Determination

Important to note that the "greater" spren suffer a fairly traumatic loss of intelligence when they cross over to the physical realm, which they restore through progressing the bond. We even see them regress very quickly if separated from their Radiant for too long (Kaladin/Syl in Rhythm of War) or if they misbehave (also Kaladin/Syl in Words of Radiance). Words of Radiance, Ch. 75 From that point of view, it would make sense that the Shadesmar spren seem so much more human-like than the unbonded/early-bond ones in the physical realm. It's because our first impression of these "greater" spren came from ones who just had a magical lobotomy. But that's not really their natural state. Narratively I agree it's a little disappointing for the spren to end up feeling like weirdly-shaped humans, though. Something was definitely lost there. But it doesn't really bother me overall, I think it works.

Nightblood visiting more worlds than Vasher also implies that somebody other than Nale had to have carried it for a time. (Because Nale is a spooky ghost who can't leave Roshar). I always assumed the chain of events went something like this: 1. Vasher leaves Nalthis (with Nightblood) and goes to Roshar. 2. Vasher visits the Nightwatcher and asks for a way to feed his Divine Breath with Stormlight. The Nightwatcher grants him this boon and takes Nightblood as the corresponding curse. 3. Dalinar visits the Nightwatcher, and we see she has Nightblood in her possession at that time when she offers it to him. 4. Nale the Sword Snatcher somehow gets a hold of Nightblood. 5. Nale gives Nightblood to Szeth. But in order for Nightblood to visit a world that Vasher hasn't, there needs to be another step somewhere. My best guess is that in between 3 and 4, someone else visited the Nightwatcher and took the sword as their boon, went on a whole adventure, and then got their sword snatched by Nale. It could also be something completely different, I just like the whole Nightwatcher boon angle because it explains both how she ended up with it in Dalinar's flashback and also why Vasher can feed his Divine Breath with Stormlight but can't Awaken with it. (Not that there aren't other possible explanations for that second one.)

Don't forget, the Listeners of Narak are bonding Willshaper spren by the end of SA5. That's a bunch of more or less neutrally-aligned Surge of Transportation users with easy access to Warlight and a literal perpedicularity in their basement. Honestly, if anyone is ferrying people in and out of Urithiru and/or Shadesmar, it's probably going to be a Willshaper for the foreseeable future.

So first off, it wasn't until I came back after posting and saw the the little "1 year later..." thing that I realized I resurrected a long dead thread. Whoops. Maybe by this time next year, I'll be able to look at the number 2023 and think "that's not this year". My assumption was that it would be dead plate, and therefore wouldn't actually glow. I also got the impression that the vines were mostly effective because it confused the Awakened/Lifeless soldiers, and their programming didn't anticipate being immobilized like that. I suspect they could have indeed ripped the vines apart, had they not been dumb robot-zombies. That's all true, but you don't need any special powers to wear Shardplate (or to wield a Deadeyed Blade for that matter, but I'm not suggesting that these soldiers had Blades). I'm also not suggesting these soldiers were still capable of Surgebinding. It would probably interfere with Awakening a corpse that was currently wearing Plate, but it wouldn't stop you from stuffing an already-Awakened Lifeless into an empty set of Plate.

The way they're described in Tress (if Riina's soldiers are indeed the same thing as the "men of gold and red"), it seems highly likely they're Lifeless Knights Radiant, still wearing their Shardplate, which has been painted gold. In particular the bit about looking like "men in armor with lowered faceplates" seems like a huge hint. They're described as looking about 7 feet tall, and Rosharans are notoriously tall. In fact pretty much everything about their portrayal in Tress is exactly how I'd expect a Lifeless wearing Shardplate to work out (i.e. fantasically well). I don't have time right now to go digging in The Lost Metal for quotes but I don't think there's much in the way of description in there anyway. It's possible that they weren't Lifeless at that time --we know that story happens fairly soon after SA5, so depending on how exactly Dalinar's contest goes horribly wrong, they could be Fused Knights.

Fair enough, Kaladin doesn't necessarily know exactly how it works, he could easily be wrong. And there is some evidence in that scene (and elsewhere) that the potential Squires at least need to be on their way to the Second Ideal. I just don't think that a Squire is being held to quite the same standard as a bonded Knight trying to swear the Second Ideal. I think there's likely to be room for a Squire to bond a spren but still not be ready for the Second Ideal, but it would be a pretty narrow window for sure. At the very least, we didn't see the whole "crack of thunder, explosion of power" business from the newly-minted Squires, but it's not exactly a stretch to say that would only happen for a bonded Knight swearing the Second Ideal anyway. Presumably it would be the Knight that they have the strongest Connection to, in particular the Connection representing their suitability toward that Order. I could imagine a hypothetical almost-Squire who's like, exactly equally-Connected to one Knight of each Order and exactly equally suitable to each Order's Ideals, and then he swears the First Ideal. At that point I don't know what would happen, but I agree they certainly wouldn't become the Radiant equivalent of a Mistborn. (Gotta bond a whole stack of Honorblades to do that ) Maybe it would be random, maybe it wouldn't work at all, or maybe it requires Intent (seems to be a popular choice for Brandon these days) and they have to choose for themselves. Intent at least would agree with the notion of being "on your way" to the Second Ideal, so if I had to guess, I'd go with that one. I agree completely with this. Bridge Four was already Second Ideal material at least by the time they charged the Tower. (Except Moash, he was always motivated by something other than protecting people. Brandon was dropping hints that guy was bad news every time his name came up.)

I had noticed that fact for rubies - that you could treat them as if they were attached by an invisible, intangible rod - but I hadn't considered looking at amethysts like pulleys. Very insightful. I think I get it now. Maybe I should go on more long car rides. So amethysts as pulleys seems to work, you just have to assume a rigid connection to the pulley - thinking about it like a rope or chain connection doesn't describe the opposed motion in both directions along the axis. But a rope/chain model is fine if you're thinking in one direction at a time. I'm gonna go into detail because this was a tricky one to think about. The easiest way to show why this disproves the amethyst engine is to consider an even simpler scenario, one without all the rotation business. Suppose you're standing at the top of Navani's shaft of weights in Urithiru, cranking the winch to raise one of the weights back to the top. The crank pulls down on the chain, which loops around a pulley, and pulls up on the weight, which rises. Note that if you happened to pick out a chain link on the part of the chain going up to the pulley and another one on the part going down to the weight, you would notice them moving exactly like a pair of amethysts would. Now imagine a Windrunner is coming up the shaft and, noticing someone is trying to winch up the weight, decides to help out by Lashing it upward, making it weightless. The weight continues up the shaft on its own inertia, and to prevent the chain from bunching up, you keep winding the crank at the same speed. The chain is still moving exactly as it did before, but it's no longer adding anything to the motion of the weight. So what about the amethysts so "cleverly" arranged on the gear? The gems are already moving opposite each other, because they're physically connected by the gear. Each gem is magically connected to its twin by the "virtual pulley", but because they are already moving toward the "chain" that would be pulling them along, it doesn't actually add to the motion. Therefore the amethysts act as if they weren't conjoined at all, just like the rubies! That was a lot. But the perpetual motion machine is defeated, and the orbital ruby once again reigns supreme among fabrial engines!

The force is only "divided" between them in the sense that it's being applied to both of them at once, because in this case they're physically connected in addition to being conjoined magically. But that's not really necessary to explain why the forces transferred magically between conjoined rubies must always cancel out exactly. The rubies don't move relative to each other, so they never accelerate, hence no net force. This is, of course, all within the frame of reference of the rubies. From an external frame of reference, the rubies would be moving all over the place. You do bring up a good point about frames of reference being subject to perception with these things. I don't think it would come into play with these examples because the gemstones are all close together and co-moving, but it could certainly have an effect on something like my "orbital fabrial engine" concept from earlier. You're saying it's practically impossible to keep them from rotating even slightly, and therefore the runaway rotation effect would always happen and that would destroy the gemstones or the object they're embedded in or both? The solution to that (as mentioned by @PurpleZebra in his floating platform concept) is to use aluminum to isolate planes of motion. If you only allow the object to move on a single axis, then it physically can't rotate at all. Even without thinking about aluminum, it should still be possible to reason through how it'd behave in an ideal scenario, "spherical cow in a vacuum" style. Not at all! If my crackpot ideas don't add up, I want to know. Especially with the amethyst engine. I know that thing won't work - that infinite rotational acceleration is a dead giveaway - I'm just not certain if the problem in an unaccounted force, or if the way amethysts are supposed to work is just fundamentally broken...

On Roshar, any fabrial that converts Investiture to mechanical energy might as well be a free energy generator. It's not like you're gonna run out of highstorms. You bring up a good point with gemstones cracking. We know that it can be mitigated by spreading the load across many gemstones. Perhaps with enough gemstone pairs you can prevent cracking entirely. Of course, when the gear spins up to infinity, something's gonna break. This machine obviously wouldn't work, but I'm not sure where the mistake is. Consider rubies. I think what happens is that each ruby in a pair is as hard to move as both rubies, since that's what you end up doing when you push on one: you move both of them. So a spanreed would feel twice as "weighty" as it should. So what happens if you embed them both in the same object? Moving one moves the other in two ways: the regular mundane way, and the magical conjoined gemstone way. I think these forces all end up balancing out, and the entire object ends up behaving as if the rubies weren't conjoined at all. But now do the same thing with amethysts: embed them both in the same object. For simplicity let's assume you just glue the halves together. Assuming the glue holds, you wouldn't be able to move the thing at all. Every force you apply to the object is divided between the halves, then transmitted to the other half and reversed, perfectly opposing that force. This is the essentially the same thing as @PurpleZebra's floating platform. It gets weird with rotations. If the halves are embedded in an object that rotates on the Z axis, and the Z axis crosses the line between the halves at its midpoint, then (ignoring the fact that they're conjoined for a moment) the halves always move exactly opposite each other in the X and Y directions. It seems that adding the conjoined amethyst force transfer+reversal effect to this system would increase the rotation speed. But we already determined that the analogous situation with rubies acts as if they're not conjoined at all. I feel like amethysts should work the same. What gives!?

So there are a few "fundamentally different" things going on here that I feel like are pretty central to the Taln side of the question. I'm going to ignore Wit because Wit is Wit and so he's mostly unknowable until he decides to say something mysterious for us to decipher. The first unique aspect is that after the "Last" Desolation the rest of the Heralds ditched Taln and sent him to Braize alone. This of course turned out to be a wonderful idea for everybody else, because unlike those other cowards, Taln is such an absolute unit that he managed to solo Damnation for 4500 years. We don't know exactly how it normally works when Herald "breaks" (except perhaps that it happens quickly ) but we can probably assume that Taln knew he had been ghosted, and that he would expect the Fused to remain bound unless he broke. The other thing that's different is we know the Fused had already basically given up on breaking Taln and were instead pursuing other options, with all the Everstorm and the Voidspren business. Very relevant WoB I get the impression that at some point Taln suddenly realized he could return to Roshar, and he had been able to for some time. Cue "oh jeez they all started without me" reaction, panicked exit, chasing the school bus down the road, that whole thing. We know that Taln arrived before the Everstorm but long after Ulim began his meddling. He may have had some knowledge upon his arrival that things had already been set into motion which he was unable to stop. It depends on the exact circumstances of his release from Braize, really. There is some potentially relevant information in the SA5 prologue preview but I won't include it here because it doesn't change any of the conclusions. All that being said, it's tough to say whether Taln knows much of anything about what's going on, seeing as he's basically stuck in a loop mumbling to himself. There's a good chance that "I fear I may be too late" is just part of his standard pre-Desolation speech, since the rest of his posse couldn't even make it a whole year in Braize by the time they betrayed him. As far as Odium's goal during Desolations, we know he's training up an army to take over the universe or something nefarious like that, but I suspect he's playing both sides, and is/was entirely willing to send the singers to space instead, if they come out on top. He's probably just waiting for one side to end the wars for good on their own - the Desolations have gotten progressively more intense as the Fused get more experienced in waging war, and the humans somehow keep winning. He's just going to keep letting them level up on each other until one side is strong enough to ship them off to his Star War. Aside, my hunch is that the whole "Odium is humanity's god" business is only part of the story. We know he used to cruise the Cosmere murdering Shards, and eventually got stuck on Roshar because he's a big dummy and Honor somehow tricked him into promising not to leave. Seems unlikely that his "home base" was Ashyn all along, and he went out and smashed three Shards before finally going after his neighbors? And yet somehow only recently (in Sibling time scales) became Invested enough on Roshar to get his own Pure Tone? I'm sus. Spooky Hate God is totally an alien. How that plays into his goals is unclear, but it almost certainly does somehow. tl;dr: Taln is banana sandwiches don't listen to him, and Odium is a snek don't listen to him either

This seems to be true for the Skybreakers (who we already know are weird in general), but not for the Windrunners. In Oathbringer ch 37 it's strongly implied that the First Ideal is sufficient: If becoming a Windrunner Squire required the Second Ideal, then this whole scene is just a total misdirect. And it's not a Shallan chapter, so that seems unlikely. I skimmed for a bit, but couldn't find any mention of First Ideal Windrunners who had bonded a spren. The existence of those would pretty directly imply the First is sufficient for a squire (or else they'd all start at the Second), unless they all bonded their spren before joining the Order (like Kaladin did). At the very least, I would definitely concede that a Windrunner Squire would probably be ready to swear the Second Ideal pretty much immediately after bonding a spren. I like this interpretation. It feels right, in the context of the scene. My only reservation is that I'd expect truths to really only have an effect if he'd bonded a Cryptic already. Or maybe even if he just caught the attention of one, like Elhokar had. I guess he might have and just not realized it, but I'm not aware of any other evidence of that. And I feel like Pattern might have said something? Maybe not, Pattern's weird. Yep, I somehow forgot that 1st/2nd Ideal Windrunners exist. This observation brings the stated numbers much more in line with the book's general portrayal of the Windrunners being basically at capacity*. Thanks for catching that, the inconsistency was bothering me. *Edit: I guess they would get closer to that 1500 number as more Knights earn their Blades and unlock another 30-50 Squire "slots"... But it's not exactly the kind of thing you can rush, so it still makes sense they'd want to move things along by recruiting Honorspren.

True, if the Squire limit still applies then that's going to put the brakes on the whole "Oops All Squires" strategy. Though I don't think we actually know what that limit is, do we? I had thought the Windrunners were probably at or near the limit at the beginning of RoW, but that would mean a Windrunner on average only gets about five Squires. (Rhythm of War, ch 5: 300 Windrunners - 50 Knights = 250 Squires) Kaladin by himself had more than that by the end of Oathbringer. I saw a count somewhere that he had about 30, but I don't know how accurate it is. If it's correct, that should get you at least 1500 Windrunners, including Squires. And we don't actually know how many more Squires Kaladin could have picked up, if any. We don't have good head counts of the other Orders or any information about their Squire limits, so we can't say much about those. I don't think there were any mention of Cultivationspren/Peakspren/Mistspren shortages though, so somewhat counter-intuitively they might actually be able to generate even more Squires than the Honorspren-starved Windrunners... It's interesting to think how different things might have been if you could hire Squires with the equivalent of an "I agree to the Terms and Conditions" checkbox instead of all this "become a better person" business.

Sorry, I probably wasn't very clear what I meant there. I didn't mean he'd be swearing Bondsmith squires, I meant he'd have instituted a policy where each soldier was sworn as a squire to some Order or another, likely dependent on the role of the individual soldier or their unit. After all, it'd be pretty foolish to have any un-Invested troops if Squires worked the way that was described in the original post. I agree. I suppose I didn't actually include the part after "choosing to live up to the Ideal" where they actually, you know, do that, but it was supposed to be in there.

That's a pretty solid point in Rlain's favor, though given he's already bonded one of Sja-anat's enlightened mistspren, it feels unlikely he'd end up bonding the Nightwatcher.

We've never seen a spren "share" a bond with their knight (Shallan's deadeye is a sort of special case) and I believe there are WoB that suggest that while it's possible, a spren is unlikely to want to do so. So I think neither option is particularly likely. Lift is the first edgedancer we see, and is even the focus of a novella titled "Edgedancer", so it would be absolutely bizarre for her to become anything other than an edgedancer. I think the purpose behind Cultivation's touch was to position her to be the next Vessel of Cultivation - just like the outcome of her meddling with Taravangian, and probably what she's intending with Dalinar and the Shard of Honor. In Adolin's case, there are just too many factors that point toward him becoming an edgedancer. The most obvious one being he's already bonded a Cultivationspren. An earlier and easier to forget sign was in one of Dalinar's visions in The Way of Kings, the one where he's following a Knight around in the Purelake - he remarks that her armor looks exactly like Adolin's, and then later he notes how gracefully and easily she moves through the water. He guesses it's due to the Plate's strength, but given what we know by now, it's pretty clear she's using the Surge of Abrasion. Additionally, all throughout Rhythm of War, Adolin consistently demonstrates edgedancer Ideals #2 and #3 through his behavior, especially with respect to the deadeyes, though I don't have time right now to dig out specific examples. It's just the strong impression I got on my latest re-read. I think the Nightwatcher's bondsmith is likely to be a Listener, mostly because of the repeated theme of humans and singers needing to figure out how to get along, and partially because of the tease with Rlain almost getting to bond the Sibling. If I had to guess, I think probably it will be Jaxlim, because she was kind of irrelevant to the plot but was "revived" anyway, and also because of what she was described to have been like before her mind started to deteriorate.

I'm not sure if the "unreliable narrator" literary device applies to that scene in particular, though it's certainly a big factor in Shallan's chapters in general. There didn't seem to be anything linking it to one of Shallan's "nope out" memories (granted, we don't neccessarily know about all of those, yet...) so I'd be surprised if the situation wasn't as it was presented. At any rate, I believe we agree about what exactly was going on with Vathah - that it was precisely because he had become something more than he was before, that he began to manifest the powers. Regardless of his lack of knowledge of the Ideals, he had been living the First, and that was enough. As far as living superceding understanding, I do think living is certainly the more important piece by far, but in my mind, living the Ideal requires understanding it. Let me clarify what I mean by "knowing and understanding the Ideal" - the person needs to know and understand the meaning of the Ideal, they need to fully grasp what it means to for them personally to live up to the Ideal, and finally they need to recognize that they are holding themselves to the Ideal. All of these things together are basically what constitutes making an oath. But what's not included in that definition is requiring them to know that the Ideal they've discovered is the First Ideal of the Knights Radiant, if that makes sense. In other words, I think a person could totally become a Squire even if they had no knowledge whatsoever of any of the Ideals, so long as they had (even unconsciously) formed a moral code consistent with the expectations of the First Ideal, begun to hold themselves to it, and recognized that they had made this "oath", even if only to themselves. There is some evidence that it requires the person to recognize that the Ideal has changed them in some way, even if they don't attribute that change to the Ideal specifically (Oathbringer, ch 77): I don't think it was a coincidence that it was only after Shallan prompted to think about how he had changed, that the powers manifested. He certainly hadn't done anything more to live the Ideal since they sat down to chat!

If Squireship was as simple as speaking the Words to a Knight, Dalinar would be swearing in every soldier in the coalition's armies. I agree that it doesn't seem like you can just swear in any random person as your Squire, regardless of your Order. Skybreakers included - remember, the people they swear in as squires are already carefully selected, and their relatively structured approach to recruiting Squires probably reflects the mentality of their highspren or the Knights themselves more than it does any functional difference in how their Surges work. It seems pretty clear that in every case, the surgebinding abilities don't begin to manifest until the person not only knows and understands the First Ideal, but also chooses to live up to that Ideal. Actually speaking the Words appears to basically be a formality, even for a Knight - we essentially get direct confirmation of that at the end of Rhythm of War.

Oh right, the amethysts. I must not understand those correctly because it seems like it's too easy to create totally broken contraptions with those. For example: Embed a pair of conjoined amethysts within opposite sides of a large gear, placing them such that the line between them crosses its center of the gear. An amethyst duplicates its twin's motion in the opposite direction, and the placement of the gems means that both actually rotate the gear in the same direction. So the gear spins itself faster by spinning. Give the gear a nudge and its rotational velocity should immediately accelerate to infinity. Hook it up to something... very durable... and extract that sweet free energy to power your blimps or rocket gloves or whatever.

Create a pair of conjoined rubies of grossly mismatched sizes, using the method discovered in Rhythm of War. Put the small ruby into an aluminum box, and have a windrunner lash the big one into orbit. (This shouldn't actually take much stormlight, probably the only thing keeping them from doing this is the math/physics knowledge.) Be very careful opening that box when you retrieve your new fabrial engine. Edit: Thinking about this further, given the trouble required to set this thing up, you'd probably want to put the smaller gem into orbit and affix the larger one to a flywheel/gear transmission contraption. That way you can transfer that motion to a whole bunch of independent ruby pairs, using the gear ratio to make whatever speed/torque tradeoffs happen to make sense for the application. Sure beats chulls or weights in a shaft.

Take a pair of spanreeds and remove the conjoined rubies. Roll a couple of metal sheets into cone shapes. Embed one of the rubies in the base of each one. Fabrial telephone.