Everstorm

Which meeting are you talking about?

This is something that has been bugging me for a while. I just re-read the chapter where Kaladin and Shallan fall into the chasm, and it is very unclear to me whether Kaladin saved Shallan or vice versa. On the one hand, Kaladin has all but lost his powers at this stage. On the other, nothing we know of Shallan's powers suggest that she could have saved him. The only explanation I can think of, is that Stormlight healed them both individually after they fell. Is that it, or am I missing something?

Quote from Words of Radiance - So it seems Wit/Hoid is capable of being splintered (like Adonalsium, or a Shard). What does that say about him?

Well Vin was an Allomancer, and her sister's death snapped her. People only have the "potential" to be Allomancers prior to snapping. I think Allomancy is pretty well described, it's Feruchemy that I'm more curious about. I like WeiryWriter's theory a lot! It makes sense. But then, that would also mean that the Lord Ruler's "breeding" program should have been successful in eliminating these abilities over the course of a thousand years, right?

I just finished the first Mistborn trilogy (after discovering that being "Cosmere-aware" is quite necessary to fully appreciate WoR ). I had a question about how feruchemical powers are gained. We are told that to become a KR or to become an Allomancer, some kind of "snapping" is required. Something about the soul needing cracks which investiture can fill. Is that the case with Feruchemy as well? If this is addressed in Alloy of Law please don't tell me. I'm okay with WoB spoilers though.

Yeah, Shallash was alluded to a lot in this book, but I don't think we ever saw her at work. I knew Hoid was old, but I didn't know that he was present at the shattering , I should really read all the other Cosmere books. Still only midway through Mistborn, other than Stormlight.

This "Rotation" stinks of a Caesar cipher to me. For example, the Caesar cipher where you replace A->N etc. is called ROT13. Since we have numbers here instead of alphabets, it obviously has another layer of encryption on it, but keeping a shift of 15 in mind when looking at string frequencies etc. might prove useful.

So, it is not implausible that WoR too had lots of instances of hidden heralds, just like WoK. Darkness/Nalan was pretty much out in the open, so let's not count him. The only blatant hint of a hidden herald I found was something Wit says about their being "only one woman his age" in the camps. Unless this is another world-hopper, I would put my money on it being a herald. And among the characters we are introduced to, Sebarial's mistress ( I forgot her name) seems to be the most suspicious.

Peter, can you confirm that we have all the information required to crack this code? That it is actually solvable?

My first thoughts when I read about the order which held their oaths was that it belonged to Taln. All the others basically got instructions from their Heralds to walk away, while the order of Taln still believed in the old Oaths, and hence continued to fight.

How do we know the Alethibet?

I wonder if he meant "secret" secret societies, or just factions that are vying for power in a game centered around the Desolation. If it is the second, then I guess two more would be Dalinar's radiants, and the Sadeas gang. Maybe the Worldsingers are the last? (If they're not in fact just an offshoot of the 17th shard.

Next you know they'll be adapting Lion King in medieval Denmark...

I think it's almost definitely not the size of the sun. That piece of info is unreliable because it is way too dependent on what kind of naval technology they have, what route they took (they could've been crisscrossing all over the map for all we know) and how frequently storms occur . If I remember correctly England to Aus was also pretty much a 2 stop journey - somewhere in Africa and then somewhere in India, while we have an indefinite number of halts here.

Major spoilers guys, I got this chapter from Brandons own computer while he was out buying eggs. Read on at your own risk. ************************ "What is this man doing here?" Amaram asked, his voice trembling, his face red with emotion. "Kaladin? You are looking at the captain of my personal guard." Dalinar looked from one man to the other as they stood silently, regarding each other. One shaking like a tree in a high storm, the other unmoving as the Horneater peaks. "Captain? A _dark eyes_?" Yelped Amaram. Dalinar walked towards Kaladin, placing a hand on his shoulder. "I owe him a life debt. Of all the people in the world I would have expected at least you to be able to look beyond the color of his eyes. And if you must know, this man is worth 10, nay a 100 light eyed soldiers in combat." "I do, oh god, I do. "Amaram said, his head bowed, as he walked towards Kaladin. "How dare you?" Kaldin hissed, his face livid with rage. The whole room seemed to grow darker as Kaladin spoke, his eyes blazing. Amaram approached. "Kaladin, I cannot begin to express how sorry I am for everything I've done to you. " "Sorry? You think a storming sorry will do the trick? After what you did to me? After you killed my friends? My brother?" "Captain! You overreach your station!" Dalinar exclaimed. "Brightlord Amaram is an honorable man and a guest. How dare you speak to him like that?" "No Dalinar, let him speak. He has every right. Not a day goes by when I do not regret my actions. If only I had not been blinded thus." Aramam took a step towards Kaladin now barely standing an arm's length away. " If only I had been as courageous as you, to see beyond the color of his eyes." Amaram leaned forward, "To follow my heart instead of my eyes" and kissed him. Syl zipped around them as they locked lips. "The words! The words, Kaladin, you must say them!" Kaladin looked shell shocked as they broke apart and yet the words leapt unbidden into his mouth. "Amaram," he said, "Will you be my waifu?" ********************** Sorry for the terrible formatting. Took me half an hour to type on my phone.

I think you need to be above a certain mass to hold in gases. The smallest gas planet that has been seen in the universe yet has Earth's mass and a larger diameter. So if there were a gas planet in the vicinity, Roshar would be the moon rather than vice versa.

The child of Honor chapter has nothing obvious in it. If it does, it is well hidden. That was one of the first ones I checked. My guess is that it is either Shallan or Navani talking about their respective journeys. EDIT: I looked at all the maps on the Stormlight wiki, and I think the Shattered Plains maps could be useful. The distance from the various camps to the Tower may have been mentioned or estimated in the book and that could provide a scale for the entire map. I don't have my kindle on me right now, so I can't check to make sure. I'll try to look at it tonight.

I may be wrong on this, but I don't think the ocean/land cover will affect the mass of the planet all that much. The dense solid mantle and the core probably contribute much more significantly to it. This link has some back of the envelope calculations about the same. Well, what I meant was that there are too many variables right now. If we had the radius or the density, we could use those to estimate the mass of the planet. If we had the distance from the sun (along with the length of the year), we could find out the mass of the sun. If there is more information, it is really well hidden, because I've read this book six times already, though not with the intention of making distance calculations (yet) . I will probably read it once more in the run up to the WoR release, and keep my eyes peeled for size-of-things clues. P.S. I hope you're not trolling, but it's okay even if you are since I was going to read the book again anyway EDIT: Okay, we can actually make some inferences. In Earth time, the length of their year is 400 days. Mars' year is 687 days. So if their sun was the exact same mass as our Sun, we could say for sure how far away Roshar was from it's sun. T^2 is proportional to R^3 (Kepler's laws). We know at least that their sun is in the same ballpark range as our sun, otherwise for a planet placed between Earth and Mars, the time period would be much shorter.

I think the Sun's mass comes into play only when we talk about the length of the year. If the planet is further away than Earth though, it means that Roshar's sun has to be brighter than Earth's sun. This cartoon of the goldilocks zone for various solar intensities shows why. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone Either this or the composition of the atmosphere is probably slightly different and contains more greenhouse gases which can retain heat better. I think as far as fan speculation goes, it is probably not rewarding to go into the size of the sun because the intensity could depend on so many factors like what the mass of the star is, what stage in its lifetime it is at, etc., and we clearly have insufficient information to deal with that right now. The fact that Roshar's density is less than that of Earth does imply though that it is perhaps bigger than we had expected, and there could be as yet unexplored regions on the other side of the globe which could be relevant. This maybe throws a wrench in the "Origin of highstorms = Place of honor => Urithru is on the west coast" theory, so this piece of information doesn't make me too happy. But thanks for the tidbits, Peter!

I actually checked a few links before that post as to how long it took couriers in Ancient Egypt to travel some x distance and they actually went much faster than 50 km / day. For just general travelers, it was as much as 30 km/day. But I reasoned that if the speaker is actually making a comparison about how fast it takes a man to travel on foot he would definitely not be talking about the slowest denomination, but about the average (or the fastest), hence I decided to stick to 50 km/day (Also 5 km/hr is not really fast at all, it's more like an average speed). I think 30 would be a conservative estimate, and because an analogy isn't likely to be about the slowest possible speed, I think 50 is probably a good number too. I agree with your point that the travel is probably not in a straight line, but then, the journey that the speaker is talking about is also probably not coast to coast . Also, I think my original calculation and EvilKetchupCow's calculation make much more sense than assuming 10 hours of travel in a 19 hour day, so around 6000-7000 is probably a better estimate.

I think Szeth is the least of Kaladin's problems. From whatever we know of his abilities, he seems to be much more proficient at using Stormlight than Szeth. Think Darth Sidious vs Mace Windu. The Force > The Lightsaber . Dealing with Thunderclasts and Chasmfiends and other things which require Shardblades to slay are probably going to be much much more of a problem if the strongest (combat-wise) Radiant of the age doesn't even have an infused weapon, let alone enough people who could back him up. The difference (if in fact this story has a happy ending) is probably going to be the Voidbringers/Listeners/Parshendi. If it's just humans vs everyone else, I don't see it ending well. If on the other hand, it is everyone vs Odium...

Oh yeah now I remember. So unless the story is apocryphal, there definitely seems to be uncharted territory on Roshar.

I don't remember this actually, could you remind me which chapter it is in?

Hi everyone, The I-8 interlude chapter(Geranid) of The Way of Kings shows two characters talking about how the act of measurement seems to freeze spren. This is very similar to (and almost definitely inspired by) something in quantum mechanics called "the collapse of the state vector". Although this has been discussed on this forum before, I'll go over it briefly at the end of this post for completeness' sake (so scroll down first if you haven't come across this idea before). So reading the Kaladin chapter from Words of Radiance got me thinking that perhaps the afore-mentioned concept wasn't the only thing in Spren theory inspired by Quantum Mechanics. Kaladin uses stormlight on the rock, but when it has stuck to the wall, it turns out that there are spren holding it together. What if this is the spren-equivalent of the Wave-Particle duality of nature. In the same way that Light can be described as photons (particles) or rays (waves), and the way all particles have an associated wavelength, maybe spren (or some spren) are just a manifestation of Stormlight. This is kind of pointless I know, but one of the biggest reasons I love Brandon's books are because of the amazing magic systems, which is not common in most other fantasy novels I've read so far. Seeing the quantum interlude in Way of Kings blew my mind, and I can't help but obsess over the magic system now. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How this works is, that an atom (or a spren in this case) has some probability of being in one of many states. But once you make a measurement, it can collapse into any of the states with some probability. Now if you make the measurement again immediately after this, you get the same answer because now it is collapsed into that particular state. The second part of the spren experiment relates roughly to quantum entanglement (or spooky action at a distance). You can have two or more atoms with "entangled" states, which means that measuring the state of one of them can collapse the others into deterministic states as well. These are both very hand-wavy explanations of some really beautiful physics. I can go into more detail if anyone's interested.