @Stormtide_Leviathan’s idea work, then, is more akin to transformation. You would be commanding a Breath (I guess via other Breaths and a color source for fuel) to change from gaseous to solid. Might run into the old problem of Investiture resisting Investiture there. Two, it’s interesting how Brandon describes the interaction between Breaths and a soul during Awakening. Sounds like when Breath is used to Awaken it remains in the physical realm but reaches through to the spiritual (and the cognitive I would think), to the soul of the object. That could be another problem with the theory. Does a Breath have a soul that can be reached in this way? Edit: found another WoB So it’s functionally nearly impossible to Awaken liquid. Seems like there would be similar problems with a gas.

Sounds fairly plausible. That is unless Edgli has imposed some kind of limitation on Breaths that prevents them manifesting in the physical. Maybe, in line with Endowment’s Intent, the magic only works if you endow or give the Breath to something/someone else?

Yup. Not only was he devastated by what happened with Evi, he lost his top 100 elites as well. The more I think about this, the more this theory makes sense.

Good theory @tim.D It does seem fairly plausible. From a meta perspective, though, I wonder how we would ever learn about this since it seems like everyone who might know is dead. I actually wonder this more broadly about all of Gavilar’s scheming. Dude had his fingers in so many pots, but we still know so little about what all he was doing. Assuming Gavilar really died (which I’m still not entirely sold on, but let’s go with it for argument’s sake) through which character’s POV or flashbacks will we get more info about what Gavilar was up to?

I'm loving this discussion. I've generally been of the opinion that BAM Connected to the singers through their Connection to Roshar and the rhythms. This is because of this conversation between the Sibling and Navani in RoW 49: But that doesn't provide a full explanation because, as this discussion above illustrates, it's not clear whether that Connection was through the spren in the singers' gemhearts, an independent singer Conection to Roshar, or both. But I'm coming around to the view that @Proletariat and @robardin expressed above that BAM "proxied" herself to the singers in a one-to-many bond, either by displacing or overwhelming the spren that gave the singers common forms. Those spren would not have been able to do anything with Voidlight, so she served as a spren to all of them and facilitated the use of Voidlight. This explanation actually tracks pretty well with how Ulim describes what happened in RoW 73: I never really understood the "too little" line, but it makes sense if what we're talking about is a one-to-many bond where she's the proxy Voidspren for all of them. There's further support for this idea in the SA 5 prologue, but I'm putting my discussion of that in a spoiler box.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Nohadon was always Hoid. Only that Hoid likely knew of, and respected Nohadon as a fellow storyteller. And that Hoid may have impersonated and/or created an illusion of Nohadon in the OB Nohadon vision in order to help Dalinar. I suppose it’s still possible in that case that Nohadon was once an apprentice of Hoid’s, or that - as @Hoids4thApprentice suggested - Dalinar is taking the place of someone who was an apprentice of Hoid in the OB vision.

Great catch. It even seems possible that the Nohadon we see in the OB vision could actually be Wit in disguise. The mannerisms and playful nature feel spot on. And it reminds me a bit of the Dog and the Dragon - providing a safe space and delivering a message the character needs to hear, while the character is assaulted by something. For Kal it’s the hateful winds, for Dalinar it’s the painful memories returning.

I think I posted this excerpt in @teknopathetic's original thread with the Chana Davar theory, but just wanted to drop it here as well. Especially given the conversation about Chana having children AND the bit in the SA 5 prologue about finding replacement Heralds. From WoK Chapter 7: Perhaps the Stormfather/Stormfaker wasn't the only one trying to find replacement Heralds. What if this is a cleverly-hidden description of how Shallan came to be? Perhaps Chana, with help from Cultivation (or maybe Shalash?), created Shallan from a piece of her soul with the idea that Shallan would eventually take her place. This could help explain why Shallan would be different from her siblings. And perhaps this is also why Shallan's mother was so upset to learn that Shallan was bonding a spren, because it would conceivably mess up the plan.

I think this is right and that Axindweth/Ulim’s scheming is what Kelsier is referring to when he mentions the things they’ve put into motion in this passage: