Observer

I wish Brandon's books had stable time loops. Not just because I really love those, but because it would complicate the timeline a whole bunch. Then, after hundreds of thousands of years of crazy-complicated time shenanigans, twisting the timeline into a freakishly overcomplicated ourobourus, I could finally tell you all that Elantris was Aons ago on the timeline.

Okay, it would seem I overinterpreted the quote a little now that I'm looking at it, but this it what I'm pulling from, Chapter 3 AoL annotations. You should know that holding two opposed Shards of Adonalsium has made Sazed more . . . zen, if you will. Not inactive. However, he has taken a belief that both Ruin and Preservation are important in people’s lives, and doesn’t feel that interfering is something he should often be doing. He sees his primary role being to encourage people to be better, to keep an eye on the other Shards, and to make sure the world keeps working as it should.

Death is my Life, my Strength becomes my Weakness, the Journey has ended. If these things predict the future, which radiant is going to fall apart here? Probably not Kaladin, not with how far and how strongly he's built up. Shallan has a level of self-awareness that makes shattering really difficult for her, so I'm betting on a Kholin here.

For questions like this, I highly recommend the Q&A section of the forums, and probably the Cosmere Theories area instead of WoR Discussion. Shards are sixteen pieces of a thing called Adonalsium. Shards are wells of enormous power, allowing whoever controls them to be nearly godlike omnipotents, with the abilities to create and destroy life, and a lot of other cool stuff. Those who hold shards lose their physical form and become mostly all-seeing. For more on Shards, try reading MIstborn. Problem is, each Shard has an "intent", such as Ruin, or Honor, or Odium. Whoever holds the Shard will have their personality and temperament slowly stripped away by their own power, until nothing but the need to follow the intent is left. This keeps the Shards from being too powerful, but makes them no less of a threat. As for Adonalsiu, we know it resided on a planet called Yolen, long before any of the books. For some reason it broke into sixteen pieces of power and intent, and sixteen people took up the pieces and left Yolen. Hoid was there when it happened, but beyond that, we know very little about the big Ado. I recommend finishing the Mistborn trilogy, and hanging around the Cosmere 101 thread for more answers.

If you're sure he's not burning Nicrosil, you could just try a Shardblade. Gold shouldn't be able to heal that, since a lifetime of sitting around in a hospital won't heal it, so a few years of concentrated healing shouldn't either.

That would be true, Death Rattles are vague and hard to work with unless you already know what happened, at which point they become frighteningly clear. We can see what they mean because we have the text in front of us, but they're largely useless to most people. Vargo is not most people. He has the Diagram, mapping out the future up until the end, which gives him exactly the context he needs. The Diagram says six armies will march on Jah Keved, a rattle says something about seven rebels attacking their home. It's pretty clear with a huge tome of future and page history what it means. I'd actually say he has a very solid ground to built upon.

And while I see where both you and the Stormfather are coming from, it doesn't explain or excuse what he pulled during the final assault. Deciding to stay neutral and hold back your spren is one thing, and somewhat debatable. Actively trying to destroy one of the sides is a bit of a step over the line.

Since he is capable of venting off extra Investure, I can see him intentionally overbalancing when it all hits the fan. Still, motivating himself to do so would probably take the better half of a millenium.

Hoid's conversation about Gibletish makes me think that he fears the reassembly of Adonalsium though. That's one of the only reasons I can think of for why he would talk about putting humpty together again would probably make it come out very differently than when it first was. He seems to be traveling around, growing in power as he picks up most magic systems and grabs a couple of keepsakes as well, which just now made me wonder. What would happen if he combined them all together? Would he get a mini-Adonalsium? Is Hoid quietly testing out, if only for himself, what would happen using a small-scale model?

Okay, back to the actual puns we're supposed to be making. Tolkien puns are all well and good so long as they have context, but they won't be enough, cos-mere unrelated puns cannot have a place here.

With Forgery it should be possible to temporarily cure a zombie, since they are quite familiar with older versions of themselves, and likely long to be that person as well. Could be very useful for gathering information.

As per the usual, somebody else has touched on the topic. Still, I think I'll keep this going until I get a Word of Mod, if only for the quotes. I suppose you make a good point PB on Broken referring to one of the three, but it's always required logical leaps to make Odium out as the Broken One. He isn't splintered, and he's not broken in the mind either. Honor is the only one we know to be broken, so he would fit the description better, if he actually reigned, which he doesn't. The way that Stormfather has so completely turned his back on his Investure's purpose leads me to the second, less supported idea of his Odious corruption, but I can't see how any true being of Honor would act the way that he is. He's known for ages that the Desolations were coming, and he never even tried to stop them. Not only that, but he did everything he could to wipe out the humans, knowing full well it wouldn't harm the Voidbringers in the slightest. I'm sure somebody else will come up with a stunning argument to shut me up, but for now I see the Stormfather as an enemy.

This quote has long been attributed to Odium as the Broken One, leading to the belief that there is another, unknown Shard on Roshar. However, thanks to WoB, we have the following quote. which means that The Broken One is not Odium. From this, we can draw the conclusion that not only is Odium off-planet, and Honor dead, but Cultivation has also faded into the background or gone MIA. This leaves the question I would like to answer: Who is the Broken One? Simple enough. It's the Stormfather. Let's take a look at some quotes: On top of this, I speculate that Stormfather has become corrupted by Odium, forsaking and ignoring honor in favor of pettiness and hatred. The Stormfather ignores all that is honorable, forbidding the spren from returning to stop the Voidbringers, trying to stop Kaladin from saving Elhokar, deciding to destroy the Alethi armies rather than actually acknowledge the coming disasters. The only reason he even sends Honor's visions is because he doesn't have a choice, and he makes it fairly clear that he wouldn't bother to warn the humans of the coming Desolations if it were up to him. I believe that Stormfather has become corrupted, either directly by Odium or by the hatred of the thoughts that form him. Honor, Cultivation, and Odium once ruled Roshar, but now they are gone, and the Broken One, the Stormfather, reigns.

Between Hoid's big mouth and his insufferable nature, Steelheart would have thrown him out of a window a long time ago if he were anywhere near Newcago.

On the grand scale of the Cosmere, training a Truthwatcher to know what he's doing in a set of Shardplate a few weeks before a Desolation seems to actually be pretty important, but whatever, I refuse to start that debate again.

Sadly, Worldhoppers seem to be doing important things at the moment, and likely don't have the time to slow down and hang around with people who aren't in the loop. Also, telling the reigns to strangle things. For some reason, that image is just perfect to me.

This one here stinks of both Darkness and (WOR SPOILERS) And this one refers to one of the Unmade, which we know from Taravangian move around in Shadesmar and mess with things. Looks like one of them got hungry and decided to grab a meal from underneat Moelach.

Okay, I know I shouldn't post if I don't have the time to contribute much, I promise I'll edit later or something, once I'm done being the dreaded "that guy". I can see the title of this post from the front page. People are already pissed about seeing a billion Nightblood topics off to the side and being spoiled, but this title takes the cake for spoilers. Could you please make it a bit for vague? There's still a lot of people who haven't read WoR. /Thatguy

From what we've seen and been told, the Heralds cannot surgebind without their Honorblades, which act a lot like Nightblood in the way the suck up Invesutre, in this case creating an inefficient access to the surges. The things that made the Heralds so powerful were the other powers that they had, such as whatever is giving them immortality and keeping them around for 4.5K years. Yes, I do agree, I'm pretty sure that Honorblades are far weaker than a Nahel Bond. They were a prototype that the spren perfected, fixing up the efficiency problems and boosting the power. I think that on a spiritual level, instead of being able to pull power through a wide-open gate in a spren bond, Honorblades either just let you do it yourself, but without the filtering of a bond, or give you a shoddier connection to Honor, but all at once without a need for oaths or spren. I still think Honorblades are potent, but it was definately the Heralds themselves that was so powerful.

Actually, we have WoB saying that Sazed is yanked in two directions full force, making it extraordinarily difficult for him to do anything at all.

The Way of Kings anybody? It's responsible for like, 45% of Dalinar's transformation into the man he is now.

The different planets are entirely different sections, almost like regions/countries, of Shadesmar. It's pretty hard to wander into a different country if you have any kind of goal in mind. Basically, I doubt she had the time to do any worldhopping. Also, if it were that easy, the KR would have mentioned it.

Ghostblood is actually at 425, 10 below the stated limit. EDIT: And I'm the King's Tester at 450, 20 lower than the stated limit.

Well, we might as well make a list of what we do know. 1: He was a pretty nice guy on Yolen, though it's been a loooooooong time since then. 2: In Elantris he helped get weapons to the Elantrians. 3: In Warbreaker he tells Siri the history of the land. 4: In Mistborn he acts as an informant to Keliser, takes a Lerasium bead, tries to speak with Vin, and hangs out with his worldhopper buddies at their wedding. 5: In Way of Kings he searches/hides from Odium, talks to Dalinar about the Cosmere, spends his time on the Plains insulting people, tells Kaladin a story and gives him a magic flute, and waits around for Taln. 6: In Words of Radiance he talks to little Shallan and pokes around about her powers, does more insulting, talks to Dalinar more about the Cosmere, tells Dalinar that he isn't to be trusted before vanishing again, and is waiting around for teleportations because he can. It's not a whole lot that we have on him TBH, but put together, mostly leaning on his interactions with Dalinar, he seems to me to be an overall okay guy. Yes, he'd kill to get what he wants, but that's because of how huge the Cosmere is and as a way to explain to Dalinar that they don't have the same goals. The fact that he firmly believes that he is in the right, alongside the way he tells Dalinar not to trust him, and his dislike of Rayse being left on Roshar, I get the feeling he isn't as awful as he seems. But this is kind of irrelevant to debate, and I feel dumb for starting this train of thought. We don't know enough as-is to pin down Hoid's personality, so this is a kind of dumb thing to get stuck on. We should probably take a tally of everything he's got and done, and then try and figure out what a person could do with it all, and I mean literally every useful use, and then look at it.

"A duralumin Ferring would be able to walk among the zombies unharmed, so that's useful too I guess. Also, Hemalurgic half-zombie Dahkor would be my bodyguard" is what I would say if I had eyes but I don't and now type this all blind.