PorridgeBrick

So I've been spending a lot of time staring at one of the last four Highprince glyphs we haven't identified yet. I attached to this post a magnified image of the original, as well as 3 badly drawn attempts at making it out. From what I can tell, it's definitely not Ruthar– none of the inner lines even slightly resemble R. It's probably not Thanadal, since there's neither enough lines nor anything that could be an N. And I don't think it's Hatham– nothing really looks like the M in Vamah. So, Bethab, maybe?

The Korean king he's talking about here is Sejong the Great btw. I remember him from World History class earlier this year.

But in that instance, both sides would have the guards on: you're not hitting the guard with a Blade, you're hitting the guard with another guard.

It's really no bigger a similarity than the complete metamorphosis many insects undergo. Endopterygota is a clade that comprises all insects that undergo complete metamorphosis with a larval, pupal, and adult (or imago) stage and contains butterflies, flies, ants, bees, beetles, fleas, and many other more obscure groups. Now, that's a very large similarity: all of them begin as larvae, eating until they reach pupation, at which point they remain immobile and transform into a sexually active imago. And yet this clade probably dwarfs the entire phylum Chordata in species and diversity. Chasmfiends and Parshendi have one similarity: they switch spren during highstorms. That's not that big, especially when so much of the surrounding mechanics are different. Parshendi don't create chrysalises (chrysali? What's the plural for that?), and they can switch forms again and again. While Parshendi have hundreds of forms, Chasmfiends only seem to have two: larval, and adult.

Or it could be some remnant of an Adonalsium-based magic system that is causing the strange behavior. After all, Yolish Lightweaving still works after the Shattering, so perhaps if Aluminum played a role in the magic those properties would be retained.

And likely Hoid visited their original world at some point and learned their words for axe and hound, so he recognizes them in the term axehound.

About as related as me, a cow, and an elephant. We all have fur, are warm-blooded, and drink milk. Similarly, Parshendi, chasmfiends, and chulls all have carapaces, contain gemhearts, and change forms during highstorms.

Almost certainly. The only reason Chasmfiends can get so big is from their spren bonds. The pupation probably acts very similarly to changing forms in Parshendi– you go out into a highstorm, and switch spren. Except instead of hiding behind a shield, the Chasmfiends get a nice, comfy chrysalis to hide in while the delicate transformation occurs. In fact, the similarities in that are the main reason why I think Parshendi have gemhearts of their own to stuff their spren in.

I definitely think muskets shouldn't really factor into the equation at all– for the reasons you mentioned, and because we as far as I'm aware only discovered gunpowder by accident, way before the Renaissance. To discover it purposely would require extremely advanced scientific knowledge considerably beyond the Renaissance level. And the military stagnation in other respects is probably from the presence of Shardplate and Shardblades– who needs killing machines when we have them already? However, the other issues are valid. It seems that while their science is certainly of the Renaissance, with logarithms, advanced medicine, the scientific method, etc, its application is far behind. I wonder if the divide has something to do with the class divides between the Ardentia and the rest.

Fullmetal Feruchemist: Brotherhood

5. Taln passed down both his Honorblade and his title (and the abilities that come with it) to some poor guy. So he is a Herald, even if he was likely a Stoneward or Radiant before, he has just endured 4500 years of torture, and the patron to his order, a man they practically worship, betrayed him and made him endure an entire 4500 years of torture. That doesn't seem like bad storytelling to me.

We know from WoB I believe that the Heralds and Honor were the original parties of the Oathpact, so they do indeed know the exact terms. I doubt they ever actually stayed around long enough to cause any back-to-back Desolations.

On the Linil glyph: I think there's another way you could parse it that is a little more consistent with Kholin and Roion, if not Nahn. Notice how the line you label N intersects a Screw You Line at the midpoint? What if the bottom two strokes of that are actually just part of the Screw You Line too? This would make the N be just two strokes, like how it is in Kholin and Roion. Then, the only irregularity would be in Nahn, where the extra could just conceivably be more Screw You Lines.

Spooktober 31st: the Spookiest day of the year.

Gawx didn't either. His "application" was by being there and getting healed by Regrowth.

This supports the idea of large gaps in between, actually. "Taln" withstood 4500 years of torture at ten times the usual intensity. And at that point, Odium has had all the previous times between Desolations to develop his torturing abilities to their max. It would be insane if the Heralds can't withstand at least 450 years when Taln took on ten times that, in both duration and intensity. It's incredibly hard to rebuild when infrastructure is entirely gone. Consider the fall of Rome. After the Germanic tribes sacked everything, incredible amounts of technology were lost, some of it forever, and the Dark Ages started. The people at that time all knew of the technology that was possible: they'd been the ones using it, some of them building it. That knowledge wasn't passed on. There was neither the economy, governance, nor resources to supply using that technological knowledge. And in this sort of preindustrial society, knowledge is passed down by family lines or apprenticeship. Kill off a family, you kill off the secrets of their trade. In bad times, all you do is try to feed your family. You don't care about spreading your knowledge, preserving technology. Now, let's apply this to the Desolations. They'd literally just learned bronze-working. This wasn't all that widely known, presumably: there's only so much one man can do to teach an entire population in a small time span. And everything was just ruined. Their population has been ravaged. Their farms to supply food, their mines to supply metal, their men sent off to fight in the war, all are decimated. The Heralds can't exactly stay long: they can't risk sending another Desolation. These people are going to be desperate. They're not in the situation to technologically innovate, or even preserve. They're back in the Stone Age, hunter-gatherer societies. It takes time to regrow populations, to rebuild civilization.And you can't use Scadrial as an example. Sure, it seems Medieval, but that's because TLR has been suppressing everything. They have pocket watches, advanced metalworking. They're a society that's been on the brink of Industrial Revolution for a thousand years, and past that brink in the years before. It would be strange if the damage of the Desolations was that much less, however. This is a society of Bronze Age and Stone Age level technology. With ten people-TEN- to stand against the Desolation, ten who know what they're doing. They're facing the entire listener race, who at this point held a considerably larger repertoire of forms with even more terrible power. They can throw lightning, predict the future, make illusions, do whatever awful thing decayform does. Then you have thunderclasts, giant enemies made of stone that can swat men like flies and appear anywhere, at any time. You have the Midnight Essences. You have the Unmade, enormous, godlike spren. You have Voidbinders. And that's likely not all the monstrosities Odium has up his sleeve. Before surgebinders came and gave mankind a chance to defend themselves, the Desolations should be many times worse, not better.

Here you go.

Is there anything that says there can't be two Focuses in a system? Spren, as a 'primary' focus, and gems as a 'secondary' focus for Soulcasting and fabrials.

I've been thinking a lot about this myself, so thank you for referring me over here. I agree that there's something very fishy with Roshar and the relative tech levels of the Cosmere. First, we have Shards, animals, and people settling the Tranquelline Halls, developing ecosystems and later civilization. This presumably takes a while, even if the Shards were actively spurring things along. Then Odium attacks, and everyone flees to Roshar, likely resetting their technological level as everyone dies or abandons their homes and possessions. Then, per WoB, everyone chills for a while on Roshar before Odium comes back again (perhaps after a Shard-shattering, planet-destroying temper tantrum on Sel). Then finally, you have the Desolations resetting the technological level again and again, with large time gaps in between to allow the population to regrow. After that ends, you have a whole 4500 years after before the present time. As it is, it seem almost unbelievable that Roshar is not more behind in technology than it is. If there were 99 of those Desolations, I think the entire human race should have probably gone extinct by the time Roshar gets its act together.

I'd say considerably more than a decade. 9/10 of the population died every Desolation iirc, and it should take a very long time to get back to normal– at the very least 300 years. I kinda doubt the 99 Desolations bit, seeing as by this point all the other planet's populations should be flying around in FTL spaceships zapping each other with giant lasers with that much technological delay on Roshar's part.

There is also another interesting case of a material Shardblades don't cut. The sheaths used in the training grounds on the Shardblades are brittle and easily breakable normally iirc, but the Shardblades don't cut them. Now, since this can break normally, it's obviously not the same material as Shardblades. It also doesn't scream, nor does the Oathgate. I think that neither of these are spren, then– that, or they're lesser spren like windspren, creationspren, etc.

True enough. I just find it curious that both Roion and the two Kholin glyphs have it so heavily truncated and in the exact same manner, when the only other evidence of truncation is in the tattoo, which is many times more stylized than all the others.

Just for the sake of curiosity, could you also do versions of the Aons where all possible Aons are given the chasm lines? For example, Deo would have the chasm lines for both the unmirrored, rotated Aons and for the mirrored, rotated Aons, even though the two overlap and drawing the Aon only requires drawing the one set. I think the results might be even more aesthetically pleasing.

Wait, two people voted for me without me noticing!? That's, uh, rather worrying. Time for explanation then. So here I vote for Jeo. Note that at this point, the vote is tied between him and Chide (I think: correct me if I messed up here). With ~10/11 hours left in the day, this vote at this point could have very well been the one to kill Jeo. This changed, obviously, but the potential was still there. I voted for Jeo for a few reasons. For one, I though that both Meta and Wilson had put up decent arguments against him. I also disliked how obviously he was targeting Hallendrens and trying to turn us against each other. And I, as I said here, did not want to waste the lynch on Chide. Some conversations with Aonar had convinced me that Chide had gone fully inactive, as opposed to pretending to be such. Such an action seemed very unlike what a PK would do, so it seemed like a waste to spend our kill on him while the PK slowly killed us all. Here I change my vote. I had been requested by Jeo to change it, as 'important people' or something required it. I was naturally suspicious of this, as I even noted here. The only important person I knew of was Aonar, and he hadn't said anything to me. But, just in case, I changed my vote anyway. If what Jeo said was actually true, we would be in trouble, and I knew that if he was lying we'd all figure it out soon and lynch him the next day. In hindsight, this was a dumb move, but it seemed okay at the time.Well, here's my reasoning. Not sure if it helps anything, but I'll lay it out here anyways.

Nice work here. On the weirdness in the N's– could they have two N sounds, or maybe have different Ns for ones that end the syllable and those that begin them? In Japanese Hiragana (their phonetic script), for example, there is a specific character for an N that ends the syllable: ん That symbol has a slightly different sound from the other N– it's normally a bit like an Ng as in 'Sing', 'Tank', etc. They then have several characters for Ns that start a syllable: な (na), に (ni), ぬ (nu), ね (ne), and の (no) These are all an N sound much like our own, just with different vowels following each.