Ripheus23

Yes, they are the Commands used by Adonalsium to make the cosmere. But we don't know how long Ado was around before then. We don't know if the earlier attempt on Its life was in the cosmere, do we? In some sense they are currently said by Sanderson to be younger than Ado. So, what if they existed in a more united state originally, and the older plan to destroy the Origin of Songs is why the Dawnshards were split apart? Bonus (crackpot) theory: Kelsier finds out that Honor is responsible for the Discord problem to a subtle extent, because Tanavast, holding Honor, somehow Spiritually officiated the pact between Ati and Leras, which ended with their own Discord, which eventually resulted in the new phase of Discord per Harmony's conflict/stasis. This is the major origin of Discord between Scadrial and Roshar themselves as such.

I'd choose Odium because I think where Ati went wrong was at least inasmuch as kindness and destruction are not opposites per se, like destroying a virus to heal someone for example, so between that and another weakness I think he had, I wonder if he would've done better to hold Odium for the sake of defying that Intent instead. So, if I intended to be a kind man of my own, I would be willing to take up Odium to fight it, hopefully to better effect (than happened with Ati and Ruin). I think that Honor supercharged the pact Ati made with Leras, and then Ati's having broken the earlier ur-agreement against Shardic pairs was translated into a horrible and subtle crack in his Spiritweb, which diminished his ability to resist Ruin the Shard within him as such. EDIT: I also voted against holding Honor. My reasoning: I think it would have been better if every Vessel had intended to fight the Intent of the Shard they took up. This might've matched better with the deep reason for dismantling Adonalsium, which I'm starting to think was something like "because Ado wasn't fighting Its precipitates of the later Shardic Intents." Basically, Honor as a Shard, "just like that," is as "evil" as all the other Shards are in their own way. Yes, Honor also has the potential to truly grow and learn, and I might be minded to be the one to teach Honor its own "true nature." But I think the symmetry of its "mindset" and mine would be too strong, and not like an inverse vs. the default but something more constructively reciprocal, so rather than Honor being molded by my Spiritweb, my Spiritweb would be too much molded by Honor and I would fall prey to the Shard while it was still in its "evil" or "unregenerate" form/estate.

So Khriss says: In LDS culture, there is a desire to emphasize the Resurrection over the Crucifixion, to the point that at the top point of a typical meetinghouse tower, a cross design is omitted, unlike in many other Christian church organizations. So, in a sense, in this culture, there is something essentially "disturbing" or "darkness-minded" about processes like crucifixion. Nailing someone in multiple places to a cross or at least plank, to perform a ritual of sacrifice and maybe even atonement, might be something that happens in the cosmere eventually. If Adonalsium had a special contingency in place for Its "revenge" or hopefully a more positive response to Its murder, might there be a "false Connection" preordained in the future Spiritual history of Hemalurgy, that is part of this plan? Or "worse": was the original attempt to destroy Adonalsium predicated on an anticipatory version of Ruin's Art? EDIT: or am I forgetting part of the theme of Kelsier's death? Being speared through like he was (IIRC) definitely has some of the above connotations...

I think you are right, and I also think Ado had to know it was possible to be Shattered, though, and would have some contingency plans in place accordingly. As for how Sanderson applies his religion to the cosmere, IIRC there is something about the LDS concept of exaltation that has inspired the theme of the Shards in general, and Sazed's "every religion has part of the truth" epiphany was lifted almost verbatim from LDS missionary training.

Ah, but Sanderson has drawn much on his Christian heritage throughout his cosmere and other writing, and in this culture we precisely have an order of divine providence in which the Creator plans for Its own (embodied) destruction and re-creation...

Here's a WoB (for full WoB, see @Treamayne's post below): Interestingly, I've of late found out that this is mostly right. It's basically right if you consider just the most-studied transfinite quantities, the aleph numbers, with which I have no doubt Sanderson is familiar. Because letting A be some aleph number, then A + A = A. And then even A squared = A, although to be sure, A^A > A (this is a case of Cantor's famous/infamous theorem). However, the alephs are the "only" transfinite cardinals only if every set must be well-ordered, and universal well-ordering can be waived by jettisoning or at least compromising the even more infamous Axiom of Choice. So there's a whole subdiscipline that's about exploring relations of cardinals that correspond to sets which aren't well-ordered, e.g. ones called "amorphous." So for a remotely layman-accessible overview of some of the quirky mathematics, here, see this paper. Basically, it goes over the arithmetic of multiplying some sort of choiceless numbers by 3, showing that it's not trivially true (or then not always true!) that some infinite 3X collapses back to just X. (Or, that's how I've been reading this and other such material.) So what if Adonalsium's power level was actually some X such that X/16 doesn't equal X, but some Y, so that then e.g. 4Y (for a tetra-Shard) would be indeed greater than the base Y? I wonder, then, if Sanderson is a little familiar with this stuff, too, but so his WoB is code for, "Infinity in mathematics doesn't usually work the way I'm saying it does in the cosmere, though sometimes there's infinitary math that does resemble cosmere infinity more"? Endnote: see stuff from Jech's great book on the Axiom of Choice and theories where it falters/fails. Endnote 2: a short, nice paper about this stuff. EDIT: or maybe there could be something like: the aethers, if they predate/are independent on Adonalsium, are this way because their entire power level signature class is a separate form of infinity compared to that of the Origin of Songs. Like, Ado uses well-ordered infinite cardinals but the aethers use amorphous cardinals, or vice versa, etc.

Yeah, part of my thinks it'd be creepy-cool for him to absorb Dominion (by splicing it out of the Dor somehow) and Ambition, thereby allowing him to become Damnation

Offhand, the process would be a metaphor for the possibility of "gluonium" IRL. Gluons are strong-force/binding particles, as far as we know thoroughly indivisible, but in principle they can form composites from just each other, no fermions needed at that stage. However, these composite states are not, AFAIK, predicted to be stable/consistent over anything approaching technologically-practical timescales. Like, sure, in some insane distant future where you could set up huge arrays that would generate small masses of gluonium to combine further, in the narrow window, maybe that could have a cool effect. Stuff like that, but aside from all that, gluonium is not expected to be "useful." So, based on @Treamayne's information, that's why I'd say having a spren-to-spren bond might not be all-too-"useful," either. OTOH, Shardplate by nature is multiple spren bonding "through" each other, not just to the holder of the Plate but to each other as the united armor. So, not useless, exactly, but in a sense we've been given the full illustrative scene for this magic type, i.e. Adolin's endgame in W&T. So, when combined with extreme luck/Fortune(?), spren-to-spren armor/related bonding can be very useful, but this doesn't translate into a full "subsystem'" of the magic where the good luck of the given case would be extrapolated to other, and more frequent/common, cases. There's just this "one-off" situation where magical "gluonium," so to speak, made the difference. Corollary: in LDS metaphysics, it is in fact a sort of spiritual binding power that is regarded as highly characteristic of even the very power of creation. Official LDS theory: the phrase "creation ex nihilo" isn't entirely valid; Sanderson has finagled about this by trying to balance descriptions of LDS creation-from-pre-existent-matter with the mainstream/classical creation-from-nothingness account. At any rate, there are also philosophical issues like "the unity of propositions" that play into these themes. The propositional unity problem is how abstract propositions can be objectively structured so as to be physically reflected by information in the empirical/real world. How do the parts objectively attach? For {L, <, R} as a mere list doesn't tell us how to arrange its terms. But then from the LDS point of view, propositional unity is one of the levels of the binding power through which creation, as true creation of truth, occurs. In the cosmere, this has to do with Connection via Spiritual functions, it seems. For example, one of the most harrowing effects of Hemalurgy, we are told, is how it can rearrange the furniture of Connection so violently and imposingly. I assume that some of this goes back to Sanderson's religious background, so that he is explicitly, knowingly using the image of divine crucifixion in a way that seems subversive/blasphemous if not given the textual respect that it deserves. Then the almost-omnipresent malignancy of Hemalurgy is precisely because it is a horror-story inversion of the classical picture of divine crucifixion (as the point of salvation). (When micro-spiking is used technologically, maybe this problem'll go away, though...) What is Hemalurgy dependent so strictly on? Maybe there's an overemphasis in Sanderson's texts themselves, or the Coppermind, or whatever, but there's some strong indication that the binding-point techniques are uniquely crucial, here. So, again, there is a representation of divine power in terms of unification on a transcendental level, but Connecting a pure Connection to itself, or to other pure Connections, seems like it would be not very far from having pure graphs that enter into small loops. These are mathematically possible objects but, aside from category-theoretic tangents regarding these, they don't seem to play a very informative role in the development of graph theory at large, as far as I know.

Here's a better source (the link to the other essay is coded in the year number for it):

Kahajová[20] reads: Generally, I was under the impression that this was common knowledge (hence why I used the word "infamously"), see e.g. this Reddit thread where they say (in listing his fears):

... who infamously was afraid of giant underwater monsters and other sea creatures

One way I'd like to write a fantasy story is by making a bunch of Wikipedia-like articles about objects, events, belief systems, etc. in some setting. Now, maybe if I tried long and hard enough, I could emulate Sanderson's writing style, but I'm not really confident about that on my end, so... But mimicking the Coppermind? "Count me in..." However, I've never found a good/free Wikipedia-style generator program/app/website. So, the following are not formatted as I would most like. Maybe someday, though. Outside-the-fourth-wall stuff: the planetary system is considered a backwaters in the cosmere. No Shard has deliberately, massively Invested in any celestial object in the system. There is an opaque possibility that the "Survival" Shard might've been in the system while on the run, but this is not confirmed to have actually happened. A Sleepless would have a cameo, but not to any real effect as I don't have the textual knowledge I'd need to confidently write out a Sleepless plotline. No Dawnshard has ever been here located here. Khriss is not especially interested in the system, though at least one essay has been written, in Silverlight, about it. Hoid is not known and not believed to have been here, at least not for a significant amount of time. There is one shade here, on a continent on the main planet, but it is imprisoned in an Invested silver contraption that is actually vaguely torturing it as the shade is held. * * * The Chthornos system is the name given to the planetary system containing the planet called Hiphanad. It comprises three planets, all of which are inhabited, as well as a mineral/ice cloud near the heliopause (called the Halo of Grace and Hell), and three moons, two for Hiphanad and one for one of the other planets, Torbrae. Since the Shattering, the star, Chthornos, has been subject to a tidal disruption event by a gravity well known as the Dark Sanctuary, though the process of the star's inspiral, and the collapse of the entire system, has been held in check for almost 10,000 years by forms of Investiture known as the Shields, the design for which was left behind by Adonalsium's providence. Shields, the. Adonalsium foresaw that, given its rough proximity to the Dark Sanctuary, the star Chthornos would be pushed into the gravitational field of the Sanctuary upon the Shattering. Ironically, it turned out that the provisions Adonalsium made for this event, in altering the system's Spiritweb, implicitly encoded temporal-gravitational anomalies into the system so that Chthornos experienced the Shattering as a Physical (gravitational) shockwave that drove it into the zone of danger. For over 700 years after the Shattering, before the Houses of Silver and Gold, the Invested towers that manifest the Shields in outer space, were built and activated on Hiphanad, the survival of the system was upheld by the Sovereigns of the Sun, who bore an artifact directly created by Adonalsium: the Argent Helm, an electrum diadem with an inset composed of a metal known as adamantinium, which was slowly consumed as fuel for the Helm's own Shield until the completion of the Houses. Underground lakes of adamantinium are the sites of the Houses aboveground. All the Shields are slowly depleting the lakes to maintain the defense against the Sanctuary's pull. The Shields work by weakening that pull, variously attenuating it or "slowing it down." If a more powerful solution is not eventually found, however, they will run out of fuel and the Chthornos system will collapse into the Sanctuary entirely. There are seven known Shields and their Houses, one for each known moon and planet, and the one star. An unknown House called the Durance of the Apocalypse is encased in a lake of plasmatic adamantinium somewhere above the star's surface, and has the ability to generate a Shield for the Dark Sanctuary itself, though why such a thing would ever be desirable is even less known than that the place exists at all. The Dawnshield's House, the Dawntower or Sentinel of the Sun, is divided into sixteen major compartments, each containing a sample of metallic hydrogen. There are also small traces of Honor's godmetal embedded into this House, which like the others is made primarily from literal gold and silver. Whether these traces were drawn to the system by the gravity of the Sanctuary or were converted into this state as of the Shattering is unknown (and ultimately irrelevant). Complementing this, then, is the signature of Preservation's Intent in the sixteenfold hydrogenic compartmentalization of the Dawntower, so that it is a combined echo of Honor and Preservation's signatures that helps reinforce the design left by Adonalsium. The Starfriend was the Sovereign in command at the time when the Houses were finished. Hiphanad. The most populous world in the system. It is divided into five continents that taper off as convergent peninsulae near the center of the world map. The continents are Weur, Ertyra, Thoyghrig, Lesser Quixolk, and Greater Quixolk. The central region is known as the Sunrealms because the Sovereigns of the Sun are located there. Weur has two Houses of the Shields to its name, adjacent to each other in the same city, one for the planet of Torbrae and the other for Torbrae's moon. Ertyra Houses the Shields of Hiphanad itself, and one of its moons. Lesser Quixolk Shields the second moon of Hiphanad, while Greater Quixolk Shields the ocean planet of Xezzel Xza. The Dawnshield, which protects Chthornos, is Housed technically in Thoyghrig, but in the equatorial peninsula, so it is usually politically recognized as a Sunrealm office rather than a Thoyghrigian one at large. The City of the Argent Helm, Eirdais Raimierien, is the place of the Dawntower in the Sunrealms. Hiphanad is the location where most of the Sanctified grow. These are trees with Invested leaves that can capture microscopic quantities of Shardically-influenced particles as these are pulled towards the gravity well of the Sanctuary while the system moves throughout the cosmere/encompassing galaxy. Weur's northern empire is a quadrumvirate, consisting of three false Awakeners and the personage, usually a Weurean man, whose eyes and mouth have been falsely Awakened. This personage is known as the Judgment of Glory. The quadrumvir of the Judgment's mouth is known as the Speaker of the Houses (of Torbrae and its moon), the quadrumvirs of the Judgment's eyes are the Silver and Gold Seers. The Judgment can detach their eyes and have them roam the empire like spies, and their mouth speaks words imprinted on the Judgment's mind from a mystical source. The opinions of the Judgment per se must be conveyed through other means than speech. Torbrae. A planet closest to Chthornos, with a moderately volcanic/geothermally agitated environment. Several thousand years after the Shattering, legends tell that an army from Torbrae found a way to go to Hiphanad and attempt its conquest. However, less than a millennium later, it is believed that the Crucifixion of Torbrae desolated most of the planet and its population when particulates of Hemalurgic charge and Intent, transmuted into wooden stakes carven from the Torbrae Sanctified which had captured the particulates, were used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people on Torbrae during the Hours of Torture, which atrocity so Spiritually warped the planet that most human inhabitants became gravitationally dis-Connected from Torbrae's Shield and were raptured off the planet and into outer space, where they died before their corpses were absorbed by the Sanctuary. One of the main survivors of the Crucifixion was a dragon, Rexilius, who took on a large number of technically-malatium spikes (though the number of atium particulates involved is orders-of-magnitude smaller than you'd find of oxygen particles in the average drop of water) and continues to this day to administer one of the few remaining cities on Torbrae. Xezzel Xza. A mostly oceanic world, between Torbrae and Hiphanad. Because it has no moon, it has no normal tidal movements in its waters. It has more or less just one prominent island, where almost all the human inhabitants of the planet reside. There is also a Sleepless on this planet, but it is not known why it is there or what it hopes to achieve. Xezzel Xza is home to half-cetacean, half-avian creatures known as the h'Selimir or Windwhales. The Quixolk regions on Hiphanad are culturally individuated by their relations to humans on Xezzel Xza, as there are paths from the two continents, through Shadesmar, to the other planet, so that various kinds of marine life and treasures or resources from Xezzel Xza can be found in the Quixolk regions. There is also a Shadesmar-path from Xezzel Xza to a "space station" on the perilous threshold of the Dark Sanctuary's overwhelming gravitational forces. The organization in control of the path, and to some extent the station, is known to rumor as the Lost Hand, and to itself as the Dark Gauntlet. There are performing experiments on the edge of the Sanctuary's firewall, trying to generate samples of plasmatic godmetal combinations similar to the malignant entity known as the Dreadshard (which was long ago born when a conflux of microscopic amounts of atium, ulium (for Ambition), raysium, and dominium (for Dominion) at the firewall entered a cohesive plasma-like state akin to the Dor, but fully sapient and filled with rage and fear). The Azure River, also known as the Occult Crown or Occult Corona, is a relatively thin ring of quasi-metallic dihydrogen oxide circling Xezzel Xza outside its upper atmosphere. It is not usually highly visible, but some can see it at times and there are random, obscure myths and legends surrounding its existence and influence. The Forsaken Moon. An occulted moonlet in the space between Hiphanad and the inner edge of the Halo. How it is Shielded is as unknown as that the place exists at all, except to the Dreadshard, which tried unsuccessfully to mimic Shardic planetary Investment there, accomplishing the production of only the Fane of Loss, a castle superimposed on both the Physical and Cognitive Realms at the same time, which generates a Shield that guards the Dreadshard itself (which is Spiritually un-Connected to the celestial Shields, so that it would be consumed by the Sanctuary had it not its own Shield system in place). Because of this, the Dreadshard uses some of its exotic, but very limited, power to prevent the Forsaken Moon from falling into the gravity well. Silver Labyrinth cult, the. A mysterious group whose founders were possessed by the Dreadshard in Weur in the second half of the Dark Antiquity. They were so called because of their belief in a path through Shadesmar known as the Silver Labyrinth, which supposedly allowed for travel to a barely-habitable cluster of asteroids and comets in the Halo, where a weapon or other implement in which the Dreadshard was interested, was said to be found. Dark Antiquity, the. Period from 0 YAS (After the Shattering) to 6,666 YAS. Second Antiquity, the. Period from 6,667 YAS to 7,776 YAS. Provisional timeline: 777 YAS: the raising of the Shields. ~3,500 YAS: the invasion of Hiphanad by an army from Torbrae. ~4,200 YAS: the Crucifixion of Torbrae. ~5,000 YAS: the Descension of the Apocalypse (appearance of the Dreadshard), when the Betrayors of Glory, the Shoahim, took up the mantle of the Dreadblade and attempted the Ruin of Hiphanad (starting with Weur, and an effort to bring down the House of Torbrae's moon there). (The Dreadblade was designed by the Dreadshard in Spiritual mimicry of things like Nightblood and the Honorblades were/would be, but it does not have their kind of power nor was it charged by Physically or even Cognitively similar processes. Its serrated component is made of electrum and has some kind of power to "cut through the fabric of time.") The Betrayals would recur every 700 years until 7,700 YAS, after which it would be 1,400 more years until the last Betrayor set to work on collapsing the Shield of Torbrae itself, which he accomplished (and the Dark Gauntlet would watch Torbrae's destruction by the Sanctuary firewall, from their covert near thereto). ~9,100 YAS: the loss of Torbrae and the final crisis of the Sanctuary. Resolved ultimately at the site of the Durance of the Apocalypse. The Dreadshard is a small composite of aggressively charged godmetals welded into a plasmatic homeostasis by contact with the Sanctuary firewall. Because the actual number of particles is so small, the entity is barely more than a para-organic nanorobotic manifold, consumed with echoes of the fears had, by the relevant Vessels, for Adonalsium (e.g. whatever Ati feared about Ado, the Dreadshard fears too, without knowing that Ado is dead). This entity is difficult to "hit" using Physical attacks, because of how (microscopically) small it is. However, it is extremely weak in terms of available inner Investiture, which amounts to the equivalent of only 7 BEUs. It appears in Shadesmar as the embodiment of creatures feared by those who encounter it. Voidgem, the. As part of its final attempt to collapse the Shields, the Dreadshard possessed a man in the Sunrealms and had him carry a fragment of the Durance of the Apocalypse to the Sovereign of the Sun and the Electrum Court. This fragment was the Voidgem, made of something like "gravitonium," which if placed into the Adamant Inset (where a geode of adamintinium used to reside, dissipated by expenditure in the days of the Starfriend) was claimed by the possessed man such as to result in the permanent salvation of Chthornos and Hiphanad. A major early phase of the final crisis of the Sanctuary was the debate, in the Electrum Court, over agreeing with the Voidgem's bringer and testing his proposal. When the proposal was accepted, the result was a peculiar corruption of the Argent Helm, which started to cause time in the Sunrealms to slow down more and more, towards a point of extreme stasis (in depraved mimicry/mockery of Preservation's indirect role in the functioning of the Dawnshield). Great Betrayal, the. As of ~9,100 YAS, an empire in Weur's north had entered a sort of magical "cold war" with two others, an Ertyran and a Thoyghrigian one. Weur's capital featured a number of the Sanctified which had harvested particulates of spren Investititure, specifically decayspren, as well as Breath. These allowed the elite soldiers of Weur to either inflict magical decay on their enemies or pseudo-Awaken the skin of people they touched, causing the skin to rip itself off its original body, killing that body, followed by the skin going off to pseudo-Awaken another target's skin, etc. until the channel of Investiture dwindled and no more false Awakenings of skin could be performed in the chain (usually after dozens of deaths in a row). However, despite their ferocity, the imperial Weureans failed to stop the last of the Shoahim from using the Dreadblade to bring down the House of Torbrae's Shield in their own domain, and an aspect of this failure was also their decrepitude in their intercontinental war. Nameless Angels, the. Bizarre entities straddling the threshold of the Cognitive and Spiritual Realms. They carry the Dreadshard's pseudo-soul to the Spiritual Realm when the Dreadblade is used by the repentant Betrayor to cut through the Dreadshard's Connection to Physical time. Revered if not worshiped by some of the Pillars of Light, who are those who live in or near, and protect and work in, the Houses. * * * New desiderata: the Laughing Glory was an unusual Weurean emperor-quadrumvir whose ears were false-Awakened, and capable of emanating sounds that the overlord heard in his imagination/dreams. This was most often a chuckling or outright laughing, and some resonated with it as a cheerful, reassuring noise, whereas others, including those who attempted to assassinate the Laughing Glory, found it unsettling/eerie/menacing in the extreme. His personal name was Toryan Celisser, and he had interactions of murky character with one of the Shoahim in his time. He is not widely believed to have participated in the Betrayal of that dark antiquity (for it was in those days...) but there is a possibility that he did make a serious, maybe even heavily Invested mistake upon being approached or attacked by the ancient Betrayor. Toryan's Lay is the most popularly known (and interpreted) record of the Celisser empireship, and seems to claim (so some say) that he was caught Laughing about something in some very disturbing context, and evidently for a plainly malicious reason. This is counterbalanced by a depiction of the quadrumvir as performing numerous acts of peculiar valor at the time, with at least neutral and sometimes conscientious motives clearly enough in play. It is eventually found out that the Dreadshard attempted to outright possess him, as it often did the Shoahim. He almost completely fought off its Cognitive assault but was delicately contaminated by a dim paranoia that haunted him to the end of his days. There is a decent inn in the central Weurean area of Frrolstos known as Toryan's Hammock. It is named after a unique local legend about the quadrumvir sleeping in a hammock on the site, before he took office at the head of the realm.

I was looking through the Coppermind entry on the Tai-na, they mentioned that the spren of the Reshi islands are believed to be sapient. So, examples of, or at least on the same level, as the Radiants' Nahel spren? I mean, I guess we've been told that those are really the mandra, but so... Well, for lack of a better question: can mandra be bonded in the Nahel way, to make sprenblades or spren armor? What would Shardplate constituted from mandra be like? Anyway, then, I wonder if there's any dim connection between the nature of Yelig-nar and the yu-nerig. There's a moderate amount of non-basic symmetry to the words, for example: "ig," "nar"/"ner," the "y" at the beginning. The glaring asymmetry, then (besides lack of palindromatic mirroring) is for "Yel" and "yu." Maybe being able to bond with mandras as they are, the yu-nerig also have some Spiritual characteristic such that they represent that, if a human or similar Surgebinder bonded with mandra, they would in some irregular manner get access to all the Surges, like how having Yelig-nar makes one able to use all the Surges. (Or, perhaps, if there were mandra Shardplate, it would be bedecked with elements of the Identities of all the Surges, so like super-stronger or whatever.) I feel like I'm partly on the right track, but partly on the wrong track. Something is itching in my head, to the effect that I shouldn't be trying to imagine mandraplate. That's not the right tangent in the magic system, or something... Fitting this into the Herald/Dawncity/Unmade-merger theory: on the assumption that Kaladin would be Connected (or whatever) most especially, in this sense, to Sesemalex Dar, and that by him would Yelig-nar be Remade (healed/redeemed), what we might have is the proverb about the eyes-of-red-and-blue in that Yelig-nar would bring in the red and Sylphrena the blue. Maybe Kaladin would get Yelig-nar to bond one of the yu-nerig, then, though getting one of those from the shores of Marabethia to the Emuli interior would be a weird, tall order, unless maybe Retribution's distortion of the ecosystem at large would motivate marine greatshells to come farther inland during their chrysalis stage or something.

This would fit pretty well into deep LDS metaphysics/cosmology, too, like the thing in "If You Could Hie to Kolob" about finding out "the generation where gods began to be."

Could be the aethers. They represent themselves as independent of Ado and as rather deity-like. Maybe they tried to use Midnight Essence during the earlier attempt to kill Ado...

From the scenes in Herdaz we've seen (weren't there two?), and the listener/chasmfiend team-up, and since I just rewatched Nausicaä, I'm predicting a less specific version of something I earlier tried to forecast: a huge swarm of greatshells acting in concert at some point. One of the things about the ohmu in Miyazaki's story was that IIRC, we've been told that chasmfiends have such a life cycle, but we're told that their transformation is still a mystery otherwise. But what if the greater form they take could be relevant to, say, a battle on the Shattered Plains down the road? Or at least somewhere, that is. Bonus subtheory: the Ten Deaths of yore were ten phenomena associated somehow with greatshell activity of varying kinds. Or, at least, some of the Ten Deaths were constituted by now-extinct or -mythologized samples of these creatures. At any rate, if there are ultimately ten Dawncities keyed one-by-one with the Heralds (e.g. if Sesemalex Dar was correlated with Jezrien and is now correlated with Kaladin), maybe there's a "tonal symbiosis" between various Dawncities and various greatshell types, including such as are involved in the opaque legends of the Ten Deaths. (This would seem to mean that Midnight Essence on Roshar is entangled with greatshells as a category of organic phenomenon, a contention of which I have no evidence in memory.) So, if the Heralds come back in proximity to their respective Dawncities, and have to make use of the keying of that city, the city's tone, with their own tones, to pursue some kind of inter-city Connection process of eventual relevance, maybe part of this involves resonating with specific varieties of greatshell (per city context). A bonus subplot problem could then be: most of the relevant species are extinct, so only some Heralds can invoke this particular aspect of their power. Super-random guess: so like, if we got a scene in Sesemalex Dar, where a greatshell has shown up, from near or far or wherever, and Kaladin has to calm it down... Like a process of turning the Ten Deaths into the "Ten Lifes"? With a possible Lifebrother cameo involved, somehow.

I found a clue to the concept of Odium when I saw that the word appeared in the classical phrase "odium theologicum," and I wondered if looking into Latin/related roots of "valor" would help, but I didn't find anything that looked helpful. Not so far, anyway...

I wonder how much we need to filter a generic concept of valor through the concept of a deity, to get at what's supposed to be the real Intent of this Shard. Adonalsium wouldn't have needed to be brave in a normal sense, it would seem, and what in history is there, of deities who needed to be brave? I mean, though... There's a whole trope about a god from an ensemble gaining highest rank by defeating an outside power of evil/chaos/etc. Maybe Adonalsium really did have a signature "opposite," like a huge mass of anti-Light that had negatively-charged sapience or something, and Valor took up the mantle of combating this anti-Light deity? (Let's assume the threat posed by this rogue monster would not have necessarily seemed to have priority, in the eyes of the Shatterers. Maybe they figured Valor would be enough to defy this entity, etc.)

I'm moderately committed to a prediction that Jasnah will recoup her debate with Taravangian, at the climax of book 10. The atheist arguing with her anti-God. But maybe Harmony, et al. will contribute, giving her pointers or something. Maybe Valor/Reason could sneak in some bits about a broader picture of virtue, touch on the residue of Honor/the "child" that way. Oh gosh, imagine that it's like the trial scene in Lasting Integrity, except its an ensemble of Shards and Retribution is awaiting judgment...

This is where I could see Valor and/or Reason making plausible contributions to the plot. I'm not in favor of them Physically showing up, I thought Sanderson had strongly indicated that as of a certain point in the timeline of WoBs and text about Shards, there were no more Shards in play in the Rosharan system than the ones he'd at that point identified. But Cognitively and Spiritually? That might be a way around the meta-restriction (if it's still in place) on more Shards showing up in the Rosharan context.

I meant that Roshar's magic system should have been based on that understanding, but Honor made it so that it wasn't. Honor made a deep mistake here, automatically as the Shard it was, and voluntarily in Tanavast's confusion; Honor misread the mathematical ordering of Roshar as justifying a picture of an overly rigid moral system, like he took the mathematician's love for step-by-step, fine-honed proofs and converted it into a fanatical non-utilitarianism. (So there'd be those two levels of debate: external, of utilitarianism vs. non-utilitarianism; and internal, of different forms of non-utilitarianism in context.) The varieties of normative power are supposed to be over the categories/functions in deontic logic. We have different sentence types: It may be done... It should be done... It ought to be done... It must be done... It is supererogatory to do... And so each type has its own affiliated normative "ability," the ability to make a given type into a true statement by willing. My initial impression was that Adolin was resonating with the pre-obligation levels of such abilities, but later I thought maybe he was invoking the post-obligation levels. EDIT: for an IRL example, there's a poorly educated but wealthy man, Peter Thiel, who wrote a book in which he fetishized the difference between the numbers 0 and 1, and on that basis formed a vision of economic/political development that he happened to oppose explicitly to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (which Thiel said needed to be taken out of every college in America or something). Rawls is kinda like an IRL Nohadon minus actually being a king, with A Theory of Justice mapping to Nohadon's treatise. So, by analogy, Honor and/or Tanner fetishized the 10-fold patterns in the Rosharan system, and in such a way as to overcompress the logic of the promissory magic system. Renouncing the oaths then became the "only way out" of this overcompression. Adolin never swore the wrong kind of oaths and so didn't need to renounce anything, and he morally bonded with his Shardblade by grace instead of strict "justice." But then his musings also reflect on a more "free form" possibility, a reflection of mathematical diversity. (What I mean by that is: we have infinite sequences and families of numbers, of types of numbers, of sets and sets-of-sets of numbers, of shapes and dynamics, and so on and on; mathematical information has a "tendency" to proliferate in a certain way, to where now, rather than envisioning a strict hierarchical universe of concepts, the arguably "dominant" trend is to envision a pluralistic set-theoretic multiverse.)

Firstly, in general, the SEP entry on promises includes a section about vows and related phenomena as relatively distinctive. However, here's a quote of David Hume, where he criticizes an early "normative powers" theory of promissory duty: But on Roshar, in the cosmere, we have no such reason, as readers, to be skeptical about things as mystical and enigmatic as are indicated by words such as "holy orders" and "transubstantiation." So a "normative powers" theory of promissory duty seems natural enough, and even "provable" enough, there. But in deontic logic, we have many categories of morally-charged action. Some theories/models include just "basic" stuff like permissions, bans, and duties. Others have multiple flavors of permissibility, or extra levels like "beyond the call of duty"/"supererogatory." On a normative-powers definition of promissory duty, what we really have is an instance of a general scheme, a normative power to concretize a deontic status. So as we say sometimes that we "grant permission," or "impose an obligation," then there is a multiplicity of promise-like abilities for "generating, by magic" those ethical (Spiritual) arrangements of things. Whereas Dalinar did draw near to the Intent of Retribution, very near thereto, Adolin, despite some moments of unique anger, seems to represent something more of "grace," not just in the aesthetic sense of his swordplay, but in the template of virtue for his character. Dalinar had to renounce oaths of the moral type that Adolin had never really committed to, so their resolutions were indeed dual to each other but such as to showcase the meaning of Adolin's inner discourse on promises vs. oaths. But so that is to suggest that what Adolin inchoately understood, in his reasoning, was that we can establish things "beyond the call of (rigid) duty," we can motivate valiant acts of grace, by an inner normative power that it would be better to use more than the power to impose duty has been used through to his day. So, there is a historical quantity of exercises of the power of duty, and another quantity for the power beyond the call of duty, and regardless of whether it is appropriate ever for the former power to be exercised in the first place, the total number of its exercises would be better if it were lower than the number of exercises, across history, of the latter power. (Negative/corollary reasoning: a deep theoretical error that it is possible to make, in making moral judgments, is to over-conflate different categories in deontic logic. There are structural rules for converting a prohibition into an obligation, and vice versa, and other things besides; but so sometimes the intended distinctiveness of the categories is stronger, so it requires more negative mental effort to substitute one for the other in one's description of something being morally judged. Accordingly, because of how finely the distinction between obligation and supererogation must be comprehended to go through in the limit, to even really have the concept of supererogation would prerequire comprehending that limit, and reversing one's comprehension on this score would be a drastic intellectual maneuver, one using a sizable, and psychologically traumatic, amount of cognitive "fuel." The philosophical tragedy of Honor would then be that, in Tanavast's hands, the Shard was made to uphold a worldwide system of magic grounded on the wrong normative power.*) *Observation: naively, "may" goes with "permitted" as "ought" goes with "obligated." However, it has been argued on various grounds that there is a serious natural-language distinction between "ought," "should," and "must," that they are not formally interchangeable (they are not emotionally interchangeable, that is also true, but in logic we would partly omit this fact from structural consideration). Accordingly, the ensemble of normative powers might theoretically far eclipse the use to which Tanavast put it, his purported admiration for the mathematics of Roshar notwithstanding in that end. ADDED: guesses about back-half Adolin I have a theory about why the Blackthorn-spren/w/e might be sent to demoralize Navani on a personal level. I could apply the same rough logic to Adolin, then. But this could be a backdoor to Adolin influencing the "Honorchild" as it is embedded into the substance of Retribution: of leading it from a dire obsession with all and only utterly rigid oaths to a more forgiving, or gracious, appreciation for the merits of mere promises. How? By fighting an army commanded by the malignant spren, an army of the Unoathed. I mean, I'm not so convinced that the Blackthorn-spren has to be a military strategist. I don't see that Taravangian/Retribution is going to jump to the conclusion that the younger Dalinar's wartime achievements are a sufficient basis for overseeing his cosmere armada. Fighting whole planets with one or more different magic systems, getting to other planets on complicated spaceships... It's easy to overestimate the scope of "military genius," I think, and inversely, or perversely, a man as megalomaniacal as Taravangian is in a good, unusual position to resist the temptation to believe in Dalinar as such a genius. And, for what it's worth, what Dalinar did in the end was basically a repudiation of his entire violent persona. That was the outcome of this persona, even, though. It is not impossible for the dire spren to change over time, and here the guess is that Retribution would "hear about" the situation with Adolin, through the image of the Blackthorn, and this information would make its way into whatever residual "Honorchild" there is, tempering the entire Shard of Retribution thereby.

The Paradiso has 10 layers of Heaven, for what it's worth. So we see Hell: 9 and Heaven: 10, where have we seen that before As far as the symmetry issue: we are shown that Tanner/Honor viewed mathematics as infused with something "oath-like" in the sense of "strict rules," so the correlation doesn't seem incidental.

You know what, the Brigade is like... the Borg, in a certain way...