11thorderknight

What better way for a group of religious leaders to keep the Blades safe than to forbid anyone of their culture from touching weapons? Keep in mind that these are Shardblades; they can be kept in the Spiritual Realm and only manifested when used for fighting. They don't even need to be manifested to enable use of Stormlight or Surges. If I were a secretive cabal of tribal leaders who intends on keeping 8 Honorblades secret, I'd make up some religious reason to forbid most of my subjects from touching weapons, ban walking on stone, then put the weapons in some mountain cave somewhere. I'd also make forgeries of each one to put on display and have the real ones kept by the eight senior Shaman, but that's just me.

If a select group of people were in charge of protecting 8 priceless objects that give their bearers incredible powers, I would think that the members of that group would learn to use those object by periodically using them themselves. But that's just me.

I interpreted "Jasnah would not have approved" as meaning that Shallan is finally starting to realize that she doesn't have to become a clone of Jasnah in order to learn from her. Jasnah was all about scholarship, study, reason - she was (is) a philosopher at heart. Shallan is not - she's an artist. She needs a grounding in scholarship in order to have a base from which to build her art, but her tools, her methods, for creating new knowledge are going to be different from Jasnah's. Anyway, that was my take on it.

I think Brandon simply put them in in order to give a reasonable explanation for how someone like Graves, and now Moash, could hide among the common people. Otherwise, it would be completely unbelievable. Also, I bet they wouldn't work for Kaladin or any other sufficiently-advanced Radiant. Their eyes are not merely light, they actually glow.

The bronze age tech is not that confusing - we dont' know exactly how many Radiants there were during the pre-Desolation time, but whether it was dozens, or hundreds, or even a couple thousand, it would have been a tiny, tiny number compared to the general population. When you add the fact that the Radiants (and the ruling elite that had access to their services) could rely almost completely on surgebinding and fabrials to replace technology, and it's not a surprise at all that the general tech level of Roshar continued to be pretty crappy.

I'm assuming the "old reptile" is a dragon, and that his name is Khryss. Does anyone else find it pretty scary that this individual, who is supposedly far more Cosmere-aware than Hoid, thinks that what Hoid is doing is very, very dangerous? Also, note the over-text of the letter exchange: Hoid is arguing for intervention on Roshar in order to save lives there. Khryss is arguing for non-intervention on the grounds that whatever disasters might take place on Roshar, they will not spread to the rest of the Cosmere....unless he and Hoid meddle. Anyone else see a parallel to Journey before Destination?

There's definitely been some confusion on this point. I forget where, but in Way of Kings there is most definitely a scene with Szeth where he does drop his Blade, and it does vanish, and he does spend ten heartbeats waiting for it to reappear. Obviously, he is capable of dismissing/summoning the Blade, and he's capable of Surgebinding when the Blade is not summoned. To me, this clearly indicates some sort of bond between Szeth and the Blade. Now, it may be of a different nature than the bond between a Radiant and his spren/Sprenblade. But it is clearly a bond, nonetheless. So, I admit, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to reconcile these facts with the "Honorblades don't bond" statements.

We have WoB that Ash/Shalash destroyed her statue that night? Really?

I think there are a lot of overcomplicated theories going on. Here are some observations: 1. Jasnah was hell-bent on getting to the Shattered Plains, getting to Urithiru, and giving warning about the parshmen/voidbringers. If she was in control of the situation in any meaningful way, she wouldn't have staged an elaborate charade that involved taking herself out of world events while abandoning the 2nd known (to her, at the time) surgebinder and a bunch of other innocent people to likely death. 2. We have never seen her use the Transportation surge to travel any meaningful distance, or at all, prior to the epilogue. And she's someone who does a lot of traveling, and was in very much a hurry at the time of the attack. Therefore, it's not unlikely that she wasn't able to really use it that well at the time. 3. We know that length of time doesn't always correlate with progression of the Nahel bond. Shallan has had hers for longer than Jasnah (yes, she is a bit of a special case, but still). Jasnah has spent most of the last 6 years with her nose in a book, and while that does get her somewhere in the "wise" sense, true growth happens during crises. I think THIS was her crisis. 4. I read the Shardblade in the epilogue as a sign that she's made progress in her Words, rather than as a sign of where she was at the beginning. Remember her conversation with Shallan, about how most Radiants didn't fight and that "no one is going to make you swing a sword" or some such. Yes, Jasnah can be deceptive, but she has never outright lied to Shallan, and if she knew that Shallan was eventually going to manifest a Shardblade she wouldn't have said that, I don't think. Regardless, if she could form a Blade, she wouldn't have let her assassins live, if only to protect the others on the ship. 5. The length of time she was away, and her conversation with Hoid, implies that she wasn't in control of events. She definitely looks the worse for wear at the end, even discounting her burns, in terms of her clothes, etc. My take on things - whatever happened, she was taken by surprise and nearly died. She managed, in a crisis, to level-up to the point where she phased herself to Shadesmar, and maybe did some stormlight healing as well. Then, she ended up stuck there, and had some crazy adventures. She may well have been trapped there, with no stormlight to get back to the physical realm.

I don't see why she wouldn't be able to "compound" investiture using the food-stormlight-plants-food cycle. After all, the Lord Ruler did basically that for a thousand years, and Brandon has mentioned several times that worldhoppers can "hack" the magic systems of various planets to get really powerful effects. Lift got what's basically direct Shardic intervention to allow her to access investiture in a new manner. Why shouldn't she be able to get a "hack" out of it?

I think it's not that a Desolation happens when all the Heralds give up, but when any of them give up. This explains why the last period was so long - Odium only has Taln to break, who is the strongest of them. Before, he could break any of the ten, but this time he had to break the strongest one.

His Blade is also described as eel-like and decorated with crystals - which is EXACTLY how Wyndle is described. I'm sure the various blades are somewhat affected by the nature of their spren, and that sounds for sure like an Edgedancer spren.

Based on WoK info I was expecting him to become a Radiant eventually; however, based on WoR, I see him taking a much darker turn. So far, every spren we've seen has been the only one of his/her kind to bond a human in recent times. Wyndle and Pattern seem to have been chosen by their communities to do this, and had support, but Syl and Ivory are both defying their respective communities. We don't know much about Renarin's spren, but he and Ym are the only examples so far of two Radiants of the same order, and given the timeline, it's quite conceivable that Ym's spren moved on to Renarin after Ym was killed. My point is that Elhokar is not going to be a Lightweaver, and I doubt there are other orders that bond cryptics, or spren that look like them. And, given that his spren are fleeing from Kaladin.....well, it's not a good sign. More importantly, Elhokar's personality takes a pretty dark turn in WoR. He's clearly not Radiant material.

The whirlwind romance between two unlikely lovers against an end-of-the-world backdrop is hands-down the most overdone, obnoxious fantasy trope. How about this for originality: Jasnah sneaks off for an hour, pours herself a bubble bath and a glass of wine, conjures up a Shard-rabbit and goes to town solo. Then she gets dressed and proceeds with the business of saving the world.

There's something wrong with the Heralds - they've become perversions of the ideals they once upheld. Ash is running around destroying art, specifically images of herself. Jezrien's a drunk. Nale/Nin is pursuing "justice" in a very twisted, literal sense that obviously runs counter to what anyone would consider to be true justice.

it's pretty well established that the original Radiants were able to summon and unsummon their Plate, or parts thereof. In "Starfalls", it's noted several times that the Radiant's helms appear and disappear without them needing to actively take them off. The Plate also glows in a way that modern Plate does not, in a color and glyphs that correspond to the Order of their wearer. My personal theory is that, while the Blade is derived from the spren as the physical manifestation of the bond, the Plate is derived from the Knight (again, as a physical manifestation of the bond). That's why it comes later on in the progression. It's also why budding surgebinders can touch and wear Plate while being unable to comfortably handle Blades.

On the ship, when Jasnah told Shallan about her correspondence back and forth with Navani, it was implied that Navani didn't think the break was such a big deal; she said "you'd be surprised how often that happens" and seemed reasonably certain she could fix it. Now, may she could have, and maybe not; we'll never know (though now that we know the Soulcaster was broken by a regular sword and not a Shardblade, the chances are higher). Anyway, the important thing is, Navani knows enough about the Ardents' Soulcasters to know that they can break, and how to fix them. We know the key portion of a soulcaster is NOT in the gems, since those are swapped out all the time. Navani mentions the alignment of the gem housings as being critical, but obviously there's more to it that just that, otherwise she'd be making new soulcasters. My theory on fabrials in general is that the gemstones are used to "target" the effect to the essence corresponding to the gemstone, while the surge that's accessed is determined by shape of the metal that holds the gems. Spren have to be trapped somehow as well, maybe by describing their "measurements" on the metal, or some other way.

I'm very curious to learn the exact circumstances of Jasnah's sabbatical. What could she possibly have learned that Hoid doesn't know?

I think the connection is not to the gender of the Radiants, since I'm pretty sure all the orders comprised both genders; that would be too big a point for people to not know. However, there is definitely a correlation to the gender of the spren: the male Heralds at the top of the chart all have female spren from what we've seen (though so far, it's only been Syl) whereas all the female Heralds have male spren (Wyndle, Ym's ball of light, Renarin's Glys, Pattern, Ivory). The big exception is Dalinar's spren, of course, but the Bondsmiths are an outlier in other important ways as well, so I'm willing to let this one slide, for now.

I'm sure there will be a lot more about them in future books. One thing I noticed was that the larkin that Rysn got was described as being HERS, and I got the strong impression that it wasn't in a "you own this" kind of way. There seemed to be a significant connection implied. Also, the one Darkness had was bound to keep it from escaping. This implies that larkin are intelligent on par with a Ryshadium, and choose people the way Ryshadium choose riders.

The effect on the eyes and skin are described here for the first time, and we really dont' know much, if anything, about them. Adolin seems to know about the effect, and that it requires prolonged use. This is certainly plausible; we know that Brightlord Davar had a Soulcaster for several years and didn't exhibit any outwards effects. Jasnah's also been soulcasting for 6 years, or close to it, without any outward signs. Maybe it's a hint that using fabrials that mimic surgebindings will have an effect on people. There is no relation to Shardblades here. The air sucking in is telling us that matter isn't being conjured from nothing - air is being compressed into enough density to become stone. In another thread a long time ago, I postulated that this was the reason that sapphires are second in value only to emeralds; they are needed in order to compress air to sufficient density to transform it to useful solid objects.

My take on the Oathpact and the Desolations is this - Odium gets to have the Heralds on Braize, where he tortures them. When one of them breaks, all ten return to Roshar, and Odium gets to have his Desolation. This actually explains why this last time took so long - normally, Odium only had to break one out of the ten. This time, he had to specifically break one (who coincidentally may have been the hardest to break?). It's like getting to throw ten dice and needing one of them to read 6, vs. throwing one dice and needing it to read 6.

All ten Heralds have been mentioned at some point by their real names, which are as follows: Jezrien Jezerezeh Nale Nalan Chana Chanaranach Vedel Vedeledev Pali ??? Ash Shalash Battar Batab Kalak Kelek Talenel Talenelat Ishar Ishi The only one we don't know is Pali's Vorin name.

I think the concept of Adolin's Blade waking up in response to his actions is awesome, and definitely foreshadowed fairly heavily throughout WoR. The only conflicting evidence is that when it's described - eel-like, with crystals decorating the backside - is a perfect description of what Wyndle would look like if here were a Blade. Additionally, there are plenty of mention of other Shardblades having flame-like patterns, presumably from the flamespren-like Dustbringers. So, if Adolin's Blade were to wake up, it would almost certainly put him among the Edgedancers. Now, how well does he fit that order? Well, we don't know, because we don't know much about them. All we know is that back in the day they were the most "refined" of the orders. Which is a complete contradiction with what he know of Lift, who is anything but. She's also the stereotypical "thief with a heart of gold" character, which arguably means the Edgedancers weren't too focused on legal niceties. So, overall, Adolin isn't disqualified from the Edgedancers, but doesn't seem like a shoo-in either. On the other hand, he does seem pretty well matched for the Dustbringers. He's certainly brave, and his focus on dueling and fighting is in line with the focus the Dustbringers most likely had. Additionally, he has some issues with obedience, and from what we've seen of both Kaladin and Shallan, they've had some problems with their Secondary Divine Attributes of Leadership and Honesty. For Adolin to have problems with Obedience argues pretty well for being among the Dustbringers. So, which will it be? Only 2 years until we (maybe) find out.

I think the "unique" role of each order is less about their surgebinding abilities than it is about their divine attributes and how those fit in with their service to society. For instance, Dalinar's bringing people together isn't the result of combining Tension and Adhesion, it's a result of his personality and the work he chooses to do. Shallan's doesn't transform people by Soulcasting them or tricking them with illusions; she does it by inspiring them, partly through art (though granted, the illusions help). Kaladin doesn't just fly (the skybreakers can do that too); he flies to people's defense to protect them. I think the role of the Truthwatchers will be to learn, to investigate, to figure out puzzles and maintain knowledge. I bet their Second Ideal will be something like "I will see things as they are".