Returned

Me, too. The Siah seem to me like they have more connection to the Cognitive Realm, maybe existing in both places (like how Sja Anat is described in RoW) or being affected by Roshar's odd relationship with the CR. They're very intriguing either way and I'm excited to learn more. The implications of spren and Radiant becoming the same being would be very profound and have far-reaching consequences. Nale introduces an interesting wrinkle in that he manifests his Radiant Shardblade on-camera, which would suggest that his spren is not fully manifested in the Physical Realm in some other way (like being physically combined with Nale). But as @Treamayne pointed out, Nale may be a special case. And for that matter the 5th level ideal may not be identical across the orders. RoW raised so many more questions than it answered!

I'd thought that Syl's instance of depression came from her request to be able to feel what Kaladin was going through in order to understand him better, though I'm sure the separation is not very good for strongly bonded spren.

As far as I know they're just different parts of speech. Investiture is a noun: it's the state of something being Invested with energy from the Spiritual Realm, or the energy that is contained in someone or something. Invested is an adjective: it describes a noun that has Spiritual Energy in it. Investing is a progressive verb: it describes a noun being imbued with Investiture, by whatever mechanism. Investiture is used by Taravangian to describe the effects of advancing people through the Nahel bond: "Care must be taken to avoid placing these subjects in situations of powerful stress unless you accept the consequences of their potential Investiture." (WoR, page 935). He is describing the risk of people becoming imbued with energy from the Spiritual Realm by developing the Nahel bond. Invested is used by Zahel to describe a Highstorm: "One of those storms had come, Invested to the hilt and looking for a place to stick it." (WoR, page 398). Zahel is describing the Highstorm as being filled with energy from the Spiritual Realm. I don't recall seeing the word Investing used this way in a Cosmere novel offhand, so I can't give an example of that one.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the section of my post you quoted. The Outer Cities are in the process of revolting against Elendel specifically because of its political dominance (or at least, so they say), and the unrest is substantially fueled by how Elendel runs all overland shipping through itself while charging high taxes and denying political representation for people living outside of Elendel itself. Reading over my post again I'll certainly agree that "the whole reason" is an overstatement, definitely for the Outer Cities. Is that what you mean? The Basin is artificial, but the Roughs are outside of it (separated by mountain ranges) and are specifically not especially good places to settle-- it's commented on again and again how much harder it is to live out there, how the land isn't as spectacularly fertile and starvation is an ever-present possibility. "Freedom in the Roughs came at a cost" (BoM, page 259). The implication of that line is that the freedom in the Roughs (freedom is not clearly defined in that quote) comes at a cost of not enjoying the lushness of the Basin.

All we know about Hoid's immortality is that it's different from the others we've seen in the Cosmere, so I don't think we have enough information to talk about what effects specific mechanics would have (though I may have missed some newer information). It seems like it's not just magical healing in the vein of a goldmind or something though, so even if that power were removed from him it might not be enough to allow him to be killed.

That is a much more brief span of time than I'd been thinking. Still enough for pretty profound changes in societies (1550 - 1891 saw some pretty radical changes in various places), but short enough that the changes do seem a bit more striking given who created post-Catacendre civilization. Not so brief that the greater standards of living couldn't prompt it though, and the political dominance of Elendel's government is pretty clearly a factor regardless of timing (that's the whole reason people moved to far-flung cities or the Roughs in the first place).

I liked the events of the Oathbringer climax, but thought that it was too drawn out with all of the perspective shifts. Too many scenes end on a cliffhanger, then you jump to another character who sees a few things, then another cliffhanger, and by the time you're back to a previous cliffhanger there's a lot of repetitiveness in phrasing and event description to get you back into the mood of that scene, the character strikes a cool pose and says a dramatic line, and then things inch forward again to another cliffhanger, and repeat. In terms of narrative flow and pacing I preferred the climaxes of Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, even though the battle of Thaylen City was in its own right a bigger, more exciting, and more epic conflict than those others. It felt to me like a good Dragonball Z episode-- exciting for sure, but a little thin for its length. I also thought that the previous two books had more depth, worldbuilding, and poignance to them (but those are more matters of taste). Passable seems a bit harsh and I enjoyed Oathbringer but I, too, have read better.

Cultivation for me, for sure. Well... maybe Invention, though we know so little about it. Or Fortune, for the same reason. I'll just say those three combined, then: Cultiventune.

I suppose we just don't know enough about the history of the Basin and its polities to say for certain. I don't think that the draws of bigger cities are so hard to imagine, nor the difficulty in striking out to be a subsistence farmer instead so appealing, nor wealth consolidation being advanced by invested parties over the course of centuries (I think it's ~600 years? a long time, at any rate) so implausible, nor the loss of an individualistic farming tradition over that same timescale so unrealistic (especially if farming is so productive that most don't need to engage in it). Six hundred years is a long time, representing dozens of generations. And the Elendel set also got a large cache of knowledge from Sazed, if I remember correctly (which I may not; I'm pacing out my next re-read of era 2 to fit with Lost Metal's release), so they probably didn't even need especially long transition periods to move on to better infrastructure, technologies, and commodities. But at the same time it's also true that shadowy forces are at large, including but not necessarily limited to the Set and Trell, so there could be something more to the imbalances of modern Elendel. But my overarching point is that I just don't find it so implausible that those imbalances might exist on their own. I've just skimmed the chapter (skimmed only), and I'm not sure this is quite as strong as you're implying. There is "a field of carrots [that] grew with green sprouts, completely uncultivated" (page 255) and a wilderness "blooming with random patches of fruit or vegetables" (page 259). Neither is all that unrealistic-- you can find carrot patches, stands of fruit trees, patches of vegetables or gourds, and similar in the real wilderness too (though I would imagine that in Elendel they're more impressive and extensive than in reality). Planting in the Basin may not be "like out in the Roughs, where planting was fraught with uncertainty, and [where] the danger of starvation was real" (page 259), but that doesn't mean that you can easily run a farm or just forage forever, let alone thousands or millions of people (though they would have a better shot in the Basin than in most parts of the real world). Unless there is another section I've missed that doesn't imply to me that it would be easy, in terms of what you need to do to feed yourself and your family each year, to be a successful subsistence farmer. Definitely possible in most parts of the basin at least, but not obviously more attractive than city life. Particularly if city life has degraded over the last few decades. In the cities you might work hard and be poor, but as a subsistence farmer you'd work hard and be poorer. London had ~7 million inhabitants in 1910, and New York had ~ 4.7 million. It was definitely unusual for cities to be so massive though. But Elendel is both a deity-created paradise and also has access to magic and a great deal of practical knowledge simply handed to them. Plus the ease of growing crops would make it much easier to support a larger population with fewer farmers while also allowing large-scale production of industrial crops-- Elendel should be able to enjoy a higher standard of living than real-world cities at basically any population level, I would think. Well, again, 600 years is a very long time. And what we see in the books clearly indicates that there are such laws, so the answer to your question of "how" is some flavor of "somehow". There are plenty of unscrupulous political actors just in the tiny slice of time we see on screen in the books; a few centuries of them would be plenty to introduce all sorts of changes from what Spook might have preferred. But you may be right that there is something more specific to the story, which we may discover in just a few months.

What things were like a century before Alloy of Law is less important for working conditions during that book that the situation at that time. Given the political climate as it's presented to us, I'd bet that consolidation of production (including food) is pretty heavy. Elendel has a pretty orderly system of government and property, enough so that a random person probably can't just wander off to a patch of land, claim it for free, and then become a subsistence farmer with no startup costs. All of those opportunities have probably already been arbitraged away by the time the books depict. Even if they could, subsistence farming isn't necessarily the most awesome way to live. People like clothing, manufactured goods, and similar. Even if there's no knowledge or skill needed to grow enough to live on (a pretty strong assumption), there is a lag time between starting a farm and having edible food. If you're just scraping by in your factory job you may not be able to buy enough food to last you through that period. Plus, nowhere near all of the arable land will be dedicated to food production. People will need non-food crops also, and there will be significant profit opportunities in producing as much of those as the Elendel economy can handle. Substantial overproduction of food will just impoverish the food farmers anyways. As for a life of farming being easy and pleasant, I'm going to guess that you're not a farmer, much less a subsistence farmer. Crops already grow themselves, but harvesting, processing, and storing them still represents a huge amount of difficult manual labor. Doing all that just to enjoy a lifestyle of not starving, even if an option, might not be so appealing compared to a low-wage factory job that covers food and meager comforts. But regardless, I think that the issues you identify are more social and political than anything. The basic organization we see is almost feudal (Wax owns factories and employs workers, and also represents those workers in the government, for example). The government is both oligarchic and corrupt in ways that favor the already-rich and support their consolidation of wealth. In many ways, the social, legal, and political landscape seem to be tilted heavily to disadvantage the lower classes of Elendel and prevent them from having leverage like you imply they should have. That's a big part of why they have so much unrest!

Unless they had some sort of general distribution of goods people would still need to find some way to get what they need, like food. If there isn't enough farmland for everyone to have their own bit that grows enough for themselves that's probably going to be trading their labor in one form or another. We also see trends towards consolidation of wealth, such as Edwarn impoverishing a poor man through a vicious loan just because he would personally end up with more money. As soon as all the farmland is owned you don't have the option of easy subsistence any more. So you'll have to find some way to earn a living enough to afford food someone else has grown. And once you've got a food cartel, or several of them, in place suddenly the would-be farmers have no more leverage of any kind, and they're back to being stuck accepting what conditions they can get. Many move out of the Basin, but life isn't so easy there. Meanwhile, the standard of living goes up with new technologies and higher-capacity production, so there is huge demand for the things that industry can produce, including from the people that need work. So much like in the real world, the fact that there are plenty of accessible resources for everyone doesn't matter if the distribution of those resources is skewed enough.

Plus, with Feruchemical zinc and emotional Allomancy (and maybe more powers besides), he could really nail those dramatic speech moments whether he's planned them all out already or not.

The points made in this thread are good, and correct, I think. But the Heralds are going to be tough to understand for a while. They have an incredible amount of knowledge about the world, the different realms, the nature of magic on Roshar, risks and benefits of different things, all tempered by varying shades of undefined insanity. Their decisions and actions can range from precise, prescient, and perfect, all the way down to totally baseless and irrational, and I don't know that we will (generally) have the context to identify where any given action falls in that range.

Thanks, I hadn't seen that WoB before! I wonder how Moelach's effects work.

This seems totally plausible and appropriate for the timescales involved. I hadn't thought about this before, but it requires fewer assumptions than some powerful, mystical being about which we know nothing save for this. You have changed my mind! That's a fair possibility: Taravangian has the right information, but draws the wrong conclusion only because of specific events which he couldn't deduce. As for the "burdens of nine" comment, I've been growing more and more uncertain about it. It definitely sounds like something appropriate for Taln, trapped alone in the Oathpact. But at the same time I'm not sure it's sensible to say that he's carrying the madness of the other nine-- they all seem to be carrying their own so far, at least most of the time. He certainly bore their burden on Braize for a long time, but the madness now seems to me like a different thing. And also, death rattles only describe the future, never the past, and by the time Taravangian is collecting them anything related to Aharietiam would be in the deep past. It's totally possible that the details are garbled and filtered through the knowledge of the person perceiving the future, but I don't think that we've seen the realization of this one yet.

Hm, Conjuring yes but Midsommar no... Let the Right One In is great (the original one from Sweden; the American remake Let Me In was also good, but less so, I thought). Sinister was another that I liked a lot, and one I group with The Conjuring in my mind. Cabin in the Woods may not quite count, but is worthwhile if you're in a horror movie mood. I also really liked Hereditary, though the closing sequence might be more intense than you're looking for.

Definitely possible, but this is a huge assumption. We don't know if the rates of achieving the 3rd oath we see in RoW are typical, but that seems reasonable enough-- they were even better at Radiant-ing back then. But still, we should expect far more Radiant-affiliated people to be at the lower levels rather than an even, 50/50 split. It's just easier to be a squire or aspiring Knight of the 1st or 2nd Ideal than anything higher, and so we should expect far more of those than full Knights. Regardless, no matter how many Radiants there were at 3+ Ideals sworn, there's just not that much reason to believe that every Radiant who broke their oaths in the Recreance would manifest their Blades when they did it. I mean, why would they? Feverstone was a dramatic statement, maybe intended to let all of the witnesses know that the Knights were walking away from their oaths in a way they couldn't ignore or miss. It's possible that the Blades at Feverstone are more or less the only ones in the Physical Realm on Roshar. That would still be more than we know are accounted for, but far from thousands. Stormwardens are a relatively recent addition to Roshar. Pre-Recreance there may have been other ways of knowing about Highstorms (like spren giving warning, maybe, though that wouldn't be available after the Recreance), but we don't know. If predicting a storm isn't reliable or easy then problems would be much more common. At the same time, we know that Kaladin had spent more than one Highstorm outside without proper shelter, so it's far from a guarantee that this would be a major problem. A huge amount. To bury a city such that the buildings are indistinguishable from ordinary ground requires a lot of crem. It would take a while to cover a six-foot Shardblade's full height, but like you say it would probably be far more likely that a loose Blade would be buried pretty close to its hilt or lying more parallel to the ground. It would take far less crem to bury. But more importantly, once the thing on the ground doesn't obviously look like a Blade it becomes pretty well hidden-- in just a couple of storms, it could look like a spur of rock or be indistinguishable from the ground. It doesn't seem relevant to the story to me for there to be, say, four hundred deadeye Shardblades manifested on Roshar versus thousands. Brandon is a good writer and has thought a great deal about these books, so I personally am banking on the story being interesting and not straightforward for the next six thousand pages. I just don't think that that requires a huge cache of Shardblades, more than anywhere else on Roshar ever, be hidden in Shinovar (or anywhere else). That's not to say that an interesting story can't or won't include such a thing. I just don't find the arguments here that it definitely will to be persuasive. I still think that you're way overestimating the number of Blades manifested on Roshar during the Recreance, which is the key detail for the rest of the theory to work, and underestimating how easily a Blade could be lost (especially before they could be dismissed back to the CR). But you could be right! A question about the number of Blades known on Roshar versus the vision of Feverstone Keep would be a great one for Brandon. Maybe it wouldn't even be RAFO-ed!

At the sub-Shard level, I'd have to go with Fullborn Metallic Arts. The powers are diverse, portable, accessible, and Compounding gives you an incredibly formidable set of abilities. I'd prefer it to Hemalurgy largely because it's hard to set up (you have to spike people who already have the powers you want), which seriously undermines its versatility, while also leaving you directly vulnerable to interference from a Shard (limiting how many powers you can collect even under ideal circumstances). If you feel combining Allomancy and Feruchemy at once is a cheat by using two magic systems, then I'd probably lean towards Feruchemy. It's also tricky to get set up, but if you're a full Feruchemist you can likely do some very intriguing things with manipulating Identity and Investiture both to enhance your own, other powers as well as interfere with those of others.

I don't know that I would describe honorable hatred as "justice" or "judgement", though reducing Shards to a single word each is definitely too reductive to capture much of what they really are. It's not impossible that the outlook and intent of a new Vessel might combine them in a way like what you're describing, though I'm not sold that it's likely (even if it's not impossible). Honor, as manifested on Roshar, isn't about what is right, it's about things being bound together by promises and then never breaking those promises. Odium isn't really about destruction (that's more Ruin's thing), though the effects of its actions are often destructive. Justice is usually thought of as something dispassionate: you don't punish someone because you hate them, nor hate them because they deserve punishment; you punish someone because they deserve it or it's right to do it. Justice doesn't really depend on promises in any obvious way, at least not one that occurs to me right now. However, I do think that you are right to think beyond the nature of the combined Light of Honor and Odium to describe their nature, especially given that we know combining Shards can result in different outcomes (a WoB establishes that Ruin and Preservation could have been Discord instead of Harmony). And I wouldn't say that Honor plus Cultivation would be Tower, even though their combined Lights are Towerlight (though that's probably not named for the rhythm it gives off, but rather the only environment in which it's found). So I don't think that War is necessarily what a combination of Odium and Honor would be, but I think that Justice or Judgement are both more of a stretch. My bet is that a reconstituted Honor will instead be Unity (or something similar), and will be compelled to re-combine the other Shards. If that's true, then adding in Odium might cause the new Shard to be something like Completion, hating disunity and separation of a whole. That would be a pretty interesting counterpart to Autonomy, and would certainly drive conflict between Shards.

That's kind of my point, though. The rules of the competition in the Purelake specifically allowed Szeth's strategy. It was in the "law" of the contest, and one of the proctors even said that someone figures that out every time the challenge takes place. In that sense it's the opposite of a loophole, and the rinsing is something the rules are designed to allow and even encourage. And because understanding rules very precisely is something that Skybreakers are supposed to do they and their spren are pleased when someone demonstrates that they can notice that. I agree that a highspren might be receptive to the right argument, but I don't think that they'll be generally receptive to an argument that elides the law (however they want to define it) just because doing so would adhere to an agreement-- that's honorspren territory, and Syl at least thinks highspren won't operate that way. But as I said, I think you're right to note the very specific phrasing of Szeth's oath, especially because it differs from what we've seen of how Skybreakers operate. We shouldn't assume that Szeth's behaviors as a Skybreaker will be just like what we've seen of other members of that order, or even that highspren are a (let alone the) reason Skybreakers act as we've observed. I've been thinking of highspren as spren of law, but what if they're not? They could as easily be spren of justice, or something like that, and the rigid focus on law that Skybreakers have is something that is distinctly about that order of Knight Radiant. That would in some ways fit better with the nature of spren, and could allow for the flexibility you describe in a very natural, even necessary, way.

There's something similar in Renarin's use of Regrowth too. When he heals Adolin at the paddock, Adolin has a vision of himself perfected. That's pretty similar to the vision of Moash-- it's Moash, perfected.

I think that one of the most significant reasons to think that Dalinar has not achieved his 5th oath is the observation of the Fused, especially Raboniel. They are pretty certain that Jasnah has achieved the fourth ideal (which is why they need her out of the tower at Urithiru), and think that Kaladin may be close. If they were so concerned about Radiants with 4+ oaths, and were able to discern that Jasnah had reached it (despite not having much apparent surveillance of her), they would have been very concerned about Dalinar as well. But they never mention him at all in those deliberations, despite having tons of witnesses to his "I am Unity" moment. That said, he's clearly close to the fourth ideal in Oathbringer before that moment, as he nearly manifests Shardplate while interacting with Venli in the Nohadon vision. He's not the only Radiant to get close, with the prismatic outlines of light around their bodies, but close is all it is.

That's an interesting observation, and I guess we don't really know how rigid highspren are about oaths. I'm skeptical that highspren are all that open to being flexible with the law, since that's kind of their essence. That's one of the differences Syl notes between them and honorspren: And Nale draws a sharp contrast between morality and law: At the same time, in RoW we've seen that honorspren have come to define honor differently even amongst themselves, and almost certainly differently than they had done in the past. So maybe we're seeing something similar with highspren. Possibly in tandem with Nale himself changing so much over the millenia. We haven't seen many Skybreakers in action so we don't have a lot of comparisons available. The best one I can think of is in Lift's first interlude chapter, where a Skybreaker kills a hostage because he said he would and thought it would be wrong to not follow through. He's sharply scolded by Nale because they didn't have legal permission to kill the hostage in Azir. We have a few possible explanations that I can think of offhand: That Skybreaker had sworn his second oath to follow the law, in contrast to Szeth's oath That Skybreaker had not yet sworn the second oath That Skybreaker had sworn his third oath to follow Nale, and so regardless of his specific second oath had to follow Azir's laws exactly because that's what Nale did But I think you're right to note that the oath doesn't seem to bind Szeth in the way we might generically expect it to bind a Skybreaker, and that highsprens' judgement seems like a really important factor in what a Skybreaker is allowed to do according to their oaths.

There is one detail I tracked down that is curious, and suggests that broken-bond-dead spren are not necessarily deadeyes. This is a conversation between Shallan and Pattern: There are a couple of things to note here. The most important is that it reinforces that the Radiant bond exists before a person is a Knight, which in turn suggests that during the Recreance there were bonded spren who could have been damaged by the breaking of oaths but who could not manifest as Blades, and so would not have left Shardblades behind. But we also have an interesting description. Before being "born", Pattern existed but wasn't "Pattern". This fits with Syl's description of how new honorspren are made, in that they are specific manifestations of power/patterns/Investiture that already existed but are given a new form when the new spren is "created". But before this "birth", spren don't exist in the way we think of them, specifically there isn't a body or mind (or even an organization of components or identity) associated with them. So Pattern's description of dead spren being like Cryptics unborn doesn't quite fit with what we've seen of deadeyes, or what Pattern knew of them at that time. So maybe there are other states for dead spren, particularly those who were not manifested physically/were not able to manifest physically at the time of the Recreance. I'm not totally convinced that this excerpt is reliable enough to take completely at face value. Most specifically I believe that this was before the major reveal that Shardblades were all dead spren (my memory may not be exactly right on this), and so the details may not be expressed in ways we would expect given that later knowledge. And Pattern's description does fit with what we know of deadeyes in most respects, especially when he describes efforts to restore the dead spren. But it's a bit more information that might bear consideration. Regardless, the estimates of unknown Shardblades given above are probably a bit high: there is no reason to think that oaths are evenly distributed among people pursuing Radiant bonds, especially since the oaths are difficult to swear acceptably and become increasingly harder (we should have far fewer 5th ideal-sworn people than 2nd, for example). Malchin is an example of this, as he was essentially unable to progress. The points raised about squires are good, but we just don't know enough about how how it worked during the height of the Knights' organizations, and knowledge of which people might be ready to progress seems very difficult to determine. There is a gemstone from Oathbringer which records a Knight who doesn't think they'll be able to swear the Fourth Ideal, even though everyone around them assumes that they will do so soon. Even then, the most likely explanation for the majority of "missing" blades is just that they're lost. Many in seas, rivers or lakes, and a lot of them buried since just a handful of weeks would be enough to cover over a Blade in crem from Highstorms.

I think we can say that the bonded owner does not need to be touching the Blade. When Dalinar brings Oathbringer to Ialai in Oathbringer, he still hears the screams even though he is the only one touching it and Oathbringer is not bonded to anyone at that time. (That was a weird sentence to type, with all those Oathbringers!).