Gilphon

So, really, the colonialist aspect of the story isn't the humans coming from Ashyn- at that point they were refugees. The colonialist bit is the human spreading beyond Shinovar, and eventually enslaving the Singers.

It's a matter of Intent. Shards are bound by what they think of a deal as meaning, not the exact words of the deal. Which can leads to things when different Shards have different ideas about what they're agreeing to, which can lead to one of them appearing to break their word. That's happened with Preservation and Ruin, and with the 'let's all agree to not interfere with each other' agreement that Endowment chastises the others for not agreeing to. There's a WoB about this somewhere, but I can't find it right now And, well, we don't know exactly why Honor and Odium were able to reach any kind of agreement. (Really we don't know what Odium's win conditions even are; it's hard to imagine that 'convince Dalinar to release him' could've been his only plan for the entirety of the ten thousand years he's been trapped in the system. Like he seems to want to help the Fused conquer Roshar, but how does that help him get free?) My speculation, however, would be that there was room of negotiation because Odium didn't want to let Honor and Cultivation fight him simultaneously, and Honor didn't want to let Odium go and attack any of the more vulnerable Shards, so it was in both of their interests to agree to some ground rules.

Yeah, see, the way that Perservation trapped Ruin was by making a deal with him. That's basically the only way to trap Shards. And I genuinely have no idea where you're getting this 'Odium's free if he destroys Braize' thing; where specifically on the Coppermind does it say that?

My theory is that the sphere Gavilar gave to Eshonai contained Ulim, the Voidspren who claims to have spent years talking to Venli.

As a nitpick, the "raw" investiture used on Sel is called the Dor, not AonDor. AonDor is a generalized term for what happens when you combine the Dor with an Aon.

He probably could destroy Braize if he wanted to, but I don't know what that would accomplish. Like he can't leave the solar system because of some deal he had with Honor that we don't know the details of, and Shards aren't capable of breaking their words, as long as the Intent was there when they gave it. So if he destroyed Braize, he'd be just as trapped as ever, but without a planet to use as his base of operations.

There have been signs of him talking inside people's head- he mentioned that he had been speaking to Amaram and Dalinar for 'a very long time, and Moash started hearing a mental voice telling him to 'give up his pain' in Kholinar. And there was that one flashback where Dalinar abruptly starts thinking about killing Gavilar; something he never considered before or since. I think what it is, though, is Odium can only do that by reaching through an Unmade- that he can only talk to people who are Connected to an Unmade. Which Kaladin shouldn't be. If there's anything supernatural going on with his mental state this chapter, which I don't think there is, I think it's just lingering effect of what Moash did to him, not something Odium is doing directly. Oh, and Trell is pretty obviously an Avatar of Autonomy, btw.

I don't think she knew about Aluminium when she was giving the lecture. The lecture is dated to the same year OB takes place in, so it's before RoW starts, and when explaining the airship she mentions that she found out about Aluminium from Azish artifabrians. Learning that was apparently one the big breakthroughs that allowed the airship to be created. Exactly the kind of thing she was getting at in this week's epigraph, y'know? Also- the spears that the Fused are using are a better match for Allomantic Chromium than the Voidrial is. Which does not preclude the idea that they're both made of Chromium, of course, but I feel like it's equally possible for the Voidrial to be made out of Raysium. Or maybe some weird like Cadmium.

So now that Navani seems to have moved on to other topic, it feels safe to say that Copper is conspicuously absent from her list. A point in favour of them not having figured out what Copper does, that.

I feel like it should be possible to get a Hemalurgic spike to do something new in a Fabrial. Like if you went to Shadesmar and stabbed a spike into a spren, you would expect that to do something. But just making wires out of a Hemalurgic spike probably wouldn't be enough. You'd have to find a way to pierce the spren in the right bind points, which sounds like a logistical nightmare. Making wires out of an unkeyed metalmind is a more promising direction to take the research in, to me. That feels like it could work. Though obvious unkeyed metalminds aren't exactly easy get a hold of on Roshar.

So I think the question of whether or not Adolin is 'broken' enough to become a Radiant is officially no longer relevant; Kaladin seems pretty convinced that Adolin could become a Radiant if he wanted to, and that his unwillingness to give up Maya is the main reason he isn't one yet.

It's a WOB yeah. We definitely don't know how old Eshonai was in the prologue, because we didn't know this thing about Singers maturing quickly before this (pretty recent) WOB. I'm not totally certain because I don't have my books handy at the moment, but I'm pretty sure Eshonai is older than Venli. But probably not that much older; I feel like she's at most ten in the OB prologue.

That's not how ignoring technicalities works and you know it. A year is a year.

Venli is fourteen, alarmingly. It's because Singers mature faster, so she's not what we would consider fourteen by human standards, but yeah, fourteen.

I actually suspect that the Fused are lining their spears with chromium, not aluminium. Because those spears appear to be Fabrials, not just coated with a metal, and they behave basically exactly like a Leecher does. But- the more salient point is that the Fused appeared to be ready for Nightblood at Thaylen City. Like they seemed to know exactly how to deal with him- steal the sheath and run away as fast as you can. Nightblood is a powerful option if use correctly, but not one that can be deployed thoughtlessly. The problem with the chess metaphor is that in chess, you don't get to use pieces you capture. Odium's forces using Nightblood against the Radiants is a scenario that should be avoided at all costs.

How often do we think that's happened in past? I wonder how many individual Fused have realized the Odium's terrible and that they're not really doing it for the Singers anymore, and decided to just not fight for Odium anymore? Any time that happened, of course, Odium would've made sure that Fused didn't revive next Desolation. Which would imply that their membership has been whittled down, over the course of millennia, to only the ones who would never consider turning on Odium.

I think it would easier to repel the ship than the entire planet. Like have the fabrial attached to the bottom of the ship, pointing up, so it's kind of like a hot-air balloon. It sounds theoretically possible to me, but stabilizing it would probably be a greater engineering challenge than using conjoiners is. It's superior if you can make it safe, though, because then you don't have to bother with giant counter-weights. Although it's probably more stormlight-intensive.

Another thing that's been kicking around in my mind: In prior Desolations, the Radiants would've been lead the Heralds, and in particular, the Windrunners would've been led by Jezrien. So there would not have been Kaladin-equivalents in the prior iterations. Or, depending on how you look at it, Jezrien was the Kaladin-equivalent in every prior iteration. Leshwi, then, has probably fought Jezrien a whole bunch of times. And she has to be aware that she'll never fight him again. I would think that that would be enough to inspire some wistfulness. At least enough to make her take an interest in Jezrien's 'replacement'.

I'm inclined to agree. Rather than them not knowing about Steel, or Steel counter-intuitively breaking the pattern, to me it seems much more likely that they know perfectly well that Steel should be used for repellers, they just haven't quite managed to come up with a design that works properly yet, because it's not a tool Brandon wants to give them access to yet.

So, to draw a conclusion: Kaladin has not seen any Transportation Fused other than Lezian, meaning there's a strong possibility that he's the only Transportation Fused in the area. Leshwi says that Lezian is 'newly-awakened', so Venli has probably never encountered him. Therefore, there's a strong possibility that Venli has never encountered a Transportation Fused. Venli is able to check what spren other people are bonded with, presumably using Transportation, and it does not seem difficult for her. It does not seem unlikely to me that a Transportation Fused could do the same thing. Conclusion: Kaladin isn't the only one who should be worrying about Lezian in the near future.

There are a few problems with this assertion. First, aluminium blades would never be common because a) aluminium isn't common anywhere and b ) aluminium is bad material for a blade. Second, as I said, Intent isn't enough; you also have to hit the right bind point. Third, people that you'd need an Aluminium spike to kill are not common enough for the practice to become widespread or discovered accidentally. No no. Spook was advising that you stick you stealing Allomancy and Feruchemy, since those are relatively safe and predictable applications. Don't bother trying to steal Intellect or Strength or stuff like that, Spook says, because Kandra and Koloss are only viable things that have ever come out of that, and they both have serious problems. It's all still stealing a piece of one spiritweb and stapling onto another.

I'm not certain that 'the night' is a bad thing. Like the Nightwatcher is just a Cultivation thing, and Nightform is the only Form of Power that the Song of Secret seems neutral on. 'The night' might be a reference to Cultivation; the people of Honor choose to live, so Roshar ultimately ends up under Cultivation's control.

Well, one assumes that if you have the right Intent, stabbing somebody in the right spot with an aluminium spike makes them lose all their powers. So you can instantly kill somebody who has Stormlight or F-Gold or some other form of regeneration. But unlike other forms of Hemalurgy, it doesn't create a spike that useful to stick into yourself. Which is why the tables says 'removes' instead of 'steals'. Or that's how I've always understood it, anyway.

That's the connection I was making in my head when I wrote that, but I found the quote and it turns out I was misremembering: Nothing about Axial there; that was just my mind trying to make a connection where none exists. The purpose of aluminium, it seems, is that it allows The Fourth Bridge and the Chulls at the Shattered Plains to move in opposite directions.

So I don't think that the metals are a 'natural' part of the magic behind Fabrials; they don't seem to be a part of 'naturally-occurring' 'Fabrials' like the Singers and Chasmfiends. What we're seeing with metals in Fabrials, I think, is the innate properties of metals in the cosmere and so on. If you at this through that lens, Feruchemy is the weird one. Allomancy is, for the most part, very similar to what you apparently naturally get just by rubbing metal and Investiture together. And we've always known exactly what it takes to draw out the Hemlurgic properties of a piece of mundane metal. But what's up with Feruchemy? What exactly are the Feruchemists doing that lets them draw out an entirely new set of properties from the metals? Like the most obviously weird example of this is that Feruchemy is the only magic system we know of that lets you Invest aluminium, but now I'm not certain that's any weirder, than, say Cadmium.