Oudeis

Either way, it's a Blade that talks back to you and constantly pressures you to conform to a specific set of actions. Also, are we talking real-world, or in-world? There are few Shardworlds we've seen where carrying around a sword would be suspicious. I, however, could not get past the metal detectors at work with Nightblood. A blade others cannot see until I summon it would work better for me.

How would we account for a "year" on each planet being different lengths of time?

We know "grab what I tell you" doesn't work, so that prolly wouldn't work, either.

There still might be a certain radius within which teleporting is possible, but the point is largely unimportant for this example. Even if it's not an instant return, Syl can clearly travel very, very quickly. Even in a scenario where she has to physically return before becoming the next arrow, it would only be a delay of a few seconds. The greater worry is how little damage a shardarrow would do. The odds of hitting a spine, or even the core of a limb, are extremely low. Killing someone's gall bladder and several inches of intestines will certainly be a bad thing going forward, but it's not going to stop them from stabbing you with a spear on the field today. That's why I preferred something with a wider profile, like a bladed boomerang or a chakram.

Two Lurchers walked into a bar; the third was able to turn his iron off in time.

LOL Kelsier murdered the STUFFING out of people. The one that springs immediately to mind is some drunk noble he killed in an alley, just so he could plant the body near a noble keep. Yeah Kelsier was a straight-up psychopath, I believe we have WoB on this, perhaps an annotation? Alloy of Law: Tread carefully here; there's an entire thread somewhere of people reacting VERY poorly to the idea that you can be a Radiant if you're anything less than a paragon of virtue.

There was a pretty big one in what you said, and adding a spoiler tag is such a simple step. Even if you don't say much, you're inviting people to respond to what you say. Starting a new thread with SPOILER in the title is another good way to respect the wishes of those like myself, who don't read pre-release chapters, and didn't know that they happen in the setting you described.

I think the definition is loose and he changes it sometimes. Like, I think when he says "Kaladin has met two Lightweavers" he means two people bonded to a Cryptic. When he says, "The Order? No." he means that Tien never said any of the Ideals, and so he's not technically an Order of the Radiants. I dunno. This is all getting so confusing and seems so contradictory. We have all these W's-o-B and it's difficult to reconcile them, and the various important words seem open to a number of different potential explanations. ...Hrm. I guess I have a new theory... We've been told that there are, depending on how you look at it, 10 or 30 forms of magic. It's been speculated that this means Surgebinding, Voidbinding, and a third branch of magic all access the same powers, just different ways. Perhaps Tien had access to Illumination and Transformation, but via a different method than Surgebinding, and so he had the power, but wasn't part of the Order? All I know is, we see him carve a photorealistic horse shortly after seeing it, and we see him do something that looks very, VERY suspiciously alike to Shallan's trick of combining Illumination and Transformation. Though, he explicitly does it at a time when Stormlight should not have been available, so I don't know how to explain that.

Oh, thanks, Kurk. No idea what happened there. I've gone back and replaced the link with the one you provided, no sense leaving a bad link lying around. Thanks for the catch!

Perhaps this is what you meant? Source. (... indicates where I skipped a bit between relevant sections)

Please be cautious of spoiling teaser chapters in a thread without a spoiler warning.

Shallan and Tien.

Is Chouta a male food? Do darkborn hold as strongly to the male/female concepts for food as lighteyes do? Perhaps add something to make it spicier.

I suspect that in Awakening you meant color. AonDor and the Shades from Shadows for Silence are both examples of Investitures that seem to operate without any physical cost. Both seem to be powered primarily from other realms (in both cases I personally suspect the Spiritual, though we granted don't know enough to be sure). But good point, the parasites seem to be another example. Perhaps we can look at the similarities between these systems and try to determine why some systems require a physical loss, and others don't. Hrm... as I think about it, the death of the physical body could be considered a "cost" to begin the Investiture... though I personally suspect it will turn out to be a side-effect. Still, this matches Awakening, where you must pay color to begin an Investiture, but not to keep it going. Unlike allomancy or stormlight, where a cost must continuously be paid in order to keep the investiture on. And in allomancy, the metal isn't the power itself, while in stormlight the stormlight itself does seem to be the actual power. This is all fascinating and warrants further thought. Thank you for giving me something interesting to think about!

No, no, you're thinking of the ancient Greek philosopher, MacDonald. Everyone knows old MacDonald had a form.

@Weiry. Ah, thank you! Heh heh, interesting quote.

i sorta assumed it was like catching a Koloss. The actual act (for koloss of the capture, for a Blade of letting it out of your hand) is an effort, but once you're past that moment, it becomes easier. It might be another moment's effort to dissolve it from afar and begin the summoning process anew, but the bit in between wouldn't be too difficult. I only think this because it sorta fits what we see, I don't really have much to support my supposition.

Off topic for thread

I feel like I've heard somewhere that it was someone Greek, like Socrates, whose three-realm theory is what Mr. Sanderson says he was influenced by.

Sel, using AonDor, as I believe is noted in the Ars Arcanum of Words of Radiance. Sooooo..... I just read Chapter 44: The Weeping, of Way of Kings, and it hit me in the face like a haddock that Tien is the other Lightweaver. He carves a photorealistic horse that he saw recently with uncanny skill. He is something of an expert on the nature of Truth, as Shallan sees it; i.e., Truth is perception. If a man thinks he's noble, he is noble. If a woman can convince others to obey her, they will obey her. If Tien can convince Kaladin to be happy, then he is happy. That is Truth. Then, just as Shallan is able to convince a mercenary to act with nobility by giving him a picture showing him he CAN be noble, Tien uses his powers to counteract Kaladin's Seasonal Affective Disorder on the roof during the Weeping. But, where is he getting his Stormlight from? It's during the Weeping, when all of their spheres have gone dun. See now I feel like this makes his death even more tragic. He was on a path that would have given him the ability to recover from such a comparatively minor wound, and he gets cut down, not by a Thunderclast or a Voidbringer, but just some random soldier in a pointless border skirmish. Hrm, though now I know he's a Radiant, maybe it was a Skybreaker?

Which Order would Xena be? Throughout the series, she tends to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

If he's literally seeing it, before him, in sound and light, why does no one else see it? If he's only "seeing" it in his head, then it isn't sound and light. This cannot be the same thing as the Illumination Surge which, as Moogle has pointed out, should function nearly identically to how Shallan uses it.This also happens days apart from the "I see" quote. Even if I didn't have a second suggestion, it's still an enormous stretch to think they're the same thing. However, I do have an alternate theory to suggest. I think he was answering what his Ideal is. When Pattern asks Shallan, "Why you?" which is fundamentally the same question if asked in an odd manner, her answer is to say she finds Truth, the Ideal of her order. I humbly suggest the Truthwatchers have as their Ideal something about observation, or judgement, or something else about seeing. And please keep in mind, my point isn't to say that I'm right, for sure. I'm just saying, your support for why the two scenes HAD to be related was the total lack of a second option. Unless and until you can prove beyond literally any shadow of a doubt that Truthwatchers do not see, then this is at least a second option. I'm having trouble parsing what you're saying here. You seem to be conflating his two statements. He speaks of predictions, and says they're bad. He speaks of looking at the past, and says it requires perspective. He never says anything about the future requiring perspective, he just says it's bad, and then he moves on.And since one of the Visions is of the Recreance, and Tanavast says, "These are all things I've seen," I'm gonna go ahead and call it canon that the Visions were made after the Recreance. ...How? He's only showing visions of the past, and speaking of what must be done in the present. It's no more "speaking of what might be" than I'm "predicting" my lunch when I give the waiter my order. I think we have to grant a little leeway here; magical oracles are clearly in one category, while "what do you wanna do this weekend?" is in another. I'm pretty sure these are both the same thing. Skill with the spear, skill dodging blades, it's all just "skill fighting".And I'm afraid it's pretty much a slam-dunk that it's Kaladin's passive. Every time he's described as fighting, he's shown with supernatural skill, including the very first time he fights ever. At one point, he touches a spear, chooses not to use it, and his fingers literally feel like they're burning. It's mentioned constantly that the people who trained him, the people who have trained scores if not hundreds of men, are constantly stunned by his innate skill. He knows forms and stances almost without being taught. When he hadn't touched a spear in months, he whips out an expert kata perfectly. That simply isn't how procedural memory works. And la piece de resistance, when he fights, the wind visibly warps around him, shown from three different perspectives on two separate occasions. No amount of training can accomplish this clearly magical feat.

Is there a reason my spren couldn't form into a boomerang with bladed edges? With some care in the design, it shouldn't significantly ruin the airflow that keeps the boomerang flying. Can spren choose their own mass? Presumably. A "light as air" hammer wouldn't have done much good. So then presumably my Sharderang could choose to be the perfect mass to give it some heft but still fly far. Are Radiants immune to their own Spren? i.e., could Kaladin grab Syl's bladed edge without harming himself? That would be ideal, so my Sharderang could be bladed all around evenly, without requiring a smooth grip. Still, a grip wouldn't be the end of the world. It's possible you're right, and my Sharderang wouldn't work nearly as well in practice as I imagine it in my head. But what I wouldn't give for the opportunity to test it out and prove it would work.

If you can show me a reason we should assume that he's expressly referring to the prophecy when he says this, I will respond to it. Chapter 19, Starfalls. "To speak of what might be is forbidden." I'll grant Shallan is a special case. What do you mean, Kaladin shows his passive after the second Oath? (And do you mean Third? He says the second one, "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves," in Way of Kings.) Kaladin shows his passive ability, expertise in warfare, as young as 10 years old or so when he first picks up the quarterstaff. This was more than five years before he even spoke the first oath, more than four before the first time Syl can remember finding him. I concede that the passives might come at different times for different Orders. There is still, however, no reason to assume prophecy is Renarin's passive, and since Honor himself flat-out says it's forbidden, I think that's a pretty good reason to tentatively believe it comes from something other than Surgebinding.

I read this quote and it just adds to the confusion. Clearly, the word can mean one of the two things, and if he doesn't specify in any case, we don't know which. It's all very confusing. 1. I agree that passives are prolly related to the Surges (thought I still think the Memory is a bit of a stretch). Where I disagree is that prophecy as experienced by Renarin has anything to do with either. Does he "see and hear" the future, or does something just take over his body and force him to write the future? Also, while I realize one definition of the word "progression" would imply "the way time moves forward," that's obviously not how it's used when we see it used. I think it strains credulity past the breaking point to think that "future vision" is the same as "the way something will grow" just because you can use one word, with fairly different definitions, to describe them both. As I said above, that's like saying Renarin will one day master literally anything "in front of" him, because that's also called Progression. The Progression Surge clearly has to do with the way biological beings experience growth, not with time moving towards the future. 2. You're sorta explaining it backwards. You seem to be working on the assumption that his prophecy HAS to be his passive, and then trying to find a reason to explain it. Considering that we know Honor considers prophecy to be a very bad thing, I think it would be tremendously surprising for an entire Order to have their whole passive be a thing considered forbidden. We know that Lift has bizarre extra abilities, and in her case we know where it comes from. If we hadn't been expressly told, "This is because she went to the Nightwatcher," would we be assuming that the ability to turn metabolic energy into Stormlight is just the Edgedancer passive? We know Renarin should have a passive ability. We know he has a bizarre capacity for prophecy. But that's not enough reason to assume the two facts have to be related. Possible? Yes. Presumptive truth? No. (Making a mental guess at how many people will reply to this saying, "We know where Lift's power came from, that's an entirely different thing.") 3. Recall that the passives don't seem to have anything to do with advancement in the Orders. Shallan's had her Memory forever, though I'll grant that her path up and down the Ideals is unique. Kaladin had supernatural skill in combat six (point six) years before he met Syl. If prophecy were the Truthwatcher passive, Ym should have had it long before he ever started healing orphan feet, let alone Renarin should have had these fits all these years.