Child of Hodor

I find this odd since Hoid refers to Frost's immortality as a more recent development, but maybe Frost gained the ability to heal the soul like Hoid can. OR Frost wasn't always a dragon. Maybe dragons aren't born, but made on Yolen. Humans or Sho Del can be magically altered into a third species, Dragons through some process.

He could be lying about it, there is no independent verification. I went back to where he summoned his blade to see if it mentions a gemstone on the pommel, dead blades can only be summoned if they are bonded and they need a gemstone for that. It doesn't describe the blade pommel, so that doesn't help. It could be a dead blade. I assume he actually did join, because it seems pointless to lie about it. Maybe he pretended to join to hold sway over the Skybreakers, but he is already their Herald they'd follow him if he didn't bond a spren. Heralds aren't above doing pointless, crazy things but Nale's particular brand of crazy is interpreting the law in messed up ways to do terrible things. He follows the letter of the law while intentionally violating the spirit of the law for his own purposes. A person who fanatically follows the letter of the law could attract a Skybreaker spren, even if they are a psycho whose killed tons of people. (i.e. Szeth )

Dalinar is up there, but he is a special case because Honor modified the Stormfather at the time of Honor's death. Stormfather is both a splinter of Honor and Tanavast/Honor's cognitive shadow. Previous Bondsmiths didn't have access to that kind of power and we have seen no indication that Nightwatcher or The Sibling are as powerful as the modified Stormfather is.

That's what I'm thinking. One goes to each city. I'm not sure about the method of transportation though. I can't rule them out, but don't think it is Oathgates, The Dawncities were made by the Dawnsingers (likely) before humans arrived. In WoK Chapter 33 Kabsal shows how Kholinar and other cities have a layout that corresponds to musical notes. This implies they were "sung" into shape or otherwise magically created, there may be something fundamentally magical about (or under) those cities.The "plate" to the cities' "sand". I'm thinking each Herald is magically keyed into a Dawncity on some cognitive/spiritual level and they automatically are drawn to their respective city when they come back. When they die on Roshar they automatically go to Braize, when they leave Braize perhaps they automatically go to a pre-determined point on Roshar.

Convincing theory! The screams in people's heads seem way too real for it to only be a guilty conscience. This epigraph from WoK ch. 45 always stuck out: For a while I thought an Unmade was following Szeth around consuming his victims and that's why Szeth hears them. Doesn't seem to be Yelig-nar, his consumption has been shown to be more direct and literal, but more than one Unmade may be able to feast on the dead. The Aimian cook in the OB interlude is worried about "those" that can exploit the souls of the dead: We also know Moelach grants visions to people just as they are dying which is close enough for me to count it as manipulating the spirits of the dead:

Yeah, Hoid probably wasn't waiting for him specifically to safeguard the honorblade. He's met the Heralds before, he knows Taln has been gone an incredibly long time. Maybe he was more there to see what kind of shape he's in and look after his well being generally, giving him the dead blade so no one stole the honorblade was a small part of that. He stayed with Taln until he was well on his way to the asylum in Dalinar's camp. Hoid stuck around long enough to see that Taln was being cared for by people he trusts (Dalinar).

Too many people saw Taln with the a blade when he smashed open the gate in front of those guards. Hoid didn't want anyone stealing it. If Taln just dismissed it people could try to coax him into summoning it again and taking it from him. They would then notice it didn't have a gemstone to bond it like the dead blades do and it would lead to them asking too many questions. By giving him a dead blade for people to steal it cuts them off from trying to get him to summon his honorblade because they think they've already stolen his blade. In this Shardcast they lay out the case for there being a lot of unaccounted for dead blades. Hoid could have found an unaccounted for one. http://www.17thshard.com/news/shardcast/shardcast-the-missing-shardblades-r421/

When a Herald returns from Braize at the start of each Desolation does each spawn at one of the Dawncities in one of the ten Silver Kingdoms? Taln is the Herald of War/ Herald of Soldiers and he reappears outside of Kholinar which is the capital of what used to be called Alethela. We don't know much about the Dawncities, but Kholinar is considered to be one. https://coppermind.net/wiki/Talenel https://coppermind.net/wiki/Silver_Kingdoms https://coppermind.net/wiki/Dawncity https://coppermind.net/wiki/Kholinar Alethela was the Silver Kingdom of warriors or soldiers according to an ancient radiant in Ch. 19 of WoK.

I never thought of him just dismissing it! *facepalm* He's so out of it most of the time. Then Hoid is the most likely person to give him the dead shardblade. Maybe Hoid got Taln to dismiss it then gave Taln a blade that Hoid had bonded. One of the first things Hoid probably did upon arrival in Roshar was get himself a dead blade. Hoid was waiting there for Taln, he had to have some purpose. Brandon said he didn't "switch" the blades which would be technically correct. The biggest hurdle to figuring out who switched the blades is that the switch happened fairly quickly. Whoever made the switch would have to realize Taln was back and where he was. Ash knows immediately when Jezrien is killed, so the Heralds may have known Taln was back. However, Ash needed to find out where Taln was from Mraize. They don't seem to have Herald GPS. Unless he always comes back in Kholinar because he is the Herald of War and Alethela is the Silver Kingdom of warriors. But Hoid knew he was coming and safeguarded the blade by giving him another while Taln dismissed his. I agree with @Calderis it's not as fun as the Shin.

He doesn't follow up on Jasnah either. In WoR prologue we see Jasnah meet Ivory in the cognitive realm. Later she bumps into Nale and Kalak and Nale looks at her suspiciously and starts walking towards her until Kalak pulls him away. He suspected she was bonding a spren and didn't follow up on it for 6 years. Maybe he couldn't find a law she broke that he could execute her for. As a princess she might be above most laws in Alethkar and in other lands she is a foreign dignitary with "diplomatic immunity"

Back 5 books Taln and Ash will hopefully come around since they are set to be flashback characters. I guess they could die and be flashback only characters. Taln doesn’t seem like he’ll recover anytime soon. There is something deeply wrong and twisted about the others.

Yeah, they can clearly see each other’s madness except for his. Maybe he takes advantage of their residual respect for him as the trusted advisor he used to be. His crazy is really out in the open though, declaring himself god-king, demanding everyone worship him and waging war. He’s literally an old man yelling at clouds. Maybe he’s convinced them he’s doing an elaborate Andy Kaufman-esque bit. They think he’s Sasha Baron Cohen playing Borat.

He’s getting dumber. When he broke down and cried at the end of Edgdancer then flew off to talk to Ishar I thought it would be a breakthrough moment and lead to positive change. He just found a new way of being breathtakingly stupid. He does seem to at least understand that he’s insane and is warning Szeth about it. But in the next breath he says Ishar is the only one still sane. Ishar (as Tezim) sounds like a raving lunatic in his message to Dalinar. Stormfather tells Dalinar that Ishar routinely stands out in the storm and screams obscenities at the storm. Nale is like “damnation, you’ve really got your stuff together, Ishar! How do you do it?”

We wouldn't recognize them because they are shape-shifted to humanoid, non-scaley bodies. Speaking of potentially misleading WoBs there is this recent WoB where he says the Shards were all once humanoid (presumably before the picked up the Shards). This at first seems to rule out a dragon Shard, but we've seen Frost can appear humanoid. Dragons can take humanoid shape even if that's not their default. Or DragonSteel dragons default form is humanoid, which is less fun. Or he misspoke.

Maybe the real magic system of LOST was the friends we made along the way Brandon does say he has a 4th "law of cosmere magic" specifically for Adonalsium which that he won't discuss. This could be an additional constraint that permeates all subdivisions of the entity.

Yeah, pre-existing entity that Cultivation "adopted" and tweaked. Old Magic as in Oooooooollld pre-H & C arriving on the planet. I'm not sure if Nightwatcher was playing the Boon-Bane game back then, but maybe her ability to predates H & C. I think it's like the Parshendi where they were of Adonalsium so they are not of Honor, Cultivation or Odium originally, but have since been influenced by them. On the one hand I LET HER makes it seem like this is something Nightwatcher wants to do and C is just permitting it. IT HELPS HER UNDERSTAND YOU makes it seem like this is an assignment or an apprenticeship for Nightwatcher meant to develop or cultivate ( ) her.

Orange for Siah would fit with Singers. They are humanoid in build, but composed of crustacean-like creatures. Singers are humanoid, but they grow carapace. Not red-blooded humans, not violet-blooded crustacean, but a mix between. Now this doesn't work with a color wheel unless you go the long way around , but maybe the mixing of blood protein types is not literally like mixing dye. @Spicker Thanks for posting the great blood chart! I'd never seen one that laid it out like that before.

Agreed, the books state humans wrecked the surface of Ashyn and fractured the Shattered plains and even the most powerful radiant would have a tough time doing that on their own. Dawnshards must be something that allows for the use of power on a massive scale. All the others fit, Dawnshards being used to create the Dawncities and all that, but the creation of Shinovar is one where I think either Cultivation or Honor could have done it in literally 5 seconds. All the other examples are shaping or dividing stone on a grand scale, Shinovar would require the creation of Earth/Yolen-like soil which doesn't exist on Roshar at all, except in The Valley where Cultivation hangs out and she probably just created it there after her arrival. I'm sure humans brought some soil with them as they transported plants over, but not enough to create whole fields. Maybe the Singers and humans worked together to create more, but I think Cultivation could have just done it. The Singers took in the humans at the instruction of their gods, even if their gods are spren, the spren answered to C & H by that point so it was ultimately C & H's idea to take in the humans. The Shards would have been motivated to create a stable living environment and they had the power to do it easily. In Mistborn:

The evidence for Mraize being a dragon is mostly that his mouth and hands are badly scarred. Fangs and foreclaws would be a dragon’s primary weapons in their natural form and would be exposed to counterattacks. The other traditional dragon weapon is their breath weapon and Mraize does love playing with that blow gun. He also speaks in Hunter and Prey metaphors which an apex predator like a dragon might think in. The hunter talk he may have picked up from his “babsk” Iyatil who is descended from a group of Southern Scadrians called The Hunters https://coppermind.net/wiki/Southern_Scadrian#The_Hunters She also uses the blow gun to try to kill Amaram in WoR, so it might be hers as well. Still, Mraize is constantly toying with it, maybe it reminds him of a thing he can do in his true form.

Would be hilarious if she revives and decides he’s not the right personality/fit for her particular order and she bonds someone else. ”Thank you so much, but you’re just not right for me.” No, I don’t think this will happen.

Friendly. Sly would admire the way Kandra honor contracts and they would bond over stories of how they were both considered rebellious by others of their kind. Sly might find TenSoon too stuffy and quiet to really hit it off though. Kelsier and Jasnah

It conceals the 10th Dawnshard which is the one Dawnshard that Odium hasn’t turned into an Unmade. Dawnshards being “planet Spren” one for each of the 10 planets in the Roshar planetary system. No I don’t have any evidence for this, why do you ask?

Yeah, they aren't radiant spren as we know them now. I'm not convinced ancient spren couldn't help humans access the magic system, but I'll get to that. More generally, we know the Singers pre-date the Shattering and we know Honor and Cultivation were on Roshar for a while before humans came and brought the void with them. For a while there where the Singers, Honor & Cultivation on the planet. Spren existed back then and from the POV of the Singers there were spren that could be held in their gemhearts and there were other spren who just did their own thing, but there weren't a whole bunch of spren actively aiding "the other side" in a great war or anything. Then, at some point after the humans came, eventually humans and Singers were fighting mostly on opposite sides of a war or wars and some spren were actively aiding humans. It is implied in "The Girl Who Looked Up" that the ancient humans finding out about Stormlight is what motivated their exodus from Shinovar. Choosing to live in those constant storms only makes sense if they are using the Stormlight for more than pretty lighting. Those ancient humans who expanded and conquered were using Stormlight to fuel magic powers accessed either through bonds or fabrials either way spren were involved. From the Singers perspective the spren had always been either allies or largely neutral spirits of nature, emotions etc. When humans started expanding and making war on the Singers all of a sudden humans were making war against them with magic accessed via spren this would have been seen as a betrayal. Even though it was newer types of spren that had not existed in that form on Roshar previously Singers would have viewed them as part of the larger spren community and felt betrayed. He is saying the powers predate the order of the knights radiant, but humans were using these powers before the knights radiant or the Heralds. The 10 surges are a way of accessing the 10 fundamental forces that are inherent to the magic system in the Rosharan system that was all set up by Adonalsium. The Shard filters how those powers are accessed, but not their basic nature. It could be that these ancient humans got access to surges again through the Dawnshards, but other spren may have been capable of granting access by then. Honor and Cultivation had been present on Roshar for a while and some of their Spren or Spren they modified could have granted access to the surges or powers that could be called surges. If it is through Dawnshards it may need to be pre-corruption though. If Odium co-opted spren like the Unmade nahel bonded humans then Voidbinding may be a more appropriate term than Surgebinding and the same underlying 10 forces may manifest differently enough in execution that they wouldn't have been referred to in world as "Surges". That's a whole other can of worms though. I know Amaram ate a gem with an Unmade and he got access to powers while the gem ate him inside out, but that's different from nahel bonding an Unmade.

I don't have a theory or anything, but I stumbled upon this miscellaneous entry in Arcanum while searching for other things and it tickled me so much I had to share it. I love how there is no question prefacing it. It's a comment on a 17th shard post, but I like to think it's the opening remarks from a meeting Peter called specifically to yell at people about this. It reminds me of the movie Adaptation where the experienced screenwriter is exasperated with his inexperienced brother's screenplay. I imagine someone responding to Peter with "Mom called it scientifically plausible" and Peter facepalming. It may be just me, but this brought me a lot of joy and I wanted to share it. P.S. Adaptation is a good movie and you should check it out sometime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWTErr-91BE

There is a Kandra on Roshar. That would also support Harmony's interest in the planet. I could have sworn there was a WoB that confirmed the Roshar Kandra was not a rogue Kandra like Bleeder so the Kandra would be one Harmony can talk to. But I'm not seeing that WoB.