RedBlue

Endowment’s letters place a lot of emphasis on the informal agreement between the Shards to stay separated and not get involved with each other. She seemed to think that Devotion and Dominion deserved what they got, and her reaction to Ambition’s death was ‘good riddance.’ Until Odium arrives on her doorstep, he’s not her problem. I’m sure she has ‘plans,’ but I don’t think she’s about to put them in motion.

Guesses about the younger generation: Lift will get over her body image issues, but will still be working through mom-related angst and her relationship with competency Gavinor will learn how to be a functional adult in the Physical Realm but is otherwise a mess of a human being Oroden will be the spitting image of Tien and other people will have Feelings about that. These people have a tendency to make that Oroden’s problem. Shallan’s kid will have gone on a brief jaunt outside the time dilation bubble, and will have aged a few years (5 or so) more than his/her peers

I think ‘alliances’ might end up being the wrong word to describe it. Some Shards will move against Retribution now that he’s a credible threat. Other Shards will, presumably, continue to remain neutral for much the same reasons as before. It remains to be seen whether the Shards moving against Retribution are going to work with each other, or if they will pursue their own schemes (possibly resulting in scheme pile-up chaos). Thoughts on individual Shards: I don’t think Harmony will exist in the same form by the time Stormlight 6 rolls around. It looks like Mistborn Ghostbloods is going to happen during the Stormlight timeskip, and I don’t anticipate a major Mistborn trilogy ending without a major shake-up of the status quo on Scadrial. Endowment seems very, very opposed to the idea of getting involved. I don’t think anything short of an encroachment onto her territory would convince her to get involved. Valor is obviously being teased as a Shard who will be fighting against Retribution. I think Cultivation is too involved to just run away. She has to continue to be relevant, so she will be doing something against Retribution. If we’re looking for a dark side of Mercy, I would expect that to be along the lines of never holding anyone accountable or stopping them from doing bad things. I don’t expect Mercy to attack Retribution.

Interesting — this is basically the same list I have, so it’s good to know I’m not the only one thinking this way Out of interest, what Shards do you have in the Obey and Feel categories? I have: Obey — Honor, Dominion, Reason, Autonomy Feel — Odium, Devotion, Valor, Mercy

I’ve been thinking along the same lines. Valor’s Intent is all about courage in battle. Tanavast calls her a warrior. That doesn’t mesh with a Shard who goes into hiding for self-preservation. Shouldn’t the Shard’s power demand that she go and find (or pick) a fight? How has the Vessel resisted the Intent for 7000 years? Why make limited contact with select other Shards? But if she’s hiding as part of some master plan to spring a trap on a problem Shard at the opportune moment, then I understand how her Intent aligns with her actions. That leaves Reason as the Shard who is hiding for self-preservation. I don’t know if this has something to do with the fourth moon. I’m inclined to think not, since it would be too obvious a hiding place. Odium must have taken a close look at the stuff around his Perpendicularity at some point, and surely he would have recognised another Shard.

This sounds great in a vacuum, but with Taravangian there to point out how dire Fen’s situation would be if she doesn’t cut a deal, it falls apart. And if Jasnah keeps repeating ‘you can’t trust Taravangian,’ it only highlights that she can’t actually counter his points. Loyalty and trust isn’t something Jasnah can argue because it’s antithetical to who she is. Somebody like Navani might have been able to pull it off, but not Jasnah. She perceives herself as, and has a reputation for being, someone who works on cold hard logic. If she pivots now and begins making appeals to loyalty, Fen will see her as not being genuine. I think what Taravangian gained was emotional leverage over Jasnah. By demonstrating that she ‘agrees’ with him, he’s showing her that their ways of thinking are very similar, and maybe planting the seed of the idea that joining him wouldn’t be so bad. This is something he can use to manipulate her at some later date. Taravangian seems to value having an ‘in’ with Jasnah over having stronger control over Thaylenah. Given who Jasnah is, I don’t think that’s a bad call.

That would require Taravangian to ship all his officers, rank and file soldiers, and all the logistics/maintenance support workers an army depends on into a tailor-made Spiritual Realm vision. That’s a lot more complicated than transplanting a city that already knows how to run itself. He would then need to prevent all those people from following Connections and wandering off into Spiritual Realm shenanigans, which many of them would immediately try to do upon realising that it’s an option. He would also need to hide this from anyone else (like other Shards) who might interfere and are paying much more attention to him now. He can’t use the tidal wave trick again without destroying his own land, which would hurt his own infrastructure and tip off any observers. Besides, Taravangian is probably contractually unable to pull that sort of trick in areas that cut a bargain with him. That’s a lot of effort and risk for a project that doesn’t help to lay the foundation of industry and infrastructure that the army needs to be built on. Roshar has been devastated by the war that put Retribution in power. In some key countries, entire systems of government are going to have to be installed from the ground up. Cities must be physically rebuilt. That’s where the real time crunch is going to come from. Even if super-fast training and organising of armies in the Spiritual Realm is feasible, it’s a pointless exercise when progress in the Physical Realm is the thing that is going to take the longest time.

I don’t see how that would have worked. Allowing Odium to lay out his case and then refusing to respond to it would not have been convincing at all to Fen. Odium made some extremely valid points, and failing to mount any kind of counter argument would look like conceding.

It appears to me that Taravangian is not doing alright, and that having more power is pretty much the worst thing that could have happened to him personally. It just enables all of his worst instincts. And Honor is just as divorced from context, nuance and common sense as the rest of the Shards. I doubt that will help.

I expect the Singers to be treated as equal to normal humans in Thaylenah, because treating them as a underclass would be counterproductive at this point. But I don’t expect Taravangian to install them on a level of power between himself and Fen’s government. Rayse paid lip service to the idea of restoring the Singers’ ancestral land to them, but Taravangian and Honor don’t care about that. Taravangian is going to do whatever gives him an advantage in his war, which does not need to involve shaking up a local government that is already stable and working for him. And Honor’s very narrow understanding of oaths doesn’t require keeping informal or implied promises.

Could you expand on why you chose Control and Connect as the two speculative Dawnshards?

I’m picturing a network of Radiant spren sharing information, carrying messages, gathering political support from spren societies, and creating new Radiants. They won’t do anything to actively oppose Retribution during the time-skip, but they will be ready to go when an opportunity presents itself (ie when the plot starts again). Having more Radiants, of a greater variety of Orders, will make a big difference when the conflict eventually gets going again. This is about preparation. Unless I missed something, I don’t see why Taravangian would install a Fused government in Thaylenah. The government they already have works just fine for his purposes. Fen can report directly to Taravangian. No need to fix what isn’t broken. And the Everstorm will still be there, but people can live with that. I think Azimir is going to be on its own. I hope they can manage as an isolated state.

Shallan helps to organise a sneaky resistance movement among Radiant spren. Now that Retribution is a direct threat to them, they take the conflict seriously and there is much more interest in forming Radiant bonds. Adolin fills out a bunch of paperwork and becomes a legal citizen of Azimir. Szeth and his wife travel around looking for answers. The people in Urithiru stay physically trapped there, but establish a fairly robust system for passing messages to and from the outside world. Renarin and Jasnah set up a system of government in Urithiru that can function without either of their direct input. Thaylenah is going to be fine. Nothing awful happens to it, and people living there have a decent quality of life.

This is from Jasnah’s notes (WoK epigraphs). This has been a bit of a mystery ever since WoK. If it refers to the Change Dawnshard, that’s odd, because the context of a grand temple and steps for Heralds doesn’t mesh with how the Sleepless are hiding it. Same issue with the Exist Dawnshard, assuming Wit has had it all along. If there is another Dawnshard that was used by Taln and then taken away, and that’s the incident the epigraph is referring to, then it begins to make sense. The ‘steps crafted for Heralds’ line is strange, since the Heralds weren’t a thing when Taln tried to kill Cultivation, but that could be down to the whole era becoming mythologised. From WaT chapter 65, referring to Taln. Soul warping is, as we know, caused by holding a Dawnshard. It seems unlikely there could be another type of god-killing, soul-warping weapon hanging around. As other people on this thread have pointed out, Taln can’t have held the Exist Dawnshard because that would severely hamper his ability to fight, but he could have held a different Dawnshard. We don’t know what effects the others have on their holders. My speculation: Taln once held the Bind Dawnshard.

I think the main problem here is that you can’t build a powerful planetary army just by putting a bunch of conscripts through an accelerated boot camp. Retribution needs to create and organise a command structure. He’ll need several layers of people with officer training and real experience of military leadership at various levels, and he needs them capable of working as a cohesive whole even though these people come from very different cultural backgrounds. They all need a practical understanding of what their job is, who they take orders from, and who they are supposed to be leading. He also needs to sort out logistics. His armies need to be fed, equipped, transported, and able to communicate. There will need to be real infrastructure and industry in place to support large-scale military campaigns, and that will need to be built up in the Physical Realm. Basic training is not the limiting factor. It’s everything else.

The Iriali are a group of people who believe that everyone is a fragment of a god called the One. The purpose of each fragment is to collect lived experiences to be brought back to the One when they die. While this does not seem to be strictly true, this belief does colour how a lot of Iriali see the world. The devout believers go through life viewing their own conscious minds as constructs created by a greater being, of which they are a part. Fake Wit has something vaguely similar going on, in that he/it is a small chunk of investiture trying to simulate a conscious mind while ‘knowing’ that he/it is just a simulation.

I-7, Moash’s Interlude between Day 4 and Day 5, page 526 of the UK ebook. This is Moash’s dialogue, so I think the ‘rat’ reference is an error.

Very good point — I’d forgotten about that example. A huge problem with Jasnah’s approach is that she hyper-focuses on arguments and presentational styles that work well in formal debates, but nowhere else. I think she knows that people don’t actually make decisions or change their minds on the basis of this type of logic, but she keeps falling back on it whenever she tries to convince people, probably because it has worked for her in academic contexts, which is what mattered to her in the past. It’s one of the things she’ll have to unlearn.

I thought Taravangian was great throughout the book. He’s appropriately scary as the primary antagonist, while also being an interesting and layered character, so I’d say he got the right amount of screentime. I’ve never been a huge fan of Mraize or Iyatil. They’ve always been a bit too mysterious and unknowable for me to latch onto them. Having said that, they drove a big part of the plot forward and facilitated Shallan’s whole arc this book, so I’d say they did an okay job as villains. Similarly, Abidi The Monarch did the job the story needed him to do. He posed a legitimate threat, and showcased how insane most of the Fused are. No complaints. Sja-Anat and Ba-Ado-Mishram were intriguing. They didn’t get much screentime, I assume because they are being set up for the back half and it wouldn’t do to give the game away early. Nale and Ishar were highlights for me, but they’re non-villainous antagonists, so I get why they don’t scratch that ‘bad guy’ itch. Moash was the only villain where I felt the ball was dropped in this book. I think it would have been better if he were in it less. He’s clearly being set up for stuff in the back half, and I’m looking forward to finding out what that is, but too much of his appearance this time felt like a rehash of what he did in RoW. I would have preferred if we'd had just a brief appearance from him, learned where his mind is at, established the gemstone eyes and the corrupted Honorblade, and then shuffled him into the background until he has something new to do.

I think Brandon was never trying to give a didactic moral ‘lesson’ in any of his books. Like most good stories, it’s about exploring themes, not about making a specific point about right and wrong. Utilitarianism is a strong theme in WaT, alongside the series’ usual themes of mental illness and personal growth. We see characters with different viewpoints — Jasnah, Fen, Taravangian, Dalinar, Szeth — grapple with difficult moral quandaries and come to their own conclusions. In the end, Dalinar doesn’t have to make the choice Taravangian tries to force on him, because he manages to find a third option that allows him to have his cake and eat it. This allows the story to sidestep the question of whether sacrificing Gavinor would be the ‘correct’ choice, because it’s not the story’s job to tell the reader where to draw the line on sacrificing innocents to save other innocents. It’s the story’s job to ask the question.

It’s heavily implied in chapter 116. Then Fen and Taravangian begin talking terms before Jasnah cuts them off by changing the topic. And I don’t think Fen has misplaced confidence in her ability to negotiate good terms. I think the point of the scene is that Taravangian is correct. Cutting a deal is genuinely Fen’s best option in this situation, if you look at it from a purely utilitarian perspective.

Fair point, and it would be fairly on-brand for Cultivation to stash an elderly Nohadon away as part of some long-term plan to deal with Honor. I’m not suggesting Tanavast had a backup copy at that point in time. I’m suggesting he made one later, since Nohadon’s legacy would be around in the Spiritual Realm long after the real one had passed on.

Tanavast’s POV explicitly states that the real, original Nohadon is dead, but Dalinar was definitely talking to somebody who is self-aware and has Nohadon’s memories (at least to some extent). I think Tanavast and/or Honor created a sort of spren using Nohadon’s legacy as a template — a bit like how Retribution created the Blackthorn — to keep baby Honor company in the Spiritual Realm, and that’s who Dalinar spoke with.

The point Taravangian was making about trustworthiness wasn’t that he personally is more trustworthy than Jasnah. His point was that he is magically bound by formal contracts, while Jasnah isn’t. Taravangian can exploit loopholes, but Jasnah — and future generations of Urithiru rulers — can disregard their promises entirely. The reason Jasnah doesn’t rebut him with ‘but Taravangian betrayed the coalition!’ is that it’s beside the point. Fen knows how Taravangian works. She’s betting on her ability to negotiate a contract that doesn’t have exploitable wiggle room.

I think the ‘another’ with a claim on Dalinar is supposed to reference the God Beyond. Whether there’s a real Beyond entity claiming Dalinar, or it’s just Dalinar pulling himself into the Beyond with the strength of his own belief, Retribution’s claim doesn’t stick because Dalinar doesn’t recognise him as his true god.