Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive

We all know how Kaladin's life works. Things will NOT be that convenient.

I think any troubles Kaladin has with Roshone can be resolved by "I have a Shardblade. Do you have a Shardblade? Does anyone else in this town have a Shardblade? No? Well then, I think you'd better go fetch me some coffee."

I wonder if Dalinar can use the Stormfather to send messages

*Highstorm rages through Hearthstone* *loud voice from above* "ROOOSHOOONE! DALINAR KHOLIIN SAYS YOU SUUUUCKKK!!!!

The fun thing about Alethi culture is that he doesn't have to threaten anyone. In our world, waving around a weapon and expecting people to do what they're told is the action of a thug. Here, it's more like a movie star. "Oh, you don't know who I am? Let me show you some identification in the form of my awesome magical sword."

Did Kaladin actually tell Dalinar he was from Hearthstone? I know he specifically didn't mention anything when Dalinar told him the story, and at the end of Words he just mentioned "my citylord has parshmen."

In any case, the Stormfather would doubtless consider such tasks beneath him.

Badum tss

I do like that Dalinar notes that while most of the time the Stormfather has important duties to attend to across the world, he also spends a lot of time pretending to have important duties, because he's still grumpy about the whole bond thing.

I seriously just got that joke. Been staring at it for over an hour.

Chapters 7 - 9 are out.

Perspectives are: Kaladin, Shallan and Shallan.

Well, it seems like Bondsmiths might get special interactions with the different orders...

I also find the contrasts between how Kal and Shallan view their blades as something interesting.

"He spun the Blade and rammed her down into the floor in one smooth motion."

“I am. I don’t like the idea of swinging you about, smashing you into things.”

She sniffed. “Firstly, I don’t smash into things. I am an elegant and graceful weapon, stupid. Secondly, why would you be bothered?”

I just love these lines.

edited 12th Sep '17 6:26:25 AM by 32ndfreeze

Some of the old spren have four genders because they are pre-human. Interesting.

Love how Kaladin takes control of the room before he even summons his Shardblade. And while Laral mostly dominates him—she's always been able to do that—he does get a few points by casually having a conversation with Navani and Dalinar.

Older spren have four genders. Are those the parshendi genders? Male, female, malen, femalen?

The darkeyed scout seems interesting. Odd that the Alethi seem to consider scouting to be a gender-neutral profession. When Dalinar called her Lyn, I initially thought she was the assassin with the Shardblade Jasnah had hired, but that was Lyss. Wonder who this person is.

Does someone know what Adolin did and is staging the murders to guilt him? It seems Renarin knows, or at least knows that Adolin is hiding something.

Might be Sadeas' wife Ialai is aware that Adolin killed her husband and is trying to frame him for other murders. She was shown to be cunning and I have been expecting her to make a move for a while now

edited 12th Sep '17 9:49:09 AM by GutstheBerserker

Can't say I sympathize much with Laral's viewpoint, which seems as self-serving now as it was when the turned a cold shoulder to Kaladin, but he doesn't really care anymore so that's that. There's so many threads being set up around Renarin, can't wait to see what comes of it all.

And I see two options on the murder: Either someone is trying to take advantage of the murder of Sadeas to disguise their own as part of the same killing spree, or someone (possibly Ialai) knows Adolin is guilty or suspects it and is trying to make people look deeper into it.

edited 12th Sep '17 10:48:30 AM by Ninety

Renarin's definitely doing everything short of shifting his eyes back and forth while sinister music plays.

Poor Adolin. You could cut the dramatic irony with a knife.

And poor Lyn the scout, not getting any help from Shallan in breaking free of Alethi gender norms.

My suspicion is (since Eshonai's sister seems to be on Team Voidbringer for a while now) maybe some Smokeform voidbringers are there to sow dissent

The odd thing is that the new murder was staged exactly the same as the previous one. Not too many people saw the body before it was moved. So either it was one of Sadeas' soldiers (it certainly wasn't Bridge Four) or one of Sadeas' soldiers was able to describe the scene perfectly to someone else—most likely Ialai. Or it's supernatural, at which point we can't really be sure of the killer's limits.

I do like the smokeform idea in principle, but I doubt Voidbringers would have been able to infiltrate them so quickly. Unless Highprince Hatham accidentally brought some with him when he finally arrived. He was in the warcamps during the Everstorm, after all, so his Parshmen presumably got infected. Some could have been transformed into smokeform and... done whatever it is that smokeform does to let them hide among humans.

I thought that was a swordstyle?

Smoke is one of the Ten Essences, so it gets mentioned a lot. Smokestance is an Alethi sword style, Midnight Essence are smoke-elemental Voidbringer minions, and smokeform is a Parshendi form. Specifically:

The mentions of lies and infiltration make me think it's the parallel to the Cryptics. Sounds like this is going to be the Shallan plot this book.

My immediate thought was that someone was trying to throw suspicion off of Adolin by staging the murder to "obviously" have the same culprit while Adolin's with everyone else.

In which case the most obvious suspect would be Renarin. He's always been Adolin's biggest supporter. We still don't know much about the Truthwatchers, but their Herald's attributes are Learned and Giving, which doesn't necessarily contradict killing somebody to help exonerate your brother. I suspect we'll know more once we learn something about this second victim. A Radiant wouldn't just kill some random person no matter the reason, but maybe if he was secretly a murderer or something, Renarin could have justified killing him in this way.

I'm thinking that a possible theme for this book could be the Kholin boys revealing their darker sides. Dalinar is something of a Retired Monster (just to what degree the flashbacks will show), and we've seen what happens when you push Adolin too far. The less said about Gavilar the better. So we're only missing Renarin (he's long overdue some focus) and Elhokar (trying to take the bull by the horns with either his uncle or wife gone horribly wrong?) and we got a stew goin'.

I feel I should point out the LAST time Sanderson handed us a murder mystery like this, the culprit was LITERALLY the ULTRA LAST person anyone would have considered for EVERY good in-story reasons. So I'm going out on a limb here and calling it now: the Faceless Immortal did it!

When was that?

For suspects we still don't know where Szeth has gotten to, yet.