Oltux72

No. He doesn't have the weapon. He has a potential capability. Dalinar has never done this. He has ten days to train, not knowing what kind of enemy he will face. Odium is under very few restrictions on that. So you want him to face an unknown enemy with a Blade in a state nobody has ever tested out? After spending his very limited training time on a venture that nobody has ever attempted?

Alethkar and Herdaz are major things to the Rosharans. They are not major gains to Hoid. His triumph is the contract they got Odium to agree to. Strategically, sorry to repeat a point, Hoid is using up the Rosharans to fight a delaying action against Odium. Now, it may be that the Hoid/Jasnah chapter Brandon read out of marks the beginning of the end of the alliance between Hoid and the Rosharans. You have a point. Maybe we should ask what has immediate relevance: Odium's armies attacking one last time to shift the borders before they are frozen Finding the loophole Sja-Anat (Taravangian must very much suspect her of disloyalty) The problem is that if I look at it that narrowly, I fail to see a justification for sending Kaladin & Szeth to Shinovar. Reforging the Oathpact is a long term priority. Dalinar isn't an idiot. He will not dream that Ishar has the one world-shaking secret of Bondsmithing, which he could learn in a few days well enough to use in the contest. Neither is finding Ba-Ado-Mishram. She has been stuck in a gemstone for over a thousand years. This going on for a few more months makes no difference. Neither is there a point in Adolin and Shallan even returning home, provided Lasting Integrity can supply so many humans. Or for the Honorspren they recruited to hurry to Urithiru. We know from the readings that something import and urgent happens, which Adolin and Shallan report in (do you think they are physically in Urithiru or is somebody sitting in front of a Seon all the time?) the Radiant side understands that there is a loophole in the contract If Hoid and his associate can find the loophole, they will need to draw conclusions from it. That raises the question what they'll do if they find the issue unfixable? And that leads me to a very dark corner, where my inner ruthless pseudo-Ghostblood wakes up. Can and should the Radiants abort the contest by killing Dalinar or having him unbond the Stormfather, if the issue is unfixable? Would Navani be bound by the contract?

I am sorry, but that avoids the elephant in the room. Will a contest take place at all? Brandon subverted a lot in Stormlight Archive. Jasnah spent years researching the voidbringers. It turned out to be useless. That is indeed his logical goal. We have Brandon's earlier reading: Wit discovering that memories are missing Hence the Radiant side won't be surprised. That raises a question. If they find the loophole, will they still want to carry on? If the contest is not the solution of the Stormlight Archive, then we have a huge pile of loose ends. For example Kaladin should soon tell Dalinar/Jasnah/Navani that his/her uncle's/her husband's slave is an undead immortal from another world. Shallan and Adolin will have learned incredible things. (Sunlit Man) By that logic Brandon should pull another Rhythm of War. The ten days then are the first part where the Urithiru crew is busy conferencing via Seon with a specialist on shardic contracts. (Do we call such a specialist an arcane lawyer?). The rest of the book then deals with finding the true end of the first five books.

There is nothing in the essay that would rule out that would rule out Taln's Scar to be the site of Ambition's death. It does not confirm it either. We are not seriously discussing that Nazriloff is thousands of years old, are we? So the question is the nature of the Evil. Yes, the essay tells us that there have been consequences of the battle. But it does not tell us that all consequences happened at the same time.

Kelsier was a god. If you can claim that, is letting people build shrines to you narcistic or merely confident?

Arcanum Unbounded, essay on the Threnodite System:

(Cosmere & Announcements)

Indeed. Sorry, if I should have implied anything else. It just seems important to add that even within the options some parts apply, but others do not. For example Kelsier is not a psychopath, but had he been a pure blooded noble, he would have gone into villainy as far as Straff Venture.

The clash must have happened before the first Desolation. But it took place in interplanetary space. Hence the time the Evil was created and when it came to Threnody need not be identical. The Evil may literally just have fallen from the sky. That means that between Silence in the Forest of Hell and the departure of the future Canticlites could be centuries. A lot of time for their technology to improve and for the Evil to try jump to the minor continent. We also know that the Threnodites made an attempt to retake the Homeland. Hence the chorus may be based on technology from old Threnody.

I can assure you that people whose lives are in his hand won't be confident to depend on that distinction.

I am going to put hypothetical words into his mouth: If a lion chases a zebra and the zebra tries to escape, neither is doing anything wrong, though their goals are mutually exclusive. If you are one of his, he is willing to die for you. He literally did so. If you are against him or his, your very existance is a stain on the universe. If you told him that you are everybody's friend, he'd tell you that thereby you are nobody's friend. Kelsier is most of all tribal. Kelsier has no problem accepting that people have incompatible interests and you have to pick a side. Note that this does not mean that he was dishonest when he said that he did not know whether he fought against somebody or for somebody. The question is secondary to him. As would be the question whether he is a good man. Primarily he is a loyal man. Yes. Neither are they consistent within themselves. Kelsier will protect the marginalized. But not the weak. Absolutely. What he tried to do to safe the doomed army is inconsistent with being a psychopath.

He had a problem. Killing Kaladin strongly tells his army not to show initiative. He had to find a way to signal that initiative is fine for officers, but bad for bridgemen.

With a part of their intrinsic Investiture. Their soul if you will. The key resource is still people. A fabrial is a trapped magic life form. A awakened object is made from parts of people. Shardblades are spren. Medallions are magic objects, that is true. The Cosmere is developing into that direction.

I am first listing the evidence. The largest concentration of Investiture that we know of are the Shards themselves and the Dawnshards. As for the "Forces of Threnody" the Ire developed a specific machinery against Cognitive Shadows and indeed some of them. Nor are they surprised to see a CS in the Scadrian system. Their troops know how they look like. That makes no sense unless Threnodites Shades (at least at that time) could leave their system. In addition there is the "Shade Gun" from the broadsheets. So the idea that Shades in general are unable to leave has a lot of evidence against it. And hence we must question the rest of the chain of reasoning.

You cannot go into your smithy and forge a shard blade. Even fabrials contain a spren at their core.

Well, the thing is that Spren and indeed Stormlight are bound by the same constraints. Seons, however, are not. Neither is roseite aether, or hemalurgic spikes or aviars or whatever Autonomy's army was made of. And neither are - elephants in the roon - the Dawnshards. Hence, is there a point i explaining the Returned specifically? If they posted guards, the Threnodites could leave. What would be the point if they could not? If Hoid could get a CS from Scadrial, what was the point of using the perpendicularity? Do you wish to propose that he had created a stash of CS boats just in case? Shards in general are not tied to a system.

(Nalthis & Roshar) The shades the Ire defended against were also CSs outside their home system. Presumably so was Hoid's "raft". We do not not know which CSs can leave their home system. Hence we cannot conclude that somebody who has become a CS by virtue of being a sliver would suffer from that issue.

(Roshar)

The people who held the power of the well prior to Rashek could be still around though.

That would imply that he sent his soldiers into Shadesmar yet another way. That really does not simplify things. It just looks to me like opening a temporary perpendicularity is a power of unchained Bondsmiths in general.

Brandon Sanderson is a bloodthirsty butcher. He is just very nice about it. He won't torture somebody on screen, but megadeaths in the background is OK.

True. However, even if he cannot get that, even a continuation of the war would be preferable to a win So let us be comprehensive. Taravangian's preferences in order of decreasing desirability ought to be: Dalinar breaks the treaty. They come to an agreement more favorable to both sides to call the contest off. Neither a win or a loss Odium wins Dalinar wins Odium breaks the contract If you list the outcomes like that, it creates perverse consequences and incentives. In particular, if Dalinar were to face his nephew and cannot bring himself to kill him (would you depend on that if you were Odium?), Dalinar should kill himself. And that is the issue I see with child champion theories. Hence it seems to me that Taravangian will aim for outcome #3. However, I may be wrong. In particular, he may have found a way to guarantee outcome #3. If that is the case, Taravangian ought to demonstrate that and Dalinar should call the whole thing off. If I were Taravangian I would offer Dalinar to return all of Roshar against a release from the duell. Rayse thought that he could not leave Roshar behind. Taravangian need not necessarily hold that oppinion.

That still leaves a basic question unmentioned. As Odium wants to be out of the contest, will there be a contest and hence champions at all?

Is it aging? Is there a reason it would be different from hair of fingernails? And if we are talking about perception, wouldn't they think that Koloss blooded people keep growing?

Many people would say that the Cosmere is different from other works of fiction by having very hard magic systems. Yet, this is true to a lot of LitRPG and the Cosmere feels quite different. Though if I think about it more, I see another characteristic that applies at least to the early Cosmere: There are almost no magical objects. The Cosmere has no enchanted swords or chalices of immortality. Where it has those tropes it very much tries to subvert them. Shardblades are technically not objects. Nightblood is borderline. Even Honorblades are debatable.