Wallaby

Woah, that's interesting. The shift from Harmony into Discord would probably signal a change in Intent, and that could totally be the thing that Harmony is the only living shard to have done (change Intent to the point of a name change). The thing about flipping Intents through some tangible process like making anti-Investiture feels a bit too easy to do though. If Shards are able to create their own anti-Investiture, and that process flips their Intent, then they should be able to negate part or even all of their own natures at will. But that seems to be the one of the few things that shards can't do. I imagine that Ati would have loved to negate Ruin, but was only able to shift it slightly before losing himself. Also, thinking about this just now led me to a different idea for what it might mean for Harmony to shift into Discord. What if instead of directly fighting with each, Preservation and Ruin were pointed in different directions? The Preservation part could be focused on preserving Scadrial, while the Ruin part could be focused outwards on colonizing/changing the Cosmere as a whole. The colonization could be part of an arms race, now that combining different forms of Investiture is known to be very strong, while the preservation could involve uniting the planet under a single (Malwish) empire. These changes could be spurred on by Harmony seeing the impending threat of Retribution / Autonomy, and wanting to strengthen the planet as much as possible as fast as possible. In that case, the only way Sazed sees to preserve Scadrial (or maybe even prevent Retribution from splintering Harmony itself) might be to ruin a large swath of the rest of the Cosmere. That sounds a whole lot like Discord to me.

Oh interesting! I would bet Shardic related then, given the power level of the death. It did occur to me that it could be two societies fighting, but then the waves carrying Cakoban would also have to be metaphorical (fleeing conflict perhaps?), unless somehow there was far future technology or a huge amount of Investiture involved. Still, having a wave that carried him for 3 days seems oddly specific for a metaphorical wave. Yeah Sel is definitely another possibility. The jar of "light" could be glowing just because it's concentrated Investiture, and could even be a kind we haven't seen yet. Ooh, good point. In Dusk's vision, right before Cakoban takes on the Dakwara, he is leading several people, including Jope (who is presumably his sister's lover) to the "place with the portal". Also, he drinks from the jar of Investiture, which does suggest that it's a new kind we haven't seen yet. A revision of the theory based on this might be: The shooting star first led Cakoban to the place in the unsea, where either it creates the system (embedding this into the Eelekin creation myth), or the system had already been created Cakoban goes through the perpendicularity and finds a land that he'd want to lead people to (not infested with deathants and nightmaws) He leads several waves of migration there, and on the trip where he takes Jope, they encounter a part of the Evil, which was attracted by the Investiture from him Navigating He then defeats the entity by sacrificing his own life (I somehow forgot this part despite finishing the book 3 days ago!) Some combination of Cakoban's sacrifice and Frost's subsequent actions causes the entity to be bound to his will. The entity is then trapped at the location of the island in the Cognitive realm. A byproduct of this (somehow) is the creation of the various monsters on Patji, which effectively cut off First of the Sun from outsiders (this could satisfy the Dakwara creating the islands bit -- it created not the land itself, but the islands as they currently are. This could even be an early system for planetary defense.) Finally, over millenia, the entity (which is originally described as having many arms), gets shaped into the Dakwara by the telling and retelling of the creation myth. Perhaps the way it's told was even an intentional choice (informed by Frost?) so that the entity would be shaped in this particular way.

I feel like there's a lot more to untangle in Cakoban's story! First, re: whether it's worth digging into the details and interpreting them carefully, I suspect it is. Some of the details may have gotten fuzzier over time, but the Loremothers' oral tradition sound quite rigorous. Brandon goes out of his way to write about this detail, and a big theme of Emberdark is not overlooking the traditional wisdom of pre-industrial societies. As Dusk says in Chapter 57: I would actually guess that inaccuracies are mostly due to (1) misunderstandings of what was going on from the eyewitnesses in Cakoban's time, or (2) maybe intentional obfuscation, like how Cakoban said to Jope: With this in mind, here the full story from chapter 3 of Emberdark as told by Loremother Frond. After each quote, I'll highlight a few things that stood out to me that haven't been discussed yet in this thread. The conflict between giants created waves in the cognitive realm Those waves physically transported Cakoban (so they're much stronger than the current pulses from the Knell) Both giants crashed to the ocean, dead The death created the biggest wave of all, carrying Cakoban's ship for 3 days This part suggests to me that the giants are shard-level powers. The present-day Knell is probably a lot weaker than it once was, and Cakoban was closer to the source, but the death carrying him for 3 days suggests that proximity can't be the only explanation. My guess is that the giants were major parts (but not all) of Odium and Ambition. When they died, Odium was severely weakened, and Ambition perhaps more so (to the point where Mercy finished him off). The shooting star was described as "brilliant" (which suggests that it's a light source in the otherwise pitch black Emberdark) The Dakwara is not described as the child of one of the giants, but instead as the "child of a distant god" Light can "blind" the Dakwara, and is a thing that the Dakwara "knew not" A few things here: We see presumably Invested light in both the shooting star and the "torch" that Cakoban uses against the Dakwara (which might be from the same source as the jar of light that he holds -- see the last quote in this post). Given that the Type 1-6 entity that chases Starling's ship eats an entire cargo hold worth of unkeyed Light, I'm guessing that Cakoban did not have enough in his jar to physically blind the Dakwara. But he could maybe metaphorically "blind" it by getting it to chase him in circles until it somehow gets stuck. A jar of light could be just the right tool for that. This one is going out on a bit of a limb, but one of the places where we've see Invested light is Taldain, where Autonomy has Invested the blue supergiant star and rains down this light on the entire planet. Given that Patji is an avatar of Autonomy, I wonder if the Eelakin were originally from Taldain, and the shooting star was some manifestation of Autonomy guiding their people to a new planet where they can seek freedom for themselves... The Dakwara is strongly implied to be a splinter of Ambition, so it being described as the child of a distant god instead of one of the giants seems to go against my theory from earlier about the giants being big parts of Ambition and Odium. Not quite sure what to make of this — it could be that I'm making something out of nothing, or maybe there's something more complicated going on here. The Dakwara was forced to acknowledge it was defeated (which suggests that it was already bound by some kind of rules / honor) The Dakwara was involved in creating the islands Rules seem to be an important check on several Cosmere antagonists, including Odium's promises and the Simple Rules from Shadows for Silence. I wonder if there's a more general Cosmere principle at work here. Also, given the Dakwara's involvement, I wonder if the murderous creatures on Patji are the result of parts of the Evil interfacing with Autonomy? Patji "rose from the ocean" with blazing red light, and only later "ordered islands created" An ember of this light became the sun This makes me wonder whether the shooting star was actually just Patji (the avatar of Autonomy, not the island), and whether "rising from the ocean" meant creating the entire solar system + perpendicularity out of the the unsea. The way Brandon wrote this, it makes it sound like it was a volcanic eruption that created the main island that is now called Patji. But an ember of a volcanic eruption becoming the sun? And the islands were created by the Dakwara under Patji's instruction, not by this eruption. Anyways, this post is already far too long and parts of it really go out on a limb. But I think quite a bit of it is reasonable, and if true, there are some pretty big lore implications here! Would love to hear your thoughts.