LewsTherinTelescope

Liar of Partinel sample chapters. Can find the links in this thread.

I mean, they apparently use Tamu Keks for communications sometimes, so Mraize and co are already using the bones of a sapient being as a cell phone. The lady loves Hemalurgy and thinks it's cool to watch the death of a Shard. Seems she's a bit desensitized to some things by now. Aetherpulp is only mentioned in the samples in the context of Duskr, not Amberite.

She peeks between Realms using it a ton. If you have an eBook, you can do a search for "Shadesmar" and a decent number of the results will be her using it (though since part of the book is in Shadesmar, obviously not all the results, lol). Doesn't ever teleport from location to location, though. Also, another point on this that I forgot: If Elsecallers are the best with Transportation and Lightweavers the best with Illumination, which order is best at Soulcasting? And if Lightweavers are best at Illumination and Edgedancers are best with Progression, which Surge are Truthwatchers best at? Every attempt I've seen to set "primary Surges" for the orders runs into an issue with missing one order/Surge or another, or ends up with counterintuitive results like Lightweavers being better at Soulcasting than Lightweaving (which is certainly not universally true).

Both of the Elsecaller Surges center around traveling to the Cognitive Realm. Makes sense that they spend a lot more time there, whereas the other two would have to split their time between Realms to train with both Surges properly, and ultimately with Elsecallers being around it's not as important for them to anyway, so they probably didn't train as much. Don't see why that requires them to be inherently better with one Surges, especially when again our Elsecaller almost never uses it and seems to be kinda bad at it, while our Willshaper uses it constantly.

I mean, the sapience part isn't really compatible, but that's about it. There's literally a group called "The Order of Amberite" that has rose-colored crystals embedded in them (though Yunmi's is in her forearm just above her wrist instead of the center of her palm like Raeth's), so I don't see why Amberite existing in canon rules out the changes that were tried in Liar from being canon too.

Wow, can't believe nobody saw this version of the battle coming! So obvious now that you say it

I took Brandon's comment to mean that not all the ones he played with adding got kept (for example, Syl is probably not going to show up on Lor anymore lmao), but agreed that if he does mean he cut some of the original six, Bestarin is likely to have not made it. I still have no idea what the heck is actually going on with Order and Chaos... they seem almost like Ruin and Preservation, except for the fact that Decay is completely separate from them. Sub-Shards of the Former, maybe? Except the Former still has full power, seemingly, despite Order and Chaos (called "that which makes", iirc) existing separately.... So Night and Illuminous are not actually associated with opposite Shards, just opposite... Splinters? Sub-Intents? Something else? Oh, except someone with powers from Chaos touching the Verdant source is fatal iirc.... which makes no sense if Order and Chaos are the same Shard. (Also, Order and Chaos get referred to as Sha and Lum at one point, which based on the Conqueror sample chapter from MB Prime seem to have become Ruin and Pres, so it makes even less sense. I have no goddamn clue what to make of them and have agonized over this for months lmao.) If I had to guess, I think Night and Illuminous will still be around, but perhaps renamed, and as just teleportation instead of raw divine power like they currently are. This seems most likely to me. Though it's still sorta weird. But then, the fact anti-Investiture is relevant to controlling them at all is weird. I wrote up a post on it some time back, if that helps. Crystal is probably Amberite, as others mentioned. Basically budget Shardplate and Shardblade. Lets the user grow magic super strong crystals from it. The stain... possibly also Amberite? The crystals dissolve into dust, if I recall correctly, so maybe those stain? We see a bit of them in the Liar of Partinel sample chapters, and they seem to all start sapient, but lose both power and their minds over time and/or as they're transferred. Unclear if this is how it remains in canon or not. Quite plausible. If I remember, we see the source of the Verdant aethers in AoN, and it's a giant vine thing that presumably the others got split off of. So those are probably the ancient crafty powerful ones.

Shades are really weird because, while they wither you, they also seem to Invest you, since they make you hang around as a Shadow...

I'm pretty sure Venli has used Transportation far more than Jasnah xD And I think that's just because Abrasion makes you slippery while Progression heals the dead, one of those is a bigger deal to focus on than the other.

WoB is that that's mostly just a meta thing to avoid overwhelming readers, more than a hard and fast rule on the way things work. (For example, while Shallan is horrid at Soulcasting, this is explicitly noted in-world to mostly just be a thing she personally is not good at and the rest are better, as opposed to an order-wide thing.)

Venli checks Shadesmar multiple times throughout the book while the suppressor is on. Edit: ah, ninja'd

Venli can use Voidlight for either Surge, but only Progression worked with Lift. So while fuel matters, it's not the answer in this case.

I don't think they'll be a major Shard in SA if so, just a scene or two like that and maybe a letter, but I do think it'd be a smart move on Brandon's part to demonstrate why Valor is its own independent Shard of the sixteen, instead of being included in Honor and Odium or Honor and Devotion or something. Why would that be the case for Adhesion but not Progression, which has demonstrated similar weirdness via Lift and matches Cultivation's Intent similarly closely to how Adhesion matches Honor's?

Huh, that is weird. Maybe the Diagram had spies there and he knew about the fall of the Shin prior to disbanding?

Tbf, we don't have the audio, so we don't actually know how he said that. (Now, I don't really want them to be honorspren, but Brandon looooves his sneaky answers...)

I saw an interesting suggestion with this: The lines immediately preceding the emotion sound like they might be external in source, the description is extremely reminiscent structurally of the descriptions of Shardic Intents such as Odium and the Mistborn ones, the lines are all not just bravery but specifically selfless bravery and glory, and the one Shard that Harmony suggested might be most willing to help if Hoid approached her again was Valor... I don't believe this is confirmed? (I mean, it seems likely, but then almost all the Death Rattles are about the future and not the past, so...) Probably pulled from the Spiritual, I'd guess, same as when Stormfather makes Stormlight. Wasn't that due to the Honorblade, which last he saw it had been in the hands of his father? I forget, why does Szeth think he knew, again? Probably, though I dunno if Teft was really getting redemption in that scene considering he'd been pushing through things for a while now. Imo, Odium's lying when he says he can't grant Adhesion, he just doesn't want to give the Fused the potential to Connect to another source of power and remove their dependence on him. Huh, weirddd....

Annoyingly, that just confirms they aren't honorspren-human, not that they aren't pure honorspren or honorspren-singer...

I'm actually more worried about it going the other direction. Imo, Ishar's plan is to use spren to reforge the Oathpact, since unlike humans, they can't break their oaths. And as someone mentioned above, honorspren survive the longest in his experiments, and Syl is becoming more humanlike as the bond progresses...

Imo, the main difference is just that they can hold Light indefinitely while using it on themselves for some reason, combined with having thousands of years of practice and more advanced scientific knowledge. But Brandon's spoken about it a bit differently, so I dunno. The Fused are weird.

[Warbreaker]

Ah, I forgot about those, good catch. Wouldn't say that's really the same thing as an Alerter, though.

I've liked Abrasion & Dustbringers, loosening inhibitions and self-control. That could make sense. I'd guess probably normal Voidspren, because a distinction is usually drawn between Enlightened spren and true Voidspren, and stormspren are usually just called a type of Voidspren, not anything else. Well, probably not really, since we see the Dawnsingers in Venli's vision using Surges, and Ashynites did so. Also, Brandon counts the Honorblades as a mechanical means of access, so they may be more analogous to a Soulcaster than anything else. How does that prove that in the past swearing Ideals didn't give Radiants stronger Surgebinding? Not the same as an attractor. I forget, when do we see spren doing that? And how does that explain any of the fabrial types there? Which spren does that outside a fabrial? That's fair. Sure, but it'd be sort of odd for Brandon to count fabrials as the third if there was a direct parallel to the other two. (And again, Radiance is of both H&C.) Doesn't have to be a Surgebinding equivalent (and in fact, the difficulty Khriss has in fitting Voidbinding in would seem to point to Voidbinding being not a direct parallel either). "Voidbringer", not "Voidbinder". Raboniel mentions that the Fused generally weren't able to convince them to. I dunno, I wouldn't say Nightwatcher boons feel particularly equivalent to me, but I can see where you're coming from. But Sja-anat directly compares her power to Transformation, and Raboniel is explicitly said to be using Transformation during her corruption attempt. I'm not sure that someone trying to act ten accusing something of being essentially a demon is a great source of reliable information. Very good question. I assume the same way she knows things like the terminology around Lashings, be that Shadesmar, Shin contacts, etc. Not likely, last we heard White Sand is post-Aharietiam.

Oh jeez. That's scary. Ah, that quote. I took it to be more referring to how they think Honor "make the Surge into natural law" like cometaryorbit mentions, but that could be it as well, yeah. Hm, could be. I mostly just took the claim that Cohesion is bound as knowledge being out-of-date and it being another example of rules from past Desolations not applying, but Bondsmiths are pretty weird so who knows. I can't find him saying that, do you have the link offhand?

Yeah, WoB is that microkinesis apparently sometimes led to accidental nuclear fission reactions, which is..... "fun". Which is sorta weird, because the restrictions seem to have gone away for all the Bondsmiths even before he died (Melishi was bonded to the Sibling and did things previously forbidden, so it's not just Stormfather weirdness). I'm curious whether the restrictions truly are still there on Cohesion, or if Khriss just found a record that mentioned it and didn't realize that this had changed. I don't see where the referenced chapter confirms the Fused are also bound, do you know more specifically what it said? Dalinar and Melishi seem to imply that Bondsmiths in general are now unchained, not just the Honorblades.

That's because the Honorblades are a special thing. Source? Heatrials? Painrials? Alerters? Attractors? Conjoiners? There isn't one, as far as we know. Fabrials, Surgebinding, and Voidbinding are the three systems. (Besides, Surgebinding is of both Honor and Cultivation.) We know very little of how Yelig-nar actually works, but burning up your soul to gain powers could quite possibly be a form of Voidbinding, though not necessarily Surges in particular with non-Yelig-nar things. We know that "all of [the Unmade] have some relevance to precognition", supposedly, so there's presumably a bit more than meets the eye there, since Yelig-nar's power does not have much obvious connection to futuresight. There's exactly one mention of Voidbinding outside the Ars Arcanum, and basically the only thing we know about it from there is it involves seeing the future in some form. Though, we do know it usually (but not always) "originates with the Unmade": And we know Renarin is the first of his kind, so "with the Unmade" can't just mean from Sja-anat's corrupted spren. (Also, Sja-anat directly compares her Enlightenment to the Surge of Transformation, and guess what Raboniel was said to have used to corrupt the Sibling? And we know that while it's not quite one-to-one, the Unmade do correlate with the nine non-Bondsmith orders to an extent. So the Unmade having ties to Odious interpretations of the Surges, or "Voids" if you prefer that terminology, seems to be implied imo, and it would make sense if that was similar to the expressions in Voidbinding.)