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Thanks to all who contributed. I have made some formatting changes to Mysty's version, and the updated file is here. I did two things: Added larger, clearer glyph symbols for the surges and orders. Changed the surge layout to get rid of the "primary" and "secondary" designations. Now the surges lie between the orders that share them. Are there additional changes you'd like to see? Edit: fixed the link

I'm not convinced. The evidence Jasnah cites for them communicating across distances is that they can all sing in time with each other no matter how far apart. But we know from Eshonai's POV that they are always attuning to one or another rhythm that they can "hear." It doesn't follow that they can actually communicate across distances, only that they all share a connection to something humans can't sense. In (sort-of) support of this, think about the first time Kaladin wears the Parshendi bone armor. Most of the enemy archers shoot at him in outrage, but not all of them. I assume that if they were really passing information telepathically then all of the archers would have noticed and been distracted. Similarly, in the battle of the Tower, Kaladin fights through to a group of Parshendi who haven't taken the gems out of their beards yet. It could be that they underestimated him and hadn't bothered to do that, but to me it means that they hadn't gotten the (very important) message about a surgebinder using stormlight from your beard to kill you.

Hmm... In the past I've been dismissive of suggestions that the glass of the spheres is soulcast, partly because of the apparent high cost of soulcasting, and partly because of descriptions of flawed spheres (i.e. with air bubbles in them, which you would expect from inserting a cut gem into molten glass.) I also doubt that in Vorin kingdoms people would be comfortable with the ardentia controlling the currency (since they are the ones with soulcasters). Memories of the Hierocracy are pretty strong. On the other hand, molding clay around a gem and then soulcasting it would be incredibly easy, especially since gems themselves are immune to soulcasting so you wouldn't have to worry about accidentally destroying your wealth. And in a routine process like that, it would be unsurprising to have blemishes like air bubbles introduced occasionally (provided of course that the air doesn't also get transformed). This clay system is much more plausible than the air-to-glass versions I've heard before. It accounts for the flattened bottoms of spheres, and gets around the need to hold the gem somehow while the soulcasting happens. For now I'm going to continue to assume that it is really glassblowers making the spheres. That technology does not seem at all out of place on Roshar, especially since we've seen stained-glass windows, glass bottles, etc. ...not that it matters much for this discussion of gem sizes. Sorry if this sidetracks us. Back on topic: Does anyone know anything about pre-modern gem cutting? I would be curious to learn about the necessary tech/tools and the size limitations.

This is a bit out there, but it's my honest prediction: First half of the fight is Kaladin POV, he does his best but Szeth gets around him and dispatches Dalinar. Sadness! Then, switch to Szeth POV for the twist! Apparently-innocent-spectator Shallan has fooled him with a lightweaving and Dalinar is really on the other side of the room. Szeth is about to fail, can't trust his eyes, and is running out of stormlight fast. More fighting, ending with Szeth's narrow escape.

We have seen neither old or young parshmen. The closest I could find to a child parsh was the young (teenage?) parshendi that Dalinar was fighting on the tower plateau.I'm pretty confident that Dalinar was calling the femalen Parshendi "youths" because they were beardless and the idea of women fighting never occurred to him. Kaladin and Jasnah were both a bit more observant.

Great reasoning, Fingerstyle, and thank you for the size estimates. I particularly like the wineglass photo, at it gave me a good visual of what we're looking for. I agree that those appear to be upper-limit mark sized. I had interpreted the loupe being used to look for counterfeits, but I didn't know that quartz melted too low to be inset. Is that true for all types of molten glass or just the formulation we use today? I know that the process for making glass a few hundred years ago was probably very different than ours now. I'll have to go look up glass blowing etc. now. I definitely follow your logic all the way through, and agree to the valuation ratio limits you arrived at. I would add that the newly developed technology of a proximity-detecting-fabrial is likely to be a huge portion of the cost, as compared to the gemstone "battery" that powers it. The fact that Rysn is surprised by the fabrial's cost suggest that it is much more than she (a trader) would have assumed for the metal and gem it's made from. Using the figures above, that reduces the size inflation factor by whatever the actual-to-expected cost ratio is. That puts it well below 3, in my mind, and probably closer to 2. EDIT: Also, welcome to the forums! Glad to have you here.

I think that means multiple cities or at least towns near each other, but not a sprawling metropolis.

The recent preview chapters have confirmed that even chips contain cut gems, and that "gemstones are precisely weighed before being encased in glass." The context implies that all chips weigh the same. So each denomination is a specific karat of gem, and all gems are cut and faceted before being put into spheres. I think we're getting closer.

I read it as at least 3 bodies, probably more, but with only two gender-specified (i.e. the woman is her mother). She is being carried away by her father, and "in the room behind him, dark corpses stretched out on the floor." A few steps later, she is carried over the unbloodied woman in white (her mother). I can't tell if "the man who bled" is there next to Shallan's mother or if he is one of the corpses already mentioned. I agree with Morsk's post on the previous page--gender characteristics are suppressed or latent except in mateform, so other forms receive a different designation. I interpret it loosely as "male-ish and female-ish".

Oh! Probably been pointed out before, but the midnight essences were cut in half by shardblades. That means that whatever makes something "alive" doesn't apply to the Ten Deaths even when moving around, attacking Radiants, etc.

Hey, thanks! I forgot to put "Are you a potential Voidbringer" on our babysitter interview list. That was a close one. It's a boy, so no luck on Syl. Oh, I totally forgot about the Olympics being this month. Hopefully I can work those in.

I will: Try to be productive at work (I have some lab experiments that really need to be wrapped up). Get the baby room ready for our first child (due in 4 weeks, perilously close the the WoR due date) Watch the new season of Sherlock. Sleep as much as possible (more because of the baby than WoR).

I'm seeing several people say things like this, but I reacted very differently. Amaram's words are what Pattern would call a true lie--he never says that he won them himself, and he is accurate in describing where they came from. They just never contradict the assumption that most everyone has about what happened. What Amaram did was awful, but I'm actually rooting for him in the coming confrontation. Definitely redeemable.

There was a suggestion that Eshonai may have multiple viewpoints within an interlude set. If that happens twice, that makes 14. Alternatively, we could just be getting extra from other POVs

Re: the OP of whether spheres as currency is a post-radiant development, Dalinar's Starfalls vision caught my attention. He observes that the light is from an oil lantern rather than stormlight, which strikes him as primitive. I can't recall a vision where he mentions spheres or gems except as part of a fabrial like Regrowth. He doesn't always comment on their absence either, though, so it's not difinitive. Does anyone have a quote from one of his visions where spheres were present? If not, that goes quite a ways toward supporting the theory of the OP in my mind.

On the topic of cool things noticed this time through: In the Starfalls vision Taffa swears by the heralds a few times, but when she's really amazed she says, "Three Gods, Heb" Sixteen guesses for who she's talking about...

Dalinar mentions that those with the king's favor can pay a large fee to borrow the king's Plate and Blade in order to duel a shardbearer, though in the context that was for general duels of honor or sport; I suspect the king would be less likely to favor duelists seeking shards as prizes. When Rock told bridge 4 that his nuatoma had come to duel for shards, they all seemed surprised that he would attempt it. (It is not specifically stated whether the nuatoma was loaned a set of plate for the duel, but from the context I doubt it.) Rock says it is a fairly regular occurrence for a group of Horneaters to come down and try for shards, but it seems like within Alethkar most attempts to win a set of shards take place on the battlefield rather than in the dueling ring. That's not to say that it doesn't happen.

Something else to consider: In several weeks of bodyguard duty, neither Kaladin nor Syl seem to have picked up on the fact that "Renarin seesa spren nobody else does." (per WoB) This despite the fact that in WoK Renarin is frequently observed to be "preoccupied," with "staring at nothing." I'm guessing that his spren is around a bunch, but neither a watchful surgebinder nor that surgebinder's spren has noticed. Presumably Rock hasn't been around the Kholins at all to see things. I take this to mean that there's something else going on with visibility than just Nahel bonding. As an aside--I seriously doubt it will happen this way, but I have a scene in mind where Jasnah is introducing Shallan to the family, and S notices R's spren. She says "Oh, you have one too?" This leads to explanations Kaladin only gets to hear afterward from the bridgecrew who were on bodyguard detail at the time.

Weiry is right. The days are only 20 hours long, not 24, so a 500 day Rosharan year is only 1.1 earth years. So the ages given in the books are actually very close to what you would envision. Edit: Is there a reason this info isn't on the wiki page? I assume we have the relevant WoB citations to reference.

I like the comparison of type I and type IV, and the idea that the smoke may be a shared byproduct. I don't think that has been postulated before. The alternative is that the smoke is more from Nightblood's destructive ability, and the things he is destroying (such as walls, etc. in the final fight scene) are reduced to smoke, while Breath is simply fueling that ability.

Here is a description of an emerald broam from Ch 55 of WoK. There are a few extra details there, but the main point for me is that the gems (at least in broams) are definitely cut and faceted. (When I was finding the quote to post it I thought that there was also something about the size of the gem relative to the sphere, but it doesn't say anything about that.) Edit: Found another quote to add to my earlier luminance post, but the upshot is that a broam is between 3 and 5 times the size of a mark, depending on your use of "several."

Wow, that's great! I made one for myself that is similar, but yours definitely looks nicer. I'll be printing a copy to make notes with through WoR. Did you make this directly as a pdf? If you have the original spreadsheet file, do you mind making that available for my own downloading-and-editing pleasure?

I did this. After reading all of Rock's quotes, I didn't find any cases of swapped pronouns, though he does frequently drop pronouns at the beginning of clauses. So, I could go either way on this. He does have a unique speech pattern, and "him" in reference to the broam could be just a manifestation of that. Or, since this is the first time this particular irregularity has manifested, it could well be something more significant like a spren sighting.

I'm going to take a stab at the relative sizes of broams, marks, and chips. While this has been discussed before, I'm going to try a new approach. Making some admittedly tenuous assumptions, I'm going to try to use the "brightness" of the spheres to estimate their sizes. I don't have a searchable WoK, so if anyone else wants to double check my quotes and improve on this reasoning, I welcome the corrections. My basic assumption is that the luminosity of an infused gem is proportional to its size. We know that a mark is almost as bright as a candle. The luminosity of a candle is ~1 candela, which, assuming it shines in all directions, is about 12.5 lumens, giving ~4 lux of illumination at a distance of half a meter. As an upper limit, a broam will not be more than 5x the size of a mark, or it would have been cut down to 5 marks plus chips from the waste, giving a profit. (Good arguments can be made for the ratio to be lower). Using this upper limit, if the broam is 5x as bright as a mark, it provides ~20 lux at half a meter. Reading is uncomfortable below 50 lux, and difficult below 10 lux, even when the eyes are adapted to dim room lighting (reference). Modern home and office lighting guidelines are for 300-600 lux for study and reading (reference). This makes sense, as at one point Shallan "was forced to use gems of all 9 colors and all 3 sizes" to fill up her lighting goblet to read and write by. If I remember correctly, at this point she only has 1 or 2 broams left, so for argument's sake let's say she has 2 broams, 9 marks, and assorted chips, making for ~80 lux. (Illuminance decreases with the square of distance, so if she scooted in and was only .25 meters from the goblet of spheres, she would have 4x the amount of light. That is about 10 inches, which puts her awkwardly close to the light source if she also has to worry about pen and ink, etc.) If anyone finds more references for the spheres used as indoor lighting, please post them to help refine this. The next piece comes from a comparison in the released WoR chapters. I'm spoilering both the quote and my analysis since we're not in that subforum, but seriously, this doesn't amount to much of a spoiler. My math is probably a better reason to hide all this: Clearly, there is a lot of ballpark figuring here, but I'm guessing other scenes can help us narrow in the windows of plausibility. Also, wow! I spent way too much time on this. Is there anyone with more experience in lighting who can help me out here? EDIT: Here is another WoK quote: "Several" can be interpreted variously, but is generally used to mean 3 or 4. So a broam is probably on the order of 3x the size of a mark. (Although, since a mark is only "almost as bright" as a candle, a good argument can still be made for 5.) With a nominal currency value of 4 marks, that is also a very plausible ratio for their gem sizes.

So, this morning I woke up all excited to come post the new WoB I heard at the signing last night. There were confirmations of theories, and a few brand new tidbits about Sel and Roshar. Then I gradually realized that no, all of that actually happened in a dream and Brandon hadn't actually told me anything. It was disappointing, to say the least. Clearly I am spending way too much time on this site. (I decided not to post the fake WoB by subconscious came up with.)