taxilian

Reading through the thoughts here, I have to point out a couple of things: Just because you can't bond an honorblade doesn't mean there isn't any type of link between the honorblade and owner/carrier. In fact, it seems pretty obvious that there *is* some sort of link, since Szeth could summon it at will. What is more interesting to me is why Szeth's honorblade took 10 heartbeats to appear like the others. As to how the link/bond/whatever works... who knows? Maybe the sword bonds you =] I'm seeing a lot of talk about "bonding" spren as though it's a single event. Remember that there are 5 ideals, and each of the 5 seems to strengthen a link that started before any were specified. In each case there seems to be some sort of personality catalyst (Kaladin's honor and desire to protect, Shallan's art and lies/truths, Dallinar's ... leadership? confidence? not sure) before any of the ideals are even spoken. Shallan has aparently spoken the first ideal long ago (we don't seem to know when) and she had access to pattern as a shardblade long before the Truth that seems to have served as her second ideal ("I killed my father"). My point is that the bond works a little differently with different spren and I would guess that Dalinar actually started "bonding" with the StormFather when the visions began and the bond grew slowly stronger as time progressed. By the time he was ready to actually formalize it he was starting to be able to use small amounts of stormlight. This exactly follows the pattern Kalladin followed, so I'm not sure why people are confused by it =] As a few people have said, this can't possibly be an honor blade that Dalinar has. Reasons: The blade doesn't look right Gemstones were added to shardblades to make it possible to "bond" the dead spren. Thus, an honorblade wouldn't have one. Whether or not an honorblade can be bonded there is no way it would work the same way as an artificial bond such as that The scream comes from the remnant of the "dead" spren -- an honorblade is neither dead nor a spren, thus it wouldn't scream. Looking forward to piecing together more parts of this if any of my friends / immediate reading group ever finish the book... =]

I'm going to assume that anyone making it here have read WoR by now, but the origin of shardblades is completely explained in that book.