Xardan Ta'Caran

No worries sir! I didn't actually take it as a challenge to the point. I didn't make that very clear before, but I truly appreciate the clarification of the facts. I hate it when I mess stuff like that up. ;-)

My mistake @Quantus. You are absolutely correct. But the point still stands. At least a few of them could see all spren and I think that would include most of their leaders (not positive, but it keeps hinting that Rock was somewhat of a leader in the Peaks). Perhaps the leaders seeing Moelach is what is causing the issue. They consider spren gods, so if Moelach were to tell them to attack another peak, they would likely listen. But this is all conjecture anyway. I could be horribly off base. lol.

Something to consider on this front: Rock made it sound like going to this transition point was something of a "rite of passage" for Horneaters. If that is the case, then every single young Horneater is approaching that transition point between realms, which could be causing them to see the future that Honor showed to Dalinar, which could be driving them mad. But even if that isn't the case, every Horneater can see the spren around them. If Moelach is chilling in their home that by itself may be what is "very wrong" with the peaks. Every Horneater may just be able to see Moelach and it's scaring all of them to various extents. In either case I do agree that Moelach has to have other purposes, but those are my immediate thoughts on what is going on in the Peaks.

If I can toss this out there I have another opinion on this and here it is: Dalinar did order the deaths of every person in the Rift and ordered Sadeas to post his men at the mouth of the Rift to make sure nobody escaped, but in that same battle he ordered Sadeas to allow any and all survivors to escape. To this, Sadeas responds that his men had set the base of the Rift on fire. So the long and the short is the question of who is truly responsible for the lack of survivors at the Rift? Dalinar or Sadeas? Not trying to absolve Dalinar, he still ordered it, but if his orders had been carried out as he had ordered, there would have been survivors and those that he could have made recompense to in some way. Becuase of Sadeas' independent choices and actions, there was nobody left. Just food for thought on that.

I think a LOT of this boils down to one thing: Odium can see Honor's visions that were left behind. I think I agree that Honor and Cultivation were in on the same plan and they could have provided MUCH more detail to Dalinar about what had happened and what needed to happen, but if they did that and Odium intercepted one of those key visions their entire plan would be thrown to the dogs. The other side of that is that perhaps Honor and Cultivation knew that Dalinar was the key to the whole thing, but they also knew that many others had the chance of seeing those visions from the Stormfather, so they couldn't really put specific information for him out there. We know from various places that at least two other people were given the visions by the Stormfather before he chose Dalinar. Every time I read these books I get the feeling that Honor wants to reveal more, but is unable to for reasons we don't know and I also feel like these are the most likely reasons. I'd love to see Cultivation come out of the woodworks and start helping the coalition much more than she has in the past now that Dalinar is in the correct place and is sure that Dalinar is staying with the Coalition. Odium did choose him as a Champion, so there was a chance that Dalinar could have broken right then even with Cultivation helping him through all of it.

If you're going to continue writing this story you might also want to read the book called "The Redemption of Althalus" by Eddings & Eddings. It's a very different situation, but luck is being granted by a specific god to the main character (Althalus) and is then withdrawn at a specific point to create a specific result (I'd give more detail but I don't want to spoil the book in case anyone wants to read it). This all happens fairly early in the book so you wouldn't even need to read the entire novel, but it gives another take on luck that you can draw ideas from. I also really like this ideology along with: Between these two ideas you could have a very well written and well balanced story about a very lucky person who manages to hurt those around them unintentionally. This sounds like an awesome story to me.

I appreciate the input @Ammanas! I'll look into all of the above.

Thanks for the suggestion @Ammanas, but it looks like Orbit requires authors to have an agent that submits manuscripts for them and I'm trying to do this without having to pay an agent (at least until I have someone who wants to buy the rights to my book). Any other suggestions?

Hey everyone! I'm hoping for some assistance for myself and hopefully many others in the future. As many of you may know I (and my cousin) am now a self-published author through Amazon. If you're interested in what I've written please visit my website at Khesyc.com. Anyway, The reason for this post is to ask all of you to help me find a real publisher for my book. In that, I'm hoping everyone can look at their favorite fantasy/sci-fi novels and tell me the name of the publishing company as I'm not the best in the world at finding a good list of publishers. Obviously I know of TOR and Tom Doherty as some of the major publishers, but I was hoping you guys could help out with additional ones. Let me know if you have any other possibilities. And I want it to be known that we won't turn down a "small town" publisher if there is one that's willing to take up the cause of my book. Thanks in advance everyone!

Knowing that I could make one more suggestion that may work. If you're going for vibrational energy entirely you could have him go to a place where he feels heartbeats. That would allow him to automatically tune in to sentient beings only and it would play in to the vibrations. Then you could have it be more like the beating of when someone senses allomancy as his way of tracking it. From there he could easily still "tune" himself in to (just for example) the human frequency or the animal frequency. If you do your research right you could even base that on typical heart rates of the different species and have it be those heart rates that let him know what each is. That would also entail a lot of learning about the different creatures in the world to learn how each "beat" applies to each type of creature.

Glad I could help! And I'm also glad that the inherent information came through (at least to one reader). That's hard to get across in some situations, but you've done it well here.

How about "Physardry?" A mix between Physics and Wizardry. But barring something like that, you could just not name your magic system. I've read quite a few books that I've VERY much enjoyed that don't actually name the magic, they only define it. Just some examples are Terry Goodkind's magic system (Additive and Subtractive magic) & L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (Order and Chaos). Not sure if that will work for you, but those are my first thoughts.

Have you thought of the possibility of him "seeing" the frequencies of everything when he first enters this realm of sensing other minds, but then he "tunes" the frequencies to only be sentient beings since they're the only ones he can affect? That might give you a good way to make his power grow and help others understand it a little better. That aside I would say that when you say they use vibrations and frequencies to locate people my imagination immediately goes to something like echolocation (I'm picturing the screen from The Dark Knight that allowed Batman to "see" all of the bad guys at the end). Using the "tuning" could allow you to make the place where he goes more interesting because he could begin by being overloaded for just a second while he hones in on the correct frequency, then all he sees clearly are the people and the sentient minds and all of the other "garbage" is kept at bay.

I quite like that actually. My only suggestion would be to reorder the words when he says "His mind was gory. That was bad. Unfortunate. Upsetting. Unpleasant. Unfavorable. Unlucky. Who decided that un was bad?" I'd reorder it to "Upsetting. Unfortunate. Unpleasant. Unfavorable. Unlucky." That way it keeps all of the "Un's" together and I think it would flow better. Honestly though, I don't think it's too extensive. I think if this was the end of his moment it would be a great length of time for the ravings of a madman and it would give someone a good scope of where his madness is leading him. I do have to say that I like these ravings as well. It makes him seem like he was a very intelligent person and that intelligence is now forcing him to fixate on silly parts of words.

I may be the only person on this forum who thinks so, but I have to say that Szeth is by far my favorite character so far as far as TSA goes. His development from the first to the third is just plain incredible. But welcome to the forums! We're always glad to see new people out here!

Come on man. You gotta get it right. It's falling, not flying. On a side note, welcome to the forums! I just self published my first novel as well. There are a few of us out here who are aspiring writers. Come visit us in the Creator's Corner if you want ideas or to share your insight!

Thanks! It's super exciting and was 15 years in the making. I'm just glad it's finally up and running!

Hey everyone, I wanted to share this with my fellow Sanderfans right after my family, but my book is finally published on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1084156377/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=knight+of+strolm&qid=1564516998&s=gateway&sr=8-2 The link above is for the paperback, but the ebook option is out there as well. Have a look if you're interested and if you read it, please review it on Amazon for me! Shoutout to @Koh, who did the cover art for us! Thanks everyone! P.S. I checked with moderators to make sure I wasn't breaking rules by posting this here. ;-) Thanks @Argent

Welcome to the club Sleepless! I think it wouldn't be too far off for me to say that there are a LOT of us who have only joined this fan forum and for a lot of the same reasons you did. There are a ridiculous amount of posts about theories and ideas about every topic you've mentioned above, so feel free to dig and and contribute! I look forward to hearing from another Sanderson fan!

So I have two thoughts on this. First, I should have worded that better. I should have said "chose the moment of his death and used it to trap Odium" rather than saying "chose to die." That one is my bad. I should've been a little more clear. Second (and with that being said), I do believe that Odium killed him, just like Ruin killed preservation, but preservation had already put plans in place to resolve that issue. That's more what I was alluding to. I think Honor put plans in place to ensure that Odium couldn't leave and that there would be some kind of a chance of stopping Odium permanently. My apologies for the misstep there. :-) EDIT I realized I didn't mention the visions. It was proven in Oathbringer that Odium can see the visions. I think Honor intentionally left out the sensitive information of choosing that moment of death so that Odium wouldn't ever discover the secret. That way it gave the people of Roshar a fighting chance.

Agreed. I had just assumed that Tanavast trapped Odium to begin with, then chose to die to ensure that trap stayed in place. Happy to admit if I'm wrong, but it makes sense to me that he knew he wasn't going to be able to keep it up indefinitely, so he chose to die to ensure the trap wouldn't fail. Realize I've also read almost no WoB's about any of this. Just theories according to little ole me.

Sorry. All of my information has to do with spoilers from Oathbringer. Please don't read that unless you've finished the book.

I've actually had a theory for quite a while that Tanavast chose his moment of death both to preserve his spren and to trap Odium on Roshar. I think he has a plan very similar to what Ati did on his planet and that there's something that's going to cause Tanavast's shard to come back into play eventually.