Dros

I like the way you think, Unwordly

Anybody know what the symbol might be on the ship's sail in the Kharbranth drawing?

Could explain why Honor apologizes so much in the last vision. It was strange for me thinking he apologized for letting Odium kill him. Regret for the desperate Oathpact and not foreseeing the ramifications of the Oathpact being shattered makes more sense.

You put down your thoughts better than I was able to, Jaconis.

Quotes on Voidbringers:

Quote

Gifts of their god, granted to allow them to fight horrors of rock and flame, dozens of feet tall, foes

whose eyes burned with hatred. The Voidbringers.

Quote

“They were suddenly dangerous. Like a calm day that became a tempest.”

—This fragment is the origin of a Thaylen proverb that was eventually reworked into a more common

derivation. I believe it may reference the Voidbringers. See Ixsix’s Emperor, fourth chapter.

Quote

Innia, in her recordings of children’s folktales, speaks of the Voidbringers as being “Like a

highstorm, regular in their coming, yet always unexpected.” The word Desolation is used twice in

reference to their appearances.

Quote

Like shadows they were, that can transform as the

flame dances. Never underestimate them because of what you first see.

(emphasis mine.)

Quote

Suffice it to say that the

Almighty’s pure goodness created the Voidbringers, but men may choose good without creating evil

because as mortals they have a dual nature.

I found this one interesting-it's by Kabsal.

The following are from Jasnah's notes:

Quote

Shallan scanned the page. Some of the quotes—or at least the concepts—were familiar to her from

what she’d read already.

Suddenly dangerous. Like a calm day that became a tempest.

“They were real,” Jasnah repeated.

Beings of ash and fire.

“We fought with them,” Jasnah said. “We fought so often that men began to speak of the creatures

in metaphor. A hundred battles—ten tenfolds...”

Flame and char. Skin so terrible. Eyes like pits of blackness. Music when they kill.

And I rest my case! Oh wait, yeah, you're right.

Well, I guess that takes care of that. heh.

Mmm, but there have been descriptions of Voidbringers-ash and fire and all that.

But do the notes ever actually say, "Voidbringers have skin like so: XXXXX"?

BS is a savvy writer, it's like presenting a policy or project proposal to a savvy politiican, boss or potential client who has something else in mind for whatever reason. After you present, they'll say, "Yessir, I think that is the best option."

If you leave and tell your superiors you've landed it, you'll be in for a big surprise. Yours might be the best option, but they never said they'd implement it or even ever discuss it again. They are very careful about exactly what they say. If you imply something and they agree, great, they won't say anything. If you imply something and they don't like it, they point back at the exact phrasing only.

It seems BS is very careful about how he words things(this is a series after all and he is quite a successful writer, and who wants to read a series when you already have all the answers and it's easy to project the arc of the story?). Every conjecture or bit of speculation I've written could be completely wrong, and every scrap of research Jasnah in story has gathered could be completely off base. Hell, she could be a Voidbringer trying to throw everyone off her trail!

That's basically my argument. Throwing out different theories is just a fun way to speculate, but really I don't think it's anywhere near definitive that the Parshendi are the Voidbringers. I do agree, however, there is quite a bit of evidence in favor of that theory and I think BS has deliberately done that so he can throw one heckuva twist in there at some point. What that twist might be is what I'm speculating about.

Y'all might be completely right, the arguments are very convincing, in my opinion, that the Parshendi are the Voidbringers. If we're assuming Voidbringers are some type of person or animal, the Parshendi seem to fit the bill when considering Jasnah's research. I certianly can't back up many assertions to refute them...I imagine BS will settle this later, but the speculation is pretty intriguing to me.

Just a couple thoughts to see what you guys think:

Tthe name itself (Void-bringer) seems to describe the entity's actions. The Voidbringers "bring the void" whatever that might entail. After looking at this for a little while, I'm not sure the Voidbringers are anything like a physical person or being at all.

Has anyone discussed the drawing described in the book? ...the picture described by Jasnah (?? I think it was her research) showed a similar creature to a Chasmfiend with people pointing at it and a storm of some kind behind it. The caption said it was a drawing of a Voidbringer. Now was it referring to the creature or the storm behind the creature as a Voidbringer?

Hoid's story about the king looking for a place where the Voidbringers (if they're storms of some kind) are spawned would actually make more sense in that regard.

A Herald says they do, surely we can take their word?

I don't recall him ever saying that specifically...did he?

This message is much more like a warning about Odium, so that suggestion seems very strange.

Who's to say Odium isn't one of those annoying guys that refers to himself in the third person? You know, like the Hulk. "odium is coming. Odium SMASH!"

In all seriousness, Mad Scientist related a theory where Odium, Honor and Cultivation were all fighting the same Enemy, meaning Odium wasn't the main enemy they were fighting. Perhaps Odium is the source of the Highstorms, he sees a man riding the storms, the Oathpact that allowed men to do so with Odium's permission is broken, so he calls Kaladin out on it.

Yes, Odium killed Honor, but Odium's, by definition, a d!ck, right? Doesn't mean that whatever rules the Void isn't the actual Enemy causing the Desolations. Odium just wants to be the only Shard. And all of BS's books have been differently themed...Elantris was about a broken Shard-machine, right? And Mistborn was about a conflict between Shards, so as a twist I can see him introducing a grand conflict of an old enemy facing off against all the Shards...after all, we don't know what shattered Andasolium(sp?). Maybe that which killed Andasolium is now trying to destroy Roshar. Honor said it involved "all of them" which I took to mean all the Shards on every world.

I noticed in Dalinar's last vision he never says Odium wants the True Desolation, although taken in context it would seem he does. He always says "it's what he wants"...he always refers to the entity as "he" and only refers to Odium as his killer. Like Mad Scientist said...if Honor had been fighting Odium for eons, why would he not be ready for Odium to come for him?

However, I could be wrong on so many levels it's not even funny. I guess I'll have to RAFO

Allowing for the red blood to be human, we can assume that the orange is that of Voidbringers.

Assuming Voidbringers bleed.

I believe that we can safely assume that the Pashendi are either Voidbringers themselves or are closely related to them.

Oh, I'll be the first to admit every shred of evidence points to this^, but it just doesn't...feel right. It's hard to argue it in that respect. Voidbringers are described as having terrible burned skin and eyes like pits of darkness, etc. The skin of Voidbringers seems to be described as actually being scarred and consumed from fire.

The parshendi are similar, but not the same.

That and all of Jasnah's research quotes about voidbringers refer to ash and fire and the ability to shapeshift.

One thing that caught my eye was Hoid's story to Kaladin about D. (can't remember the name!) and his attempt to find the origins of the Voidbringers and where they are "spawned". That word caught my eye. It's like they were created or summoned, not born (I keep thinking of Call of Duty and "spawn points"...one shows up ready to fight). This suggests Voidbringers show up out of the blue and originate somewhere else in the world...or some other world, dimension, universe...void?...etc. I imagine everyone is quite aware of where the Parshment come from now and if Jasnah's research was correct, the Parshmen have been around for a long time and turned on their masters time and time again. If this was how it happened and how the Desolations caused so much destruction I think people would have been well aware of the Parshmen's and Parshendi's origins.

Now this assumes Hoid's king wasn't commencing his search before the Parshmen were enslaved (and it's actually a true story or at least based on some type of truth). But really, wouldn't they have questioned and gotten an answer out of any surviving Parshmen they enslaved? Apparently, the Parshmen can speak Dalinar's language.

But maybe they do change in some way, but I think it's odd there were never any Parshendi bodies in Dalinar's visions...could be he looked over them in awe of what he was seeing, but since he had been fighting them for so long I doubt that would be the case.

That is quite interesting. Do you have a source for that? It would be really interesting they kind of make their own hell. This does pose the question though: why would they envision themselves in hell between desolations? If they did go insanse, i find it hard that they would go to a fire and brimstone kind of plane.

The other side might be that they have gone insane since they abandoned the Oathpact, and the hell they go to is real. A few thousand years of hiding your immortality might get to someone after awhile. Honestly, I find this scenario a bit more likely.

Here's a link to his description of the Stormlight Archives:

http://www.brandonsanderson.com/blog/29/Tor-Proposal-Part-Four

I think you're probably right about the insanity manifesting after they break the Oathpact. The rest of the books might just be about the characters trying to find the mad Heralds, slap 'em around a bit and get them back into the fight. But, the way the Oathpact seems to be flawed just really bothers me for some reason. It's just such a terrible deal and I would think the Heralds and especially Honor would be savvy enough to avoid being, or having your champions, tortured for years on end.

And there's the quote from a Chapter heading most folks seem to think comes from Talenel, which seems to indicate he's bearing the full onslaught of the Herald's madness when they broke the Oathpact:

The burdens of nine become mine. Why must I carry the madness of them all? Oh, Almighty, release me.

I'm just skeptical the Heralds accepted torture in between the Desolations, even if they knew the result would be an ability to to defend mankind. The horrors of being in the middle of such conflicts would seem to be enough to destroy a man's mind, they really had to know to add torture to it would seriously erode their ability to defend Roshar (at least Honor should have known)? Doesn't make sense to me. There's something to it.

Ah, the Heralds. That makes more sense. I still don't think the Heralds are involved in any planets aside from Roshar though.

We know there are three realms: the physical, the cognitive, and the spiritual. But we also know that there is actually something else, a fourth realm of sorts that exists beyond the three realms, the true afterlife, which is not the same thing as the spiritual realm. This hasn't really been talked about much in the books, but Brandon has answered some questions about it. This true afterlife is the place where Vin and Elend are, and is a place even Sazed cannot reach into very well. (At least not at the time Hero of Ages ended.) Since Sazed was able to tell that Vin and Elend were happy, it's not unreasonable to presume that this true afterlife contains at least something akin to a heaven. I suppose it also might have something like a hell.

Some people never reach this place after death. Brandon hasn't revealed the details of how, but some people with certain connections to the physical realm can hang around after death in either the cognitive or spiritual realms. This is what happened to Kelsier in Mistborn. So he's dead, but not as dead as Vin and Elend, if that makes sense.

Now, finally we get to the Heralds and the odditiy of their situation. After death, they go to a place of torment. It's possible that they are reaching the true afterlife, but that raises two very big questions. First, how is one of the Shards on Roshar reaching the true afterlife when even Sazed couldn't? Second, why are the Heralds suffering there? They certainly don't seem like people who have done something worthy of damnation. If anything, its quite the opposite. At least before breaking the oathpact, they were heroes who fought to save the world, or so it seemed.

So I suspect the Heralds are never reaching the true afterlife, and are instead getting stuck in either the spiritual or cognitive realms. I suspect the spiritual. And since the Shards seem to have a lot of power over those realms, it certainly seems possible that one of them (such as Odium) could have created his own personal hell inside the spiritual realm somewhere.

That still leaves the question as to why the Heralds would be required to go there between desolations, of course. But there are a lot of things about the oathpact that seem odd to me. I suspect there is something huge that I am missing, something that should be obvious.

Are we sure they all go to a place of torment? The only part of the book involving a Herald is from Kalak's POV. Maybe the torment is just his own madness...a figment of his broken mind. Maybe it's different for all the Heralds.

In a statement from BS describing the story line for WoK he says it involves ten angelic warriors, who have gone insane in their own different ways, as a result of defending mankind from Odium's attacks for centuries on end. Maybe they only think they go to a place of torment and there's actually nothing wrong with the Oathpact, there's a just a flaw in the Heralds.

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 like that except for one thing. Aren't the Stroms getting stronger? I would think the storms would eventually be getting weaker, not stronger. The Highstorms becoming more powerful denotes a force still actively creating them and increasing the ferocity. If the Storms are just remnants, the kinetic energy needed to sustain them would be slowly ebbing away.

I just don't see the Parshendi being the Voidbringers.

Bear with me here. I've been thinking about the Oathpact...from what we know of it, that has to be the worst negotiated settlement I've ever heard of. Honor gets ten angelic warriors to stop complete destruction, not bad, they seemedd to have been winning...but if you dig into it a bit? Odium gets Thunderclasts, Voidbringers, Chasmfiends, and god knows what else to bring on Desolations. In between Desolations Honor has to send his champions to be flayed for centuries or even millenia. Odium? His guys are fine? Just biding their time, gambling, drinking, kicking dogs or whatever floats their boat or they have to serve humans until the Heralds show up again?

I would imagine Honor might be a better negotiater than that. I see the Voidbringers being the counterpoints to the Heralds. I just don't see the Parshendi as the Voidbringers. The picture J points to as a Voidbringer is similar to big giant lobster...what would a "voidish creature" actually look like? Can they choose whatever form they want...like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters? A big giant mean-as-hell lobster is as good as anything I would think. So if Voidbringers are the counters to the Heralds...where do they go to be tortured in between Desolations? Watching Yentl over and over and over? Being forced to feed cute kittens milk out of saucers until the next Desolation? For something made of pure hate, I imagine that would really suck.

In that vein, I don't think the Parshendi are trying to commit suicide. They probably want gemhearts for the same reason any man wants them. Power. However, hasn't there been quite a discussion that access to magic on Roshar is closely tied to one's actions and one's journey and not merely their accomplishments? Perhaps they need to retrieve the gemhearts in an honorable fashion and walking up hacking a dormant creature to death doesn't cut it. They need to compete for it, so starting a war with the Alethi would satisfy that need.

Might explain why they threw away Szeth's oathstone with disgust even after they made sure he approached Gavilar in white. Szeth thought that was quite inconsiderate, but for god's sake...he's an assassin! However honorable he thinks he is...assassins are not really thought of as the most honorable folk. They did a terrible thing as honorably as possible...not sure if that works or not, but who said people always come up with perfect plans?

Whattaya think?

Sorry this was so long...hope I didn't ramble.

I always thought the Shattered Plains was probably the location where Odium laid the smackdown on Honor. No evidence to support such, but it seems to fit what I would think a location of one god destroying another would look like. I figured Urithuru (sp?) was located near there and was destroyed along with Honor...you know, because the two were supposed to near each other...am I right on that? I seem to recall someone saying the City was to be built to be closer to Honor. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I also thought that might be why the Parshendi are still there...the Honor Shard probably remaining or splintered in the area or something similar. Might explain how they got Shardplate/blades and have an honorable streak.

Just throwing that out there.

Great site, though...not sure why it took me so long to find it.