pmj812

Similar. The Parshendi really do seem honorable. I'm also not convinced death is final for them. I think if their corpses are undisturbed they can be raised. Why else would corpse-disturbing be offensive to parshmen, who have no culture to begin with and therefore no cultural taboos? I'm really curious what chapter 69's epigraph refers to: “All is withdrawn for me. I stand against the one who saved my life. I protect the one who killed my promises. I raise my hand. The storm responds.” I think it's Shallan, but it just might be Szeth. Shallan stands by Jasnah, who "killed her promises" to her brothers to steal a soulcaster and save the family. If in the next book she stands against her brothers or the ghost bloods, it's conceivable that this is her. On the other hand, we know Szeth's sanity hangs by a thread to the idea that he is only doing as his oaths and his honor demand. If somehow the re-establishment of the Knights Radiant releases him from his oaths, then he may wind up protecting Dalinar from King Crazypants Von Mengele. That one is entirely conjecture. I'm also curious about 49: “Radiant / of birthplace / the announcer comes / to come announce / the birthplace of Radiants.” announcer: synonym for Herald? Possibility: announcer = herald, Talanel will tell them where Urithiru is and help them re-found the Radiants. In this case I believe that Urithiru will be on one of the moons - isn't there reference to there being what might be forests on the green one?

I just had a related idea. Several, even: First, it's possible that the darkness-making, stone-skin, and flames all come when they are "activated" by odium. Second, what if the Parshmen were the Voidbringers, but the Parshendi were a rogue tribe that fights against Odium? And Honor granted them their increased intelligence as a reward? What if they know that the Desolation is coming and they assassinated the king just to bring the Alethi army out to the shattered plains so that it will be there when the real war starts and it will by and large avoid the mass surprise slaughter when the Parshmen rise up? That allows the Parshendi to be friends AND the Parshmen to be voidbringers! Third, I owe a great deal of thanks to whoever put together the Coppermind page with all the epigraphs: http://coppermind.17thshard.com/wiki/The_Way_of_Kings/Epigraphs So thanks whoever did that!

All three Mistborn novels had wonderful mysteries and hints in the epigraphs. Way of Kings does too. I think it will be fun to discuss all of the chapter epigraphs in one place: what their significance is, what they might mean or predict, etc. Much has been made of The Letter just about everywhere so I'd like to focus on some of the death quotes. chapter 3: “A man stood on a cliffside and watched his homeland fall into dust. The waters surged beneath, so far beneath. And he heard a child crying. They were his own tears.” Chapter 59: “Above the final void I hang, friends behind, friends before. The feast I must drink clings to their faces, and the words I must speak spark in my mind. The old oaths will be spoken anew.” Chapter 61: “In the storm I awaken, falling, spinning, grieving.” These are my absolute favorite (I swear 59 gives me chills every time I read it) and they clearly prefigure scenes in Way of Kings. One is Dalinar seeing the last vision, the next is Kaladin leaping across the chasm in the climactic battle, and the third is his trial by storm. Prologue: “The love of men is a frigid thing, a mountain stream only three steps from the ice. We are his. Oh Stormfather…we are his. It is but a thousand days, and the Everstorm comes.” chapter 5: “I have seen the end, and have heard it named. The Night of Sorrows, the True Desolation. The Everstorm.” These are interesting. I think there's reason to believe that the storms are preserving Roshar - bringing life and stormlight to a dying world. But the reference to the True Desolation as the Everstorm suggests that the storms are of evil, not good. Chapter 53: “He must pick it up, the fallen title! The tower, the crown, and the spear!” The "fallen title" is Knight Radiant, the tower and crown is house Kholin, whose Khokh-linil glyph pair is stylized so it looks like a tower and crown, and the spear is... Well here's the confusion. Either "he" is Kaladin, and the spear's meaning is obvious, or Kaladin is the spear, and "he" is Dalinar or one of Dalinar's sons. Chapter 55: “A woman sits and scratches out her own eyes. Daughter of kings and winds, the vandal.” The smart money is on Baxil's mistress being the herald Shalash, and this referring to her. She defaces statues of herself (both "vandal" and "scratches out her own eyes,") but I think there's a small chance it refers to Jasnah as well. She "sits" and does research, which is based on a flawed premise (her skepticism and belief in mundane natural causes are in this setting completely incorrect). In doing so she leads herself away from the truth - she "scratches out her own eyes." We know that she is the daughter of a king, and a potential Radiant (daughter of kings and winds) but the "vandal" doesn't quite fit. Playing off of this theory, two quotes lead me to believe that the Parshendi are not Voidbringers: (52) “I’m standing over the body of a brother. I’m weeping. Is that his blood or mine? What have we done?” (until the last question it seems to be Kaladin over Tien, but "what have we done?" doesn't fit that scenario as it wasn't their fault) (59 again) “Above the final void I hang, friends behind, friends before..." (recall the "friends before" were parshendi) and these lead me to believe that the Voidbringers are not Parshendi (7) “They are aflame. They burn. They bring the darkness when they come, and so all you can see is that their skin is aflame. Burn, burn, burn….” (8) “Victory! We stand atop the mount! We scatter them before us! Their homes become our dens, their lands are now our farms! And they shall burn, as we once did, in a place that is hollow and forlorn.” (65) “I see them. They are the rocks. They are the vengeful spirits. Eyes of red.” (66) “That chanting, that singing, those rasping voices.” (in 71, not an epigraph) “The day was ours, but they took it,” the boy cried. “Stormfather! You cannot have it. The day is ours. They come, rasping, and the lights fail. Oh, Stormfather!” notes: these make it sound like the voidbringers are (a.) stone, (b.) literally aflame, not just red, (c.) capable of literally sucking the light out of the space around them, and (d.) raspy, which descriptor I don't believe was ever applied to the Parshendi singing. Though one supposes that Talanel can say definitively if the parshmen are voidbringers just as soon as he wakes up.

Because we're so early in the series there are only two possible outcomes of Jasnah's "discovery." 1) she's right and no-one believes her, 2) she's wrong and everyone believes her. It's too early for a resolution so her discovery can only be part of a raising of the tension. I admit that her research seems solid but I'd like to present an important counterpoint: her worldview is WRONG. Her beliefs that the Almighty isn't real and that the legends of the desolations are just stories that describe natural cataclysms are demonstrably incorrect. Starting from such a flawed premise, can we really trust her conclusions?

Could Sazed be the Seventeenth Shard? This post may contain some confusing semantics. Please bear with me. In the letter, Hoid uses the following wording: "Your friends of the Seventeenth Shard" not "Your friends in the Seventeenth Shard" or "Your friends, the Seventeenth Shard" This may not mean anything, but it's at least possible that "of the Seventeenth Shard" means that they are acolytes who serve or follow an entity called the Seventeenth Shard rather than members of an organization which is called the Seventeenth Shard. Moving on, here's why "Seventeenth Shard" might be a title that Sazed deserves: Adonalsium shattered into 16 shards. If we were inclined to number them, they would naturally be the first through sixteenth shards, in whatever order you like. Suppose it isn't strictly true that Sazed currently holds both Preservation and Ruin. Suppose that by taking both shards he caused them to fuse into one shard, and this new shard is called Harmony. Harmony is neither Preservation nor Ruin, it is something new. I'm going to fall back on basic chemistry to illustrate this. Table salt is sodium chloride. In terms of its physical properties it is not sodium (which is a soft metal) and it is not chlorine (which is a gas), it's something new. If Harmony is a new shard, that makes it seventeenth out of sixteen. That's where this gets semantically confusing. In this model there are only fifteen extant shards but if you numbered them, they would be numbered one through seventeen and two would be missing (Preservation and Ruin, because technically they don't exist as separate shards anymore). I think there's some support for this idea, that there is now one shard called Harmony where there once were two called Preservation and Ruin. But if I haven't already lost everyone's interest with the tiresome semantics, here's an interesting consequence if I'm wrong: If Sazed held Preservation and Ruin as separate shards, then the shards' tendency to direct their holder's will toward their intent would be in conflict. If the two shards have remained separate in him, it may be that Sazed now has two wills reflecting two intents. This takes us down the road of some fascinating real-world theology. (google "two wills of Christ" to see what I mean, but if you do you may end up waist-deep in the Summa Theologica, and I can't be held responsible for that.)

I'm seeing a lot of "love synonym, charity synonym," etc. To me that means "Agape," (ah-GAH-pay) one of the four Greek words for Love, very important in Christian theology. Charity would be the closest translation and it means unconditional self-sacrificing love. So an opposite for it, if Skai is the opposite, would be taking rather than freely giving. So while unity sounds benign and good, what about assimilation? WHAT IF SKAI IS THE BORG? but seriously, see if this makes sense: If the aspect of love that we're supposed to get for Aona is giving, then Skai might be consuming. It may be that Fjordell doesn't want to unite the world, it wants to consume it. Let me actually take all of this in a slightly new direction. So there is the Dor, the energy which, when the Aon was improperly constructed, tried to pull Raoden in. What if Aona's essential nature is to give of the Dor to the world, and Skai's essential nature is to absorb the world into the Dor? Think about this: when an Elantrian uses the Dor, they create an Aon outside of themselves to bestow energy on others. What we know of the monks on the other hand is that they can seemingly absorb AonDor energy, and think about their teleportation: to teleport someone a monk must die. Why? Could it be that his soul is sucked into the Dor, leaving his body dead? Give from the Dor, absorb into the Dor. I think that's how they're opposed.

I think it's the big, crazy sea spren from the Axies the Collector interlude.

You're right on splinters. Sorry about that. I guess one of the things about odium/rayse that confuses me is, why is Hatred one of the most powerful of the shards? and why does Hoid hate Bavadin, whoever that is? Anyway the whole thing sort of rolled together in my head when I started trying to put the shards into a version of the allomancy wheel. I still think there's a way to categorize them that way. I suspect my first attempt is way off (heck I'd be disappointed if I was completely right - it would deprive me of 10 more years of speculating!) but even off-the-wall ideas sometimes shake something loose, you know? I think you're right about ideals being spiritual and emotions being cognitive. That raises the question, is compassion/charity an ideal or an emotion? Or is it both? On another note, when I saw that Aona meant charity, it made me think that the other theological virtues, faith and hope, might also be shards. Finally, to elaborate why I made honor and odium opposites: The idea is, the dynamic represents a rising action or a falling action, and the static represents the pinnacle or nadir. So charity is the virtue that leads to a more perfect spirit, and the state of the perfect spirit is honor. Meanwhile, Odium is the dead spirit, devoid entirely of virtue. Actually what makes me think of this is a juxtaposition of Preservation, Nohadon, and Dalinar. Dalinar says the Codes are for a people that already knows right from wrong. But first they have to get there. Likewise, preservation is not a virtue unless the thing being preserved is good First a thing is cultivated and made good, then the good is preserved. Or it rots and falls into ruin.

I think that we know what happened to Honor. "Above silence, the illuminating storms - dying storms - illuminate the silence above." The world is dead. The sky is dead. The storms are the last vestige of life, and for all their violence, Roshar and everything on it would die without them. The storms and the spren are the splinters of Honor. When Odium struck the fatal blow most of the world was dead or dying already. Honor instituted the highstorms with his last breath as a desperate, last-ditch effort to keep Roshar alive.

I think we have a strong chance that "paranoid about shady dudes" means Gaz has taken himself to Shadesmar accidentally and is trapped there. Remember, Gaz takes ridiculous chances to infuse his spheres. There was a sense that "Gaz is giving us dun spheres again" when it was Kaladin who drained them - but notice the "again." Spheres go dun around Gaz too, I'm thinking. But he doesn't understand why. He and the King both seem to be using stormlight without realizing it, and be paranoid about half-seen shadowy figures. Soulcasters, both of 'em.

Hi everyone! I’m new. That means most of these ideas have probably been discarded ages ago. I did try to look for them in the forums but I can’t say I was completely thorough. Anyway here’s what I’ve got: 1) an idea about the 16 Shards based on a problem I had with Odium 2) Some Sprenology 3) a small Stormlight 2 prediction SHARD THEORY: So I was thinking: Why does Odium want to destroy the universe? Odium means hatred, premature heat death of universe seems like more of a Ruin thing. This had me gnawing on Odium all morning (not the best flavor btw) and I came up with an interesting possibility. Remember in Allomancy a metal could be “external physical pulling” and that was what categorized it? I think the Shards fall into 4 broad categories and within them can be positive or negative, dynamic or static. 3 of the 4 categories are physical, spiritual, cognitive. I’m stumped on the 4th. Cosmic maybe? Let’s run with that. Here is what I am proposing: Physical, positive, static: Preservation Physical, negative, static: Ruin Physical, positive, dynamic: Cultivation Physical, negative, dynamic: Rot? Spiritual, positive, static: Honor Spiritual, negative, static: Odium (Bavadin, not Rayse) Spiritual, positive, dynamic: Compassion/Charity/Aona Spiritual, negative, dynamic: Skai - Envy? Cognitive, positive, static: Knowledge? Cognitive, negative, static: Ignorance? Cognitive, positive, dynamic: Hope or Learning? Cognitive, negative, dynamic: Despair or Forgetting? Cosmic, Positive, Static: ??? Cosmic, Negative, Static: HDU (Rayse) Cosmic, Positive, Dynamic: Endowment Cosmic, Negative, Dynamic: Entropy? HDU stands for Heat Death of the Universe, which seems to be Rayse’s goal. I acknowledge the likelihood that Rayse is Odium, but what if Odium is only Rayse’s henchman? Question marks indicate wild speculation, obvs. OK! Onward to justification! Since I was thinking that Odium’s “destroy it all” thing seemed more in Ruin’s court, and Odium is an emotion, and emotions are, perhaps, spiritual - That’s what sparked the idea that Odium and Ruin were somehow in the same category. Ruin wanting to see all physical things destroyed, odium wanting to see all spiritual things destroyed, and if they take down the other realms at the same time, hey! bonus! The rest of the structure comes from the fact that there seem to be so many opposed pairs, and from cultivation and charity come the notion of the static vs. dynamic ideas. The idea of cosmic as the fourth category and above the other three comes from Sazed, Endowment, and what Brandon has said about Sazed: Sazed can’t reach into the afterlife proper (yet), but perhaps Endowment can, making Endowment one of the “greater” shards. From here we get the idea that Rayse is the greater cosmic static negative because letter writer calls his shard the most powerful. Thus Odium becomes Bavadin and only the Sauron to Rayse’s Morgoth. From here I make the further wild guess that the Letter Recipient is either Knowledge or the Cosmic Positive Static I have no name for, and Hoid may be Hope, but probably not. I think it’s possible the Nightwatcher is Despair. For this to be true then Honor’s reference of Cultivation would not be a reference to any of the “three who ruled” but rather a more distant memory. Or perhaps that the Old Magic and the Nightwatcher are not the third of the 3 at all, but moved in and set up shop later. So anyway that’s the big theory. Fire away! the small theories: the Spren are the slivers of Honor, they and the Highstorms are his remains. Also, this one is more of a storytelling nature: One of two things will happen in stormlight 2: either Jasnah is right about the parshmen and no-one will believe her, leading to tragedy, or she is wrong and everyone believes her, leading to atrocity.