listerfeend

I sort of feel like true God Metals get a pass on the hemalurgy front due to their nature of being God Metals, and Nightblood could be considered a God Metal, but there is an argument to be made that it isn't one. I think that the mechanism by which Nightblood became Nightblood, from whatever it was prior to the murder of Sashara, might be similar to this, but not exactly hemalurgy. Although, until we have any more information from Brando, this is as likely as any other series of events, I think

Wouldn't Nightblood be too invested, with 1000 breaths, to be used as a spike? I'm pretty sure that much investiture would resist the amounts of investiture a spike would be taking. That doesn't completely invalidate the theory, however. It's possible that, pre-murder of Shashara, Nightblood DID consume investiture, just not in the same way that we've seen it consume now. Maybe Nightblood consumed Shasharra's Divine Breath, and, somehow, that Breath stuck to it, and changed the way Nightblood operates?

This seems logical to me, this whole question really started because @CtrlAltDepressed and I have had many arguments about whether or not this WoB applies to Odium in the other Systems. To me the WoB indicates that Odium needed permission to settle (Read: Invest) in Rosharran system, but @CtrlAltDepressed reads this to imply that Odium got permission on Sel, and with Ambition in the Threnody system. I don't read "settle" to mean "visit" or be in proximity to, and I don't think Odium would have had to have gotten permission anywhere else, considering his motive was to NOT get Invested any where. He can correct my paraphrasing of his position if he'd like to

Ok, first I need to define the term I think matters here. Specifically, the term "Settled". Settled: to establish a community or to inhabit and develop a previously unoccupied or sparsely populated area. In the context of a Shard, settling and Invested are synonymous. We know for a fact that Odium had no desire to Invest in any system, he was actively trying to avoid that. So, why would Odium get permission to Settle anywhere? This WoB seems to be indicating that he asked and got permission to stay in the Rosharan system, but it could be applied to other systems he's been to (Sel, for instance). These two things, Odium's desire to stay un-Invested and free, but also asking permission to settle anywhere, don't seem to work together logically.

That's because shards can't settle because they exist every where read your own wob Sorry, but...that's not what that WoB said, and we've got like...hundreds of other WoB's that discount it. Shards definitely can and do 'settle' places, that's what it means for a Shard to be 'Invested' in a system. What Brandon is telling us in that WoB is that our puny human brains can't really comprehend what that actually means, and it's, at best, a rough approximation of what is actually happening when a Shard Invests in a system. How does a thing that is outside of PR concepts like Time and Space get restricted to a specific Time and Space in the PR? Well, they do, but they don't, and they are, but they aren't... And it's about as clear to us as a quantum mechanics text book thrown in the mud. However, this WoB right here, just before the one you said to read, is stating, explicitly, that Shards do settle, and that there are rules around where they can do it, and consequences for doing so.

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with @LewsTherinTelescope on this one. El was around for previous desolations, and it seems very unlikely that a kandra would be able to replace a Fused and not have that be pretty obvious to everyone on that side of the fence. And since El was there for previous desolations, that sort of puts him out of the running due to when Kandra were created...

No, we don't know where they originated, or where they are going. As @alder24 mentioned, they are on the Long Trail, Seven planets that their people have to travel to in order to fulfill their...I guess purpose? Of rejoining the One. We are not sure where the originated, or even which planet they were on before Roshar, or which they went to after, though it seems that they will leave Roshar "soon" and I think they will end up on Lumar after Roshar (Lumar being the planet Tress is set on). In the Cosmere, and from a narrative perspective, it seems as though the Iriali are being set up for some kind of major reveal in the future books, likely sometime around Mistborn Era 4, in my opinion. There are many theories on them that float around on these forums. It's hard to tell if their belief in "The One" is a belief in Adonalsium, or perhaps (more likely, in my opinion) the One the reference is the Unnamed and Unmet 16th Shard of Ado, the Shard whose name will be something like Prudence/Wisdom/Something along those lines.

hostbloods have infiltrated every aspect of Roshar. They had people whispering to Gavilar for years. Getting a dead blade is not THAT difficult, especially for a group that can surprise the holder with magic they have never seen before. (Felt trapping Kalak). They just need to kill a blade holder. Easy. I don't even know why I argued against this point, as was pointed out, they did have Shardbearers in attendance It's very easy to have a plan for someone to come. It's also very easy to miscalculate and underestimate how that person might come in. I really just feel like everyone here has this idea that the Ghostbloods are this all knowing entity, when we've been shown time and again that they aren't even all on the same page with what the plan is. Iyatil has plans that Mraize doesn't seem to either know about or align with, Mraize has plans that Iyatil doesn't fully approve of, and BOTH of them are off script from what Kelsier expects from them. And these are the two "heads" of the organization on Roshar.

I really feel like we are completely overlooking what the entire subject of this chapter was. They are fallible humans, and all that comes along with it. They have vices, hubris, they can overlook things, completely miss them. That is just it. Yes, they have all these magical things and what have you, but they still wouldn't stand a chance against 2 or three Radiants of 3rd Ideal. And it's entirely likely they knew that right behind Shallan would be the force of Windrunners and Stonewards that showed up. What would they have gained by staying and fighting? How, exactly, would they have detected Shallan after she took the place of one of their own? The spy organization should have essentially a kingdom? There are, what, a hundred or so known deadblades in the world? And they should have access to one of them? One of the things that is, typically, held by some of the most powerful people on the continent? How? Sure they could recruit someone with a Blade, maybe. Convince them to give that up? Never. And if a Blade had been used there, then they would know a member of the GB's they didn't know before, or, if that bearer had been able to take Shallan out, then, at the very least, they'd have a small pool of suspects to track down. What did Shallan actually learn here? That Sja-Anat is working with the GB's, and they have a potential weapon to bring parity with GB's and Radiants. Maybe. I get that it feels a little like a let down, to see a cell of the GB's get infiltrated so easily, but, honestly, I think we are giving way too much credit to them.

So, I think this WoB might be shedding some light on what is going on with Shallan What Brandon says here is that how a Lightweaver perceives people influences their mood, but, crucially, also "things like that". I have had a theory for a while that Shallan's alters are Connections to versions of Shallan that could have been. To me, it seems contrived that Shallan, at the age of, what? 10, was somehow a talented spy or anything useful to an organization like the Ghostbloods, as some people on these forums seem to suggest. However, it does seem reasonable that she was being groomed by the Ghostbloods, for one reason or another. Maybe that is because mom is actually a Herald, maybe it had something to do with cultivating an agent from a political house that they were also grooming to gain more influence... there are a number of reasons I can come up with for the GB's to want to groom and recruit an asset like a young Shallan, but I can't really come up with any good reasons that Shallan would have learned anything useful from them as a child. I bring all that up because, if Shallan's Alters are, in fact, formed by Connections to "potential" Shallan's (I'm thinking something similar to how Malatium, the mythical Eleventh Metal, worked, showing Vin a different version of the Lord Ruler, a version that "could have been"), then Veil would then become a version of Shallan that was fully recruited into the GB's. Veil would have skills in spy craft that Shallan doesn't have. Shallan is able to use the same perception tricks that work on other people, on herself, and they are expanded beyond what a normal Lightweaver might be able to produce, due to her double bonding. This also works for things that Shallan has done with Surgebinding, through Radiant, such as the Substantiation we saw in previous chapters.

We seem to be making a distinction between Fused and Humans in this case. Raboniel didn't need to "breathe" the Anti-Light in to annihilate her soul, but for some reason a Human would. I'm not entirely sure why that would be the case, except maybe a Fused's spirit-web is more accessible through the physical body than a normal human's would be?

I completely disagree that the bolts would even need to penetrate the Plate or Shield for it to be devastating. At that point, the bolt would crrrrrunch into the Plate/Shield, similar to a car crashing into an impervious wall, obliterating the gemstone and crashing that anti-light directly into the Investiture made solid of whatever it was hitting, annihilating on contact with any part of the Spren that it is coming into contact with. Whether or not this is enough to completely kill a Spren, I don't know, but I do feel the effect would be devastating.

I'm not sure I see what you are getting at here. Allowing him to settle and not allowing him to leave seem like either: 2 different agreements, or the same agreement, depending on how that agreement went down. "You may settle here, in perpetuity" for instance, could be viewed as an agreement that one can stay somewhere, and never leave. Especially viewed through the context of Rayse' beef with letter of the law vs. spirit: Conversely, there could have been two separate agreements, one to allow Odium to settle, and then one binding him to the system. Or the original agreement could have been phrased as a contest in the first place. "You must stay here, until such a time as one of our forces dominates the other" or something like that. Obviously, we do not have any of the actual wording of whatever agreement was made, just like we don't have the wording for whatever agreement the Shards made about settling with each other. As I write this, I think I begin to see maybe what you are getting at here though. Tanavast is dead, somehow. Which indicates a vulnerability. The main way we've been told to make a Shard vulnerable is to get them to break a binding Oath, so perhaps this is what happened to Tanavast. If that is the case, however, I feel like he'd have died long before he actually did. It took Leras 1000 years to fully die, if I'm remembering my timelines from MB era 1 correctly, and Odium has presumably been bound to the system since the First Desolation, at least. Which would have been nearly 6,000 years before he bit the dust. It could be possible that different Vessels or Shards can hold out longer depending on circumstances... Although, I now suspect that Tanavast's death may have had something to do with Aharietiam.

It feels like very weird wording to me. I'm told I'm way too pedantic about things, but this feels weird

I think the timing fits nicely. Here’s the Sibling’s statement on timing (bold added): It sounds like “Night” left and Cultivation replaced her with the Nightwatcher while the Sibling slept. The Sibling slept from around the time of BAM’s capture and the Recreance. This works just fine with known timing. The problem I have with this is: we know that Warbreaker takes place roughly 200 years before Way of Kings. We also know that the events of the Manywar took place roughly 300 years before Warbreaker. So, for Vasher and Shashara to have visited Roshar pre-recreance would have to mean that they were Returned at least 2000 years before the events of the Manywar, with basically no historical record. As @LewsTherinTelescope states, Sibling knew Nightwatcher before she slept. And she went to sleep somewhere around the time of the Recreance. Which still puts Night leaving sometime before that, at least in my opinion. This also does not include the fact that Nightblood is not the swords original name. Side note: It's interesting, in that quote, that Sibling says "Mother replaced her with a being of some of the same essence. A new creature, unconnected to anyone's perception" and then goes on to call the Nightwatcher by name. This makes me wonder if there is a Nameless being floating around Roshar made of the same stuff as Night, imperceptible. This could also just be the Sibling being somewhat artistic in their description of what happened.

This all seems logical to me, the only thing I can take issue with is that I don't know that we know that Ishar was a Dawnshard. Also, I don't think bringing a Dawnshard into the Binding of Odium to the Roshar System is entirely necessary. We have another instance of one shard binding another on Scadrial, and, frankly, Leras exhibited much of the same issues in his last years of life as Tanavast has been depicted as having here. He was losing his mind, dying slowly, and making plans for the future to help continue to contain and/or defeat the problematic Shard. Both of these are fairly minor quibbles, however. We don't know that Ishar wasn't a Dawnshard, so that lies totally within the realm of possibility for me, as we do know that a Dawnshard was involved in the destruction of Ashyn, and a Bondsmith was involved in the Wordlhop from Ashyn to Roshar. Very well could be Ishar for the former, and seems silly to suggest it WASN'T Ishar for the latter. As for Honor's seeming mirror of Leras' final days, all we really have is fragments of snippets that tell us that he was "raving" at the end about ancient weapons, dawnshards, and Surgebinding destroying Roshar. He may well have used a Dawnshard to contain Odium, though I still leave open the possibility that he had no need of such a thing to accomplish the goal of restricting Odium to the system. I do suspect that, if a Dawnshard were to have been involved in that binding, that a simple "you may go" from Dalinar shouldn't be enough to set Odium free, however.

Problem: The timeline we currently have would have put Vasher and Shashara on Roshar post Recreance. Night, presumably, "left" LOOOONG before that

I recall that we are outright told that Nale was there for the imprisonment of BAM, but he may not have been there for the "throw her in the SR" portion of things.

I'm confused by this. The timeline we have currently really feels, to me, like it was a pretty rushed thing with BAM. Ancient Radiants found out they could trap spren in gems, figured they could do that to BAM to stop the False Desolation, went and did that, and then pretty much immediately went and broke their Oaths, causing the Recreance. When would they have had time to ALSO go get Dai-Gonarthis? If Dai-Gonarthis was imprisoned, why haven't we heard even the faintest whisper of another Unmade being trapped like BAM? They also threw BAM in the SR, why would they apparently bury DG in Shinovar? I don't feel like we have any good reason to assume that any of the other Unmade are imprisoned like BAM was...

I think the implication is that Szeth, in the time of The Sunlit Man, is no longer bonded to Aux, and that sometime between SA5 and SA6 Sig actually bonds Szeth's former Highspren

I was trying to edit my post earlier, but it wouldn't let me. I was trying to add that I think Lirin has made a lot of progress towards me liking him as a character since the final act of RoW, but up until that point, he really rubbed me the wrong way. That storming man...

I think that this WoB completely shuts down that theory Not to mention, I really hate Lirin, so I just don't want this to be true at all.

I very much agree that the entire timeline seems so weird. Honor and Cultivation switching from Singer to Human, Odium switching from Human to Singer, all of it seems super suspect, and I'm not sure that what we have been told is even half true.

I'm struggling to see how this ties into Kaladin being called Child of Tanavast by the SF. Which was kind of why I was confused. I think it definitely could be the case that BAM was related to Honor in some way, that seems to make sense, given her ability to Connect with all the Singers and give them forms, I just struggle to see how that relates to Kaladin. Perhaps you weren't thinking of Kaladin when bringing this up, but he's pretty much the only thing that has been called "Child of Tanavast"

Or it got UnMade and provided the Void side with a previously unprecedented power once upon a time... This statement is confusing to me.... Are you suggesting that a lineage of people was Unmade? I don't quite see how that would give Odium or the Void any kind of power. Or how a line of ancestry is unmade, other than by killing them, and that's obviously not what has happened...