Gilphon

So, like, a lot of Rosharan fauna has magic stuff incorporated into their biology. Gemhearts and what not. I imagine anti-Lifelight would be quite bad for those. But to a totally mundane creature, it'd probably just to a totally mundane stab. 

So, my main objection was 'wait, so all nine heralds have managed to avoid dying for the past 4000 years? I get that they don't age, but accidents happen'. 

But what if, for some reason, you need to use a living Shardblade to kill them? That would be a much more unlikely sequence of events, and it would explain why Nale thought that Radiants could cause a Desolation. 

Or Ishar just directly hacks into wherever the visions are and fakes the entire thing. 

And I do feel like Ishar is the only one who could do all this. Well Cultivation or Odium probably could, but it's doesn't seem like a thing either of them would do. 

Come to think of it, if this is Ishar, that's a way for Gavilar to be 'on the path to becoming a Bondsmith' without bonding a Bondsmith spren. Like if Ishar was intending for Gavilar to replace himself, or even just give his Blade to Gavilar. 

Personally, I was on the fence at first, but reading this discussion has convinced me that it makes a lot more sense for this to be Ishar than for it be the Stormfather. 

Another thing is that the Stormfather seems to indicate he never really understood why the Heralds would break until his bond with Dalinar let him see things from a human perspective. The spren is this chapter seems to understand that situation pretty well. 

For what it's worth, I do kind of question those WoB in this context. Like a paraphrased WoB from six years ago is the exactly kind of thing we have to reconsider now that we have new information available. Who knows, maybe Brandon actually said something like 'Gavilar was on his path for longer than Dalinar', and it just sounded like he meant the Bondsmith path from context?

And a WoB where Brandon says that Dalinar and Gavilar saw the same visions, but then cuts himself off from saying anything more concrete than 'Gavilar had a different reaction to them', and then he starts talking about how the Stormfather works in general terms? Really that just reads like Brandon talking around a spoiler. 

4 minutes ago, Nameless said:

The Stormfather could have been giving the visions, unaware of the fact that Gavilar was being fooled by some other force.

I feel like the Stormfather would've been able to tell. Like surely he could've heard Gavilar talking to himself, at the very least. 

So I'm thinking that it does kind of need to be either Chana or Vedel that died here- I would presume that what happened here is that whichever Herald died this chapter was sent to Braize for five years, and then broke sometimes around the end of WoK. Jezrien, Nale, Kalak and Shalash were at the palace, and weren't dying. Taln, Ishar and Battar are accounted for during those five years, and Pailiah more or less is.

And there's Vedel, where we just have no information whatsoever on her current whereabouts, and Chana, where all we actually know is that she appears onscreen at some point in the first two books. Which would make it more likely to be Vedel at first glance, but the theory people have been tossing around today about Chana's identity is a plausible one. 

2 hours ago, Ta'veren Kaladin said:

It could be the survival shard, which would mean the sunlight is it's way to train warriors to defend it(though it isn't working). Maybe I should write up a theory on this.

I'm pretty sure we know that the so-called survival Shard isn't tied to any particular planet, which is part of why I think the survival Shard is Invention. 

4 minutes ago, mdross81 said:

Alternatively, what if because of something that happens in SA5 oaths ... just aren't a thing anymore. What if the whole radiant-level system of control on Shardblades and Surgebinding goes by the wayside.

I'm inclined to think it's more of a Sigzil-specific thing. Because if huge sweeping and shocking changes to the nature of Surgebinding as a result of the events of SA5 was a thing that was important to the events this book, I don't think Brandon would be recommending we read this book before SA5. 

Also I don't think it's that the Night Brigade doesn't know that Sigzil if from Roshar; it's that they're going to follow Sigzil wherever he goes and going to visit his loved ones means that the Night Brigade would also show up to visit them. 

17 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

That is the full quote. Sigzil talked about oaths. Auxillary does not know about them. As whatever will have happened in SA 5 may have damaged a spren's mind, you cannot use that to say that Auxillary is not a radiant spren. But not knowing the oaths surely does not support the theory.

I assumed Aux was being passive aggressive here. Like how he's needling Sigzil about because responsible for his death. 

Don't worry, there's precedent that says you're allowed to eat a sock-shaped cake. 

4 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

Valor, the Shard, could find it funny or perhaps meaningful to test people in this way. Do we have any tidbits about her character?

Just what we know from the RoW epigraph; Harmony thinks she's reasonable (at least in comparason to Whimsy and Mercy) and that she might be willing to help against Odium, and that she wants to talk to Hoid again. Which would admittedly be a bit of large ask if this is what her planet is like, but maybe that's why Hoid hasn't been talking to her and Harmony was just missing the subtext. 

On the contrary, this tells us that Roshar is still there and there are still people who care about Sigzil living there. That's more assurance than we used to have that things will turned out alright. 

Even Sigzil's disbelief at seeing Kaladin reads more like the impossibility of Kaladin just randomly showing up on an alien world than implying something bad's happened to him. 

I'm also think about that Invested sunlight. There's quite a lot in Investiture being constantly beamed onto this planet- even Taldain's sun doesn't have effects that immediate. We've never seen power on this scale on display without a Shard being directly responsible. 

So, if we assume there's a Shard in the sun like Autonomy's in Taldain's star, the question becomes which one. Nothing about this set-up is Merciful, and it doesn't feel particularly Whimsy either. Invention is possible, but I don't get the sense they settled into a single world. So that leaves Valor and the one remaining unknown Shard. 

An interesting note here is that is seems to be quite far in the future- Sigzil thinks of guns and such as modern weapons, seems to have be travelling the Cosmere for quite some time, sees things like electricity and hoverbikes as things he's encountered on many world, Scadrian tech has spread quite far- but it still thinks that there are people who love him back on Roshar. People he's worried about leading the Night Brigade back to. 

He didn't directly mention Ashyn- but the reference to floating cities on a planet close to home is pretty clear in context. We're clearly not on Ashyn and this book clearly isn't Silence Divine. 

Invention isn't particularly close to Prudence, but that was a name Paleo provided. But Invention does imply knowledge, and study, and ingenuity, which gets at stuff that's pretty conceptually close to Wisdom. Close enough that before he settled on the name 'Invention', Brandon could've plausibly being thinking of it when he said that there was a Shard with an Intent similar to Wisdom. Plus the way Harmony talks about Invention makes me think of the survival Shard. 

I'm of the opinion that the Shard being referred to in that WoB is Invention. 

Certainly possible. It also might just be something that takes centuries of practice before you can pull it off reliably. Or just something that Shallan hasn't quite figured out yet. 

I think the force fields are just a more advanced application of Lightweaving. Like we've already seen that Shallan can imbue her illusions with a little 'weight'. 

1 hour ago, Dakaladin said:

It's probably being told to a scadrian worldhopper who has visited Roshar as the person he is telling it to would be familiar with electric lights but aware of cultures on Roshar. Also he mentions Scadrial while telling the story as well.

Other way round makes a lot more sense to me. A Rosharan worldhopper who's visited Scadrial. Like he's making references to things from all over the Cosmere, and at one point implies he's on Scadrial, but the metaphors are Rosharan.