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Questioner

Can spren die?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, spren can die.

Questioner

Okay, so Syl, she's been around for at least a few thousand years, right?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Questioner

How does she forget her memories? Is it in connection to humans that makes it so she remembers things?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Questioner

And she's what, a Bonding Spren?

Brandon Sanderson

You will find out. She's an Honorspren, but you will find out.

Zas

Is that bond the Nahel bond?

Brandon Sanderson

There is a certain amount of... It is a symbiotic bond that is gained by Syl. And things gained by the person bonding. And the stronger presence in the physical realm, and the ability to think better in the physical realm is a part of that bond. She is mostly getting [something] of the physical realm. Without the bond, it is very hard for her to think in this world.

Questioner

Because she's windspren?

Brandon Sanderson

That's part of it. That's part of something else.

Questioner

Shallan. What the crap are the headless spren?

Brandon Sanderson

You will find out! Read and Find out! I did just finish her flashback sequence, which is the first thing I wrote for the second book.

Rick

1. Are there any other sentient spren like Syl, if not are there any spren capable of becoming sentient, or is she purposefully unique?

2. If so, what are the conditions that must be met for a spren to become sentient?

Brandon Sanderson

1. There are other sentient spren.

2. There are many more who could become sentient. There were choices that were made that we will get into that were made by some spren that, that involved... what is happening. There were certain choices that were made that influenced this, so yes, that was a very detailed and specific question, you did a good job and so I will give you your answer that there are others like Syl that could become, and there are some that are sentient already

Rick

Would that also mean that certain spren would have an alignment, or would some spren be tailored toward good and evil or not?

Brandon Sanderson

They're creatures of nature and so good and evil aren't as, as big a deal to them. Though there are some that may be put in that sort of alignment. Certainly honorspren are going to be of a certain type, but there are many spren of many different temperaments and they are kind of aligned to their temperament, having to do with who they are and what they are.

Zas678 (paraphrased)

A question related to that. There's an idea going around that all the spren that can Nahel Bond, all Knight Radiant spren are called honorspren, and then Nohadon talks specifically about honorspren. Is that the case? You know, is it just the Windrunner spren, or is it all the spren?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

I'm going to deal with this in the next book. So I'll just go ahead and let it be a literal RAFO. It is coming.

*interruption, leading Brandon to lose his train of though*

So what we are dealing with here is that all spren are indeed all pieces of the one who has gone, so those spren are all- except the Windrunner spren, the spren like Syl, have certain umm.

Zas678 (paraphrased)

Nohadon mentioned that "All the spren aren't as discerning as honorspren."

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

So there has been dissension among them about who gets to call themselves honorspren, if that makes sense, and there is some disagreement among scholars about which ones are really, you know "This is what defines an honorspren".

But the spren you are running into are all *inaudible* of either Honor or Cultivation, or some mixture between them. And you can usually tell the ones that are more Honor, and the ones that are more Cultivation. That should be able to be *inaudible*.

Zas678 (paraphrased)

There is a debate on what to call Shallan's Symbols, so we don't have such an ambiguous term for it .

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

The Symbolhead?

Zas678 (paraphrased)

Yeah, the Symbolhead, Shallanspren.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

*laughter*

Zas678 (paraphrased)

We don't really know what to call them.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Do I want to canonize this yet?

Zas678 (paraphrased)

You don't have to canonize it yet.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

I don't know if I want to canonize it yet. But I will say this. They are spren, that should be pretty obvious. They are the spren connected to what Shallan is capable of doing. But I don’t know if I want to canonize it yet. Truthspren is as good a name as any, and I would suggest you use that until further notice.

Zas678

Does Nightblood think when he's on his own, or is it only when he's next-

Brandon Sanderson

He does think when he's on his own.

Zas678

Okay. I thought that maybe he was like the Spren.

Brandon Sanderson

There might be a connection, but he does think on his own.

Tortellini (paraphrased)

Could it be that spren and seons are basically very similar things?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He smiled, thought about how to answer that for a second and then said... "Yes, it could be."

Cuaiir

Request that Brandon write a clue to the nature of the cosmere, specifically Realmatic theory.

Brandon Sanderson

Entities exist on all three realms that are only vaguely shadowed on the other realms.

You have seen entities who exist primarily on the Cognitive Realm + are shadowed on the Physical.

Questioner

So in The Way of Kings you had a whole bunch of chapters with different characters. How are you planning on tying these chapters that you didn’t really go into depth with, in the next [book]?

Brandon Sanderson

The whole purpose of the interludes is when I sat down to write this book, I thought: Okay. I want to get across the scope of this world and how big and immense this world is, and how big and immense just all of the different political structures and all of these things are. And looking at what other authors have done, namely Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin recently as a way to do that, they add new characters to show all this. But then that seems to kind of snowball on them, and by the middle books, there are so many characters that keeping track of them becomes a challenge, which may be the biggest challenge in those books. So when I sat down to write Way of Kings, I said, I want to do that, but I'm going to do that with throwaway characters. Meaning, all of the characters in the interludes are not necessarily characters you will ever see again. You can read the interludes as if they were short stories set in the world in between the main stories going on. Everything in those is important, but those characters you don't need to worry about remembering who they are because you may not ever see from them again. They may occasionally show up for things like this and if you love keeping track of all these characters—but you won't have to, in book two try and remember who those two ardents who were working with the spren were, or things like that. That's not generally going to be that important. I will usually do one interlude with a more major character, though, that I'm introducing like Szeth, in each section. Szeth, the Assassin in White. But most of those, don't worry about those. The whole point of those is that you can read them and and enjoy that chapter and then jump to something else.

Questioner

The Assassin in White, you know how he tied into the story, with the crazy king who had people killed. Is that going to tie into the story?

Brandon Sanderson

That's very important.

Questioner

With Szeth, the Assassin in White, is he tied to the stone or is it a genetic thing or is it kind of like a spren?

Brandon Sanderson

You mean his oathstone? Aah. You will get, here, have one of these. Proudly presented to you, the first RAFO card of the night.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Objects with almost sentient behavior like Nightblood in Warbreaker share important links with the spren from The Way of Kings. If you understand the spren you will understand a lot about the connection between the books.

feelieking

Is Roshar *broken* in some way? Shards, storms, Spren—everything there seems very fragmented.

Brandon Sanderson

Roshar is broken in some way. You are on to something there.

Questioner

The spren are a really unique part of Roshar. Do you have rules for deciding what "gets" spren (wind, flames, glory, creation, life, death) and what doesn't? Have you introduced most of the spren types, or will we see a lot of new ones as the series goes on?

Brandon Sanderson

You will find out much more about the spren as the series goes on. There are a lot of things that get spren where the spren are not noticeable, or they only occur in very rare circumstances or in certain regions, as Axies explains. So the phrase "There's a spren for that" that I've seen popping around on the internet is actually fairly accurate. There's a spren for quite a lot of things. I don't want to delve too deeply into this until I've written more in the series and you begin to understand exactly what the spren are.

Questioner

Can all spren imprint on someone—like Syl has with Kaladin—or is this ability special to certain types of spren? (I just got a mental picture of a flamespren taking notice of the pyromaniac noble girl from the castle market exercise in your JordanCon talk. Not sure that would end well.)

Brandon Sanderson

It is special to certain types of spren. There you go, a non-RAFO.

Louise

Did spren lose their memories and personalities because of the loss of their attached radiants? But retain a basic attraction to things associated with the radiants they bonded to previously?

Brandon Sanderson

Not all types of spren bonded to Radiants. You will find out more about this in the future. However, if you're speaking specifically of spren that were bonded to Radiants, then yes, you're on the right track.

Mike

Has Kaladin's windspren Syl reached the epitome of her consciousness or will we see a smarter spren in future books?

Brandon Sanderson

Syl has recovered everything of her personality. There are things she doesn't remember, and things she can still learn to do, but she has recovered her personality in full.

Yeti Stomper

Is there a relationship between Soulcasting and Spren?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, there is. But I will not elucidate any further at this time.

John Ottinger

The sprite-like spren seems to be an odd addition to The Way of Kings. Understanding just when and how a spren appears and how and when people are able to notice them is the most confusing part of the novel. Could you elucidate the reasoning behind them, and how one might be able to predict their appearance?

Brandon Sanderson

The spren felt very natural to me. I didn't anticipate them being as controversial as they've become. I think part of the reason for this is that the people of the world take them as natural. They're just there, and everybody in this world is going to treat them as familiar. Asking them why a spren appears the way it does is a little like asking a layman in our world why sometimes the wind blows and sometimes it doesn't. If you walk outside, sometimes the wind will be blowing and sometimes it won't, and you just take that for granted. You don't ask why, you just say that it's windy or it's not windy. These characters in this world will say, "Oh, there are some fearspren; someone's scared," but sometimes they don't appear and sometimes they do. Some of the rationale around that will become more and more clear as the series progresses, but the reason it's not explained in this book is because the characters have just all grown up with these things all their lives. They don't necessarily ask those questions any more than most of us ask why a particular leaf falls off a branch when another one stays attached. It's just the natural process of the world. There are lots of reasons why they're there, but I don't think I can get into those without spoiling the series.

Patrick

Over your previous books you've developed a reputation as the 'magic system guy'. Was it therefore a deliberate move to hold back on the magic in The Way of Kings, at least compared to your earlier books?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it was. That's a very astute question. I've written a blog post that I'm not satisfied with, but that I'll probably be revising and posting very soon, that is going to talk about this. When I finished the Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker, I felt that there were a few things that were becoming Brandon clichés that I needed to deal with. I don't mind being known as the magic system guy. But when I become known ONLY as the magic system guy, that worries me. It isn't that I sat down with this series and said, well, I'm gonna show them, I'm not going to do a magic system. But when I planned this series, it was not appropriate for me to shoehorn in a lot of the magic system in book one. Though my agent suggested that I do just that. He said, look, this is what you're known for, this is what people read you for; if you don't have this it's going to be glaringly obvious. My response was that I would hope that story and character are what carries a book, not any sort of gimmick—well, gimmick is the wrong word.

Something that I pondered and wrote about a lot—just to myself—is that Mistborn was postmodern fantasy. If you look at the trilogy, in each of those books I intentionally took one aspect of the hero's journey and played with it, turned it on its head, and tried very hard to look at it postmodernly, in which I as a writer was aware of the tropes of the genre while writing and expected readers to be aware of them, to be able to grasp the full fun of what I was doing. And that worried me—that was fun with Mistborn, but I didn't want to become known as the postmodern fantasy guy, because inherently you have to rely on the genre conventions in order to tell your story—even if you're not exploiting them in the same way, you're still exploiting them.

For that reason, I didn't want to write The Way of Kings as a postmodern fantasy. Or in other words, I didn't want to change it into one. And I also didn't want to change it into a book that became only about the magic, or at least not to the extent that Warbreaker was. I like Warbreaker; I think it turned out wonderfully. But I wanted to use the magic in this book as an accent. Personally, I think it's still as full of magic as the others, but the magic is happening much more behind the scenes, such as with the spren I've talked about in other interviews, which are all about the magic. We haven't mentioned Shardplate and Shardblades, but those are a very powerful and important part of the magic system, and a more important part of the world. I did intentionally include Szeth's scenes doing what he does with the Lashings to show that there was this magic in the world, but it just wasn't right for this book for that to be the focus. I do wonder what people will say about that. I wonder if that will annoy people who read the book. But again, this is its own book, its own series, and in the end I decided that the book would be as the story demanded, not be what whatever a Brandon Sanderson book should be. As a writer, that's the sort of trap that I don't want to fall into.