Ripheus23

Hmm... What if...?

Quote

 Dereth further interpreted Keseg's doctrine to mean that mankind should serve a single monarch. ... He is said to slumber in the earth, waiting for a time when the whole world worships him to return and rule the world.^[8] This is cited as the justification for the Fjordell Empire's intent to conquer all of mankind. ... Jaddeth rewards devotion in his followers, as well as ambition.^[14][16][8]

And it says that Rayse weakened Aona and Skai by getting them into a state of conflict, then had to transfer their power from the Spiritual to the Cognitive Realm to keep it up from being taken up again, but this was not the optimal strategy and Rayse learned something from/after it, during his battle with Ambition.

Nothing in Threnody's lore seems to indicate a process of instigating a system of unrestricted monarchy there, does it? Lemme check... I guess not?

But then on Roshar, we get another epochal history where Odium engages with his enemy in part by trying to establish a world-king. When this happened on Sel, he was able to play off Dominion's Intent directly, whereas in Honor's case, he had to play off Honor's disturbingly corrupted role in the order of the Shards (as bound by conventions), then later on Dalinar's human failings, but either way less directly?

Hmm... Taravangian wants to be the One True Lord and God of the cosmere, for a different reason than Rayse, but still... He's Ascended from the position of already being a world-king. Or, ironically, the position of being the perversely blessed king of an enclave city who ended up imprisoned/under guard and then prayed his way into getting to Ascend anyway. Twice, no less. Still, he was a king with worldwide ambitions before, and he's really just fulfilled those in a way that even the theme of a world-king has been achieved on Sel.

Alternatively, is there some correlation between Elantris and Urithiru, Teod and Azimir, now? In the sense that, on worlds where Odium's meddling has led, over the ages, to a huge tyrannical regime dominating much of the world, there are a city of great, and countervailing, magic, and a nation with a historical separation of some relevant form from the dominant empire?

I mean, though, there's also the Rose Empire, there, and Duladel was independent until relatively recently (from the POV of the OG book). Hmm... But is that an overarching factor in Shardic magic, then? Because it's said that the geographical locality of the Selish systems has to do with the Dor being in the Cognitive, not Spiritual, Realm. Like, this is literally to the point where a guy made a huge line in the soil and that was able to trigger the local magic on a huge scale. The dynamics of the nation/state concept are what are getting magically reified on Sel, as an overflow from a political-magic process that Odium, Dominion, and Devotion fought in long ago, a process of dictatorship and war, much like on Roshar later.

Maybe one of the weird basic rules for the Shards is that they have to make it vaguely possible for mortals in their province to be able to Ascend? If they go through a weird enough rigmarole of magic and riddles and prophecies and so on and on? Or, at least, there's a conditional: if a Shard wants to battle another, and it does so on a certain level, it has to try to create a world-regent who will have a corollary chance at getting the Shard? Like, the process of establishing the regent uses Spiritual power through and through, and this puts the regent in the position of being able to take up the Shard. So, it's a risky move: the original Vessel has to manipulate the situation "just right" to prevent that from happening.

I mean, sure, Aona and Skai have already been killed. It's not like they lingered until the events of Elantris or whatever. So the rise of the Fjordell emperor does not temporally match up to the event of Skai's fall. Still, what if their prophecy is supposed to mean that if they take over the world, their final emperor then will Ascend to Dominion somehow? Ironically, in the process, perhaps dying, because he'd be trying to merge with Skai's portion of the Dor? So it would be that the process for killing Skai, that Odium used, involved creating at least the distant future possibility of a local Selish king becoming the global one, thereby gaining Dominion's profile.

... and then, by contrast, the Threnodite situation is way different. Not much information about it, either. Mercy was involved, which is indecipherable information. (Or is it? Damned if I know...)