Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive

Renarin has been told his whole life that he's essentially a failure as a human being due to something entirely out of his control (his seizures), and Kaladin is pretty much the first person ever to treat him like a person who can do useful work, instead of a liability that needs to be protected (at best) or a freak to be mocked and ridiculed (at worst).

Pretty much all he's ever wanted is to be useful, so it's no surprise that he reacts positively when someone finally offers him the chance.

When Dalinar wonders whether he should be allowing Renarin to work with Bridge Four, Kaladin points out that a Ragtag Band of Misfits probably really is the best place for him.

Tor's reread of chapter 52 is up, and the discussion about the shoemaker's Order came up near the end:

It didn't even occur to me that Lift might see spren differently due to her weird thing.

Wait, can Lift actually see into the Cognitive Realm?

Like I said, it didn't occur to me, but I guess that makes sense. I mean, the Parshendi can do something like that, and they're less in the Cognitive Realm than she is.

I still don't think Wyndle and Ym's spren are the same, though, because if "normally" people see Wyndle as motes of light, you'd think that that would factor somewhat into how Lift sees him. Assuming she seems him differently at all.

It's just something to think about. Though note that Wyndle is the only spren we see in Lift's interlude, so we don't have a good basis for comparison.

edited 27th Aug '15 5:23:34 PM by Discar

I had a thought about the Alethi "Thrill" in battle.

Maybe its purpose is more to make them more "I like war" in an attempt to keep them from uniting truly by making them warlike.

One of the conditions of being able to Surgebind is to be "broken" inside, a condition I think War and Battle would naturally provide a lot. And since the Alethi seem to be the prime warrior culture on Roshar they'd produce Surgebinders in noticeable lots.

Unless the Thrill makes them "enjoy" the battle, dulls their empathy and over all prevents them from "breaking".

More of a thought than full theory.

edited 7th Sep '15 5:00:45 AM by 3of4

The Thrill is definitely identified as an evil/Odium thing, so I doubt it'd help result in more Surgebinders, given that from what we've seen none of them are allied with him (I recall reading something about Voidbinders). I believe that it was mentioned in one of the epigraphs (the Diagram, I think) that the Thrill is associated with a specific Unmade — Chachanarach or something? Or was he the Death Rattle one? (The Unmade being the voidspren/Odium equivalent of Splinters like the Stormfather and that one female spren with the gifts and curses.)

Nergaoul, I believe.

Unless Odium wants more surgebreakers around for some reason, the purpose probably isn't to make more of them. (He might, though.) Whether or not it's meant to, though, it's possible that the Thrill contributes to more potential surgebinders just by creating more situations that can break people.

I think I miscommunicated.

My point is that the Thrill is to prevent surgebinding by preventing War Is Hell from being realized and thus breaking all the soldiers in it.

It essentially replaces the feeling of War Is Hell with Videogame Cruelty Potential

edited 7th Sep '15 12:15:11 PM by 3of4

Ah, no, sorry, I misread. That could be!

Actually, it would be sort of interesting if that were Odium's plan, but it fails because he assumed that only the warriors and leaders would ever become surgebinders. War breaks far more than the people who'd be in a position to feel the Thrill of Battle, after all!

edited 7th Sep '15 12:24:25 PM by Durazno

I figure its more of the "engaged underling initiative" vein than Odium himself.

Then there's the fact that Nergaoul (and Moelach, the one behind the death rattles) appears to be moving west for some reason. I doubt it's just random wandering.

I wouldn't be so sure that the Surgebinders are working against Odium.

I have a theory that the spren are actually up to something sinister, involving either the destruction or enslavement of humanity. That's why the Knights Radiant abandoned their mission, because they found out what the spren were doing, and breaking their vows was the only way to remove the sprens' power over the material world. That's also why, among characters who know what's going on, the reappearance of Surgebinders is seen as a sign of bad things arising, and why Nalan is hunting down any Surgebinder he can find legal justification for killing.

From what we know, the spren think that the Knights betrayed them, not the other way around. They violated their oaths and "killed" their bound spren, which is why spren haven't wanted anything to do with them since — and they're only returning now since the only alternative is the destruction of humanity and the spren. There hasn't been anything to suggest that the Knights were reacting to something the spren did.

That said, I'm not sure there's been much said about the Knights' motivation for abandoning their oaths at all. Obviously there was something, given that all of them left all at once rather than drifting away in bits and pieces, but still.

I mean, it'd be a possible twist, but I don't think anything we've seen points to the bonding spren being up to anything sinister.

We know that the reapperance of the Knights Radiant indicates that a new Desolation is on the horizon. A lot of people assume this means the Radiants appear in response to the coming Desolation in order to fight against it. But one of the Heralds (who should know more about this stuff than almost anyone else) seems to view the Radiants themselves as the cause of the Desolation, and is killing as many of them as he can in the hopes this will avert the coming catastrophe.

But the Knights Radiant we've seen so far seem to be good people honestly trying to save the world, and even if they weren't, some of them (like the Windrunners), have taken vows that require them to fight for the good of others. If they're going to cause the Desolation, it probably has to be inadvertent on their part. So what unintended consequences could the Radiants' actions/existence have?

Well, if the spren's motives are actually not so nice, allowing them to manifest in the physical world could be a pretty big "Oops!" moment for the Radiants.

edited 7th Sep '15 3:19:29 PM by RavenWilder

The Heralds aren't trustworthy in terms of either their motivations or their conclusions, though. They knowingly and deliberately abandoned humanity to its fate so that their own lives would suck less. (Whether they were justified in doing so is a separate question, but admittedly their lives did suck a lot.) They can't be assumed to have humanity's best interests in mind. Given that we don't know what they know, I don't think we can assume that their decisions are any more likely to be the "right" ones than Taravangian and the Diagram, the new crop of Knights, the Ghostbloods, or anyone else involved in the situation.

And as I recall they abandoned Taln to carry the burden alone in the process. They're not justified at all, but it's sure as fuck understandable.

Also they're nuts.

It's not clear if they're actually crazy or not, either. Taln certainly is, but he's the only one who's spent the last few thousand years in what's effectively hell. The rest of them, we can't really tell if they're crazy, sane-but-weird, or acting rationally based on information that we're not privy to.

According to Nale, Jezrien spends his time drooling. Seems reasonable enough.

Yeah, but they're clearly not all in the same situation. We have the one that's going around destroying works of art, and another that's trying to kill every Radiant that he can identify and pin something — anything — criminal on. We don't know if that's their particular flavor of crazy, or if they've managed to stay sane while other Heralds haven't.

edited 7th Sep '15 4:08:58 PM by NativeJovian

Seems like a sliding scale thing. Nale seems pretty rational all things considered, Shallash may have a reason but does seem pretty unhinged, and the others that we know of aren't doing so hot.

In the prologue of Words of Radiance, Nalan and Kalak were talking about how Ash is "getting worse," which certainly implies that this is a recent thing. "We weren't supposed to get worse. Am I getting worse? I think I feel worse." Of the Heralds seen or mentioned in the first two books we have:

• Nalan: By-the-Book Cop Up To Eleven. He'll kill someone for a forty year old case of Accidental Murder, but will let someone go the very second they're pardoned. Implied to be more yielding in the Heraldic Epochs.
• Kalak: The Paranoiac Up To Eleven. He's paranoid about becoming paranoid. His viewpoint chapter at the end of the Last Desolation showed nothing of the sort.
• Jezrien: According to Nalan, he's become a drooling idiot. We saw him Kalak's chapter during the Last Desolation, and he was definitely nothing like that.
• Shallash: Traveling the world destroying any art of herself. Implied to be a new thing (as people have had no problem making art of her for centuries), and Kalak seems to confirm this.
• Taln: PTSD Up To Eleven. Admittedly, it's for different reasons than the others.

So 5/10, and 5/5 of the Heralds we've seen, are some flavor of crazy. I think we can assume that there's something wrong with them as a whole. Whether it's simple age of some curse, they're definitely, as a group, suffering from Sanity Slippage.

I think we'll know more once we get the prologue to the next book. It's implied that all the Heralds (except Taln, who was still on vacation at the time) were present at the night Gavilar was assassinated, so we'll get more views of them.

Eh, like I said, I'm not convinced that Nalan, Kalak, or Shallash are actually crazy, based on how little we've seen of them. It'd be like seeing Hoid for one scene and deciding that he's obviously nuts. I mean, he's certainly odd, but there's no evidence that he's actually insane. "They're all varying shades and severities of nuts" is certainly one possible interpretation, but I think "some of them are nuts and some are just a little strange" is a valid take on what we've seen as well.