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Good point, the Reshi king is a dustbringer but he's more in Dawnshard, not RoW. I wonder if he shows up in RoW briefly somewhere?

My guesses for SA5: 1. Kaladin and Dalinar get to their 5th ideals. (Kaladin's the easy guess.) 2. Taravangian finds some way to loophole Dalinar into a worse-than-loss outcome in the contest of champions. Possibly involving Dalinar being unable to do what must be done to win the contest because of his honor. This is the mid-book failure for the heroes. 3. End of the book, Taravangian dies and Odium shard is either splintered or merged with Honor remnants. 4. Dalinar dies at the end too. After reforging Honor and doing something with it. 5. Szeth dies as well. He's not even going to be sad about it. 6. All of the planned flashback characters of the back 5 books survive. 7. The heralds are healed somehow. So are the deadeyes. (Possibly in the same event?) I like the theory that sometime in this book the Stormfather is killed and Stormlight becomes a lot harder to get, but I can't decide whether I should guess that's part of the mid-book crisis, whether it's the end of the book and setup for the back 5 books, or whether it's a prophecy that almost comes true but then gets averted at the last moment.

I've thought this is one that's already come to pass, at the end of Words of Radiance - this is the moment Kaladin swears his third oath at the end of WoR, when he's protecting Elhokar against Moash. "All is withdrawn from me" - Kaladin starts power-less and spren-less, having broken his oaths to protect. "I stand against the one who saved my life": Moash saved Kaladin's life once, now Kaladin stands against him. "I protect the one who killed my promises": there's a chapter in Words of Radiance titled "The One Who Killed Promises" and is the chapter where Kaladin finds out Elhokar is the one who sent Roshone to Hearthstone, and decides that Elhokar has to die. And now Kaladin is protecting him. I think the chapter title is the clearest link, because it's such an unusual phrasing. "I raise my hand. ": there's a very dramatic "stretch forth thy hand!" call from Syl, before Kaladin swears his oath, and then - "The storm responds.": Kaladin gets his powers back, plus the Sylblade.

Hmm - I don't think that Gavilar had visions is known to most of the characters... the Diagram knows, the Sons of Honor probably know, but I'm not sure Dalinar and his team know.

I like the theory! I doubt 100% of it is right, but I really like the core idea - that the Aethers are from outside the Cosmere and that's why they don't quite fit and why they argue about their relation to Adonalsium.

I don't really see anything in those WoBs that's strong evidence against my guess? Yes, it makes sense that it's not random who got which Shard, though it could have gone a few different ways. Certainly reasonable that some people participated in the shattering because they wanted power (possibly Rayse). But I still think it's quite likely that they really didn't know how all this would work after they succeeded - generically wanting power isn't the same as knowing how Shard mechanics would work. E.g. if they knew, it's likely that Ati would have done more to defang the shard of Ruin, they wouldn't have given Rayse Odium (and might have splintered a few of the Shards immediately after handing them out, and so on.) I suppose mainly I should soften my words - I don't really mean to claim that the original sixteen knew literally nothing, just... not very much, I'm still guessing we should think of what happened as the sixteen+1 "making do with what happened in the aftermath" rather than "aha, exactly as planned." Sort of like in Mistborn,

I strongly suspect that the original 16+1 had no idea what they were getting into with this Shard business! My guess is that they were focused on breaking up Adonalsium (for whatever reason) and then handing out Shards was an "oh rust we actually succeeded, but this power is still here and we have to do something with it, what now???" sort of thing. If I had to guess, I would guess they had very little idea what would happen if they actually made their plan work.

I think it'll be about Szeth - he was truthless, and then he wasn't, truth is important to him.

Correct The spren would be very very unhappy. Unclear if it would survive this; seems like the answer is probably not, though we don't know for sure. Well, two possible answers that I can think of here: One, that the sword only killed what was actually stabbed - the person (Rayse), not the power itself. The Shard of Odium was in the spiritual realm, and only the Vessel was vulnerable in the vision. Two, that a Shard is just too big and too powerful. Yes, Nightblood consumes investiture, but a full shard is so much more Investiture than nightblood could possibly consume. Yes, it's powerful, but not compared to a Shard.

Enjoy!

Navani's notebook often has things in Alethi women's script. They've been decoded at https://coppermind.net/wiki/Navani's_notebook but you wouldn't be able to read it without comparing to the key and deciphering. (Warning - that page has spoilers through Rhythm of War)

I think this is a big one. Dalinar is thinking about winning battles with the Parshendi, and the siege bridges are best for that. The main improvement of the bridge crews is that it's better for racing other highprinces. Even the compromise of using shielded bridgecrews is along that tradeoff - it's worse for actually fighting the Parshendi, better for racing highprinces.

I'm not too worried about that being a copy of Mistborn. The story of Mistborn was about much more than "two shards merge into one" - it was about Sazed's religious journey, about Vin's relationship with Elend, it was about prophecies as manipulation. I think if Honor+Odium end up merging it will still feel very different. I entirely agree about Dalinar not wanting a Shard of War. He's about Unity, not War now.

Nah, Brandon's said that's always been on his mind: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/414/#e13904

Here's the quote from Dawnshard that nudged people even more in this direction, from the description of the mural that held/was the Dawnshard: It seems to be a pretty natural guess that that's a representation of the shattering, which then has Adonalsium split into four groups of four.

I wouldn't want to join multiple orders, personally. Not because the powers aren't cool - they would be - but because of the commitment. Being a Radiant is HARD. You have to dedicate yourself to some ideal to the point of structuring your whole life around it. One set of ideals is hard enough, and two - well, your entire life would be dictated by balancing these overpowering drives. One order is worth it for the stormlight healing, which is so incredible I actually would reorganize my life around it if it made me immune to injuries. Two orders... nah.

I enjoyed it! It gripped me and I was excited for the ending. I don't think it's a classic like MB1 or Stormlight of course, but it's a fun read and I would totally recommend it to anyone who likes Sanderson.

I think it's something to do with spiritual feruchemy quadrant. That's the most unexplored section of the metallic arts, and Brandon's been deliberately cagey about it. And some of the stuff in there - manipulating Identity and Connection, specifically - could definitely be related to being noticed/unnoticed. I definitely don't have a specific mechanism in mind, but something with those two seems very plausible to me.

I think there's a few things here, all of which add up to a lot of wiggle room. First, Riina does not know what Brandon has said. Brandon is telling us fans things, but he is not an in-world character and Riina might not know that "Dawnshards cannot harm anyone", at least not with the kind of certainty she wants. Second, "Dawnshards can't harm anyone" isn't a hard rule in the Cosmere. We know that Hoid, due to having held a Dawnshard, could not harm anyone at certain points in the story. But... time passes. Tress is further in the future than any other stories. Maybe Hoid found a way around it. Maybe Riina thinks Hoid MIGHT have a way around it (20% chance, say?) - or, at least, doesn't know for sure that he hasn't. Third, in the book, we don't even know Riina's thought process! We have HOID describing what he thinks Riina must be thinking. And he does NOT say "He has a 20% chance of killing Riina". He says "Riina is cautious, and if she thought she even had a small chance of losing, she'd flee rather than fight." Using "one in five" as a small chance of losing, in that sentence. We don't know whether Riina actually estimated her chances of dying at 20%, 1%, or 0.1% - just that it was high enough for her to decide to flee rather than fight. Fourth - yes, it's possible Hoid cannot kill anyone. But he has teammates! If Hoid could, say, disarm Riina, Tress or Fort or anybody else in the room could deal the killing blow. I entirely believe that Hoid & team could find a way to kill Riina even if Hoid is personally restricted to doing things that technically don't cause harm. And, well... Hoid's had a lot of time to find ways to ruin someone's day in ways that technically aren't harm.

Definitely a fun theory! I'm on board with it.

"Foil" could also be a short version of the same name. The dragon's full name as given in ToTES is "Xisisrefliel", and though the first part of the name is "Xisis", the "fliel" ending of the name seems pretty close to "foil".

Huh, I've always thought that the writing was always pretty clear that Hoid IS always full of himself. I guess I'm coming to this after rereading some Stormlight (TWoK), where basically every character that has to interact with Hoid thinks he's annoying as heck. He toys with people with his words all the time, and he is definitely tedious to those around him. I don't think we, as an audience, are supposed to think Hoid is cool, funny, and sophisticated all the time, and I think the writing is usually skeptical of his wit, often portraying it as him having a laugh at the expense of his audience rather than him entertaining his audience.

Yeah, that's a big part of Aethers. (stormlight archive spoilers)

Hot take - he could have, but he didn't think of it and Harmony didn't want to remind him. It might have required some modification of the plan - a longer time bubble to give himself time to compound, maybe scrounging through the ship to find just a tiny bit of extra gold - but it could have been done, if Harmony had wanted it to be.

Wob about it here!