ElMonoEstupendo

The whole Harmony/Discord thing indicates that the actual result of a merging of Shards depends heavily on the Vessel's impression of each part and their relationship to each other. One is the result of them acting together, the other the result of opposition - both are possible, and the result isn't necessarily greater than the sum of the parts. You'd also expect that as Shards combine they would get closer and closer to divinity, but it's difficult to name them without narrowing their Intent, rather than widening it. So War as the combination of Honor and Odium makes sense in the cooperative mode - conflict and hatred bound by rules, directed rather than wild, channelled. What does the opposed mode look like? Hatred placing binds on people, hateful rules; it could be Tyranny? With Honor and Cultivation it feels harder to guess because "Cultivation" already implies some kind of curated, rule-bound change in the direction of growth. Rule-bound growth, or rules that grow... Culture? Direction? Evolution? Science works nicely, too. Cultivation & Odium: Hateful growth, or progressing hates. Nemesis? It's also awkward because there's already a shard for Change in the negative direction: Ruin. Perhaps passionate change... Revolution? Honor/Cultivation/Odium: I think this is where Roshar is heading. Difficult to say without knowing the other combos, but if War is H/O then we can thinking about progression through directed conflict, or conflict through progression. Makes me think of exercise, training, or games. Competition? Escalation?

Absolutely. I think the most convincing thing is that Odium was bound away on Braize when Tanavast died and Honor was Splintered. More than that, the gemstone archive indicates that Honor was both changing and going mad. If any Shard would resist change, it would be Honor, obsessed with rules and binding. He was being changed by the events on Roshar and it drove Tanavast insane. Now it could still have been a benign act. They were lovers, after all. Cultivation might have killed him with his own consent, for his own good (which is a bit more morally suspect), or for some other "good" reason. For example, there being no one Vessel meant that nobody had the authority to release Odium until Dalinar came along, two and half thousand years later. Or she could be a genuine unfeeling force for change, no matter what.

TOdium won't gamble on the outcome of the duel. Taravangian wants to "save everyone", and he is explicitly happy that - whatever the outcome - the agreement will bring peace to Roshar. He doesn't care about giving up Alethkar or gaining Dalinar's soul - these are tiny stakes to him. Taravangian will try to arrange things so he's happy no matter what. All this talk of tricky champions to pick reeks of risking the agreement being nullified rather than fulfilled.

The Bondsmiths seem to make the most natural heads of state from among the Orders, but perhaps that perception is just skewed by Dalinar being so boss. In terms of line of succession - Urithiru is a new state, they have no precedent and a brief opportunity to make the rules as they go. I don't see any scenario where Navani and the Sibling don't have the ultimate authority at least within the tower, but as for coordinating the Knights Radiant I can imagine it turning into a coalition of Orders rather than a single organisation with one leader. Kaladin makes an excellent battlefield commander but he doesn't seem to have much if any interest or experience in politics or grand strategy. I count 15 lines in Kaladin's icon. There's 15 Shards now. Just saying.

Just on a point that's a few pages back: I don't think the Heralds made any deliberate alteration to the Oathpact at Aharietiam. It was always a choice they made at the end of each Desolation. They merely took a remarkable opportunity afforded to them because only one died, and that one was Taln. The usual course of events would be that a Desolation continues until one of the Heralds dies and starts sealing the Fused in Damnation again. Usually it would be several of them, and the rest would choose to return to Damnation in order to share the agonies inflicted on them and extend the time between breaks as long as possible. Every time before when just one died, the others knew they would soon break without support. But this time, they all knew Taln wouldn't - they didn't need to return to keep the seal. In the prelude, the decision had already been made when Kalak met Jezrien. He wasn't aware of any change to the Pact, and he didn't know who had died. I think this mechanic was always possible, they just never had the opportunity before, and had reached a point where none of them could bear it any more. It may also be why Taln had a reputation for seeking out impossible causes - he knew the state of his colleagues, and wanted to be the first to die to give the others this opportunity. In his brief moment of lucidity when Dalinar swears an Ideal, he immediately grasped how good it was what the others had done.

The big issue I have with this is that it has to be Dalinar or Odium that break their word. The whole point of it would be to put one in the other's power, by "creating a hole in their soul" according to Rayse. For a gambit like this to work, it would have to be Dalinar himself Intentionally breaking the agreement. We saw in Oathbringer that trickery and deceit don't work with these kind of divine agreements. There has to be Intent. A solider from one side acting out might be an excuse to hold off or modify the agreement, but not to beat the other side. Plus, Taravangian wants the agreement to go ahead, one way or another. He wants peace on Roshar. I think he doesn't care which side wins - he'll be scheming to make sue he's happy whatever the outcome, not rolling dice in the hearts of men like Rayse.

I suppose the big question is, what are the other splinters of Honor one would need to reunite? Obviously there's the Stormfather. Tick for Dalinar. The next biggest concentrations of Honor's power seem to me to be the Heralds, the Honorblades, and maybe the planet Roshar itself. The trouble is, all these things existed before Tanavast died and Honor was splintered. Did anything new turn up after God died? Actually, now that I think about it, there's an entire city of honorspren that were explicitly not around during the Recreance, just before Tanavast died. They must have been created afterwards, but were they children of the Stormfather like Syl? Side Note: The Broken One could also be Adonalsium - the ultimate ultimate endgame might be the unison of all sixteen powers again, and I think Roshar (the planet) might have been specifically designed for this.

We know Soulcasters are spren that chose to manifest - Raboniel tells Navani as much. There seems to be two ways of manifesting spren as items - either (A) as a Radiant Shardblade or (B) by some unexplained method of convincing them to permanently manifest. A and B might be the same thing. Kaladin and Syl talk about turning into more than weapons, and the Sibling mentions B when rebuking Navani about capturing spren. Perhaps Soulcasters are the tools manifested by high-Ideal Elsecallers or Lightweavers. Have we seen an active Radiant touch one? Did they scream like Shardblades? If not then it'll be Option B. Do we know if Akinah or Aimia in general was home to a specific order of Knights?

I believe the way it's presented to us is: False Desolation -> Radiants Leave Urithiru -> Binding of Ba-Ado-Mishram -> Recreance -> Death of Tanavast/Splintering of Honor -> Scouring of Aimia All in relatively short order. Unless we're to take it as a coincidence, there must be causal links between them. I have... a theory! There's a few suspect timings involved: When the Radiants leave Urithiru, it's because things have started to go wrong with the Tower. Some think the Sibling has withdrawn from them, but there's this recording: Plus the testimony of the Sibling itself about gradually losing its Towerlight. Things were shifting due to something happening with the False Desolation, and it may have been changing Honor himself: I think Ba-Ado-Mishram Connecting with the singers and doling out Voidlight was adding more and more of Odium's power to Roshar, bringing in his true tone and causing the others to shift in an attempt to harmonise with it. Cultivation could handle it, but ol' Adherence couldn't and started going mad and losing control. He tries to keep his tone the same as it always was, refusing harmony, and so the Sibling starts to lose track of it and the Towerlight fails. When the Radiants leave, they already have a plan for capturing Ba-Ado-Mishram, but there's no recording that's obviously from after the capture. Did they leave knowing that the capture would render Urithiru inert or worse? For that matter, was the Sibling a deadeye? Melishi must have been alive and in possession of her powers when BAM was Bound. Then, when the Unmade was captured, what happened to all the Investiture she had in the singers - it must have gone into Roshar, a big jolt change that suddenly ripped up everything. Dalinar's vision at Feverstone Keep indicates that they thought fighting was still happening when the Recreance occurred - but if the singers were stunted when BAM was captured, how is that possible? The Radiants about to abandon their Shards walked back to the Keep. It must have happened on the very same day as the Binding. I'd go a step further and suggest that it wasn't the Recreance itself that deadeyed the spren but rather BAM's Binding, but we know for a fact that oathbreaking does it now because of Testament. So BAM perhaps changed the nature of the Nahel bond, through some small-c or big-C connection to Roshar. Tanavast dies and Honor gets Splintered shortly after the Towerlight stops - we know because the Sibling says as much. What I wonder is, was it Odium that did these things himself and how? He was confined to Braize at the time. There's Shardplate in the hidden rooms on Akinah, so the CHANGE Dawnshard was available until after the Recreance. Was it used on Ba-Ado-Mishram? So yeah, my theory is that Odium becoming Invested in Roshar via BAM is what drove Tanavast mad, stunted the Sibling, and changed the Nahel bond to something very dangerous. The endgame is harmony between all three powers (Rosharlight?), and TOdium is a step towards that. The most critical ingredient will be a Vessel of Honor that can compromise, where Tanavast (and Rayse) couldn't. Dalinar's already shown a facility with bending the rules with what he does with the Stormfather, and Taravangian was the King of compromise. Cultivation's been playing the ultra-long game.

By WoB, each of the Orders has a "Resonance" between their two Surges that changes how they can use them to some extent. Windrunners get, I think, an increased number of squires, and Lightweavers gain mnemonic stuff like Shallan's ability to take a Memory. Perhaps the Bondsmiths' Resonance between Tension and Adhesion is this facility with Connection - it seems closely related to Adhesion, but that Surge works very differently for Windrunners.

The Dawnshards are primordial Commands, they have to be instructions, so IDENTITY doesn't work, nor does UNITY (though UNITE or CONNECT would). Plus, Identity is already an attribute manipulated by the various magics. They're the four Commands Adonalsium used to create all things, right? They're the fundamental actions that all things do as part of existing. And they were deployed against Adonalsium himself, so they must be tangentially related to bringing down God. Everything changes, so that makes sense - Big A himself changed into the Sixteen. Does everything unite? And how would that shatter a god into Shards? I expect one of them will be FEEL or something roughly equivalent. We've seen stones and winds and plants feel in the cosmere, so that seems right. Everything also sticks to certain rules, even the Shards themselves. Perhaps OBEY? With the other two that would mean you end up with the three Shards that perhaps most closely embody those Commands on Roshar.

Gavinor wouldn't be a willing champion. I don't think TOdium cares about winning the contest. Alethkar and Herdaz vs Dalinar's soul? These stakes are small, and it was Rayse who negotiated them. He seems pretty happy that the agreement will restore peace to Roshar one way or another. His whole train of thought is to arrange matters so that, no matter the outcome, he's satisfied. I expect that while the whole world is focused on the duel at its outcome, he will have been making other arrangements that make who wins the contest almost irrelevant. On re-reading the agreement, it interestingly binds Odium to cease hostilities and enforce the peace and not work against Dalinar or his allies in any way, but it doesn't bind Dalinar to do the same. Weird. Anyway, he could do stuff like seize territory just beforehand, or break up the coalition somehow so that all Dalinar controls is Urithiru, Alethkar, and Herdaz. The technicalities of the wording are a little odd too - Odium must return Alethkar to Dalinar, but Dalinar gave up any right to rule Alethkar or to become a highking...

On another reading I doubt it's the intention of the line, but I first read it as most of the honorspren weren't bonded before the False Desolation. If they'd been bonded before the call, they wouldn't be called. BS probably just meant that they were all involved and nothing more. It also brings some attention to Syl's predicament at the time - she was catatonic because her Knight died, right? Are we to believe that no other Windrunner died during the False Desolation? Or was her bond somehow flawed?

Another question just sprang out at me from that passage. It kinda implies that the honorspren only bonded Knights when a Desolation was happening. Before, they had the Heralds to mediate the process and Honor to accept the Words. But if the Heralds were officially AWOL and Honor was going mad, perhaps the bonds were not formed the right way? Do we know how numerous the Knights Radiant were between Desolations? I get the impression that the Heralds basically rebuilt society from scratch every time.

I think I'm right that the Fused didn't return during the False Desolation. If anyone spiked BAM, it would have been Melishi or one of the Heralds. El's metal carapace replacements definitely reek of Hemalurgy or possibly Feruchemy. His other quirks - lack of Rhythms and intense interest in humanity - seem to me to indicate that he's either stolen or had stolen from him some amount of Connection and Identity, or is storing/accessing it.

Shaod makes a lot more sense to me. The Elantrians were cut off from the Dor by the Reod marring the landscape, right? So if deadeyes are something similar, something must have cut their Connection to Honor or Cultivation - this is a very similar thing to what happened to the Sibling. I think it's the introduction of a large part of Odium's Investiture into the planet - when he added his own true tone of Roshar. In Navani's experiments we learn that the tones have to shift to harmonise with each other and work together, so Odium's Investment shifted the tones of Honor and Cultivation in a similar way to the Reod shifting the landscape of Arelon. At the moment we can only speculate where such a large amount of Odium's Investiture came from, but it's highly suspicious that one of his major spren was doing something against his wishes immediately beforehand and had just been cut off... The exact timing of the deadeying interests me. Was it when the Radiants threw down their Shards (the actual Recreance)? Or did they suffer it before that, and the Recreance was a reaction? Or were they fine but injured until Tanavast died? I kinda like the latter one - The Sibling can still hear Cultivation's song but not Honor's, so it strikes me that while the Shard is alive you can pick up the adjusted tones.

I think it's a mistake to take every instance of an ALL CAPS instruction as one of the Divine Commands, simply because SURVIVE and UNITE don't seem like particularly potent weapons you could deploy against God. Also, there's no obvious "things" for Kelsier or Dalinar to have picked up, unlike the confirmed Dawnshard, CHANGE. Ishar shows the same ability to open a Perpendicularity, so Dalinar's ability to do so is a feature of Bondsmiths rather than a Dawnshard. All that said, though, I still dig it. The fourth Command in your set could be DIVERGE or something similar.

Just to make an admittedly fine distinction, killing Tanavast and Splintering Honor are separate acts. Plus, "Odium has killed me" may not be literal, or may be a guess by the shadow of Honor in the vision. I think Honor's latter madness will have been to do with conflicting Oaths, and his ultimate solution to do with the binding of Ba-Ado-Mishram and a significant portion of Odium's Investiture ending up in Roshar itself. Perhaps by interfering with an Unmade, he broke a pact like that, but also bound Odium to the system in another way.

WoB is that Honor was Splintered. But he was excited by the question, and I think I know why. First, a note: I'm pretty sure Honor died in a protracted manner shortly after the Recreance. The trouble is, Odium was bound in Braize at the time. This was the very end of the False Desolation; Taln and the Oathpact still held strong; Ba-Ado-Mishram had been bound shortly before (suspiciously shortly before); there were no Fused; there was no Everstorm. So how did Odium Splinter Honor? One possibility is Tanavast went to Braize, in his madness. But there's zero evidence of any Splinters of Honor on Braize, and the Stormfather inherited much of Tanavast's Shadow and power. The other possibility is, stay with me here... he Splintered himself. Or even, Cultivation Splintered him. He was going mad at the end - perhaps it was an act of self-sacrifice, which seems in keeping with Honor. Does anyone know of any canon source that says it was actually Odium that did it? Because I can't find one.

Two points, one for and one against this idea. Against: it seems from what happened to the Sibling that the binding of Ba-Ado-Mishram caused Odium's tone to join Honor and Cultivation as one of the "true tones of Roshar". A good amount of his power had ended up bound in the planet, something he distinctly wished to avoid. For: the True Desolation was made possible by the Everstorm, which is an entirely new phenomenon "building up for centuries". It didn't exist in previous Desolations, and it allows the Fused to Return without Odium's direct intervention. I think it completely bypasses the Oathpact (and Taln didn't break), based on what Ulim and Rayse have said. It seems very likely indeed that the Everstorm is somehow tied to what Ba-Ado-Mishram did and the Investiture in Roshar.

I love this line of thought. Navani theorises that the introduction of Odium as a true tone of Roshar stops the Sibling's Towerlight - enough of Odium's Investiture must have ended up in the planet that his tone became a part of it as much as Honor and Cultivation, causing them to shift to harmonise. But it didn't happen when BAM first started Connecting to the singers! It happened when that Connection was snapped. At that point BAM has Invested in almost an entire race, a race intimately Connected to Roshar - my guess is that once she's cut off from them and not maintaining their forms, and they lose their minds and their spirit webs are all torn up, all that Investiture gets drained down into the planet like one giant gemstone. Especially since the transfer of Light is encouraged by sound, and their Connection to Roshar is strongly tied up with the Rhythms. That's the reason Honor was convinced they'd destroy the planet by binding her. That's why her actions were "incredibly stupid" according to Ulim and against Odium's wishes - he didn't want to be bound to the system, so only he, who could not be captured and cut off that way, should grant forms of power. This shifted the nature of Roshar itself, adjusting the tones to harmonise with each other, and would have affected everything Connected to the planet. The Sibling lost her Light. Even the listeners lost a lot of their non-power forms - the Rhythms must have changed. Nale says some interesting things when talking to Venli. She guesses that it was something he did to bring across Ulim and his ilk and Nale repudiates it, indicating that voidspren could only return if there was a Connection between Roshar and Braize. He comments that he's been vigilant and careful, and that he hadn't felt Taln give in. Nale and the Skybreakers' whole deal has been finding budding Knights Radiant and shutting them down. It seems pretty clear: the exercise of Surgebinding somehow strengthens a Connection to Braize and allows voidspren, the Fused, and Odium to return, bypassing the Oathpact. Why would Knights Radiant doing their thing cause a Connection to another planet? The Everstorm is new. It wasn't a thing until the listeners summoned it out of Shadesmar, where it had been building up for centuries, according to Ulim. The Fused no longer need Odium to resurrect them - the storm handles it. It must arise from the Investiture BAM left in the planet itself. My theory is this: using Stormlight via a Nahel bond also produces an amount of Voidlight, which is useless to KsR. It built up in the Cognitive Realm as the Skybreakers used Stormlight in limited amounts, and then accelerated as more spren started bonding humans - we're told they did this in response to the Everstorm approaching, but what if they unwittingly sped it up?