Heir of the Void

It was actually the Fused (cognitive shadows of dead Parshmen hopped up on Odium) who were released from the Oathpact and allowed to return to Roshar. Presumably some unsuspecting parshmen would then get Fuse'd, and the newly returned Singer gods would them lead their people against mankind to begin the Desolation. One would also assume that the Voidspren would return to give the Parshmen/voidbringers forms of power. The powerups were probably provided via Voidspren, like what the Listeners did when Venli was stockpiling Stormspren to allow them to transform the entire population into Stormform prior to the Everstorm. Unclear. To my knowledge, we don't actually know what the victory/ending conditions for a Desolation was. It might have been killing all the fused, there might have been a time limit.

One of the Listener songs said the following with regards to Dullform: So it seems like a willful renunciation of... something, which given the context would probably be something related to BAM. Critically, it didn't. It turned them into funny-colored humans more than anything else, at least the Voidspren showed up. Remember, Stormform and the other Powerforms have glowing red eyes, because they're linked with Voidspren. Actually, I'm not sure we've seen any stormform parshmen since the battle of the Narak, except maybe for Venli's group for the few minutes before they got Fuse'd. This is true. If they used the correct process to change forms, it might at least provide them with some of the requisite Connection to stay out of Slaveform. Is FFoP 'Facilitate Forms of Power'? Because if so, probably, but obviously I'm far from certain. It's basically the model that best fits the data we have more than anything else. It could be that they were all basically connected to the same Voidspren, who was one of the Unmade. Maybe she used the Odium Rhythms to transmit her power to all the parshmen at once or something. The key detail, as I see it, is that there's no reason to expect that imprisoning BAM would also vaporize any Voidspren she'd procured and given to he parshmen. The fact that they were so severely impacted by her capture indicates some sort of ongoing relationship. At this point, we're mostly in the realm of conjecture, though, so who knows? Maybe Cultivation engineered the False Desolation and framed BAM. Maybe Hoid had some Voidspren spores on his coat when he was visiting. Maybe it was swam gas. Well, critically, they remained functional, albeit cripplingly depressing, after being Severed. They lose their will to live, not their ability to think. Significantly, Logan (the best character in that series, but that's another matter) remained an active character who actually did things for several books after being Severed, though that was an unusual case. The Parshmen don't seem to have been functional enough to have survived on their own after losing their Connection.

That seems to be the case. The Listener songs said they fled and assumed Dullform to be separated from their gods, so it seems to be safe to assume that they left the Voidbringers during the False Desolation, sometime before the Imprisonment. I agree it was a process in the sense that a meteorite impact is a process. I find the notion that there were massive bronze-age spiritual lobotomization camps rather laughable, considering that we have no reason to believe that it happened and that the only information we have says that the parshmen lost their mojo when BAM was imprisoned. Not if the Listeners deserted before the imprisonment. They wouldn't have lost their Connection because they weren't connected to BAM. Beyond that, we know BAM 'Facilitated forms of Power', not that she 'provided Voidspren'. Part of the reason that the imprisonment might have been so bad is because the Parshmen had Connected to her to such an extent that she allowed them to assume Forms of Power. Remember that the Listeners said the parshmen slaves 'had no form'; this might be because they were all in a Powerform which was abruptly ripped away during the Imprisonment. They would have no spren to enable the assumption of a normal form, and wouldn't know they needed one or have any method of knowing how to attract and bond the requisite spren if they did. Or maybe they lost that ability because bonding a spren requires a Connection to Roshar, and they had none.

There wasn't a process; it occurred all at once, by accident, as a result of the Radiants imprisoning Ba-Ado-Mishram to end the False Desolation. Because she was Connected to them to provide Voidlight and Forms of Power, her sudden imprisonment stripped away their Connection, and this also deprived them of Identity (we don't know how) and turned them into vegetables. The Everstorm restored their Connection, but apparently only by connecting them to their (human) country of origin, which is why Alethi parshmen are competent at warfare, Thaylen parshmen sail compulsively, and Azirish parshmen filed a lawsuit. We don't have names for either of these processes.

Possibly other corrupted spren Radiants. Squires don't have spren. But that is actually an interesting plot point - I assume a home means some corer of the Cognitive Realm, but I guess we don't know. I'm not sure if there would be enough of them to establish their own Spren City. Also, Renarian x Sja-anat is now my OTP.

Well, they certainly need manpower. They're looking at a war on several differnt fronts, some of them quite far from an Oathgate (northern Jah Keved, for example), and likely with multiple field armies operating on each front (required troop density still seems to be far too high to allow the sort of continuous fronts seen in both World Wars, however), so they have a lot of boxes they need to be able to fill. Beyond that, they need to be able to counter the airborne Fused, given that they are so hard for normal soliders to fight back against - and if they have access to Reverse Lashings and thus functional immunity to projectile weapons, then the only way normal soliders can fight them is in close combat, with is a losing proposition for obvious reasons. Totally agree regarding the need for fliers - even if Navani's plans for flying ships pans out, I'm not sure what they could arm them with that would allow them to fight Fused effectively. Archers would have too small an engagement envelope as well as being hard countered by Reverse Lashings, and crossbowmen provide only slight improvement on those fronts in exchange for not having the volume of fire needed to engage a small target maneuvering quickly in three dimensions. Neither seems likely to cause much harm to a Fused holding Voidlight, either. Beyond that, they could probably use more Elsecallers and Lightweavers to augment their supply of Soulcasters, and probably a few Stonewards for battlefield control.

I think the point is that she isn't making any real effort towards it. Which is understantable, as she is insane, and doesn't really seem to keep on being a Radiant, given that she spends so much time apparently trying to ignore the fact that she is one. The Bondsmiths are capped at three and probably don't have Squires, and Renarian is different and probably has different rules. Beyond that, Words of Radiance (in-universe) noted that the Truthwatchers were enigmatic and didn't speak of what they did, which makes it sound like they'd have few squires. I disagree. Szeth has sworn his Third Oath (to Dalinar), which puts him at the same stage of advancement as Kaladin and Teft when they both began swearing Squires, and Teft is definitely in a position subordinate to Kaladin and can still get his own Squires, so I don't think there's a rule that a Radiant has to be a supreme authority to get minions. Granted, Szeth would probably have a hard time finding Squires, given that he isn't very good at being a person, but if Dalinar told him to, I'm sure he would give it a serious effort. Personally, I hope Nightblood becomes his squire. Because Nightblood with Surgebinding seems like something that could not possibly go wrong. One of Dalinar's visions (the one where they were chasing a Voidspren at the Purelake) featured a Dustbringer (a Radiant with ruby-glowing Plate) who had a whole company of soldiers who were reveled to be squires when the Thunderclast attacked. Not quite - the Herlads, with the exception of Nale, aren't Radiants. They (had) the same Surges by way of their Honorblades, but this would only be true is Nale was incorrect in stating that he was the only one who had joined his own order.

If we go with the theory that Lesser Spren are basically an idea plus some Investiture, then Shardplate may be enduring for the same reason Soulcast grain doesn't turn back into gravel in your stomach. When the Radiant creates their Plate, they draw in a bunch of lesser spren and then they or their spren alters the cognitive perception or spiritual essence of the lesser spren to make them Shardplate rather than a bunch of blobs of mobile invesititure. So the transition would be something like: Wind + power -> Gauntlet + power Or if the spren are drawn and released every time the plate is summoned and dismissed: Windspren -> plate/codpiece/windspren_01 Summoning the Plate adds the file location information to the lesser spren's Intent, and because it defines itself by its Intent, it becomes shardplate (with stormlight boosting/enabling the physical manifestation). Because the intent doesn't change on its own, it remains shardplate even after the higher spren that facilitated that transformation is dead, for the same reason that a sword doesn't turn back into iron ore after a blacksmith dies. TL;DR: Shardplate is spren hacking

Slight correction - Odium is the eponymous void, and Odium was the original god of men before they switched to Honor. So the term has always been used to describe Odium's forces, but who works for Odium changed six or seven thousand years ago.

That does seem like something of a sea change for him, considering that he was previously a perennial loner. Now it's Hoid and the Loch Ness Monster, wandering the cosmos and doing... whatever it is Hoid does.

Because he was late to the meeting. We get to know the heralds decided to abandon the Oathpact, but any of the others would have also reveled to us why it was being abandoned (Heralds were broken) and various other pertinent details, such as the nature of the Fused and the Oathpact itself.

I'm honestly not convinced that lesser spren can be enslaved. We've seen no evidence that they have any sort of intelligence, and the mindless unmade were described as being "creatures of a single imperative, like lesser spren", or something to that effect. At the moment, it doesn't really seem like, say, a flamespren is more intelligent than the Cognitive presence of, say, a stick. So if using a lower spren in a Fabrial is slavery, then using any physical object would also be slavery. And at that point the word has lost its meaning.

"I once spent the better part of a year inside of a large stomach, being digested".

Quick theory: Mr. T is actually Kelsier and also a Kandra. After the events with South Scadrial, he realized that to save his planet, he needed to prevent Odium from escaping his imprisonment, so he used Hemalurgy to transfer cognitive shadow into a Mistwrath, becoming a Kandra, then worldhopped to Roshar, killed the original Mr. T during his trip to the Nightwatcher, and took his place. He then created the Diagram as an elaborate series of contingent instructions to himself and removed the spikes containing key components of his memory, causing him to believe he really was Mr. T. His plan is to make the deal with Odium, meaning that Kharbranth will be unaffected by the Desolation. As the rest of Roshar is devastated, the value of real estate in the City of Bells will rise. As a loyal servant of Odium, Kelsier/Mr. T will advise Odium use leverage to invest in this growth market. However, Kel will have already begun engineering the sale of real estate to Thaylen investors overseas, triggering a asset valuation bubble. When the bubble bursts and Odium is left severely underwater, Kelsier will revel his true idenity, and that he'd bought up Odium's debts during the Kharbranth real estate crash. Rayse has no way of making the payments required, so Kelsier forecloses his Shard and Ascends. Again.

It seems like he might have, kind of. Mr. T said something to the effect of 'you were not supposed to Ascend', with a capital A. This is a technical term in the Cosmere, referring (probably) to a person absorbing enough Investiture to transcend the Physical and Cognitive Realms completely. This is what happens when someone takes up the power of a Shard and becomes a divinity, but also what happened to The Lord Ruler at the Well of Ascension, and Kelsier after he breifly held Preservation.

Broadly speaking, I still think we're missing important pieces about the initial arrival of humanity on Roshar. All we know from the Steele is that Humans arrived on Roshar, were 'given' Shinovar (which raises several questions about what that entailed), the Spren betrayed the Parshman in favor of Humanity, the Humans conquered Roshar, and then Desolations. Given both the way Brandon tends to write everything (always another secret) and the nature of the story, I suspect there are several wrinkles in the story that we are not privy to. Namely, all the information we have on the events are from a Singer perspective; it would probably be interesting to see a human account of the time. So, as so aemetha said, Honor's Perpendicularity moves, but the Oathgates allow transit between the Physical and Cognitive Realms; the guardian Spren said Shallan could not transit back to Roshar because that functionality had been locked by a system administrator shorly before the death/splintering of Honor. Granted, this would require that Urithiru, or at least the Oathgates, predates humanity's arrival on Roshar, but this doesn't seem to far-fetched, considering the legends refering the the Dawncities as having been created by the Dawnsingers. There is also the following, from one of the WoK epigraphs: This implies that Urithiru was built much more recently than the arrival of mankind, presumably after the establishment of the Silver Kingdoms and thus after the initial subjugation of the Parshmen. However, it also suggests that there is something special about the location of the Tower - it might be the location of a Shardpool of Honor, or the Honor might be Invested in the location heavily. It seems reasonable to assume that this has something to do with why the Oathgate Hub was constructed there and not somewhere else. Well, it moves now. It's entirely possible that the location was stable back when Honor was alive.

Biggest problem with this theory (to me): Why would the Knights Radiant, who face supernatural horrors in a lifetime of war against demonic foes seeking the obliteration of mankind, be so bothered by the permanent defeat of their enemy? To be certain, what happened to the Singers is unpleasant, but they had been seeking to do worse to mankind, and this is a permanent end to that existential threat. Beyond that, in a pre-industrial society with very limited agricultural food surpluses (relative to the modern era), it is not viable to dedicate the entire productive surplus of human civilization into feeding the lobotomized monsters that were until recently trying to kill them. A population of that size must do some sort of useful work to earn its keep, so (functionally) enslaving them was most likely the only alternative to allowing them to starve. I think we are quite likely projecting our modern sensibilities onto what is/was quite obviously a very different context. Slavery was seen as some variation of normal by effectively every culture on Earth for all of history; the notion that chattel slavery is a special kind of evil is very much an industrial-era Anglo-Saxon notion that was pushed onto the rest of the world by the British Empire, the Royal Navy, and Anglo-American cultural hegemony. I think it would take something much more dramatic and topical to push the Knights Radiant into doing something like the Recreance.

This actually calls to mind the first of Dalinar's vision of Nohadon in The Way of Kings, where he mentions that the world was plunged into war prior to a Desolation by a Surgebinder named Alakavish. This was prior to the institution of the Knights Radiant, and seems to indicate that surgebinders were both rarer and more powerful then, if he presumably needed no qualifications other than that to steer the world into war. I would not be surpised if the power of human Surgebinders was somehow restricted, but I think the more likely scenario is that when Honor was shattered, his power coalesced into/around its existing concentrations; the Stormfather, the existing Honor-based Spren, and so forth. This could be why all sorts of new things are happening.

This could also be Dalinar's Surgebinding, which it sounds more like. One of the Bondsmith Surges is Cohesion, which manipulates the material properties of objects, so I see no reason he couldn't have used it to momentarily make his skin extremely strong.

True, but Awakened objects have been seen on several occasions doing things that, mechanically, they shouldn't be capable of (awakened textiles, in particular, seem vastly stronger in compression than they should be) and Kalad's Phantoms probably shouldn't work at all without their Breaths altering the material properties of their bodies. So it seems safe to assume that it could be done, though probably at a cost in Breath and potentially requiring a different Command that includes an order to replace the weight reduction of the Spren bonds. Or you could just give it Iron spikes. Lifeless are sort of alive, so it might work.

Actually, you'd only need half of them to get access to all ten surges. Each blade mimics of the power of one order of Radiant, and each order has two surges, and each surge has two orders. I think the best way forward on the Super-surgebinder front is to figure out some way of Hemalurgically transferring the property of being a perfect gemstone into someone to counteract the stormlight drain caused by using the honorblades. Or make a Lifeless Chasmfiend. Not really a surgebinder, but something that badly needs to happen.

I think there may be some accuracy to this, but I don't think it's nearly as axiomatic as it is in, say, The Dresden Files, where it's virtually hard-coded. Mistborn have much greater autonomy than virtually any normal human in their world, and Rashek could do basically whatever he wanted for a millennium (and it could have been far longer if he'd ever considered compounding steel as well as gold and atium), with the only concern being that he'd die if Ruin destroyed the world. Accumulating Breaths does not restrict freedom (Returning does, but a case could be made that a Returned is a different person). It does seem that Intent limits autonomy, as in the case of Shards and Radiant spren, but that's a different animal entirely.

I'd be shocked if that were the case - human evolution in our world has been a fair bit slower, with a few isolated exceptions - and it would also require fairly strong selective pressures that also vary widely between regions. The theory that different nations/tribes/warbands/whatevers of humans settled in a series of waves moving out from (presumably) Shinovar would make more sense to me. For example, the arrangement of skin tones makes no sense if you assume it evolved in place. To Wit: Skin tone is an adaptation to sunlight intensity - more sunlight requires more melanin to protect the skin, while less sunlight requires less melanin to allow proper synthesis of vitamin D. Accordingly, (natural, native) skin tones on Earth are mostly a gradient darkest near the equator and lighter further away Roshar (probably south of the equator, so reverse the Earth expectation) is in fact all over the place. The (light?) tan Alethi are right next to the blue Natan and the Irish-esque Vedens; the Vedens are fairly close to the (dark?) tan Makabaki, with the pale Shin next to them. The pale/blond Iri are immediately north of the Makabaki, with the (brown?) Reshi at the furthest north. Granted, this could be a result of minor admixture with the Singers inhabiting each of their respective regions, with the Shin representing the original purestrain humans who came from the original world, though that raises other questions, largely related to the lack of obvious Listener traits in the majority of (still-differentiated) Rosharan human nations. The more plausible scenario seems to be that several distinction groups of humans - probably ten groups corresponding to the ten Silver Kingdoms - escaped the original homeworld of Man. Perhaps via transition to the Cognitive Realm, which might offer refuge from a Physical catastrophe. From there, they transitioned to Roshar, set up their own subdivisions of Shinover, and eventually left to divide the entire continent between themselves. If the Oathgates either predate mankind's arrival or were all created while humans were limited to Shinovar, it could explain the pattern of division, with each tribe claiming one of the Oathgates and the territory beyond after subjugating the Parshmen.

Lets be honest; its going to happen at some point. Basically the only humor I can actually write are bad references.

NO YOU MAY NOT! Try back in like a week*. I should be able to re-read Words of Irradiation and have something thrown together for the first bit. Thanks for reminding me this existed drawing my attention to this matter; I'm pretty sure I lost my document copies of the bits posted and subsequently ran off to write something involving giant robots and suffering. Expect the style to change a bit; I'm not sure I can manage the same level of minimalism I accomplished in the first sections.