[OB] Oathbringer Chronology

[Jofwu he/him]

I'm trying to build a detailed Stormlight timeline, and I could use some help finding tidbits about chronology in Oathbringer as the preview chapters are released. If you'd like to help out, check out the Google doc below. It's open for editing!

If you add something, please highlight it in red so that I know it's new.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rr6mHJOEqSi7Sj1cJRFgX0xVyPJdgL_oVL2U_RPirGM/edit?usp=sharing

[FollowYourMuse she/her]

I tried to pull together WOR, ED and released OB  time overlaps for the time line.  Do not know if you just want OB  or ... but this is my attempt to piece it together.

Day 0 Highstorm and everstorm - shattered plains  WOR
-  Dalinar, Roion, Sebarial, Aladar - Armies arrive in Urithiu  WOR

Notify war camps to travel to oathgate  WOR
From Urithiu they Send word to nations via spanreed WOR
Lopen hears about evacuation: I think we might be abandoning camp, even though nightfall’s around the corner. Makes no sense to me, but get the king man taken care of.”  . WOR
Lopen Starts to grow  new arm WOR

( -for below  Assuming this is day of the storm but could be anytime before Kaladin returns to Shattered Plains - and we see Kalidin on Day 5 in Urithiu)
Bridge 4 returns to Shattered plains to pick up Kaladin   -  Kaladin arrives in Urithiu WOR

Day 0-1?  Everstorm hits new Natannan 

Day 5 -  

Dalinar after warm Fuzzy dream - A week had passed since they had arrived at this place, and the people of the warcamps had finally started to arrive WOR
Adolin  kills Sadeaes, WOR
 Five days of exploration had sent Adolin and Navani into the depths of the city-tower. Dalinar, however, had been driven to seek the top. WOR

Dalinar becomes Bondsmith WOR
Kaldin Leaves for Hearthstone WOR
                
Day 6  
Dalinar Vision (ch 1 OB) 
"Only six days had passed since their discovery of Urithiru. Six days since the awakening of the Parshendi, who had gained strange powers and glowing red eyes.          
The Everstorm would return, and would soon hit Shinovar in the far west.   (ch 1 OB) 
Sadaes body discovered  (ch 1 OB) 

Wit informs Jasnah   A new storm will round Ocean and hit Shinovar tonight  WOR Epilogue  

Lift Arrives in Yeddaw  EdgeDancer  day 1  (Not sure yet if Edgedancer stuff is 678  or 789)

Day 7 From EdgeDancer   Lift at Grand ..  EdgeDancer  day 2
                                          Steen and Alm have seen the new storm.
                                         Confirmation of storm from contacts in Shinovar and Iri.

         that night Storm hits Yeddaw and Azir   EdgeDancer  day 2
Day 8     Hear from  Gawks   The Empire in Chaos ,...  EdgeDancer  day 3
        

Edited September 2, 2017 by FollowYourMuse

[djammmer]

This is awesome 

[Jofwu he/him]

On 9/1/2017 at 6:37 PM, FollowYourMuse said:

Lopen hears about evacuation: I think we might be abandoning camp, even though nightfall’s around the corner. Makes no sense to me, but get the king man taken care of.”  . WOR

Oh, thanks for that quote. I was also working on a spreadsheet to work out how fast the Everstorm is moving, and I couldn't find a good estimate for what time of day the Everstorm originated. This is pretty solid evidence that it happened in the afternoon!

Quote

Wit informs Jasnah   A new storm will round Ocean and hit Shinovar tonight  WOR Epilogue  

That's good too. I don't think we had the epilogue in the existing WoR timeline. I guess we couldn't until we had a better sense of when the Everstorm was coming.

I agree with your placement of Edgedancer, now that we have Oathbringer 4-6. The Everstorm hits Urithiru during the day, so it must have hit Yeddaw the night before. Still collecting Oathbringer references in the document above, but my full timeline is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wdigy6ZNX4EGRAaUskfM0LXNANksyM1JintSn4yKSyM/edit?usp=sharing. WoR is all mostly from the effort of others. I'll be slowly adding Oathbringer stuff along the way. Way of Kings doesn't offer a whole lot of certainty, but I'm trying to fill that in as best I can.

[DiamondMind he/him]

A timeline for the first two books was done a few years ago, see this thread. There's a google doc there with the months and days of each Rosharan year filled in with events. Unfortunately it's mostly for WoR since the first book doesn't keep track of time as well. I don't know how well it meshes with your timeline.

Edit: The Everstorm hits Urithiru at night, if you read Chapter 4 closely. Dalinar looks at Navani by moonlight and then gets married in the middle of the night.

Edit 2: I see I've been away for way too long and the coppermind timeline references that thread. Good work on yours, that's a lot of effort!

Edited September 12, 2017 by DiamondMind

[Jofwu he/him]

On 9/11/2017 at 2:59 PM, DiamondMind said:

A timeline for the first two books was done a few years ago, see this thread.

Yes! I've got that timeline completely incorporated. It forms the foundation of my timeline, really. I really loved the work done there, and wanted to see how more things fit into the timeline. Unfortunately, that requires making a lot of assumptions here and there. I've done my best to track and note potential error. My goal is to put as many things as I can (within reasonable error) on the timeline, but be clear about how certain the dates are. So you know if a date is exact, a wild guess, or somewhere in between.

On 9/11/2017 at 2:59 PM, DiamondMind said:

The Everstorm hits Urithiru at night, if you read Chapter 4 closely. Dalinar looks at Navani by moonlight and then gets married in the middle of the night.

Dang it Brandon... This is a problem. Thanks for pointing this out, I missed that line. The issue is that there's a scene break prior to the wedding ("in the middle of the night") which says that "several hours" have passed. If the Everstorm passes when the "first moon" is "above" then we're just after sunset. They only have a 20 hour day, so several hours later is sunrise!

I guess you just have to assume Dalinar is exaggerating the time elapsed...

The other problem with this however is Everstorm timing. I've been trying to track the thing. We know it passed Hearthstone around noon. This gives another pretty accurate time. And unfortunately, it doesn't fit with some other rough time estimates or with the ~8 day time lapse sense it originated. Assuming it moves at a constant speed.

Ah well...

[DiamondMind he/him]

On 9/13/2017 at 0:02 PM, jofwu said:

Yes! I've got that timeline completely incorporated. It forms the foundation of my timeline, really. I really loved the work done there, and wanted to see how more things fit into the timeline. Unfortunately, that requires making a lot of assumptions here and there. I've done my best to track and note potential error. My goal is to put as many things as I can (within reasonable error) on the timeline, but be clear about how certain the dates are. So you know if a date is exact, a wild guess, or somewhere in between.

I looked at your timeline after I wrote my post, and I saw you made it really comprehensive! It's impressive work. I might have put some things differently, but it's really well done.

On 9/13/2017 at 0:02 PM, jofwu said:

Dang it Brandon... This is a problem. Thanks for pointing this out, I missed that line. The issue is that there's a scene break prior to the wedding ("in the middle of the night") which says that "several hours" have passed. If the Everstorm passes when the "first moon" is "above" then we're just after sunset. They only have a 20 hour day, so several hours later is sunrise!

I guess you just have to assume Dalinar is exaggerating the time elapsed...

The other problem with this however is Everstorm timing. I've been trying to track the thing. We know it passed Hearthstone around noon. This gives another pretty accurate time. And unfortunately, it doesn't fit with some other rough time estimates or with the ~8 day time lapse sense it originated. Assuming it moves at a constant speed.

First, I think the timing of chapter 4 can work. If Roshar has 20 hour days, let's call 1 hour a Rosharan hour (1 Rh). Now we need to make a couple of assumptions, like you said.

If the day and night are the same length, the sun will rise at 5 Rh and set at 15 Rh, with midnight being 0 Rh and noon being 10 Rh. This keeps the numbering roughly the same as ours. The first scene is by the first moon, so one or two hours after sunset, let's say 17 Rh. Several hours later can be as little as 5 or 6 hours, so the wedding probably occurs at 2 or 3 Rh, which fits both "several hours" and "middle of the night." 

As for the Everstorm, I think it's best to track it after it makes landfall in Oathbringer because it will probably be faster than in WoR, considering it was just summoned and clashed with the highstorm before going to new Natanatan and out to sea. And perhaps it's slower over the ocean to gather strength of some such - it's still a storm after all. Let's assume further that it's a straight stormwall from north to south, AND that Urithiru is in  center of the central mountains of Roshar. 

With that information, we know that the Everstrom his Urithiru at around 16 Rh and Hearthstone at around 10 Rh the next day, approximately 14 hours of travel. Hearthstone seems to be directly north Rathalas which is more or less at the latitude as Urithiru. So the Everstorm traveled two thirds of the way of across the eastern half of the continent, or a third of the whole continent, in fourteen hours. 

The above calculation is correct, the problem is noon in Hearthstone is not noon in Urithiru. So unless there's something in the book or a WoB about how big the continent is in relation to the planet (or some other indication of time differences), there's no way to tell from comparing two different places how long the storm takes to travel. 

As for getting to Urithiru there's a few more clues. The Everstorm hit Shinovar "many hours before" 17 Rh UST (Urithiru standard time). It arrives at Yeddaw around dusk, 15 Rh local time, and four hours or so after Lift spoke with Gawx, who had just been receiving reports about the storm being seen from Alm. (I believe you're off one day on your timeline, by the way. It definitely hits Shinovar on the same day as chapter 4, which would put the second day of Edgedancer on that day too.) Let's say reports are coming in to Azimir for the past hour or so before they spoke. That means the storm hit Alm around noon Yeddaw time...and traveled to Yeddaw in 5 hours or so. 

So maybe about a eighth of the continent in a quarter of a day? That would mean it would travel the entire continent over 2 full 20 hour Rosharan days. That's based on a lot of assumptions. That's probably a maximum, and a minimum might be one day travel over the continent. That's based on a lot of assumptions, but shouldn't be too bad an estimate. If there's any kind of clue to time differences it can be done even better. It does roughly fit everything we have so far.

Edited September 14, 2017 by DiamondMind

[Jofwu he/him]

6 minutes ago, DiamondMind said:

I looked at your timeline after I wrote my post, and I saw you made it really comprehensive! It's impressive work. I might have put some things differently, but it's really well done.

Any particular recommendations? I'm open to them.

There are a few things I'd do differently concerning how it's set up, but I got too far into it. Maybe for a later revision of it though...

7 minutes ago, DiamondMind said:

Several hours later can be as little as 5 or 6 hours

Yeah, I think I was equating "several" with "dozen" for some reason. Staring at numbers too much. I think I'd put the wedding a bit earlier... That puts it at something like 3am our time, which in my book is really early morning rather than middle of the night. But if the moon is up a bit earlier or the "several hours" a bit shorter could account for that. And that's just my opinion--your way works.

17 minutes ago, DiamondMind said:

As for the Everstorm

Yeah, the conclusion there is that it probably changes speed. Not unreasonable. I just hoped it wasn't the case because it makes things complicated. Should have shared my calculations on that before: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FRPLWz6JlSLU0dis9L5pv0jd7kvNIIgqu3VUsEQdq5E/edit#gid=650018079

As you pointed out, Roshar is pretty big and the time zones matter. The best map I'm aware of is here: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/59890-roshar-map-reimagined/. Peter apparently said it was "very close to spot-on," though it's hard to say how picky he was being. The first tab on my sheet assumes the Everstorm is straight north/south and moving at a constant rate across this map. The second sheet is a projection that the creator provided further down in the thread. I marked some locations as best I could figure them to be. Note that I've got a third sheet which assumes the continent is scaled down a little. I felt another source where Peter suggests the continent spans 120 degrees, while this map has it spanning 150. So that third sheet is the same as the first, but with longitudes scaled in by 120/150. 

The most definite time/location we know is noon at Hearthstone. And the second best (with your observation made) would be Urithiru, I think. The mountain range in the center of the continent gives it about 30 degrees of wiggle room. The moons are weird... The first moon rises just after dark and takes about 1 hour to cross the sky from the Shattered Plains (per WoR-42). There's reason to believe it rises earlier and takes longer to cross the sky in Urithiru I think, but in any case that gives us a window of a few hours. My strategy was to play with the location and timing at Urithiru and see if I could get the rough timing to work out in other places. The main measures being (1) dusk/evening arrival in Yeddaw, (2) arrival in Shinovar "many hours ago", and (3) about 8 days elapsed since it was summoned. (assuming constant speed, including over the ocean)

And it doesn't work out really well. In order to have the Everstorm hit Yeddaw in the late afternoon, you have to place Urithiru as far west as possible and make the arrival time there later than I think is reasonable. (168 deg longitude and arrival 2 hours before midnight on the scaled down map) Even then it arrives an in the afternoon rather than dusk. This puts it hitting Shinovar around noon Urithiru time, on the same day. Alternatively, you can put Urithiru as far East as possible and set the arrival time very early (192 deg on the scaled down map and arrival 1 hour after sunset). This makes it arrive in Yeddaw a few hours after midnight the night before, and Shinovar earlier that day.

It's a toss up between those options. I suppose I tend to side with you so that Shinovar happens the same day. You can argue that the coming of night in Yeddaw was premature (because of the storm). And I think the guesses in WoR based on the Sun tended to put Urithiru further West. So I'll probably adjust the timeline.

But I don't like either option very much. Both are stretching the numbers.

And in either case it totally ruins my hope that the storm circles the planet at a constant rate. It must go slow over the ocean if it takes 8 days to reach Urithiru. Perhaps the speed is variable, even over the land. That would help the numbers. But it would also make our hopes of calculating the timing very small.

[DiamondMind he/him]

1 hour ago, jofwu said:

Any particular recommendations? I'm open to them.

There are a few things I'd do differently concerning how it's set up, but I got too far into it. Maybe for a later revision of it though...

I am really out of date, I've only picked Stormlight and theorizing up in the past month or so. What the community has done has been nothing short of amazing. I'll look at it later to see specifics, but the biggest things that jumps out are placing Shallans WoK chapters the time gaps between Kaladin's viewpoints as a bridgeman. Also, why did you label every Chachel?? Also with references, right now it looks like you're keeping the order as is in order to not mess it up; if you link the timeline sheet to reference cells rather than have straight text you could mess with them more.

1 hour ago, jofwu said:

Yeah, the conclusion there is that it probably changes speed. Not unreasonable. I just hoped it wasn't the case because it makes things complicated. Should have shared my calculations on that before: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FRPLWz6JlSLU0dis9L5pv0jd7kvNIIgqu3VUsEQdq5E/edit#gid=65001807

---

Holy ****, I just did some back of the hand calculations, you're really into this. Unfortunately, I do think that neither highstorms nor the everstorm circle the planet at a constant rate. We know that stormwardens have to do some pretty advanced calculations, but they are able to predict them with some degree of accuracy. If there are a constant number of highstorms circling a planet at a constant rate, figuring this out would be fairly simple (and what would happen during the Weeping?). If the number varied and they are actually formed at the origin then calculation would be impossible, leaving their speed to vary in a complicated but predictable fashion. The everstorm probably behaves similarly, but it also clashes with the highstorms at frequent intervals which might slow one or both of them down. Unless you've cracked the highstorm pattern already? I wouldn't put it past this forum.

If you look at just landfall, Yeddaw, Urithiru, and Hearthstone, would the numbers work? Have the three numbers being around dusk at Yeedaw (maybe an hour previous like you said), 1-2 hours past sunset at Urithiru, and noon +/- .5 hour at Hearthstone. I think that's the best guess for a constant rate of travel over land, and from that how the everstorm and (maybe even the highstorms) travels across the entire planet could be narrowed down. Like you said, if it's not constant over land then none of this matters, but it might be fun to figure out. I might play with it a bit.

Edited September 14, 2017 by DiamondMind

[Jofwu he/him]

 

@DiamondMind

Yeah, so Shallan being on a different timeline than Kaladin surprised me. I was hoping they'd fit nicely. But I guess it should be obvious they don't, since Part One for Shallan is all one day while Kaladin expresses multiple weeks passing. I worked backwards from the WoR timeline and forward from a few other points. For example, we know the date of Kaladin's recruitment to within a week. (year is easy to figure and it's the first half of a Weeping) Anyways, they're both fairly well locked in. You can follow the references for details.

Chachel's are noted (for now) because there's a single mention that new bridgemen are purchased on chachel. Without more certain information, that tidbit helps pin down a date on a few occasions.

And yeah, I'd like to do something fancier with how it's held together. Can't quite think of a system I'm happy with... If you have interest in making a simple, short mockup, be my guest. I may try to rebuild it a better way once I've got the rest of TWoK nailed down as best I can.

The Everstorm sheet does assume that constant rate over land (ignoring time passed over sea), and yeah there just isn't a single speed that aligns nicely, unfortunately. I heard they made a spreadsheet to track it during the beta read, so I'm assuming we just have a bad assumption or two right now. Something to keep an eye on.

[ccstat he/him]

Great work! I'm super impressed on how thorough this is.

For the Everstorm timing, it seems to me that things would be easier if you abandoned the assumption that the storm is a straight line north-south, traveling across the continent. Portions of Roshar are far enough south that it doesn't make sense to assume a constant angular progress by longitude. What if, for example, the storm is traveling on a great circle that would take it through the northern hemisphere on the opposite side of the planet? Honestly I'm having trouble visualizing it, myself. I had some quibbles about the local time assignments, but I need to go back and re-read those sections before I am confident enough to comment on those.

18 hours ago, DiamondMind said:

Unless you've cracked the highstorm pattern already? I wouldn't put it past this forum

I'm pretty sure we have confirmation from Brandon that the regular highstorm pattern is much more complex than simple periodicity. I'll try to find that quote.

[Jofwu he/him]

@Diamond Mind

I realized today that in the WoR epilogue (set during the night in the Unclaimed Hills) Hoid mentions that the Everstorm will hit Shinovar "tonight". Shinovar is 6-7 hours behind, so if it's just past sunset then it's late morning in Shinovar and afternoon in Urithiru. This seems like another useful data point. It's broad... It could be hitting as they speak, and thus around noon in Shinovar. Or he could mean that it's hitting when night has set on Shinovar. Something to keep in mind though. If nothing else, that rules out the Everstorm hitting Shinovar in the morning.

If you put Urithiru as far West as possible and have the Everstorm arrive there shortly before (or at) midnight, it hits Shinovar around noon (early night in the far east, as per WoR epilogue) and Yeddaw a little before sunset. So that works pretty good. My only problem with this is that I don't see how Salas could be up that late over central Roshar. Any chance you care to comment on this @PeterAhlstrom?  

But it also sort of works if you put Urithru as far East as possible and have the Everstorm arrive shortly after sunset. In this version it hits Shinovar around the same time, but one day earlier, and it hits Yeddaw late the night before. First case seems to fit better, but I'm not ready to write this one off And the moon thing bothers me.

@ccstat

This is a very good point. I vaguely considered it early on, but was too lazy to consider that approach. But I think you're probably right. Aside from making a lot more sense, a great circle path would also fit some Edgedancer comments better. Shinovar is further west than Iri, but they suggest it hit both around the same time. The same is true for Tashikk and Azir, more or less. If it's headed slightly more in a southeast direction (in western Roshar) this would fit better.

We know from Arcanum Unbounded that Roshar is 90% of the "standard cosmere" size (i.e. Earth). Assuming she's talking about the radius/diamter, that means Roshar's circumference is 36,000 km. The great circle distance from north Shinovar (south Iri) to the Shattered Plains is about 7,400 km by my calculation. (using this map). This means the continent takes up only 20% of the storm's path compared to almost 40% if the storm just moves west to east. 

This might be the key. I'll have to rework my spreadsheet with that in mind. The Everstorm presumably spans the entire continent (Reshi Isles to Theylenah) and possibly beyond. Anyone care to speculate where the center of it's path follows?

[Jofwu he/him]

Well, unfortunately this didn't solve all the problems.

I drew a great circle from the mountains between Shinovar/Iri to somewhere off the east coast. I originally tried putting it through the Shattered Plains, but I just don't think there's a good great circle that passes through the Plains AND stays relatively centered over the continent. In any case, I don't think it would matter if you picked a slightly different path than the one I did. I assumed the storm is basically a straight wall extending to either side of this path.

So I used this for calculating the time of the storm and it didn't help much. The problem is that the distance across the continent is shortened this way. The arrival times (mainly Urithiru and Hearthstone, which are my basis) are fixed. So if the storm less angular distance to reach these two places that means it's the calculations will just have it moving faster. It circles the globe in far less than 8 days.

On the plus side, I got the timings on the continent itself to be a little more reasonable! So my best guess is that it moves more slowly over the ocean than it does on land.

[ccstat he/him]

1 hour ago, jofwu said:

Well, unfortunately this didn't solve all the problems.

...It circles the globe in far less than 8 days. On the plus side, I got the timings on the continent itself to be a little more reasonable! So my best guess is that it moves more slowly over the ocean than it does on land.

Interesting. I'm encouraged that the land times make more sense when you adjust the path. Variable land-speed vs ocean-speed is a good explanation and pretty simple to imagine. Here are some slightly crazier ideas.

(Slightly rambling intro) So, we know that a strict great circle route could never work for a regular storm. Winds just don't work that way. But it has been well established in other discussions that neither the Everstorm nor regular highstorms behave like storms we have seen, on Earth or on other planets. They aren't cyclonic, they circle the globe, they cross the continent in a matter of hours. It is an open question in-world whether there is a single storm that keeps coming back, or if there are more than one. Their recurrence is complex enough that stormwardens have difficulty predicting them (though Mr. T accurately predicted some years in advance, through what he believes was reason alone). On top of this, the Everstorm is blowing the wrong way, so it is actively competing against whatever forces make the highstorms do what they do. So these storms break the rules we understand, and adhere to ones we don't.

(TL;DR) Basically these things are magically driven, and we can assume that the storms can follow whatever path they want.

Option 1: It makes sense to me that some of the complexity of highstorm behavior comes from following a complex path around the globe, such that sometimes they circle the Northern hemisphere, while other times they strike the continent. If the Everstorm did that, say in a simple figure 8 pattern, it would effectively double the amount of time it takes to strike Shinovar again. How does that square with the timeline?

Option 2: The storms are largely cognitive realm phenomena, with a dramatic physical manifestation. Brandon has alluded to the difficulty of mapping a physical circumnavigation of the (spherical) planet onto (planar) Shadesmar. What if the storm can rage straight across Roshar, following a direct path in the cognitive realm, but must then circle awkwardly the long way around to get to where it started? This would make for some odd effects, with the way Shadesmar expands in regions with a lot of thought. Maybe the storm would linger a bit over cities and zip faster through uninhabited wastes?

Edited September 21, 2017 by ccstat

[Jofwu he/him]

We got mention of the Everstorm passing again in Chapter 23, so I wanted to update here...

I've got this laid out in my timeline. The Everstorm hit Alethkar the first time around noon on week 2 day 2. That's 6 days after Lightday, about 9 days after the Battle of Narak. Maybe more like 8.75 days depending on the time difference (haven't had a chance to revisit those since the dust jacket map was revealed) and the exact times that the storm spawned and hit Alethkar. The Everstorm hits Alethkar the second time on week 3 day 4. That's 7 days after the last. We don't know exactly when it hit. Could be at the end of the day (7.5 day difference) or very early in the morning (6.5 day difference) assuming the first one hit exactly at noon.

In any case, I unfortunately think it's pretty clear that the time is somewhat variable.

[Salkara]

20 hours ago, jofwu said:

In any case, I unfortunately think it's pretty clear that the time is somewhat variable.

I think that's almost a given. The highstorms have variable timing, so it makes sense the Everstorm would as well.