Gilphon

I kind of suspect that the Healing you get from holding Stormlight works on a different principle from the surge of Progression- Stormlight healing, as we know, it Spiritual-based, it technically doesn't heal, but rather alters you to match your self-image. Progression, meanwhile, feels to me like it's more about acceleration and strengthening what would happen naturally. Which is why it can make plants grow from seeds instantly, and fully heal Renarin faster than Stormlight alone can, but it can't fix old injuries. So in Rysn's case, her body's natural healing process is complete, so there's nothing for Renarin to accelerate and strengthen.

Re-Shephir understands swords, yes, but trying to use Nightblood like he's regular sword is probably among the least effective ways one can use him. So just toss him and run like hell; it might take awhile for him to kill her, but she might never realize that using him freely is a bad idea.

I still don't still how the power source is gonna be an issue; surely there's an entire Unmade right there that he can use for that task. I didn't realize that breaking off physical contact wasn't enough to protect the wielder from him, though; that legitimately makes this tactic a lot less viable. Maybe tossing him at Re-Shephir's feet could work? I feel like she doesn't quite have the creativity needed to make good use of a weapon she's never seen before, so it wouldn't be completely suicidal. But I cannot imagine that being a good idea with any of the other Unmade we've seen in action.

Sorry, for clarification, why exactly would you need a whole bunch of investiture with you to use Nightblood against an Unmade? Like, you'd obviously need some in order to safely unsheathe him in the first place, but once that's done, couldn't you just kind of stick him in there and led him feed off the Unmade?

I mean, personally I'm sceptical of the idea that it would be that easy. But I would describe it as an experiment that's well worth trying. Maybe test it out on Ashertmarn; he feels like the one that's least likely to attack pre-emptively and ruin the science.

My understanding was that they lived in what became the Warcamps. Perhaps they had an underground complex there that they used to hide from the storms in?

Yeah, Voidspren and corrupted spren are two different things- the former are spren created by Odium's influence- his equivalent of the Honorspren and Cultivationspren. It seems the Oathpact considers the difference between them and the Fused to be sufficiently esoteric that it catches them both- and indeed there are a few times when we've seen the word Voidspren being used to refer to Fused who currently lack bodies. Whereas corrupted spren are products of Sja-Anat's ability, serving her rather than serving Odium directly. They probably shouldn't be affected by the Oathpact, since they're tied to Sja-Anat, who definitely isn't. As far as we know, corrupting sapient spren like Glys and the Kholinar Oathgate is something she's learned how to do recently, so creatures like Ulim and Yixli, who appear to have been as they for quite a while, can be inferred to something different.

I mean, my personal instinct on this topic is 'given that the perfect gems are the only way we know of to get rid of the Unmade, risking one by trying something like this is a really bad idea'.

So to me, the real question here is whether the Voidspren are native to Braize, or if they're just trapped there as result of the Oathpact. If it's the former, then spren are probably a phenomenon that spans the entire Roshar system, and would therefore also exist on Ashyn. If not, and Odium presence hasn't spawned any native spren on Braize in the past ten thousands years, then we can conclude that spren are unique to Roshar the planet, and therefore wouldn't be present on Ashyn.

I've been thinking that the complete and total conquest we see in the present day may be a lot more recent than we've been led to believe- I feel it's possibly it's a post-Recreance thing, since that's the point where enslaving the entire race could be done easily- but the Eila Stele implies that the humans started reaching beyond Shinovar while their arrival was a living memory. The Iriali, it should be mentioned, are also visually distinct from other Rosharan humans. It's not quite as noticeable as the Shin, since the Iriali aren't nearly as xenophobic and have therefore been intermarrying at a decent rate, but they're still an obviously different ethnicity from, say, the Alethi, or the Reshi. So the idea of most Rosharans being descendant from them doesn't really work.

I mean, a war that directly leads to the creation of the Fused and the Desolations and the Oathpact cannot possibly be a small scale one. But, because I want to move past this particular disagreement and lay out some things I've been musing about: The wording of the Eila Stele does support the idea that things went bad within a human lifetime- the writer speaks emotionally about before the pity they felt as they took the humans in, and the anger at the subsequent betrayal, as if they were present of both events. And the writer claims that the humans had intended to betray them all along, which would be a rather strange idea if their arrival was no longer a living memory. However. The war Eila Stele describes is rather different from the one Stormfather describes. The Eila Stele talks about Odium-powered humans venturing forth, waging a scorched earth policy war against the Singers. Stormfather describes Odium-fueled singers refusing to die, reincarnating over and over, ensuring that their can never be peace. These, of course, aren't fundamentally incompatible- it makes sense to assume that the human were the initial aggressors, but the powerful and increasingly insane Fused are the ones who ensured the war never ended. But there's one more wrinkle here- the Eila Stele also mentions that the Gods commanded that the humans be given a place on Roshar. Implying that Honor and Cultivation believed them to be sincere. Could they really have been hiding their ambitions well enough to fool a pair of Shards- especially Shards that would've been made particularly on-guard by Odium's presence? Surely not; I think they must have been sincere. And- if indeed the Heralds were born on Ashyn, I think I can do than better than merely saying a vague 'they' had truly peaceful intentions. Jezrien, or perhaps Jezrien's predecessor- had sincerely peaceful intentions. And of course he ultimately wanted peace badly enough to sacrifice himself to the Oathpact. Which gives us that the human royalty never wanted things to go bad- which, to me, implies that the original Voidbringers were some kind of rival or rebel faction. Perhaps Odium designed their aggression in such a way that it would inspire literally undying hatred from their victims. If you assume Odium-backed provocateurs from both sides then continued to fan the flames, making sure things continued to deteriorate... I could see that bad enough getting that Honor would feel compelled to step in relatively quickly, and therefore the Oathpact. Yeah, personally, I'm seeing the pieces falling into place here. Anyone else on board with me here?

It's a false parallel because the two conflicts don't really have anything in common other than the species involved. And that's not a relevant similarity because the differences between the species didn't play a significant role the reasons why the latter war went as badly as it did for the Parshendi. And more importantly, because subjugating a city and conquering an entire continent are completely different beasts on a logistical level. 8 years is a super long time to spend doing the former, and the most direct historical precedent I'm aware of for the latter happening at all took ~200 years.

Of course the Singers would've had supply lines- they had a continent spanning civilization which would've included trade routes and all that good stuff. Maybe not ones set up for war, but it would still be much better than anything the humans would've had. And, like, if they were worried about what Honor and Cultivation might do, I don't see how making a token effort at appearing peaceful is gonna change much. Surely an instant betrayal is just gonna make them angrier at you. Whereas what actually happened with that Honor and Odium for switched sides for some reason.

The other issue here is that I feel it would take a lot of work to get the Spren to take on a form that complex and precisely engineered. Which isn't to say that it's impossible, but what we've seen so far is them defaulting to pretty simple shapes, and then adjusting on the fly based on what their radiant says they want. So you'd probably need a radiant with a lot of gunsmithing knowledge, and then probably a lot of trial and error in order to get a gun made 100% out of Shardmetal to work properly.

That's a false parallel- one is a nation's worth of Alethi against a city's worth of Parshendi, and the other is a nation's worth of Humans against a continent's worth of Singers. And the human wouldn't have had any established supply lines or infrastructure to speak of. Like, if they were capable of quickly winning a war under those circumstances, and had zero intention of ever sticking to Shinovar, why even bother with the pretence?

I mean, I feel like this would be theoretically possible, but I'm not sure it would do the job much better than a mundane crossbow.

I mean, I suppose that's theoretically possible, but it seems highly unlikely- they don't appear to be idealized versions of themselves like we've seen elsewhere- Like, Ishar is grey-haired and balding and Jezrien appears to be middle-aged. To my eyes, at least, it looks a lot more like they're just frozen as they were when the Oathpact was formed. It also gives us the rather strange scenario where the people chosen for this duty were a bunch of elders, except that one of them brought his daughter, and also a random equally elderly solder who nobody thought much of and wasn't supposed to be there (Taln) somehow snuck his way in.

That's only vaguely comparable; war broke out 50 years after the settlers first arrived there- so by analogy the younger non-Ash Heralds are gonna be in their sixties by that point- and then the war itself was confined to New England rather than the entire continent and was officially over after only three years, whereas what happened on Roshar was much larger in scale and lasted long enough for there to no longer be hope of peace-resolution, which let's low-ball and say it was 20 years. The Heralds do not appear to be in their eighties.

/finds the relevant section. Stormfather does indeed say that. That's a shame. I really thought I figured it out of a second there. Can't see a way of wiggling out of it that doesn't require a malicious amount of misreading Stormfather's lines, either. But, really, the way he describes it makes the timeline seem even crazier- he makes it sound like the Oathpact was formed a good while after the Fused became a thing; long enough that Honor had given up on trying to end the war any other way. Which really sounds like it should've taken at least few decades by itself. And the Fused shouldn't have became a thing until a good while after the humans settled in- like, the humans must've been Odium-aligned long enough for 'Voidbringer' to become a permanent part of the common lexicon- indeed, long enough that meaning shifted from 'people who brought the void with them' to 'people aligned with the void', and the Fused can only come after that. It seems... super unlikely to me that this all happened within a single generation.

Hmm... What if containing the Fused wasn't the original purpose of the Oathpact? What if it was only about the Voidspren at first? Like, maybe Honor wanted to accept the human refugees, but didn't want to give Odium a foothold, so he required them to help him contain Odium and his spren on Braize in exchange for giving them Shinovar. And then later, when things went bad between the humans and singers, Cognitive Shadows with lots of Odium-investiture were close enough to being Voidspren that they got snared by the Oathpact as well, and that gives us the present state of affairs. Which in turn could mean that the Heralds weren't being eternally tortured at first; perhaps that only became a thing once the Fused entered the equation.

Theoretically, but attempting to measure that would then lock it down beyond the ability of modern instruments to measure it. Which, to be clear, still wouldn't be a totally objective measure; all instruments have their limitations.

I'm tempted to argue that it's volume-perserving rather than mass conserving- see the tradition of Soulcasting the corpses of important people into metal statues of themselves, which strikes me as something that shouldn't work, since an equal mass of metal would be smaller than a human body. But that doesn't really work, because of the Wall creation scene and the way Jasnah needed to know that rock's mass before she could turn it to smoke. I don't see the lack of ash from the robber's body as huge issue, though- surely everything that would've been there was converted into... whatever the essence of fire actually is; be it energy or hot gas or some magical facsimile of fire.

You're seriously underestimating Lift- she initially doesn't trust Dalinar because she sees him as a man who's used to getting his way and murdered his way to the top. Which is basically true. She just phrases it as if it's about butts and old people because she doesn't like being taken seriously. And it's not like anything changes her mind about Dalinar, either- she just decides that Odium is a bigger problem than him.

It's not hard for me to imagine that a good number got misplaced over the years. Naval battles are a great way for weapons to end up stranded at the bottom of the ocean, for example. But I'm not sure it makes sense for that to be the entire explanation- a blade or plate would've had to go missing every six months on average to get that kind of attrition over a mere thousand years, and that seems awfully high, considering how prized they are. But then you have to account for people like Liss; Shardbearers who keep that status hidden and thus aren't part of each country's total, so that could make things more believable.

I mean, Taravangian has shown us that the Death Rattles aren't completely harmless- they passively encourage people to kill each other in order to gain information. But that's a corner case, and probably not what Odium had in mind. It is worth noting, however, that Odium moved him to Cultivation's perpendicularity recently, presumably to help him control that area. So I think it can be assumed that there's more to Moelach than just the Death Rattles. Like maybe he has a considerably more dangerous effect if you run into him in Shadesmar.