RedBlue

As far as I can work out, there is only one reference to a ‘sword of retribution’ in the books. WoK chapter 18 (emphasis mine): This is a heavily mythologised depiction of Nale, so given the lack of other references to this sword, I think we can assume it is a Vorin interpretation of his Honorblade. As for why it’s called the sword of retribution — well, Nale is known as the Herald of Justice. Retribution is what you call it when you go after wrongdoers. I don’t think it’s linked to Retribution the Shard. Generally speaking, I don’t think every instance of a Shard’s name appearing in some random context is a reference to the Shard. Their names are common words. As for the events of 1000 years prior — good catch. The overlap on the timing does suggest that Nale’s change in behaviour (becoming overly obsessive about the letter of the law) was directly caused by Odium’s influence via Ishar. This might be an important fact for Nale’s recovery process, since it diminishes his culpability somewhat.

In addition to the already ‘dead’ Shards, couldn’t this apply to Honor? At the time of the WoB, Tanavast was long dead and Honor was being held by a nascent emergent consciousness. That wasn’t in the books at the time, but there’s no way it wasn’t in the series outline.

WaT chapter 31 (Navani is talking to Gav, who has just commented that the tower is alive): To my mind, this is fairly definitive. Navani still has faith in a deity which she calls the Almighty, and her beliefs about that deity conform to conventional Vorin teachings, at least in Navani’s opinion. WaT chapter 125 (Wit is talking to Navani about what they will do during the Contest): I grant that this is much more vague than my other examples of Dalinar and Navani, but this use of the word ‘wish,’ especially how the sentence structure frames it as parallel to Navani’s prayer, does not strike me as secular. That’s why I interpreted it as hinting at some sort of spiritual belief. Even if we agree to disagree about Wit, that leaves Dalinar and Navani as counter-examples to @Returned’s ‘group 1.’ I think we need a fourth, separate ‘group’ for individuals who are cosmere-aware but have some level of religious or spiritual belief that accommodates for this awareness.

I don’t think this is quite true. We do see some cosmere-aware people who seem totally irreligious, but other cosmere-aware people absolutely have religious beliefs. Dalinar, who definitely counts as cosmere-aware by the end of his arc, is very much a liberal theist. He’s taken the parts of Vorinism he finds most important and adapted them so that they no longer contradict the factual information he has about the cosmere, such as the nature of Shards. Navani is also cosmere-aware by this point, and she still holds to traditional Vorin practices like burning glyphwards. The contradiction between her religious practices and her knowledge of real cosmere mechanics doesn’t bother her because she just partitions off the religious stuff in her mind so that it retains its mysticism. Also, Wit has dropped hints (the comment that he will ‘wish’ during the Contest, his opinions about hope) that he believes in some form of spirituality.

Cultivation did orchestrate Taravangian’s Ascension. That’s part of the text. And she also played a role in Dalinar’s Ascension. That’s part of the text. And yes, it backfired on her. She thought she could control the humans who were part of her schemes, thought she understood what they were capable of, but she underestimated them. She gambled and lost. That doesn’t make her not a puppet master.

First question: why did Cultivation send Dalinar to the Spiritual Realm? The face value answer is that she wanted him to gain the knowledge he needed to take up Honor. But if that was her only goal, wasn’t that a very risky way to go about it? She could, presumably, have sent curated visions to tell Dalinar exactly what he needed to know, similar to what the Stormfather did. Or she could have just explained it like a normal person. No need to take the risk of sending him into a dangerous environment he might not return from. Unless she had a secondary goal. Second question: Taravangian was quite lucky to get hold of Gavinor. Was he too lucky? Using Gav as Champion was by far the most eloquent way to make his point to Dalinar and prove himself ‘right.’ It’s not that Taravangian was in a tough spot; he could have picked some random Fused and let the Contest be a real fight, or picked some random kid and forced the same moral dilemma. But getting hold of Gav was clearly his preferred outcome, by a long way. Several pieces had to come together for this to happen, the biggest one being that Dalinar had to decide on a trip to the Spiritual Realm. Which, given how little interest he had in doing that before Cultivation prompted him, seems like an unlikely coincidence. Unless delivering Gavinor to Odium was part of Cultivation’s plan. Theory: I think Cultivation wanted Taravangian to pick Gavinor as his Champion, and arranged matters so that this would be possible. Why would Cultivation care about this? Because she wanted Dalinar to become the new Honor and be a check on Odium’s power, and that requires the Contest to go a certain way. If Odium’s Champion is a random Fused, Dalinar would plough ahead and fight without searching for a third option. Cultivation can’t let the Contest be simple. She needs the Contest to be the most difficult possible choice for Dalinar, to force him to find a way to Ascend. So Cultivation pulled the strings for Gavinor to end up in the Spiritual Realm, predicting how Taravangian would use him, to give Dalinar a final push to become Honor.

I could definitely see some Unmade ending up bonded to some Heralds. A powerful spren without a Nahel bond is a bit of a Chekov’s gun, given how the magic system works. Having one or more Unmade break away from Retribution, be ‘remade’ or otherwise develop into a new form, and then bond with someone on Team Radiant would be pretty epic. Most of the current major characters already have their own spren and their own things going on, so aren’t likely to bond a new spren. But the Heralds (minus Kaladin and Nale) are available, and we can expect the focus to shift towards them in the back half, which makes them good candidates for an Unmade bond. However, I don’t think pairing the Heralds one-to-one with Unmade would be very satisfying. It would get old if all of them did it. Also, there are other interesting candidates for spren bonds. Gavinor is shaping up to be important. Szeth has a spren vacancy. And what about the villains? If we start seeing Unmade forming bonds, why not expect some of them to side with Retribution? El could bond an Unmade. Or even Moash.

I feel like getting Valor involved in the Unoathed would be contrary to Adolin’s character arc in WaT. In this book, Adolin digs into the reason he hasn’t bonded a spren. It’s not just a lack of opportunity — Adolin has had four books to make an opportunity — it’s that Adolin fundamentally takes issue with formalised systems of oaths. He respects that it works for other people, but he doesn’t want a rigid framework or rules imposed on a bond by a third party (a Shard or representative of a Shard). He wants to make promises on his own terms, and the humans or spren those promises are made to can accept them on their own terms. The Connections between the Unoathed and their Blades and Plate seem naturally occurring. It grew organically from Adolin and Maya’s relationship, according to cosmere natural laws. I think adding a Shard to the mix at this point is unnecessary, and undermines some of Adolin’s growth to an extent.

So, I have been thinking about this thread a lot, because my reading experience was the complete opposite. Kaladin and Szeth’s plotline was my favourite part of the book. It got me in the emotions. I loved every chapter of it. I kind of hesitated to even post my thoughts, because mental health is a sensitive topic (for obvious reasons), people clearly have very strong feelings about how it is depicted in this book, and I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was trying to tell them they’re wrong for having a negative reaction. To be clear: I’m not trying to argue or change anyone’s mind. I’m just adding my perspective to the discussion. I loved that this plotline felt like a ray of sunshine among all the apocalyptic violence and desperation going on elsewhere. It felt like a necessary reminder of what we’re fighting for. A little levity and low-stakes bonding is a relief, and it felt wonderful to see Kaladin get to relax, poke at some weird plants, and try out his new mind-healing ideas. After all he’s been through in the last four books, he’s earned a break, brief though it was. But Kaladin has another impossible task to contend with: ‘fixing’ Szeth and Ishar’s mental problems. All he has to work with are an education in conventional medicine, his vaguely relevant personal experiences, some cryptic comments from an actual alien, and common sense. He has no body of literature to consult, no established theories to base his approach on, and no time to find or conduct any sort of research. So he does the only sensible thing he can do: trial and error. He tries everything that has worked for him in the past, and some things that just seem like a good idea. He throws it all at Szeth and hopes that something will stick. As one might expect, most of it doesn’t work. Kaladin’s attempts at starting a conversation and getting the ball rolling are clunky, and irritate Szeth rather than drawing him in. Ishar shuts him down without listening to a word (which I found hilarious). His first real success is the stew. Not because there’s anything special or supernatural about making stew, but because Kaladin’s intuition has always been on the money with that one — feeding people, and eating with them, facilitates social bonding. In the end, what helps Szeth isn’t the general advice, the platitudes, or the yapping. It’s not having somebody ‘understand’ what he has gone through. After the life Szeth has lived — having a natural fixation with ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ that fixation being reinforced in a destructive way by rigid cultural norms and a society that imposes a broken concept of morality onto him, being punished every time he makes a decision for himself, and eventually despairing of his own judgement so much that he gives up on having agency — the thing that gets through to him is having, for the first time since early childhood, a person who believes in him. Kaladin reminds him that his parents loved him. Kaladin thinks that Szeth can and should make choices. Kaladin doesn’t give up on him. And Kaladin is genuine. He isn’t doing all this because Dalinar told him to, though that is how it started. He isn’t ‘fixing’ Szeth so that he can be useful to Kaladin’s agenda. Kaladin really believes that Szeth deserves to heal and be better. And because Kaladin believes it, Szeth can start to believe it too. This doesn’t solve all, or even most, of Szeth’s problems. He still has a ways to go by the end of the book. But Szeth is finally on the right track, and able to make his own judgement calls. Meanwhile, the Heralds pose different kinds of challenges with different solutions. Nale comes wanting an argument, so Kaladin gives him one. After a few false starts, Kaladin gets the flute out. Reason by itself isn’t getting through to Nale, but using the story of Wandersail with the Wind’s music adds the force of emotion to Kaladin’s point, and Nale finally has his breakthrough moment. By the end, Kaladin has forced out the corruption that was supernaturally tainting the Heralds, but Odium’s influence was only part of the problem. Nale is semi-functional, and Kaladin hasn’t touched on Ishar’s personal issues. And I can hardly wait to get back to them in the next book.

As @Yaganim said, Wit’s healing ability caused him to regrow his entire body from the largest remaining piece, which happened to be a cell culture on Scadrial. It’s not clear where this healing ability comes from, but the Dawnshard is a fair guess. It’s certainly a more powerful form of supernatural healing than the others we’ve seen so far. As for his memories, I have to assume that his entire spirit web and all the Breath attached to it will automatically hone in on his physical body wherever it ends up. If things are tethered together with Connection, distance isn’t really an issue.

The list of Shards whose current whereabouts and status are unknown is: Invention, Mercy, Whimsy, Valor and Reason. Valor and Reason are apparently ‘hidden,’ which I’m guessing means they are not associated with a major Shardworld (because that would make them rather obvious and easy to find). Invention is, according to Tanavast’s description, ‘travelling the cosmere.’ That doesn’t sound compatible with settling on a major Shardworld (unless you count one of Invention’s creations as a major Shardworld, which is stretching the definition). Granted, that was 7000 years ago, but given Harmony’s difficulty in locating them it seems probable that the situation has not changed and Invention is still nomadic. That leaves Mercy and Whimsy as the last two Shards who may have major Shardworlds that we don’t know about.

I’m not sure why Alethi cultural norms are being used as a basis for this discussion. Who is in a position to be making decisions about what to do with Gavinor and also subscribes to traditional Alethi culture? Jasnah and Renarin are famously critical of Alethi culture. Navani is in a coma. Dalinar is dead. Sebarial doesn’t care. The representative government that Jasnah and Renarin want to install seems unlikely to be mired in Alethi tradition. Aladar is the last remaining traditionalist who still has enough power to be important. Is he going to advocate for punishing Gavinor? He seems to have his hands full trying to navigate the deteriorating class boundaries among Alethi in Urithiru. Moving against a member of the Kholin family (who is in the line of succession, no less) will not help his case. On that note, it is true that Jasnah has a history of considering the assassination of family members. It is also true that she has a history of not going through with it. She didn’t order a hit on Aesudan despite her suspicions. She didn’t kill Renarin when he displayed abilities linked with an enemy. Jasnah is deeply emotionally invested in her family, and I expect her to be protective of Gavinor unless he gives her a very good reason to consider him an active threat.

I went through some old WOBs and found this. There are a bunch of WOBs where Brandon implies, without stating it outright, that sorting Shards into four groups of four is a correct line of theorising. But it seems that trying to sort Shards into opposing pairs is not something that works across the board. Some of them happen to have Intents that oppose each other, but I don’t think there’s anything structural underpinning that.

I think the idea is that because Preservation specifically was involved, there was no mass destruction. Odium and Honor both have nothing against mass destruction, so there’s nothing to prevent it. It’s all down to the Shardic Intents.

It’s reasonable for people like Jasnah to want to keep an eye on Gavinor to make sure he’s not trying to undermine them. If it turns out that Gavinor is perpetuating a grudge against his remaining relatives, obviously something will have to be done to stop him. But punishing him for the events surrounding the Contest would be a horrible perversion of justice. He has no moral culpability for what happened. Anyone who knows who he is can easily understand this, and anyone who doesn’t know who he is won’t know to be mad at him.

I think it’s more that Urithiru is encased in a magical impassable bubble.

I know this is a hot take, but consider: the scene where Kaladin sees Szeth crying over the toy sheep. There’s a disconnect between what the reader knows and what Kaladin knows. We’ve read enough of Szeth’s backstory to understand what this toy sheep means, and why he’s breaking down over it. We’re rooting for Szeth to have the emotional breakthrough he’s been suppressing for so long because he doesn’t feel he deserves it. We know Szeth needs Kaladin’s help. But Kaladin is at a complete loss, because he isn’t dealing with somebody like himself. He doesn’t understand who he is dealing with. But then the stars align, and Kaladin finds a way to relate Szeth’s experiences to his own. He asks pertinent questions, and gets important answers. Suddenly, he has a framework to understand Szeth’s perspective, the empathy kicks into gear, and the two of them can finally have a meaningful exchange about the deep problems Szeth has been struggling with his whole life. Szeth, for the first time since early childhood, honestly entertains the notion that he deserves to be happy. Of course, there are no quick and easy solutions, and Szeth still has a long way to go. But the experience is a critical revelation for both Szeth and Kaladin. And that hug is cathartic.

Only mention of Gav having red eyes I could find was chapter 146, after the contest. I can’t find anything from the contest about glowing red eyes, unless I’ve missed something?

It takes language a while to catch up, so I don’t anticipate any Discord-related exclamatory language to appear right away. Maybe if Era 3 covers a significant span of time (decades?) we might see a linguistic shift. It would be interesting to hear the characters examine the language they use and how it relates to their power structures and religious beliefs. Back in The Final Empire, Kelsier made a point of not swearing by the Lord Ruler because of what that implies about his godhood. It would be cool if that topic comes back around, but this time in relation to Harmony.

I have definitely noted how revenge-y everything about Gavinor is. But if we’re talking specifically about what he’ll get up to during the time skip, I very much doubt that a revenge quest is going to happen off-screen. I don’t think it’s likely that Nightblood will be used to kill Taravangian. He’s not stupid enough to fall for the same trick he pulled on Rayse. Also, repeating that plot beat would feel repetitive.

I have been thinking about Gavinor and what will come next for him. There’s so much we don’t know about his current state. After being raised in the Spiritual Realm by a guy who only planned to use him as a tool, does he even know how to function in the Physical? Will he have to learn to manage daily routines, eating and sleeping and so on, from scratch? Will he have problems navigating real space? How developed are his social skills? If Gavinor isn’t a functional adult, is that something he can fix in ten years, or is it more difficult than that? He has been very thoroughly betrayed by Taravangian, and Dalinar — the man he was taught to hate — saved his life. I doubt that Gavinor would willingly work for Taravangian again, although it remains to be seen if Retribution retains his ability to compel Gavinor. I took the red eyes to mean red-rimmed — as in, he’d been crying. If his eyes are actually the colour red now, that’s a very bad sign. Possibly linked to corrupted Investiture. But I think, based on context, it’s just that he’d been crying. I doubt he will have an opportunity to leave the tower, and if he does, I don’t know where he would go. Alethkar is a defunct kingdom. I suspect the Alethi land will be governed by Singers going forward, possibly lead by El. I don’t think Gavinor would have an ‘in’ there. There are no obvious candidates, so if he does get a love interest, I think it will be a new character. I can only imagine that would be a train wreck of a relationship

This whole conversation is weird to me. I haven’t been expecting Honor to be the uncomplicated good guy for a while, and I hadn’t realised other readers were still seeing him/it that way. (I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind or say that other readings are invalid, just adding my perspective.) I think the switch came when I read Secret History. Preservation, which had previously been the ‘good’ Shard, was suddenly deeply suspect. My takeaway from that whole thing, with the added context of Wax & Wayne and Stormlight, was that all Shards are problem Shards. Some may be bigger problems than others, but they are all fundamentally broken and incredibly dangerous.

In my opinion, it would be a mistake to try to fill in every moment of these characters’ stories. Stormlight is an epic fantasy series, and one of the main problems that plagues the genre is bloat and unintentional scope creep. Generally, I think it’s better to tell only the parts of the story where relevant things are happening, and leave some ‘gaps’ in the narrative when there’s no proper plot movement. Readers can infer what is going on with the main characters during downtime. Sanderson being Sanderson, he will probably write some vignettes or flashbacks set during the time skip at some point, and that will be fine, but I don’t think a whole novella is necessary.

I don’t think Hoid was implying that the time bubble is directly analogous to the Catacendre. I think it was more like ‘weird and unpredictable things happen when Shards merge, I guess.’ Because some people are going to want to know WHY Odium and Honor merging would create a time dilation bubble, and the answer (at least for now) is ‘it just does.’

Another theory: it’s not about bringing back one person who Hoid was particularly attached to, but about bringing back a whole bunch of people whose deaths he feels responsible for (maybe in conjunction with the Shattering?)