Found 610 entries in 0.085 seconds.
Auxuiliary and Nomad, the Knight Radiant Bond is kind of flipped around a bit. Is it possible for Adolin and Maya to something similar happen to them?
There’s something that could happen there. Don’t hold your breath, but possible. I won’t RAFO that; it's possible.
How much research into philosophical work do you do before each book? And what inspired to use thesein particular: Kantian deontology for the Knights Radiant, consequentialism for the Alethi and Taravangian, and secular morality for Jasnah?
Why did I choose the ones that I did? I really like when stories are not just a conflict of personality; they are a conflict between ideologies and ways of viewing the world which are all valid ways of viewing the world. When I put Taravangian and Dalinar into conflict with each other, it's because they are both looking at life in a different way. And I'm kind of reaching to different philosophical bases for those. And I will butcher it if I try to use the actual terminologies, because I am not a philosophy major.
Why did I take what I did? They matched the characters. And they matched what I'm trying to explore, without trying to give you the answers; trying to explore theme in stories. And I just love doing that. It's what makes me excited about writing characters.
Did Radiants who broke their oaths prior to the Recreance also result in deadeye spren?
No.
Is Tien's spren still around, or are they recovering like Syl did after her prior Radiant's death?
We'll RAFO that for now. Tien's spren is not going to be a deadeye. Tien didn't break his oaths, Tien was killed. So we'll RAFO what's up with his spren for now. But you can rest assured that it's not any of that.
We’ve seen several groups throughout the cosmere that have the express purpose of collecting Investiture from the various systems. I have a fear that there is a group that is going to (either now or sometime in the future) go around collecting Investiture specifically through Hemalurgy.
Which is theoretically possible and horrifying to consider.
So my question along those lines was: what happens when you use a Hemalurgic spike on an Aviar?
You are a very mean person. Basically, an Aviar’s got a mini-bond, so it’s gonna work in a similar way to what would happen if you were trying to do it to a Knight Radiant, which I’ve talked about in the past. Which means it is a less effective way to try to steal something with Hemalurgy, because once you’ve got two individuals involved in it… The Aviar, obviously, isn’t exactly the same. But it’s going to work, but it may not last, I guess is the answer I would give you on that.
If that Aviar is already bonded to a person, how does that spiking affect the person they are bonded to?
That bond will last, but how long? Who knows. Basically, you’re gonna fool the system into thinking you’re the Aviar if you have done that. So the system is going to assume that’s what you are. They’re gonna see you as the bird if you put the spike into yourself. But, because there are multiple individuals, things like this, and you’ve got the whole thing with the Aviar and their symbiosis, and things like that. It is not gonna work nearly as well as stealing something from, say, a Feruchemist or an Allomancer.
We know the Moon Scepter helps to change Identity [and/or/of] Investiture? So in the case of Raoden using *inaudible* Elantrians off-planet, would the Moon Scepter allow them to...
So the Moon Scepter is part of a key that they are trying to figure out how to do this. Because, Elantrian magic can be really powerful. All of the Selish magics can be really powerful. Because they are drawing from the Dor the way that they do, you're basically hooked up to a giant battery.
So, none of the other Cosmere magics you've seen have that level going on. The closest you're going to get is when you've got a Bondsmith powering the magic for the Knights Radiant. Cracking how to make that work on other planets is a really important thing that people are trying to figure out.
You have, like you said, thousands of years of history--mostly I'm talking about Stormlight Archives--you have, you know, Radiants have done this, and Heralds have done this, you have in some ways figured out what happened and what's going to happen with that stuff. And you have a, at least I think, friend/author Patrick Rothfuss who also has kind of this mythos of stuff that happened many, many years ago, have you guys ever talked to make sure you're not going to do the same cool thing?
You know we-- *laughter* Good question. No I haven't ever asked him about that. We haven't spent a lot of time-- Like the only thing I ever remember talking to Pat with-- about world-building wise was magic and his magic and things like that. I was really interested in sympathetic magic also, Warbreaker has an element to it. I really liked how he did his sympathetic magic in Kingkiller. But when I get together with Pat I try not to ask the questions that I know the fans are asking him a lot, I try to be somebody who's a colleague that we can talk about other sorts of things to give him a break from that. I never ask him when the next book will be out *laughter* That's your job not mine. I ask him how his kid is, and I ask him how has it been working with DAW lately, are there any frustrations for you in the business, and that sort of stuff. The stuff he can't talk with other people about. He can talk about his kids but he can't really talk about publisher stuff with a lot of other people.
Can Radiant Soulcasters Soulcast objects into ones of different temperatures? For example turning a piece of the ground into molten metal or turning water into ice?
Kind of, but not the way you want. Most things are going to have to be room temperature--so water, but not ice. That said, there are some funky things you can do with pressure and the like if you get more advanced in the skill.
Is the Hoed from Elantris similar to the state of [dead] Shardblades? If so is it possible to awaken a Shardblade if the bearer speaks the oaths of the Knights Radiant?
The status is... I would say not as similar as you're probably thinking, but it does have a similarity in that two bacteria causing a disease are both caused by a bacteria, so there is a similarity there.
I can imagine a sequence where a Shardblade would be reawakened, but I think it would be very difficult.
It's not the same that they're in the middle of a transition, like in Elantris.
Oh, okay. So you have to actually... it'd be harder.
It'd be harder, yeah. It's not the same, they're not in the middle of a transition. They have had something ripped from them, and it's very painful and it's left them mostly mindless.
So they have to have that something added back?
Yeah. So what you've got going on: the spren gain-- the bond lets them have sentience in the physical plane, like they can think and all these things, and when that was ripped away from them-- imagine... (this is a very bad metaphor, it's the first one coming to my head though): imagine you had wetware, you had a head-jack or something like that, and someone just ripped it out of your head.
*stunned/horrified*
Oh.
Instead of surgically operating it out. Like that's what's happened, a piece of their soul's been ripped off.
Do we see the highspren at all in Words of Radiance? And if so do they look like a comet?
That's a good question. That's a good, good question. I will say this. The comet spren is important to an order of Knights Radiant.
Sixth Epoch, Year 31, Palahesah 5.1.5.
Skybreakers
The Skybreakers are all about order. It's not just about rules, or laws, or whatever the current or local king declares is right (though some Skybreakers do go a bit too far in that direction if you ask me). It's about higher ideals of rightness, and concepts like justice and fairness, and like I said in the beginning, order. They sought to make the world the way it should be, and not the way that passing whims of power and money declare that it ought to be. Which, in practical terms, inevitably translates as, "The way that we, the Skybreakers, think it should be. Which is orderly."
In some situations, a Skybreaker is a ruler's best friend. They enforce that ruler's laws, which supports that ruler's vision and keeps peace in that ruler's realm. But a Skybreaker also believes that the law is universal, and should be applied equally to the highest members of society as well as the lowest. And this goes for everyone, up to and including the Radiant Orders and even the Heralds themselves. Nobody, in their view, should be untouchable. Even a king, maybe even a god, should be held accountable if they abuse their power and authority. Which sounds like a pretty good belief to have, I guess, until you ask who's going to stop the Skybreakers from abusing their authority. The answer is often nobody, or the other Orders, I guess, but that can get messy.
These attitudes, as you might expect, give the Skybreakers a bit of a stodgy reputation. Some of the other, looser Orders tend to see them as sticks in the mud, and free thinkers see them as outright dangerous. Revolutionaries see them as friends of the powerful, but the powerful see them as fickle friends who might turn on you if they disapprove of your choices. The only people who really love them, I guess, are the people who know they can count on them, people who need justice. And if you're the kind of person that downtrodden people know they can always rely on to defend the innocent and punish the guilty... well, that seems like a pretty good place to be.
So...what is the safehand about-- Like how did that develop into a thing, having one hand being scandalous?
So it relates back to philosophical treaties written in world, long ago, where a woman was saying 'these are feminine arts, these are masculine arts'; that sort of thing. It was partially a way to control access to Shardblades, when Shardblades and Shardplate first entered the-- common people being able to have them because the Knights Radiant had abandoned them. At the same time there was a struggle for power over language, and this happened long ago. Really the reason is "humans are weird".
The Nahel bond, what determines whether you get a Cryptic or an honorspren?
The spren themselves.
So it doesn't have to do with the Orders of the Knights Radiant?
If you match, you have to attract the spren, the same way you attract emotionspren, you have to attract the right spren for the Order.
With the ten Silver Kingdoms, what were actually their roles and what kingdoms did they correspond to? Can you say that, or-?
Well, what do you mean by correspond?
Did the ten Silver Kingdoms each have a job like Alethela was the kingdom of War?
They would all consider themselves specialized but it wasn't official like that. It was more like their own philosophy and how they view themselves. And I wouldn't align them straight up with orders of Knights Radiant or anything like that.
I wasn't saying that, I was saying, maybe different job or it was like--
They all did kind of have different roles but its not like they had any-- you know, Thaylenah is your navy, right? Its not necessarily that it's-- if that makes sense, but Alethela has like the view of itself, it had a very distinctive view of itself.
Okay, so it wasn't like each one actually had a different role?
No, they were not quite, quite, organized enough for that.
Will we know all the words [Radiant Ideals] when this is done?
If I don't get all of the words for the different orders into the mainline books, I will release them separately.
What order [of Knight Radiant] did Oathbringer come from?
I'll RAFO that.
Why do female*inaudible*
Well, there are several answers to this. The Alethi would say it is because it is the only way to be modest. But that's not the real answer. The writerly answer, which is also not the real answer, is that I grew fascinated by interesting social taboos by traveling to other countries where, for instance in many countries showing the bottom of your feet to people is insulting, and stuff like that. But the actual answer is that, you saw the events after the Recreance when the Knights Radiant abandoned their shards and, at that point, some people in power realized that if they could eliminate women from picking up the shards then it was twice as likely that they would get one. And so they started popularizing a work, an essay by a woman who had talked about feminine arts were one-handed, painting and things like this, and masculine arts were two-handed, breaking rocks and fighting and stuff like this, and they popularized that and some of the women who were involved in this seized writing, in this division, as a feminine thing. So there were both men and women involved in this sort of split that was kind of a conscious attempt to struggle power, or struggle the power in different ways, and that became not just a thing that people talked about, but an actual feature in the society moving forward.
The second set of Stormlight books, [six] through ten, will that-- will those be more focused on the Heralds' point of view, is that the idea?
Yeah, so Taln and Ash, who are both Heralds, are going to be main characters, and they'll each get books dedicated to them. The characters who survive the first five will still be main characters as well, but it's gonna turn more on what happened with the Heralds and things like that. The first five are turning more on what happened with the Knights Radiant and then the last five are more what happened with the Heralds... 'Cause we'll get flashbacks to the time of the Dawnsingers and things like that.
I noticed my last time reading Words of Radiance that there were several times-- vines that were on Adolin's shardblade as he summoned it. So I was wondering if maybe the Radiant who used it had was an Edgedancer?
You are right.
You mentioned before that it would be possible to revive a dead shard[blade], but it would be very difficult--
Very difficult.
Like I think what you said is that it would have to be the same person that broke the bond?
That would be the-- Yeah.
So if it was an Edgedancer's blade if he made those same oaths could potentially he…
That would most likely not be enough. Something else would have to happen. Good guess though.
I've wondered whether the portraits in chapter headings have some deeper significance.
Some of them correspond well to the contents of the chapters...
"The Four" is the first chapter to have four different portraits - Jezrien, Ash, Ishar, and Pailiah, representing the Radiant orders that Kaladin, Shallan, Dalinar, and Renarin belong to, respectively.
Vedel's portrait appears before Ym's and Lift's interludes (this suggests that Ym's other power was abrasion, just like Lift).
Battar's portrait for Jasnah's pov prologue; Battar's and Wit's portraits for the epilogue where Jasnah and Wit are the only characters.
Most others just seem random/unrelated:
Kaladin's earliest chapters in WoK were headed by Taln's portrait.
Eshonai's and Szeth's interludes have a variety of different Herald portraits, seemingly at random.
Taln's own interlude features Wit and Chach, of all things.
The correspondence can be from any column on the essences table in the Ars Arcanum, or a few columns that are not on the publicly revealed table.
Is there a row for when Hoid's portrait will show up?
They are not actually portraits of those characters. But there's not a row for the Masked Man.
Yeah a shared vision with Navani would be pretty helpful. I assume the mechanism messing with the Radiants in the Tower would also mess with bringing someone into the vision. But then again, the pure Honor Surge Adhesion still works for Kaladin and aren't the vision tied directly with Honor?
It would have messed with such a vision, yes.
What if you Soulstamped a city?
Soulstaped a city... So if you're a really good Forger-- It is possible to do things like that, but it requires a lot of work and time. Just one thing to keep in mind with Soulstamps, and anything that does this, rewriting your spiritweb, right, like, requires Invesiture. A lot of Investiture. And so, for instance, what Shai can do is really cool, but what an Elantrian can do is gonna look a lot more dramatic, right? Shooting a column of fire, you would say "Which takes more power, making the wall have flowers on it or shooting a column of fire?" Making the wall have flowers takes way more Investiture. It's a lot easier to pull off some dramatic effects with others, but the actual changing of the soul and overwr-- ...So just keep in mind the extent-- This is why you don't see Shai Forge it so the whole building disappears. Right? And stuff like this. Which is not outside of reason for a couple of Elantrians with the right program to put into place. But I mean effectively-- They could blow it up, essentially, that's what they would do
Make a new hole, rather than making one that has existed.
Yeah. Exactly. Do keep in mind, people like to ask, you've probably seen people ask, "Could I rewrite myself to be a Knight Radiant?" Right? WELL... There are certain things that you just-- you can't fake without enough energy that it becomes impractical. Usually what I use as an example to that is: Yes, we can turn hydrogen into gold, if we wanted to. Right? We can do that! It might take more energy than the earth creates in an entire year, but we can do that.
I get a lot of questions with this that I'm like "is it possible?" and I'm like "Guys, is it possible?" ...You should probably be like, "Is it possible, with reasonable amounts of energy provided by one Invested person".
Are half-shards made with Radiant spren?
RAFO! Good question!
So Sleepless have held Surges. Have they been Radiants before?
RAFO.
Skepping. Dalinar refers to this by name, as a technique the Windrunners are practicing. Is this something advanced deadblade wielders can still do, or only something Radiants and Honorblade wielders can do?
Yes, it can be practiced--but it's not nearly as hard as it would have been in the WoKP version, so it isn't a major plot point any longer.
Can a spren turn into a wearable hat(conceptually, Syl’s dress being part of her body), or would the 4th ideal need to be sworn first?
This is possible with the magic at Kaldin's current ideal, but not at the current skill/understanding level of most current Radiants.
And as a transgender woman, thank you so much. To see that little detail of the Reshi king transitioning using Stormlight made me so happy.
I wanted to make sure I got the Reshi king another cameo at some point because it feels to me there would be a disproportionately large number of trans people among the Knights Radiant, considering the journey of self-discovery they go on in their lives.
Is it possible to have a stormblessed Mistborn?
...What do you mean by stormblessed? Do you mean Radiant?
Yeah.
Yeah. It is possible.
Is Sja-anat going to join the Knights Radiant?
RAFO.
Does the Fourth Ideal of Knights Radiant for Windrunners go something like "I will forgive myself for those I've failed to protect"?
I will put you on the record for having guessed that, but you won't find the answer until a Windrunner is capable of figuring it out.
Nomad and Auxiliary refer to each other as knight and squire, even though Auxiliary is also referred to as a spren. Auxiliary also calls himself dead, even though “dead” spren usually cannot talk. However, we know that cognitive shadows are also referred to as spren by various people on Roshar. Based on this language, can we infer that, at some point before Nomad left Roshar, surgebinders learned how to Nahel bond with the cognitive shadows of deceased Knights Radiant instead of true spren?
Excellent question, that is a stretch of an assumption.
Could there be a cure for diabetes in the cosmere?
Yes, there very much could be a cure for diabetes in the cosmere. Right now, if you become a Knight Radiant, that would be a solution. That's not a solution for everyone; that's a very narrow solution. But there would be other solutions.
So, there are ten orders of the Knights Radiant, ten spren, ten Surges. And there are a lot of parallels with the Fused. Do they-- Are there ten Voidspren, that match up to ten--
RAFO, but there wouldn't be ten.
There'd be nine.
Speaking of sending Stalins to jail, will Dalinar ever face any consequences for his act of genocide in Rift?
Unfortunately, no. (Other than his strained relationship with Adolin and his own personal guilt.)
Problem here is that by our standards (and now, Dalinar's own) this was a terrible act of destruction. But by the standards of his society, this was just business as usual. A city in open rebellion against the crown? That's basically an invitation.
It's a tricky scene because the awful truth is that in our world, these sorts of things were extremely common in warfare--even up to and including the modern era. It wasn't until very recently that this sort of action was seen as a the war crime that it is.
To be more accurate, I probably should have had this sort of thing happen dozens of times in Dalinar's past. But I felt that wouldn't have made the point any stronger, and felt that one time was bad enough. That said, however, it's not the sort of thing that most rulers through history would have to bear any consequences for.
Has Vasher/Zahel done anything like this? Is that why he is as we see him in the Stormlight Archive?
RAFO for now, but the responses below this do have valid points [Manywar and Nightblood].
Would something like the 1474 trial of Peter von Hagenbach be possible on Roshar? And if yes, would this be something Skybreakers would get behind? It always seemed to be that they'd be interested in the idea of 'make law, not war' (I got that quote from Ben Ferencz).
This sort of thing would have been possible (and indeed inevitable in a situation like that) during the days of the Radiants. Not so much in recent history. Old Skybreakers would have been behind it entirely, new ones have some...different ways of looking at things.
Do the riots in Kholinar have to do with the Thrill, and is there an Unmade centered there?
...That's a RAFO.
Are Skybreakers like the MPs of the Knight's Radiant?
Um, yes you could say that. That's a good way to put them. I will say more about the Skybreakers in the future, but yeah.
How the heck is Nale's spren still with him? Is his spren as wacky as he is? Or is it dead, and he still carries it around?
Nale's spren is alive. The highspren... I would say "wacky" is probably a decent term for them. I would blame some of how Nale is acting more on the highspren. Obviously, it's partially being a Herald and all the things he's gone through, but they're all on board for this. So read that as you will.
Well, "all." The ones that are making Radiants of the Order are on board for it. You'll get to see Szeth interact with his just a little bit. There's not a ton of Szeth in this book, but you've got a few chapters. At least one, for sure. And he gets to interact with his spren, and you'll get a better picture of the highspren from that moment.
When someone is "killed" by a Shardblade, their soul is understood to be severed. What do Vorin practitioners believe happens to the soul if it is severed? Does this mean that the soul cannot go to the Tranquiline Halls? If this is the case, why are Shardbearers/Blades so revered rather than feared or hated?
Vorin belief doesn't take being killed by a Shardblade as destroying the soul, likely because of Knight Radiant traditions.
On the Roshar system diagram, each planet had the sigil of a certain Radiant. I was wondering why you did that
We're using Roshar itself as a frame of reference, and that is how people on Roshar have named the planets. And they can't see them all, I don't believe, but the naming convention sticks.
And thats why you added the sigils?
Mmhmm. I don't think they've discovered them all on-planet, but since other people off-planet know about them... and in the old days, they knew about them all.
So, I was curious if the Alethi were always-- like, if there was a time where there wasn't a segregation between lighteyes and darkeyes.
Yes, that did exist.
...How did the separation occur?
There are some clues in [Oathbringer] and in the last book. It has to do with Knights Radiant and Surgebinding and things like that. It's a part RAFO. It's pretty guessable. There's nothing--
How many magic systems have you written?
Uh... You know, this is a hard one, because do you count each Order of the Knights Radiant, or each Surge as their own magic system, or...
I have never read those books, so I don't know.
So... probably a dozen. Maybe two.
Why so many? When so many people just stick with one?
Uh, because it's fun.
Has Eshonai left for the Beyond?
Yes. I'll canonize this. I'm sorry.
*sounds of horror and shock* Noooo, nooooo, RAFO it!
You wanted-- That was a RAFO-bait but, so I never intended that-- If you want to leave this one out there-- But I never intended Timbre to be Eshonai's soul. When people said that in the beta, I'm like, "Oh, I guess you could see that, but I mean that's not how spren work, right?"
I was going to say, so you're saying Timbre is not Eshonai's soul.
No. I never even thought they would make that connection. Because we saw Timbre in the previous book... I mean, I don't want to kill people's fan theories. But that one kind of blindsided me in the beta. I'm like, "Well I guess we'll go ahead and let people think that but no." No.
You can leave that one off if you want to tease people and things. Some people really want to believe that.
I made a bet that Eshonai was not only still be alive after Words of Radiance, but would also become Radiant. And then the bet was if not I had to eat a shoe.
Oh no!
So I've been trying to get out of it for like--
Well you could eat a gummy shoe or something like that...
But no, I didn't intend this. No. There are-- Yeah.
I wonder what order u/mistborn is [on the Knights Radiant quiz].
I got Elsecaller on this test, with Bondsmith close behind. Which are the two where I'd have placed myself, so I think they did a good job on it.
Are the Dysian Aimians agents of Cultivation? If not, are they in league with another group (excluding the Knights Radiant) that we have seen?
Kind of yes to both – kind of
Are these old Radiants?
Those are Heralds. That's Ash, who you'll see that the very end of this [Oathbringer]. That's Jezrien who's also near the end. You haven't met her [Vedel] yet. Ishar, you have heard about. And it's identified in this book who he is. But those are artist interpretations of them, in-world. They're like the Sistine Chapel versions of the Heralds. They might not look exactly like that, but that is an in-world interpretation of them by an artist.
Do the Radiants have only one gender per [Order], or you can have...?
You can have different genders.
Most of the Shardblades and Plate abandoned by Radiants during the Recreance are somewhere, missing. Are they mostly, kind of in the same place?
It's a good question. RAFO.
As far as the Oaths go, for Orders of the Knights Radiant that have Oaths that are, like, set, like Windrunners and Bondsmiths, do they have to be spoken in a specific order, or is it just as the--
They have to be spoken in a specific order. But the Oath can vary depending on the individual's own interpretation and feeling about it.
How was spren society impacted by Nale (legally) murdering wannabe proto-Radiants in the years before the Everstorm? Were they aware of what he was doing?
Yes, most spren thought that anyone who was trying to bond a human was--let's just say most of them responded as the other inkspren did to Ivory during his desires or Syl during her desires, and so if your foolish spren cousin goes to try to bond humans, they get what is coming to them is how most of them would probably regard it. It's not gonna be too bad for the spren, they're not going to be "killed" by what Nale was doing to the people. It's much worse for the people in that instance. But still, not a fun experience for a spren.
Squires and people wielding Honorblades use more Stormlight than a regular Radiant. Who uses more?
The further you progress, the more efficient you become at consuming Stormlight. They're never as efficient as the Voidbringers, since humans leak too much.
