Even if Daylen had managed to bring about a One World Order and kill off every last Shade on Tellos, wouldn't they just come back again anyway the next time someone forgot to turn the lights on?
There's a big difference between "an occasional Shade here and there" and "a huge army underground waiting to invade." Remember that there are enough Shade that the Archknights spend most of their time just hunting down and killing them, and Shade created by accident are a minority: due to the Endless Daytime, people can only really become Shade if they're either trapped underground or locked up somewhere, and most Shade are created by said Shade snatching people from the surface to convert. Driving the Shade to the brink of extinction would also effectively kill any chance of further Nights, since huge numbers of Shade are needed to get one started.
If Sunforged items shatter at the slightest touch of darkstone, then why aren't they covered in a protective coating of something after fabrication? I mean I get that this might be harder to accomplish with something like a sword where it would lose it's cutting edge, but what about Blackheart's shield? Couldn't he have plated it in boiled leather or something?
The shield's sunucle properties allowed Blackheart to see and attack through the shield, a huge advantage that wouldn't work with a coating getting in the way. Besides, we don't know how sharp darkstone blades are; they might be able to cut through leather with ease.
That's besides my point. I was just using Blackheart's shield and leather as an example. If not leather, why not plate it in steel? If not Blackheart's shield, why not... just about any other sunucle?
Many sunucles wouldn't be able to fulfill their purposes if they were covered with some other substance. (Boots couldn't grip a surface, for instance.) Likewise, Lightbinders can only absorb sunucles because they've been suffused with light, and a non-sunucle coating would interfere with this. Sunucle armor would become much heavier and lose one of its key advantages if it was covered in steel, and even then, all you'd need is a darkstone shotspike to punch through the steel and destroy the sunucle. It wouldn't be out of the question for the Archknights to heavily discourage sunucle coatings, as they wouldn't want to give anyone an extra reason to start loading shotspikes with darkstone and maybe find out about some things they shouldn't. Daylen also makes a point of mentioning that sunucles become brittle and easily shattered if deprived of Light for extended periods, which means a full covering would quickly render the sunucle worthless, anyway.
As stated when Ahrek asks Daylen to prove that the bound of Imperious had passed to him, a Sunucle left too long without exposition to the Sun will lose it's properties, darken, and become frail as glass, which is why Daylen have to bring Imperious out of his house to "charge" it so he can demonstrate that the link have passed to him. Covering a Sunucle with anything other than glass would effectively deplete it of power in time.
How are the shrubs on the underside of Tellos able to grow in the absence of sunlight?
Since the sun never moves, wouldn't plants only grow parallel to the light, looking more like sea fans than "shrubs" and "trees" that are described?
So Tellos is stated to have a region called the Shadowlands, so named for being shrouded in Tellos' own shadow due to the Wrap Around nature of Everfall, such that sunlight never reaches the ground there. But It's later stated that the sun is theorized (admitted emphasis on "theorized," although the evidence does point in that direction) to exist outside Everfall's "universe" and shine into it. If that were the case, wouldn't it's light be unaffected by the Wrap Around factor (at least on the "first runthrough")? I mean, if you were to travel to the suns' position and look down into Everfall, you should be able to see the entirety of Tellos, right?
On a related note, it stands to reason that one could change the size of the Shadowlands by moving Tellos further to or away from the spot in Everfall directly under the sun, right? But what if you moved it directly to that spot? At first you'd think that it would be entirely shrouded in shadow, but you'd actually have an outright paradox there. At any other location, the southern part of Tellos is having it's sunlight blocked by the northern part of Tellos, so it's fine. But at the spot directly under the Sun, all the sunlight pathways become puerpendicular with the ground, so a given point on Tellos is having it's light blocked... by that same point on Tellos: the southern part is blocking out the southern part, the norther part is blocking out the northern part, etc.
Come to think of it, you could actually create a perfect experimental recreation of Everfall using a two-way mirror, a one-way mirror, a flashlight, and a rock. Align the mirrors with eachother such that they create one of those infinite mirror tunnels, stick the rock in between them, and shine the flashlight through the two-way mirror. The rock will always be fully lit.
If the sun never sets for centuries at a time, then what keeps Tellos from being burned to a crisp over like tidally-locked planets are in real-life?
Tellos isn't a planet and it isn't orbiting a star like Sol. Maybe the "sun" in Everfall imparts much less heat and Tellos only stays warm because of the constant light (in which case the Nights will be freezing cold in addition to being filled with Shade). Maybe the sun doesn't impart any heat at all, and Tellos stays warm because the sky-universe it floats in is always warm. Maybe there are other factors that exist in Everfall but not on Earth that significantly cool Tellos down and compensate for the constant sunlight.
If the war Dayless started is called "The First World War of Tellos," then wouldn't that mean that at some point in the decades since, there's been a Second World War of Tellos?" Why is a conflict that big never commented on in the story?
Isn't Daylen the only one who called it that? He's a massive cynic who fully believes that the nations are going to go on slaughtering each other indefinitely (which is the primary reason why he didn't share his best technology with the rest of the world), so it might just be him assuming that there's going to be a Second World War sometime in the future. Also, the newspapers mention tensions rising between Hamahra and Azbanadar at around the time the story begins, so old Daylen might just have heard the news and figured that the next big war is about to start.
In real life, the term "First World War" was first used about WWI in 1914 by a German philosopher.
The phrase "The First X" is also used to refer to something novel that has never happened before and is therefore notable in itself, not just the first in a series. In this example, it is simply emphasizing that while Tellos has previously had wars, the war in question was the first time there was a world-wide war. It doesn't mean there had to be any subsequent ones.
Darkstones are described as having infinite resistance to motion while in darkness. Sufficient force will pulverized it before causing it to move. But does the same principle apply to the pulverized darkstone dust? They should be locked in place in darkness too right? If there were any darkstone dust flying about in the air, and you inhaled it, and moved, it would rip holes right through you!
Since there must be some darkstone dust flying around (due to the world wrapping vertically) and people’s sinuses aren’t getting torn out all the time, we must assume there’s a lower size threshold below which darkstone will not lock in place, no matter how dark it gets. Alternately, perhaps the magical “inner light” that people seem to have is sufficient to unlock dust-sized darkstone motes.
Darkstone's repulsion to light must not work at the dust scale either. Otherwise there would be a constant meteoric rain of "sun" accelerated darkstone dust constantly perforating everything and everyone on the surface.
