Gilphon

I feel like it's also a function of Voidlight acting differently than Stormlight. Like Voidlight isn't constantly trying to escape the way Stormlight is.

What Truthwatcher was getting at is that they're not using the Aluminium hemalurgically. It's not made into spikes that deprive their victims of their powers, it's just being used to block Shardblades.

A bit of both. I'm thinking they're mostly chumps with some genuinely dangerous individuals mixed in. But, like, anyone who thinks that causing a desolation is a good plan can't be all that competent.

I feel like that would at least warrant a mention. Shallan's talking like Amaram was their leader, which as far as we understand was never true. What this scene kind of feels like is reducing the SoH from an organization to one or two characters, so that after Ialai and Restares are dealt with we don't have to go 'but what about all the other SoH that presumably existed?'

Come to think of it, Mraize referred to the SoH as 'Restares' cronies' at one point, didn't he? So if Shallan doesn't know about him, then Mraize has deliberately mislead her about the SoH's leadership.

So, the Sons of Honor have always been a bastardized version of Vorinism, which itself was a bastardized version of the real events, but under Ialai they seem to have become a bastardized version of themselves. Like, the original idea was to cause a Desolation to bring back the Heralds, which is vaguely adjacent to a thing that could happen. But now the Desolation is well underway, so they've been forced to get a lot vaguer about how the intend to bring back the Heralds. And although they talk about Radiants in general being a good thing, Ialai making them oppose Dalinar means that practice they have to work against the Radiants, so that had invent some story about Dalinar bonding a 'false spren', whatever the heck that means, in order to justify that. It really feels like Ialai's work to turn them into an anti-Dalinar conspiracy has brought them even further away from being anything real. And them not being used to being questioning as throughly as Shallan did despite being a fairly wackadoodle cult is not a good sign for the quality of their recruits. Plus there was that line about Shallan showing Passion, implying there's still some Odium influence in them.

That line about Heralds plural being impressed by the Airship. So not just Shalash. Taln on a good day, or have one of the others shown up? It's weird to see Kaladin referring to Shalash by a nickname. I guess meeting the real people has kind of broken the idea of the Heralds as divinities for him. Shallan doesn't seem to know about Restares at all. She seems to think that Amaram was the leader of the Sons of Honor, and that Ialai filled the power vacuum after his death. That could be trouble; he's still a character that needs to be roped into the plot somehow. More emphasis on the Heavenly Ones having a thing about one-on-one duels. It really does feel like an Oath, doesn't it? Especially with other Fused not seeming to care about it. Fifty-four Heavenly Ones in a single place, and Kaladins doesn't seem to think that that's all of them. Even if we assume that they're the largest order, we still get that there are probably hundreds of Fused in total.

I now feel like the Sibling has to be in the Gemstone Column. Like the only reason I can think of why they wouldn't be able to infuse it is if it was already full with something, at which point the Sibling is just the obvious answer.

It's weird, though. I kind of wish I could ignore the WoBs stating that there's a connection between Larkin and Lycerin. Because Lycerin having gemhearts defined marks them as native to Roshar. But Larkin are just so unlike everything! You'd think, that if they were native, we'd be able to see close evolutionary relatives of theirs! But nothing else has evolved to eat Stormlight, even though that's an obviously very useful adaptation. IDK, it's weird and the idea of Larkin being a larval form of a Greatshell hunted for Gemhearts bothers me a lot.

My assumption was that the purpose of the Aluminium was to stop the counterweights from affecting each other. So you don't have to worry about accidentally launching the Chull team at the Shattered Plains into the sky. I don't know exactly how that would work, mind you, but it seems like an important possibility to cover for.

I'm on the same page there. There's still a lot we don't know about Shallan's mother and the events leading up to her death. But also- Shallan's plotline is apparently about Iaiai Sadeas and the Sons of Honor, both of which are distinctly c-list antagonists at this point. So I find myself hoping that we move through the storyline pretty quickly.

Meta reasons why I'm sure it's Transportation: It's the Willshaper book, Brandon's gonna want to show off the Willshaper powerset, and this is a good opportunity to show it in action before we get into the nuts and bolts of how it works. Having Transformation (or really, any the other Surges) be able to more or less perfectly replicate Teleportation is a needless amount of overlap between the surges; it just makes them less unique if you start allowing for stuff like that. Kaladin thinks 'oh, this must be the Transportation Fused' when he sees the ability in action. Brandon's just intentionally confusing the reader if that's not the case, which would not be wise of him, since keeping ten different magic system straight in the average reader's mind is not an easy task. Additionally, perfectly replicating an entire Singer body is far more complicated than anything else we've ever seen Soulcasting do. Doing so multiple times in quick succession strains credulity. And if he's already doing all the work of reconstructing an entire functioning nervous system three times in as many seconds, saying that also reconstructing whatever weapons or clothes he happens to him with him at the time is beyond him would be a very arbitrary limitation. And if did have control over Transformation that's that perfect, there were a bunch of things he could've done to Kaladin that would've been more effective than trying to grapple him. Really he'd be limited by nothing but his own imagination. Like, transmute the air around him to stone so he's perfectly incased in rock, just off the top of my head.

With difficulty, in a way that the Fused could muscle his way through. Not good enough to force the knife out by itself, y'see?

So we've seen this 'crumble into dust' effect in two other places in the past, to my recollection: When you regrow Shardplate, the scattered old bits collapse into dust to be replaced by the new bits you're growing, so you don't have to go around picking up every piece you lost. When Wyndle moves, he grows a new piece of himself and the trail behind him collapses into dust. The overall amount of Wyndle present is still the same, but he's moving by growing rather locating normally. I'm not sure what exactly is going on, but I feel confident that the principle behind this Fused's powers are the same. Teleportation via creating a new body in a new location and the old you crumbling into nothing.

He probably couldn't Lash the knife if it was still attached to the Fused's body, though.

So I feel reasonably confident that what he's doing is some form of Transportation, in any case. Which is a powers we really don't have a good understanding of; Jasnah's only used it a few times and doesn't seem to be all that good with it.

I think if he was soulcasting, he'd be able to take objects with him. And there'd be no reason for him to leave a body behind / have the cast-off body collapse into dust.

The Gravitation Fused always accept when Kaladin challenges them to single combat, but this Transportation Fused has no such hang-ups. Makes me think that they might also have swear oaths of some kind to access their powers. Though probably not the same ones as the Radiants. Kaladin is 'most familiar' with the Gravitation Fused. Are they actually the most numerous, or just the ones most likely to be sent to deal with Kaladin? The Fused do not have infinite voidlight; they have to carry around spheres like everyone else. I would guess, given that even the fuel-efficient Fused can only do that teleporting trick three times before needing to re-fuel, that it's too stormlight intensive for Radiants to pull off with the same kind of effectiveness. Except, Venli, as a Singer in an order with Teleportation, could very well be able to do it. Interesting to see the way the Fused's physical features back up his magical ones. He can't take objects with him when he teleports, so he has thick hair that acts as clothes and built-in weapons. Hmm. You need to drain a gem of stormlight to make a Fabrial, and there's no commonly known way of doing that. But the highest ranking members of the artefabrian guilds know a way that they're very careful to keep secret from the rest of the world. Perhaps the Skybreakers weren't the only Order that secretly survived. Also, further indications that the scouring of Aimia was a war, not a magical cataclysm of some kind. It's harder to imagine how Dai-Gonartis could've been the principle cause. Lots of Edgedancers and Windrunners, but no mention of the other orders. We saw in Shadesmar that the Cultivationspren seemed to be the most strongly pro-Radiant type of spren, so that fits; once they saw that things weren't immediately headed for Recreance 2.0, they came back in force. I would guess that the majority of Windrunners we see are squires, and there are still a relatively small number of Honorspren accepting bonds.

Small detail I want to discuss: an expression that goes through Navani's head when she's looking at Gavilar's body. So, Father of Storms of course sounds like a name for the Stormfather. But Mother of the World does not sound like a name for the Nightwatcher or Sibling; it sounds like a name for Cultivation. Which would make 'Father of Storms' Honor, rather than the Stormfather. Or perhaps a figure that's a weird mash-up of the two. Either way, it's an expression about deities that are decidedly not the Vorin divinities. A Sign of pre-Vorin culture lurking behind the scenes of Alethi culture in the form of expressions, like that time Shallan said 'Mother Cultivation' in the same way we'd say 'Mother Nature'? Or a sign that Navani might have a bit of a different cultural background? Jasnah had to get her anti-Vorin sentiments from somewhere, after all.

Thoughts: That Fused clearly had experience fighting Windrunners, but was surprised by Kaladin's competence. Implying that Kaladin's spear talent is not a Windrunner thing. Good world building note with Kaladin considering a wooden house to be decadent. Although I'm not certain how much of that was him letting his bias against Lighteyes take control. The Fused seemed to be relying purely on Transportation, not using Transformation or Cohesion at all. Further supporting evidence for the idea that each order of Fused only gets a single surge. Confirmation that the Fused's respawn timers are tied to the Everstorm's period. The voidlight Fabrial. Do we think this is a Fabrial made with a captive voidspren, or a regular spren that's been fed voidlight instead of Stormlight? Either way I don't know why it would impede the Nahel Bond. I briefly toyed with the idea that it might be voidlight-fed Windspren, but that wouldn't have shut down Edgedancer powers. Roshone. Elhokar writ small, in a lot of ways. He was not a good man. He was far more directly responsible for the death of Moash's grandparents than Elhokar was. But, from what we've seen, the Desolation seemed to have brought out the best in him. Making a genuine effort to be better, to do whatever he could to help against the Fused. But Moash didn't see any of that. He saw Kaladin's Oaths forcing him to help a man who deserved to die. Which has a note of truth to it; Kaladin certainly wouldn't have rushed to help Roshone without the Oaths. But Moash also killed two other people who did nothing to deserve it; he can't make a coherent claim to the moral high ground here.

So the sword looks regular sword-sized, not giant anime sword-sized. Which makes me think it's an honorblade. And, y'know, it would probably be easier to find Ishar's blade than it would be to convince the Nightwatcher or Sibling to bond somebody. And yeah, this lady looks Azish, so it's quite possibly someone we haven't met. Or she could be one of viziers.

This, of course, is also a function of the unified Alethkar being a pretty young nation. The highprinces are not used to being members of a team; they're used to running their individual princedom independently

Really where I'm at is that it'd want to see what the spren think of it before passing judgement. Really there's probably room for nuance; like lots of Rosharan fauna depend on sprenbonds to survive, and that's probably the same principle as fabrials. And although it's not clear what the spren get out of it, the Mandra certainly don't seem like they're being forced to do their part. And the oathgate spren don't seem to mind being an oathgate. But meanwhile we've seen that spren have a big problem with people using dead Shardblades- the most tolerate among them recognize the practical value of it, but still find the idea creepy and really wish that the humans would stop doing it. And the less tolerant just directly call it slavery. And, of course, spren fishing is illegal is some places. So it's not totally black and white; I'd want to know how the higher spren actually see it before making up my mind. At the very least, we don't see Syl or Pattern or the Stormfather having the same viscerally negative reaction to fabrials as they do to Shardblades, so they don't consider it to be as bad as that.

No, yeah, he mostly certainly did not champion self-expression and freedom of choice for all.

There should be some survivors of the battle. Venli doesn't know what happened to them, but it seem likely that they're being used as spare bodies for the Fused. Also I wouldn't be surprised if some of the awakened Parsh managed to catch Odium's eye and got chosen to become a Regal.