BlackYeti

It doesn't say this. It says that he was "hefting his Shardblade like an axe", which actually implies that it wasn't in the form of an axe.

Um, well I was actually thinking of this, I'd forgotten that Peter had only said that he suspected. I should really amend this to "probably".

It can't have been. Elantris is set before White Sand, and thus Khriss would not have been in a position where she could have written it before Elantris fell (assuming she'd even been born at that point).

Interesting... Let's see, we haven't heard of any of the other Shards shapeshifting. All of the other Shard vessels' species (where we know their species) are human, yet we know that not all of the vessels were human. We know that one of the sentient species on Yolen were dragons, and we know that dragons can shapeshift. Does it sound to anyone else like Bavadin may have been a dragon?

I think that when Brandon said that it happens, he was probably referring to things like the horses that the Ire use. I imagine that since all known Perpendicularities exist on land, if an animal were to pass through one it would immediately fall through the insubstantial ocean of the Cognitive.

Oh absolutely. I'm simply arguing that it couldn't have formed naturally, i.e. without Shardic intervention. Or in other words: Autonomy made the system.

Fair point, that is basically the only way these types of stars could exist in a system together, however the probability is quite literally astronomically low. Fist you need two systems to collide, and this is rare even when galaxies collide with each other given the vast distances between systems. Then one of the stars needs to be a blue-white supergiant, which are also rare. And then they need to end up in this precise orbital pattern. In short, it's absurd.

I'm afraid that this doesn't invalidate what I said above. A blue giant is not the same thing as a blue-white supergiant, they are completely different types of star, and as the name implies, supergiants are a lot larger than giants. Which is important because the larger a star gets, the shorter it's lifespan, and it doesn't scale down linearly. What I said earlier was somewhat loose, so let me be a lot more precise. A white dwarf is essentially a dead star, there is no nuclear fusion taking place in it at all. This means that it's already lived through it's main sequence. When I said billions of years I was actually thinking of our own sun, which will become a white dwarf in about 5 billion years time, however for a large enough star it would instead be in the hundreds-of-millions. Given its size, a blue giant on the other hand has a maximum lifespan in the hundreds-of-millions of years. The two stars in the Sirius system are both around 250 million years old, so there is indeed no problem here. Blue-white supergiants on the other hand have a maximum lifespan of 10 million years and it could be much shorter. If it helps, here's an graphic to better show the ages, and if you want more detail on the Sirius system you could have a look at this.

Thanks for the clarification @PeterAhlstrom, that does make me feel better about this. As for what the differences are I think @skaa, you might have hit the nail on the head. Maybe it also helped that Szeth was Invested when it happened. The only other difference that I can think of is that the girl was impaled with an Honourblade rather than a regular Shardblade.

Thanks for the correction! And to think that I was actually feeling good at having spotted that it was a Dysian Aimian, and that it was linked to the back covers of the books, then I jump to a conclusion and get something majorly wrong like that. That being said, I actually think I like this part more now. It feels much less contrived this way.

There's something else weird about the Taldain system now that I think about it. In every other system the stars have 16 major stylised rays of light coming from them. In Taldain however, both stars only have 14 stylised rays coming from them. I've no idea why but there must be something significant about this.

There's also the problem of the stars' ages. The white dwarf would have to be billions of years old, whilst the blue-white supergiant could be no more than millions of years old. However stars in binary systems form at the same time as each other, so they would have to be the same age as each other. The way I see it this system would have to have been constructed artificially, this could not have come about naturally.

No. According to the FAQ on Brandon's website, Shadows takes place between Warbreaker and The Way of Kings. Honestly I don't think that the Evil was caused by Ambition's conflict with Odium. The essay didn't claim that it was, in fact it was quite clear that Khriss had no idea what the Evil was. It only claimed that said conflict "Twisted both the people and the planet of Threnody." If I had to guess this is what caused the people of Threnody to start turning into shades upon death, which I think was already happening prior to the Evil.

I think this would have more to do with Wyndle being closely aligned with Cultivation, rather than a connection with Verdant. Remember that when you see Wyndle you're seeing into Shadesmar, whereas with Verdant the vines are part of the Physical Realm.

You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that it contradicts the new version, it obviously doesn't as you pointed out. What I'm saying is that it contradicts the rules that were given in the old version, and thus Brandon didn't just change what happened in the book but the underlying mechanics as well. He's previously said that he would write future books such that they would work with either version, but this doesn't seem to be the case any more.

If you remember from the original version of Words of Radiance, Kaladin rammed a Shardblade through Szeth’s chest, after which Nale found Szeth and healed him with a fabrial. However in Edgedancer Lift tries to heal a girl who had also had a Shardblade rammed through her chest, and it didn’t work. Wyndle then explains that since she was killed by Shardblade, she cannot be healed at all, unless she is healed right after it happened. Since Nale was obviously not with Szeth and Kaladin to heal him immediately, this appears to be a contradiction. Therefore, either Nale has some way to remotely heal someone (of which we have no evidence), "right after" is being used very loosely, or when Brandon changed the scene to have Szeth fall to his death instead, he also changed the rules governing what can or can’t be healed. If so, what other rules could have been changed at the same time? Is there some additional significance to the change in wording from fabrial to Surgebinding for instance? Moreover this would be a somewhat significant precedent that Brandon is setting, and I’m not sure what to make of it.

I’ve got mixed feelings about Edgedancer. On one hand it’s clearly been written for the fans, and as a fan I absolutely love it. On the other, more objective, hand it feels a bit lacking to me. This could of course be due to the natural tendency to compare it to the two Stormlight books that led into this one, and also to the Emperor’s Soul with which Edgedancer bookends Arcanum Unbounded. Since these stories are exceptional and sit amongst my favourites, feeling lacking in comparison isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The book, of course, features Lift as the main character which is a major plus. Does anyone anywhere dislike Lift? Even Nightblood likes her, which I think makes her officially un-unlikable. To me she’s not at the same level as Jasnah (who’s one of my favourite fictional characters overall), but seeing as how much I enjoy reading about her, I’m not too disappointed that this didn’t turn out to be Jasnah’s unpublished novella which I had initially hoped it to be. Regarding the secret societies of Roshar, we get a new one here: the Sleepless. This is on top of the Ghostbloods, the Sons of Honour, the Diagramists, the Skybreakers (whom it turns out actually are Skybreakers), the Envisagers, and the Seventeenth Shard! It sounds very much like this new lot are the people writing the blurbs for the Stormlight books; and are they all Dysian Aimians, or do they include the Siah as well? Either way, it seems that whenever a new character is introduced now, the question is not “does this person belong to a secret society?”, but rather “to which secret society does this person belong?” Okay, I may be exaggerating, but it is getting very crowded here nonetheless. It would indeed seem that the significant owl hoots in the night. Naln’s final scene in the novella feels too short to me. I’ll grant you that it’s perfectly in keeping with his character (what little we know of it), but given the significance of what happened, it felt like it was missing something. Also the way that, at the end of the story Lift ends up heading back to Azimir left it feeling more episodic: less like a complete work in its own right, but rather more like an interlude from one of the main books, albeit longer and on a much grander scale. Like we were being shown some cool new things about the world, and covering some plot points that would be needed for the next book, and on that level it succeeds completely. So overall I really liked it, it just wasn’t on quite the same level as the Emperor’s Soul.

So when will we be able to start talking about this? I've just finished reading Edgedancer and the essays, so I'm now pretty eager to start discussing this.

His orders have always been to slaughter everyone in his way, and he never hesitated from following them to the letter previously. Why would he make an exception for Adolin? As for how they got to that plateau? I suspect that only Brandon could answer that. We simply didn't see enough of their fight.

He wasn't in the sky though, they were inside the tent: Dalinar noticed the tent shaking and shouting coming from inside just before it happened. Szeth wouldn't have had to have thrown him far in order to achieve that. If he had lashed him I would have expected it to have been into the sky like he did with Dalinar, doing so along the ground would never have been very effective with a man in plate.

I've re-read the passage, and I don't see anything to suggest that Szeth lashed Adolin at any point on the plains. I'm guessing that you're thinking of the part that said "Adolin crashed through the tent's fabric and skidded along the stones on his back", but that does sounds more like he was thrown to me.

Might I ask your reasoning for thinking this? When Brandon described the world, he specifically described the Homeland and Hell as being different continents and said that the people moved across the ocean from one to the other by ship, which makes me seriously doubt this.

I hope those answers are okay for your survey. Out of curiosity though, what do animal shelters have to do with ICT?

Hello and welcome. This is an excellent observation which I completely missed: I never thought to consider the symmetry of the spren themselves. This potentially provides the key to so much, thank you so much for sharing. Unfortunately I can only upvote your post once but it deserves so many more than that! Now having spent a few days thinking about this, let me present my analysis of the spren's symmetry. In the diagrams that we have of Pattern, he does indeed have rotational symmetry like the cognitive glyphs; unlike the glyphs however he is far more symmetrical. Whilst the glyphs only have order 2 rotational symmetry, in each drawing of Pattern he either has order 6 or order 8 rotational symmetry. Is it significant that these are all even numbers? And is there any meaning to this? I’m not sure, but let’s try comparing it to other Radiant spren. Firstly let’s ignore the Truthwatchers and the Bondsmiths for the time being since they seem to be a special case with the connection to the Spiritual Realm. We are only looking for Physical or Cognitive symmetry at this point. Secondly let’s only consider how they appear when in the Physical Realm for now. From the eight remaining Orders, we have seen only three spren in addition to Pattern. Let’s start with Syl since we've seen her the most. Like Pattern she's frequently changing her shape, often appearing in forms such as a leaf, a ribbon, or a woman. All of these have reflectional symmetry in common with each other. Next Ivory is described as "a small figure made of inky blackness" when Shallan sees him. This indicates that Ivory is human shaped, and therefore has reflectional symmetry. Now Wyndle on the other hand is a lot more complicated since it’s not clear whether Lift is seeing his Physical or Cognitive aspect (remember that she’s a lot more in the Cognitive Realm than most people). Wyndle seems to have reflectional symmetry since he manifests a face amongst his vines; however I really think at this point that this is his Cognitive aspect that we’re seeing, and thus not relevant. I suspect that Ym was also a proto-Edgedancer (the way he was asking for people’s stories seems to fall in line with what we know of the Edgedancers), and his spren, from what little we saw of it, seemed quite different to Wyndle. Also if we assume that this is the case then we can draw some far more interesting conclusions later on, in fact I can’t find much of anything interesting if we assume otherwise. There’s also another reason, but I’ll explain that in the next paragraph. This gives us: Windrunners with Physical symmetry, Lightweavers with Cognitive symmetry, and Elsecallers with Physical symmetry. This is almost enough to predict the symmetry of each Order in the table if we assume that it’s symmetrical. The only thing that it rules out for certain is rotational symmetry, thus leaving reflectional symmetry. The question is which axis is it mirrored across? I’m assuming it’s the vertical axis for three reasons. Firstly it is in line with all reflectional symmetry that we’ve seen up until now. Secondly because when considering the lines between the Radiant glyphs, each line points towards an Order with different symmetry if we assume a vertical axis. Finally when we come to consider the Truthwatchers and the Bondsmiths they would break the symmetry if we have a horizontal axis. This means of course that Wyndle needs to have rotational symmetry whilst in the Physical Realm, hence my final reason for thinking that Lift is seeing his Cognitive aspect. This gives us all eight orders: Windrunners, Stonewards, Dustbringers, and Elsecallers with Physical Symmetry, and Skybreakers, Willshapers, Edgedancers, and Lightweavers with Cognitive Symmetry. Now we can consider the Truthwatchers and the Bondsmiths. The Stormfather manifests as a giant head, which of course gives him reflectional symmetry, leaving the Truthwatchers with Spiritual symmetry. There is of course a problem with this: both of the orders connected to the Bondsmiths (the Stonewards and the Windrunners) have Physical symmetry like the Bondsmiths do. This violates our rule that the connections are between Orders with different symmetry. I don’t have an explanation for this. The best I could manage is that these two orders are special and thus different rules apply, but then why would that be the case? It could easily have been fixed if the Truthwatcher were above the Bondsmiths, but they’re not. I’ve annotated a copy of the Physical Surgebinding chart in order to more clearly show just how these all match up. What can we learn from this? What if the symmetry is in fact related to the Shard that the spren is closest related to? The Stormfather is Tanavast’s cognitive shadow, and Syl is an honourspren, so these two match up. Ivory’s alignment is unknown, so that doesn't help. But Pattern and Wyndle are closely related to Cultivation which again, matches with the symmetry. This begs the question of what the Spiritual symmetry that I’m predicting that Glys will demonstrate indicates. Could it be that Glys is actually an Adonalsium spren? These two Orders are special then because Bondsmiths bond mega spren and Truthwatchers bond Adonalsium spren? This would mean that Honour and Cultivation are each connected through the Radiant Orders to every Surge, with the exceptions of Pressure and Tension which are connected only to Honour, and Progression and Illumination which are connected to Cultivation and Adonalsium. But if this is true, what then is going on with the symmetry in the Cognitive Realm. The Elsecaller spren seem to maintain their symmetry across Realms, appearing human shaped in both, yet the Cryptics also have a body in the Cognitive Realm, which implies reflectional symmetry (I’m betting that even the symbols that are their heads, also display this kind of symmetry here). And of course the Edgedancer spren also have different symmetry between Realms as described earlier. I've no idea what's going on here. There are only two symmetrically correct possibilities here as far as I can see. Firstly, all Orders along the bottom of the chart could have Physical symmetry and all Orders along the top have Cognitive symmetry, thus preserving the vertical axis of reflectional symmetry. Alternatively all spren in the Cognitive Realm could have reflectional symmetry. But if the latter is true, then why is the Cognitive Realm associated with rotational symmetry? And if the former is true, why doesn't the symmetry mirror the symmetry in the Physical? I honestly don't think we've seen enough of the Cognitive Realm to make sense of this yet, so I'm just going to leave this here. Annotating the Cognitive chart like I did the Physical chart above would be premature. What do you all think? Am I crazy?