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Also, I'm disappointed that Eric didn't like Defending Elysium. I love it and recommend it to people all the time.

FYI, this site has a swear filter that replaces common Earth profanities with various in-world curses from Sanderson's works. (Although it looks like your post has also been modded in accordance with site rules.)

Added two I failed to include earlier (Vev knows - Shallan, and Merciful Domi - Riino) Thanks! I'm glad it's being appreciated. Good point. I've edited the commentary.

Good discussion. I particularly enjoyed hearing some new voices: welcome to Matt and Shannon! Your input was great. Regarding the triangle as a whole, I felt that it was made more palatable because it was not there for its own sake. Yes, the relationships are important, but in my view the primary narrative purpose of the triangle was to highlight Shallan's fracturing psyche and to provide her personas the opportunity to conflict with each other. Since I LOVED Shallan's mental journey, having the triangle work in support of that made it a useful tool rather than a set of occasionally cringey interactions. I wanted to mention one major point in Adolin's favor. You brought up Shallan's aversion to being protected (which is kind of Kaladin's whole purpose in life, so there's another reason their pairing wouldn't go well). She has lived a very circumscribed life and is just now experiencing independence. She reacts badly to the renewed constraints of her wardship, and she seeks in each of her personas to avoid any hint of impotence. She needs to be capable. That's why Adolin's confession about Sadeas is so perfect. Shallan opens up a little about her insecurities, and rather than telling her what to do or how to fix it, he responds by saying, "Yeah, I know what it's like to lie to everybody. I have no idea how to deal with it. When you figure it out, please help me." That trust in her ability, the assumption that she'll figure it out before he does, and the invitation for her to be a strength to someone else is exactly the validation and empowerment that she is able to accept.

Spoiler boxes are made by clicking the eye symbol in the formatting bar when you compose a post. (It's just to the left of the smiley face that lets you select emoticons.) Now that you can do spoiler formatting, I want to hear your thoughts on Dark Talent. The signature is confusing to find. Click on your name/icon in the top right of the screen. In the dropdown menu, select "Account Settings." This will bring you to a page where you can change your email, password, username, and signature.

Well, to keep the metal from warping it would have to add strength to the bow. So if Rock turns off the fabrial briefly while he draws it (reducing the draw strength) then reactivates it as he lets go (causing the metal to spring back into shape) that might have the desired effect.

Yes, the "shardbows" are fabrials, or at least augmented with fabrial tech: My thought was that, in addition to stormlight-enhanced strength, Rock may have been able to manipulate/operate the fabrial portion of the bow. Remember in WoR when they see the bindspren holding rocks to the chasm wall and Syl described natural laws as "an agreement among friends"? I got the impression then that part of surge manipulation is paying off the subcontracting spren with stormlight to do things the way you want. Maybe Rock was able to convince the spren bound in the fabrial to help him shoot the bow?

That's true, though in my mind "colorful" made me think "multicolored." We do know that the type of bird determines the effect, and that multiple bird species overlap (Kokerlii and Mirris both project "copperclouds"). So if we can match Mraize's chicken to one of the aviar in SotD then we should be able to identify its power; but if they don't match we can't assume the power is different from one we've seen.

So I've taken another crack at the Taker of Secrets image. It's tentative, but I think I've got a lead. If I'm right, it contains the word "corrupted" twice. First, I compared the new glyph phonemes from OB with the similar Thaylen alphabet we derived from the frostlands map in WoR: As you can see, the majority of the letters match quite well. We got new phonemes not represented on the map, including vowels (which aren't written in Thaylen). EDIT: I've now confirmed our assignments from the frostlands map, concluding that the differences below reflect a divergence in the two writing systems, not errors on our part Blue: We assigned multiple English letters (e.g. J+G) to certain Thaylen letters, whereas the glyph phonemes have distinct symbols for each. Orange: The Thaylen letters for T and D are reflections of each other. In glyphs, which can reflect and rotate phonemes freely, that symbol is assigned to Th (not a unique letter in Thaylen), while T and D are assigned to related symbols. Green: The symbols for Sh and for Z are altered slightly between the two systems. For making character assignments I used the OB phoneme chart, but supplemented it with our Thaylen deductions because the reflected T and D characters are both in evidence and vowels are entirely absent. Assuming the character orientation aligns with the reading order, it does appear to read from top to bottom on both sides, and left to right across the top, but right to left across the bottom. Multiple characters are flipped other directions though, so that assumption is suspect. Still, here is my transliteration using that convention: (original image) (colored image, with color-coordinated text -- I'm sorry about the ugly lines. My image manipulation skills leave a lot to be desired) I recognize that the color-coding ended up being overkill. Hopefully between that one and the original image you can see how I got to what I have. I have concluded that the writing system in question is closely related both to the glyph phonemes and to the Thaylen writing of the frostlands map, but with some important differences. In particular, this text seems to freely reflect and rotate characters like the phonemes chart, but also utilizes the vowel omissions and character redundancies of Thaylen (e.g. P=F), with the additional redundancy of T=D=Th. If you are interested in helping to decipher these strings of consonants, these website may prove useful. OneLook is a dictionary search that allows wildcards, and Litscape provides soundex matching. (For the latter, note that soundex ignores repeated consonants, while this Thaylen text does not.) This box shows my current guesswork in table form. Bolded words are those in which I have the most confidence. The top line is interpretation. The second line is the transliteration from the image, with subsequent lines providing alternative letters to account for the phonetic redundancies. This spoiler box contains previous guesswork and explanations, superceded by the above, though the formatting may be easier to read. EDIT: I'm considering the possiblity that the points where symbols flip orientation (the Fs do this a lot) are indicative of word breaks, but I haven't really looked closely at that yet.

Good thought, @StormingTexan. Regarding color, it turns out the descriptions in SotD are really sparse. Kokerlii is "colorful," Sak is solid black, and Mirris has "subdued white and green plumage." In comparison, Mraize's chicken is "one of the stranger varieties, pure green and sleek, with a wicked beak." Not a match.

Good point about color. None of the aviar have physical descriptions in the coppermind, so that will have to wait for a reread. I'll check it out if someone doesn't beat me to it.

I don't think that's how it works at all. What supports this idea? The honorspren captain says you can take beads arbitrarily far from the objects they represent, because the connection between the PR and CR aspects of a thing goes through the SR which is location-independent. I have a hard time believing that you couldn't similarly move the object while the bead remains stationary. According to the captain, beads will slowly make their way to the corresponding location of their object, which sounds like the opposite of vanishing and reappearing.

Possible error: bridge 4 barracks are located on the ground floor, but in interlude 14, Teft and company walk from the oathgate: "A winding path through corridors and a stairwell led them back toward their barracks." I initially read that as going up the stairs to another level. They could just be passing the stairs to another connecting hallway, but I thought I would flag it. The next time we see Teft, after he has run away from his men (and potentially up any number of levels), he is able to walk out onto a balcony. Edit: unless ch 35 uses "the tower's first floor" in the European sense of first floor above the ground level?

I like it. I've been asking those same questions about summoning/dismissing blades since reading Ico's comments. I'm not sure how many they would have actually moved to the CR, if the goal was really to help the deadeyes. Once the first hundred didn't receive them, would they have kept trying? As for the possible hidden cache, there is at least one place in the physical realm that we know has been inaccessible to humans for quite a while. While I'm of the opinion that the Sleepless are hiding something far more significant than a pile of spren corpses, I could totally see them using such a cache as a distraction, setting things up so that anyone who comes looking will discover the blades and assume that's all the treasure there is to find.

I fully support Anat for Sja-Anat. "Satan" just doesn't make sense to me, especially when you have a much closer cognate already. I have also been trying to identify these, and don't have a good suggestion yet for Ba-Ado-Mishram. I've been using this list to look for similarities, and you found the best ones. I do think that Yarikh, a moon good on the list, sounds somewhat similar to Yelig, so he could be a match for Yelig-Nar.

So the WoBs that we have in Arcanum do not include the part where he said that the clues are in the book, but I trust the report. There is not a lot happening in the scene where the aviar is present. The chicken chirps at Shallan twice when she speaks angrily to Mraize, and Ialai conveniently decides to send both Mraize and Shallan into the side room at the same time so they can chat. Here are the relevant quotes: The chirping looks like the best candidate clue to me, but other than sensing hostility (which doesn't seem super useful as an aviar trait) I can't guess what it's responding to. Unless I missed something, we don't see that chicken again in OB.

I'm one who didn't believe Mraize's chicken was an aviar until Brandon confirmed it (here and here). Then we got the stunning confirmation that Patji is a Shard and that First of the Sun is referenced in one of the letters. This can only be the one from Autonomy. (Authorship not officially confirmed, but come on. It's pretty obvious.) Here is the text of the letter: All the water references, plus the WoB above, make it clear that Patji is an avatar of Autonomy. The pronouns and articles are a little ambiguous (ha!) but I interpret "this world" is the reference to First of the Sun, being distinct from Obrodai. (Note that Brandon had previously RAFO'd whether Hoid had been to the Drominad system, which now appears to be a question of more significance than I thought.) So my question: does all of this imply that the Ghostbloods have connections to Autonomy? Others in the thread have already cited the AU essays, where Khriss states that no Silverlight teams have yet survived their exploration attempts. While the skills and knowledge of the Ghostbloods make it plausible they could successfully capture an aviar, it would be far easier if they had at least the tacit support of the local Shard. We still don't know anything about the origins or motives of the organization, but whatever they are up to could well have Bavadin's approval or coincide with her own goals. I speculate that they are not working at her specific direction, since they seem very autonomous (ha! irony!) and their methods are different from those of the organization we presume to be working for her elsewhere in the cosmere. (Scadrial spoilers below) Note also that Mraize's collection includes sand from Taldain, a planet Khriss says has been closed to travel. Maybe the presence of the sand and aviar together are evidence that not everyone is excluded from her domains. There are other explanations, but this one makes sense to me. Aside: This isn't quite correct. We see the powers work at a short distance multiple times when the birds are in flight or perched nearby, and there are comments along the lines of staying "within range."

US Kindle version loc 18668 (ch 99) has an odd line break. The word "coatrack" is hyphenated coa-track rather than coat-rack.

Hm, good points. I can see how some of my assumptions are weak, starting with the idea that those doing the research went on the mission. I also assumed that each gem corresponded to a unique radiant, and the team of truthwatchers just stuck their gems in together, but that may not be the case. One person could have taken sequential research notes and stored them all in his/her drawer. It looks like the other drawers housing multiple gems also contained a single type of gemstone. So the correspondence may be one drawer per person, not one gem per person. (I was also guessing that each gem contained substantially more text and we only got a snippet, but maybe there isn't much storage space in them and the multiple gems are necessary to convey longer thoughts/messages.)

I was gushing to a friend about how incredible the two Girl Who Looked Up sequences are. Great writing, beautiful story, powerful tie-ins to the main plot and characters. Truly one of the standout pieces of Oathbringer. And I realized that it is the perfect self-contained bit of visual storytelling to adapt for the screen. We've talked before about how DMG owns film rights to the cosmere, and how despite the size of the story and world they appear to be trying for a Stormlight movie first. I wish them luck. But it occurred to me that to promote the project (either to filmmakers or to the general public) and/or to gauge interest, they could produce an animated short of The Girl Who Looked Up. It is a great way to showcase their artistic vision and their ability to adapt the material, and they could add all sorts of teases at the end about illusion magic or the Voidbringers or highstorms to serve as a hook. I know I would watch it over and over and over. In fact, they could do a series of shorts around Wit's stories (Wandersail, Fleet, and Mishim), and possibly other in-worlds myths. The nice thing is that this gives them complete freedom of medium. It's a story being told in world, so the visual stole doesn't have to match their eventual film. CG, stop motion, illustration, live action, etc are all free game. (It also gives us the possibility of getting something sooner, but that's just my excitement talking.)

I like the idea, but I'm not quite convinced. If Cultivation had a hand in it her touch would need to have been very light. We know that there were eleven parties to the Oathpact: Honor plus ten Heralds. Honor directly powered the Heralds. We speculate that the KR orders are an uneven mix, some being more "of Honor" and others being more"of Cultivation." (We know that's true of their spren, but extending that to the orders themselves is what I consider "likely but not confirmed.") Assuming that's true, it would be a distinction between the KRs and their patron Heralds who were all firmly "of Honor." I have a hard time believing that Tanavast would permit another Shard, even a friend and ally, to interfere with his personal servants in a way that influenced them directly counter to his intent--in this case the breaking of oaths. I also want to point out that when the Heralds volunteered it was not to be tortured. Their plan was to stay in the Fused's prison and they were essentially volunteering for exile. According to the Stormfather, the torture came later when the Fused realized that humans could be coerced to break promises.

Thanks for the great analysis and fun theorizing. There were quite a few connections I had missed. In particular, I hadn't paid any attention to the drawer numbers, so having you group them together that way was very useful.

The recent Shardcast discussing the Part 3 Epigraphs (the gemstone recordings) brought some things together in my mind, and prompted an intriguing question. Things we know: After Aharietiam the Fused were confined to Braize and Odium could not provide the Regals with voidlight. However, during an event known as the False Desolation, Ba-Ado-Mishram was able to stand in for Odium and provide voidlight to the singers, enabling them to use the forms of power. Melishi the bondsmith came up with a plan to counter this and organized a strike force of Truthwatchers to capture Ba-Ado-Mishram. (For more about Melishi and the False Desolation, check out this thread or listen to the Shardcast linked above.) Ba-Ado-Mishram has not been active in modern Roshar, and is presumably still trapped. (For more about that, see this thread.) Epigraphs where we learn about all this: So what do we know about trapping Unmade? We saw it happen once in OB, along with some additional hints. While difficult to accomplish, it's only slightly more complicated that "grab the spren and stick it in a gem." You need one of the special "perfect" gemstones like the King's Drop and you need bait. You may or may not also need a bondsmith to lock the Unmade inside. The gemstone recording says "It would require a special prison. And Melishi." I don't know whether Melishi is functioning as bait or as prison warden here, but since his stratagem was "related to the unique abilities of the Bondsmiths" I am inclined toward the latter. But you definitely need bait. Taravangian describes it to Dalinar this way, in reference to lesser spren: Remembering this, Dalinar decides to make himself the bait for Nergaoul during the battle of Thaylen Field. That is an obvious match since the Blackthorn is the perfect vessel for the Thrill, someone who was gleefully addicted it for decades. In the sub-basement of Urithiru, Shallan learns that a previous Lightweaver served as bait for Re-Shephir. Excerpt of the Re-Shephir confrontation from Ch 30: So Re-Shephir is similar to creationspren, the presumed secondary spren of Lightweavers that are attracted to their artistic abilities. And Shallan is all about creating imitations of things, which makes her extremely compatible with Re-Shephir (note the Unmade's attempt to displace Pattern). So when Shallan opens herself to Re-Shephir, it is too much like the last encounter with a Lightweaver and Re-Shephir flees, fearing imprisonment. Shallan encounters two more Unmade in Kholinar. Sja-Anat just talks to her, but Ashertmarn is attracted to her. The attraction isn't related to her Lightweaver status this time, but rather to her fracturing psyche full of competing desires: This affinity is real, but doesn't seem anywhere close to the oneness that Shallan experiences with Re-Shephir, or that Dalinar has Nergaoul. The odd thing to note is that Melishi's strike team appears to consist entirely of Truthwatchers. This indicates that members of that order may be uniquely suited to act as bait for Ba-Ado-Mishram. So what are the qualities of Truthwatchers, and what can that tell us about the personality/effects of this particular Unmade? (Presumably we could draw conclusions about the Truthwatchers from information about the Unmade, but we know even less about her than we do about the order.) We know that they use Progression and Illumination. They are associated with Pailiah's divine attributes: learned and giving. The in-world Words of Radiance has this to say: They were secretive and... that's about it. If only Ba-Ado-Mishram and not Sja-Anat were the Unmade known as the Taker of Secrets. But no, that can't be it. Honestly I'm pretty stumped at this point. Brandon has repeatedly RAFO'd information about the Truthwatchers, so we don't have any useful WoBs about their resonance, their nahel spren, or the lesser spren associate with their order. The only thing we have is a soft confirmation that they are an order that "is about using knowledge to help people" (questioner's phrasing). There has been a fair amount of speculation in other threads about the Truthwatcher resonance, but nearly all of our data comes from Renarin who, after the reveals of OB, is clearly not representative. He says he "sees," which I believe applies to more than his atypical future sight, but there is not clear textual support for that yet. I'm still pondering this relationship between the Truthwatchers and Ba-Ado-Mishram, and I will be looking for more hints on my reread. My best guess at this point has to do with discerning the essence of things. She served as a general during Desolations, and that ability to perceive would be extremely useful in that context. I look forward to seeing your suggestions and speculation.