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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.
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.
Do the Radiants have only one gender per [Order], or you can have...?
You can have different genders.
There are honorspren and cultivationspren on Roshar. The other spren that are tied to orders of Knights Radiant, do they have any relationships with any other Shards?
They are all going to be a mix of the Shards on Roshar. Some weight a little further one direction or the other. They are not off-world Shards. Good question.
Which orders of Knights Radiant do you think the main characters would best belong to?
Hm. Let me think on that. I'm not sure if Davriel would fit into any of them, honestly, though Tacenda could fit several.
You have like tons of spren, right? And the the ones like rotspren, and you have your characters and some point will be able to harness those spren and be completely evil with them?
And be completely evil with them? *pause* There are-- There is an order of Knights Radiant that has to do with the breaking down of matter into smaller pieces.
What would happen if a Parshendi were to attract a spren and bring it into the Highstorm? Like, an Honorspren of some sort?
Sapient spren have a choice of whether they get bonded or not, unless you entrap them some way. But simply attracting them...simply going into the Highstorm with one wouldn't work, what you said is 'attracted a spren', so, to answer that actually... The thing is, honorspren, all the spren of Honor and Cultivation, not honorspren capital, Honorspren or whatever... The spren that create the orders of the Knights Radiant have not, in the past, been attracted to Parshendi because of certain events in the past.
*inaudible*
You'll have to Read and Find Out.
So the series, people are presuming it's going to be ten books long because of a comment you've made, is that correct?
That is correct; it's going to be ten books. Ten is a holy number in the series. It's related to the Order of Knights Radiant and the number of magic systems and things like this. So ten books.
Is the 1000-page format something that's going to continue throughout the series?
Each of the books will be medium long. I'm not sure...you know, I can't tell you exactly how long they will be. Instinctively, looking at my outline, I feel that the first is probably one of the longest in the series, which is a bad way to do it, honestly. You really want to have the first ones be the quick pow, and the middle ones get to be the thick, meaty ones. But I'm expecting... This one was about 400,000 words; I'm expecting them all to be around 300,000 words. There may be some that go a little bit longer. It'll depend on the book and how many characters I decide to deal with in that book, and the plot structure of the books.
Would the Unmade correspond to the various Knight Radiant Orders by philosophy? Would Odium's champion be his equivalent to the Bondsmiths?
No, the varieties of the Fused do that. It's not 1-to-1, but think of the Unmade as the analogs of Heralds. Odium has no Bondsmith Analog.
If the Lord Ruler joined the Knights Radiant, what order would he fit in best?
Lord Ruler might make an okay Skybreaker, but not a great one.
Would a Seeker burning bronze be able to tell what order of Knight Radiant someone is? Or what Surges they have access to?
Yes, but they'd have to be actively using it, right? So you could hear somebody -- for instance -- Lashing, but if you just saw somebody who'd drawn in Stormlight, you probably wouldn't be able to tell until they use that Stormlight, which it was. You'd be able to probably hear that they have the Stormlight.
So the pulses are not unique to Scadrial's Investiture?
No they're not. You'd be able to do that. In fact there are other things in the cosmere that are kind of the same sort of "radar detection" here and there, that you can read in the same way. Bronze is just the one of the best... way to do it -- being a Seeker is really handy for these reasons.
Being able to go off-planet with your Allomancy also is a pretty big advantage. It's really hard, for instance, to get a Surgebinder off of Roshar, because of the Connection stuff that's happening. In fact you may have heard in a prologue just recently someone complaining about that.
Besides the confirmed Knights Radiant at the end of Words of Radiance have we seen any characters that share the same orders with the current knights?
Oh boy, you’re putting me on the spot. N-n-n-n-n-n-n-yes you have. Yes. You’ve seen, I think you’ve seen several actually, but, yeah.
The second set of The Stormlight Archive. Is that the same characters? Or different ones, like you did with Mistborn?
They are same characters, but we're gonna see a few main characters fade to being secondary characters. The ones that survive. And we're gonna see a few minor characters fade to be-- The structure of The Stormlight Archive is: one flashback sequence per book, and a focus on one of the Orders of Knights Radiant per book, and I've already announced who these all are, though I have secrets that pertain to them. Our next two books are Eshonai and Szeth. But, of course, Eshonai is dead. We're gonna see flashbacks from her viewpoint that inform our "now," but I haven't promised that these characters all live. Does that makes sense?
But our back five are Lift, when she's grown up. It'll be about ten years later. I haven't gotten the exact date yet.
Is she alive, or a grown-up ghost?
...If she survives! *laughter* It will be Lift, Renarin, Taln, Ash, and Jasnah. So, yes, your main characters-- some of them are main characters. People who aren't on that list will still-- some of them will have big chunks of the stories. Just like you will notice that there's a big chunk of Kaladin in Book 4, even though it's Eshonai's book. So, that will happen. But I'm not making any promises about who survives and who doesn't.
What I really also wanna do is, like-- The big epic fantasy series. I have an advantage over Robert Jordan in that I've read Robert Jordan. And I can see the structure of this, and say, "What can I do to create the structure of a big epic that will have a lot of the things I love about a big epic but avoid some of the potential pitfalls." And I feel that one of those is beginnings, middles, and ends are really hard the longer you go in a series. And if I bring it to five, and then I take a break. And those five tell a story. And then I certainly am gonna leave some things that we start up in the next one, and do the second sequence of five. It's just kind of how the structure of The Stormlight Archive works for me.
A given book, I usually plot as three novels. And I will do this outline of three novels, and this becomes one volume of The Stormlight Archive. Well, each of those novels has Act One, Act Two, Act Three. And then all of those combine into the thick ones that you get, and then five of those combine into an arc. And then the two books of five combine into their own arc. So, hopefully it'll all work out. When I first pitched this to my editor back in 2003, his response was, "Wow, you're ambitious!" And he was a little frightened when I gave him Stormlight. And then, in 2004, I pitched the whole 9-book Mistborn thing that is somehow now... 13. But, yeah, so. We'll see.
Assassin in White. He's still working for the bad guys, right? Because he doesn't have a spren attached to his sword? *pause* You don't know?
I know. "Bad guys" is an interesting definition in the cosmere. Right now... he is directly under the influence of the Skybreakers. Who were an Order of Knights Radiant.
Hey u/mistborn I have a couple questions about Magic: the gathering.
What colors/kind of deck do you play in magic?
What colors are the known shards?
What colors are the various orders of the knights Radiant?
And finally, have you ever thought of doing the story for Wizards Of The Coast on one of their mtg blocks?
Any combo-style deck I can draft--or esper if I'm constructed.
Ruin: Black. Odium: Red. Honor: White. Preservation: White. Cultivation: Green. Devotion: Green/red. Dominion: Black/White. Autonomy: It's complicated.
(Also, question 3 is way too large for me to commit to right now. And for 4, if the right opportunity came along and they were interested, I could see myself doing this.)
What about Endowment and Ambition?
Ambition is mono-black, and endowment is probably mono-green. Some of the blue shards are ones we haven't seen as much from yet.
On tour, I did a reading from what up until now was listed as "Mystery Project" on my website. If you missed the newsletter explanation, I've pulled the book I was going to release next year (The Apocalypse Guard) because it needs more work. Instead, I've turned my attention to something else—and after a furious bout of writing, I'm confident in where it's going. So it's time to announce Skyward.
Like Steelheart and its sequels, this is a kind of borderline YA/Adult project. In the US, it will be published by Delacorte Press (publisher of Steelheart) in the Young Adult section of bookstores, while in the UK it will be published by Gollancz (publisher of almost all my books) in my main line, shelved in the science fiction/fantasy section of bookstores.
I've mentioned Skyward before in summaries of stories I'm working on, but haven't said much about it. I started noodling with the ideas in 2012, I believe. (The year that the Write About Dragons recordings of my lectures happened, where I mentioned it briefly—but not by name.) The first outline thoughts are dated summer 2013. It's a book I've been wanting to write for a long time, and it finally came together this year.
It has its roots in some of the very first books I ever read as a young man getting into fantasy. Like many young readers, I was captured by books about dragons, specifically books about boys who find dragons and learn to fly them. These have been staples of the fantasy genre for some fifty years. For me, it was The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey and Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. For others, the "boy and his dragon" story that captured them was Eragon, or How to Train Your Dragon.
I've always loved this story archetype, but I've never written anything using it. This is in part because…well, it's a familiar story. Too familiar. I wasn't certain I could add anything new to it. So I left it alone, letting ideas simmer, until in 2012 something struck me. Could I mash this together with a flight school story like Top Gun or Ender's Game, and do something that wasn't "a boy and his dragon," but was instead "a girl and her starfighter"?
Skyward was born, much like Mistborn, with me taking two ideas and mashing them together to see where they went. And they went someplace incredible—I grew increasingly excited about the project, as I saw in it a chance to both play in a space I loved, and do some very interesting things with story and theme. It wasn't until this year that I got the personalities of the characters right, but I really got excited when I found a place for this in the lore of stories I'd been creating.
The official pitch is this: Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living among them, longs to be a pilot. When she discovers the wreckage of an ancient ship, she realizes this dream might be possible—assuming she can repair the ship, navigate flight school, and (perhaps most importantly) persuade the strange machine to help her. Because this ship, uniquely, appears to have a soul.
As I've played with Skyward over the years, I tried to pull it into the Cosmere, then found it didn't work there. However, it is in the continuity of something I've written before. Something that isn't the Cosmere, and isn't the Reckoners. And no, I won't say anything more for now.
The goal right now is to have Skyward done in time for a publication date of November 6, 2018. We'll see if I can meet that deadline! I'm optimistic. As always, you can follow along on the progress bar on my website. Look for a cover reveal and chance to pre-order soon!
Have we seen another Lightweaver, as of Words of Radiance?
Um... Yes. Depending on your definition. Straight-up Lightweaver? Like you could make the argument... the Order of Knights Radiant? That... that, no. But you have seen people Lightweaving. The skill.
The Reachers in the ship that leads Kaladin and the group... What kind of Order do they create?
That will be answered in the next book. You'll have pictures of all of the Radiant spren and their bonds, except the Bondsmiths, obviously.
The Stormlight Archive already has that feeling of an "epic" tale, not just in the size of the novels and the rich world building but the story too. Do you have any idea how long the book series might go on for?
Yes. I conceived The Stormlight Archive as a series dealing with ten characters, where each book took one of the characters and delved deeply into their past and their psychology. Granted, the other characters will appear, as Kaladin is a big part of Words of Radiance even though this volume could be described as Shallan's book. Since I have those ten characters, and there are ten orders of Knights Radiant, I built a ten-book series with two five-book arcs: five books and then a break, followed by another five books.
I want to ask you a question about Pattern. Could you speak to anything about where your idea for...
I wanted different spren to look drastically different. And, as I was building-- Like, I wanted a lot of the spren of a lot of the Orders of Knights Radiant to kind of have an internal, natural conflict. Like, that's one of the division lines between a spren that's not sapient, and spren that is. For instance, Windrunner, honorspren, right? Honor is about rigidity in a lot of ways, and Syl is the embodiment of a lot of the opposite of that. And Pattern, who is so interested in lies, is a mathematical fractal-- a mathematical equation. This sort of thing, like naming the inkspren Ivory is just-- I want that internal, natural contrast to be part of them. And Pattern, I really wanted a spren that wasn't just another ball of light. 'Cause Syl is basically a ball of light. And a lot of the others are basically balls of light. And I'm like, I need something that's different, I want something that looks different, that feels different. That's where I went.
What Order of Knights Radiant would you want to be in?
I would probably place myself in the Bondsmiths, would be my guess. But Bondsmiths are very hard to get into. There's a limited number of people who can be Bondsmiths, so yeah.
If a non-Windrunner Surgebinder (who had spoken all the Ideals of their Radiant Order) summoned Jezrien's Honorblade, what color eyes would they get? A blend? Different colors for each eye?
:) I'm going to RAFO eye color questions for the moment. We'll actually be dealing with some of these in the books. Maybe not the specific ones you ask, but the concepts in general.
After what Adolin does at the end [of Words of Radiance] are there still Radiant orders that would take him?
Yes, there would be. In fact, yes. Definitely that's possible. I'm not going to say that he becomes one, but yeah.
So like the Skybreakers or Dustbringers or...?
The Skybreakers might have trouble because it wasn't legal. But there are others who would be like "oh that was totally the right thing to do."
Can the forms of power of the listeners be treated as anti-equivalents of the Orders of the Knights Radiant? Could we consider Stormforms to be anti-Windrunners?
You could consider it that way, but there is not a one-to-one analogue.
Because it seemed like there are ten voidforms, and their abilities are kind of anti-Surges...
Yes, yes, there is definitely something there, but again I say, it's not a one-to-one correlation. They are not going to be exactly opposite.
How would food production be like without soulcasters? Has Alethkar, for example, grown far beyond what it could (population-wise) without them?
The food question is a great one. As far as the Alethi go, it's more a matter of concentration than raw food production. Shipping is SLOW in Alethkar. It's long, which makes getting between north and south difficult, and the rivers aren't as useful as they are on (say) Earth.
The warcamps, for example, would starve themselves out short order without soulcasters. Supply lines are just not an Alethi strength. Kholinar, while not as big as Scadrian population centers, is also large enough that it depends on soulcasters for some of its food. It could survive without them, though, with northern Alethi food production.
Really, warfare is where they've learned to extend themselves, and depend on the soulcasters. Remember, gemstones in them DO break, so you do still need a ready supply of emeralds. The larger, the better.
Very interesting on the food logistics of Alethkar - I never did quite imagine Kholinar was smaller than say, Elendel, but the technological progress there explains it.
Given how slow food transportation is, I would presume fresh food is a no-go. Are spices and preserved food selling well in Roshar, then? As for population centers, is Kholinar the largest around, or are other places a lot larger?
There's a reason that Herdazian food (which makes soulcast meat taste good) is popular these days.
Azimir is larger in population than Kholinar. Kholinar is big by Rosharan standards, but far smaller than an Earth population center (like London) at a comparable time. The warcamps had it beat by a lot--depending on how you view the warcamps. (As one city, or ten small ones.)
Does that just mean Herdazian food is incredibly spice-heavy, then? Also, why is Soulcast food bland? Is it due to the nature of the object (changing food to food makes it tastier than stone to food), or just because the Soulcaster lacks practice, like Jasnah did with strawberry jam?
Flavorful, rather than spicy. Most western food is already spicy. The Herdazians offer something a little different, and are pretty good with soulcast meat. The portability is also a bit of a revolution.
Soulcasting anything other than the basic Essence requires some innate knowledge and practice. People could learn to soulcast better food, but it would have to be a Radiant with control over the process. The soulcaster fabrials are far more rigid in what they can create.
As for soulcasting - now that is... interesting. So are Surgebinding fabrials more rigid in general? And what of an Honorblade when a non-Herald uses it?
A soulcaster is built to do a certain thing, and can do that certain thing well, but without as much flexibility. It is the difference between having a computer output a picture of a circle--following some inputs such as size and some changes to shape--and having an artist who can draw what you want.
What are the other books in The Stormlight Archive going to be about?
Well each one is going to cover a flashback sequence for one of the characters and each one will focus on a different order of the Knights Radiant. And that's not always the same, like the flashbacks for the first one were Kaladin and it was also Windrunners, but we won't always have them be the exact same.
Is there a reason, with 16 being such an important number, that there are only 10 orders of Radiants
That is relevant.
Am I going to have to read and find out?
Let's just say 10 is a number that is relevant to Roshar and its inhabitants.
And what's the significance of the number 10?
The significance is that it is very significant.
Will we find out by reading it?
Maybe, that's why you're getting a RAFO. Potentially.
You've mentioned that other books in the Stormlight Archive will have different characters as their focus, is this linked to the 10 orders of the Knights Radiant? Or is this just coincidence?
It is linked. I may not be able to completely link it, but I'm going to try. The first book's symbol (on the front) is the symbol of the Windrunners.
I'm assuming there's going be be ten opposite orders to the Knights Radiant? Yes? No?
RAFO! That's big ol' RAFO!
Lopen. Is he a squire, or does he actually have a spren?
He’s a squire. You’ll find out a lot more about what the squires are in the upcoming book. For most orders, squire were knights radiant potentially in training, so you can see what happens in the next book.
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.
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.
Would a Windrunner's Investiture be able to be used in space?
Would a Windrunner's Investiture be able to be used in space? In fact, yes. Windrunners would be particularly handy in space because they can control pressure as well as move around and things. So if you were going to pick an order of Knight Radiant, and you wanted to go be an astronaut, Windrunner would be the best choice.
(written in book: Is there a radiant order that would accept Allomancer Jak?)
(written in book: It would depend on the spren, but possibly. There are a few that would have liked him once...)
There’s some portent in that answer.
So I've noticed a pattern in the way that the Radiants learn their surges. They seem to learn their anti-clockwise surge before their clockwise surge?
They do.
Excellent, everyone thought I was a crazy person!
They do tend to-- Now, I'm gonna give you some behind the sausage stuff on that. That is partially for writing expediency reasons.
How do you mean?
I designed that partially because I didn't want to overwhelm people with too many magic systems at once so I came up with a little bit of a pattern so that I could have a little bit of an in-world reason why we were slowing that down. It's not a hard fast rule, it's something that I've kept to in order to not overwhelm readers so it's more of form following function than the other way around.
If Hoid could have picked to join any order of the Knights Radiant, regardless of the Oaths he had to swear, just the powers, would he have picked Lightweaver?
He would have.
Tell me more!
Lightweaving matches him very well, he's quite familiar with it and experienced with it. He's very good at using it and he likes it.
It's the fulfillment of a long, long quest of his to finally get full access to Lightweaving.
Even though he had some sort of Lightweaving?
He did have some sort of, yes. He's a very very happy Hoid.
I saw an interview of you talking about Way of Kings before it came out/before I read it. In the interview you mentioned the ten knights and each book will focus/be about one of the knights. After reading book one I can honestly say, I have no idea which Knight was supposed to be in book one. Is this by design? Or did I miss the point?
I'm not sure what the question means. Do you mean the Heralds? Or the ten orders of the Knights Radiant? The symbol stamped into the front of the first hardcover represents the Windrunners because of Kaladin's awakening as a Windrunner. Also because of Szeth, but mostly because of Kaladin.
There are different kinds of spren that bond with people and it appears they’re based on a concept. Is it possible to have a concept which would make a Nahel bond that gives two Surges that don’t align to one of the Radiant orders?
Um, uh...this is a theoretical possibility that has not happened yet.
The glyphs on the cover of the [US hardcover Stormlight] books do represent the Order of the Knights Radiant that is being investigated in that book, as is the color of the book. If you look, it represents the color [of the] them in their, sort of, periodic table of Surgebindings in the first book's front endpages.
You were the illustrator for Shallan's sketches of Shardblades, right? If so, huge props for Sunraiser - it's so interesting that you chose such an iconic and historically accurate design, yet still managed to ornament it in a believable Shardblade style. I'd definitely buy one for HEMA if replicas existed, which is something I wouldn't say for most fantasy swords.
For those of us who know what that style was used for, it has some odd implications - like the fact that someone at some point was halfswording with a Shardblade, and seeing fantasy authors acknowledge halfswording always makes me geek out! Was this design a specific order from Brandon or were you just tasked with making a more knightly sword for the king and did your own research?
So, there's a few different things going on here.
One is that, way early into the project, I did a bunch of silhouette studies for Brandon so that we could zero in on just how nutty he wanted Blades to be. From those studies he's picked out a few that we referred to when drawing the Blades in Oathbringer, and one of those in particular became Sunraiser.
He did specify that he wanted Sunraiser to be simple and traditional and purposefully in contrast with other Blades. The long ricasso wasn't a call for half-swording in particular, but that doesn't preclude the use of that technique, and it's likely that the original spren that became Sunraiser was probably used by a Radiant with some experience in wielding oversized two-handed blades.
From a Watsonian perspective, it's worth remembering that Shardblades are impractical interpretations of practical tools. Spren made themselves into what they thought swords were, but because of their nature the result became more about the spirit or the concept of a sword than about the requirements of forgery or physics or the practical needs of sticking pointy bits into other people.
Are the glyphs on The Way of Kings front sheet the Alethi glyphs for the Radiant orders and the Surges? If so, can you tell us the name (i.e. the pronunciation) of the Windrunners glyph? Or, if you don't have this one, maybe another one?
Yes. I'll see if we can get all of the pronunciations into the appendix of the third book.
I wanted to ask about the process of creating in world symbology, specifically the Allomantic/Feruchemical/Hemalurgical symbols in Mistborn and the Radiant Orders in Stormlight.
Edit 1: I see you've answered some of these already. I know you just recently showed us the Hemalurgy. Symbols, so insight into that would be oh so cool.
Hemalurgy stole their symbols from Allomancy. But in the early books, we go back in time with the symbols. First showing Allomantic symbols, then showing in Well of Ascension the symbols as they were used maybe in Terris at some point, and then we see the proto-symbols from before the Lord Ruler, and at that point, they look a lot more organic. Over time they morphed to what we see now. From the symbols in Well of Ascension, the Feruchemical symbols developed separately, but still look related to Allomantic symbols due to their similar roots. The more angular style is due to the influence of the Terris people on their development. In my mind, their visual aesthetic is punctuated with hard angles and triangles.
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.
What order [of Knight Radiant] did Oathbringer come from?
I'll RAFO that.
Spensa comes across as overconfident and bombastic at times, while her AI sidekick, M-Bot, is both comic and tragic. What else can you tell us about developing characters?
They really play off one another. With M-Bot, I needed both a friend and a foil for Spensa, since there's a lot of conversation between them. I also needed an outside perspective. Spensa's culture has problems. Humankind crashed on this planet decades ago, and has been subject to these alien invasions and air raids for so long, that their entire society is built around the machine of war to protect themselves. The technology and temperament revolve around getting pilots into the air at all costs, and it’s skewed everything as a result. I needed an outside voice to ask questions and raise concerns, even if it's through humor.
Because Spensa is such an extreme character, one of the challenges was to depict that a person who's spent most of her life alone, hunting rats, while imagining herself to be a great warrior, is going to have a warped perspective on what it means to be a fighter pilot, weirder than the rest of the society might.
In a way, she's a stand-in for someone like me, who enjoys larger-than-life action movies but has never experienced real violence. She’s like the person in the seat with the popcorn, who’s confronted by the reality and discovers it’s not what she imagined.
At first [Skyward] was supposed to be in the cosmere. Were there any reasons you pulled it out of it besides not wanting to deal with spacefaring era of Cosmere yet?
Where was the planet supposed to be in the cosmere? Would it have had a Shard or would it have been a minor Shardworld?
When Spensa started life in my brain, she was late cosmere pilot character, from around Era Four. When I started to work on this as my next YA project, I decided I wanted to use a certain technological aspect from a story I'd previously worked on--something I touched on in a novella, but which was still very interesting to me all these years later. But it was something that did not work with cosmere technology, so it was a natural fit to port Spensa over to this new story.
It wouldn't have been planetary-based if it had been in the cosmere. Mostly, it was Spensa as a character. Once the story started transforming into a girl and her spaceship, the cosmere ties got severed quickly.
So far all the spren that have bonded to humans appear to be emotion-based as opposed to nature-based. Is that true for all the Knights Radiant?
Well it depends. For instance: how would you define Wyndle?
I struggled with that one.
Uh hm. So I would say that you are on the right track, that there is a definite inclination that direction.
Towards Honor?
Yes. There is.
Is there other surges then, that are more Cultivation-exclusive or other Knights Radiant that are...?
We'll RAFO that, but the original Knights Radiant are more focused on Honor and his spren.
You've confirmed that several Heralds have appeared or been mentioned in the modern (non-prelude, non-vision) parts of The Way of Kings. Have any members of the Knights Radiant (the one from the days of Urithiru, not near-Radiants like Kaladin) appeared in the modern parts of The Way of Kings? And if you have to RAFO me, could you give me a hint about the Heralds?
I can answer that--no, no Radiants from those days have appeared on screen in [The Way of Kings].
What would be Spensa's favorite food?
Her diet doesn't have a ton of variety, but I'd say she would pick anything that isn't algae paste or rat meat.
Obviously Spensa would love anything that isn't what she normally eats. However, if Spensa could afford food, what would be her favorite?
I think she'd SAY she wanted "warrior's food." She'd imagine that as big hunks of meat. In reality, most of what we find delicious, she would find so overly-spiced that she'd never be able to stand it. I think you'd find her finding simple, but flavorful, foods as her favorite. Rice and beans. Mashed potatoes. Something that doesn't have a lot of spice, but still has flavor. Crepes might completely overwhelm her.
Why are there so many Kholins that are Radiants? Is there a story reason or...
There is a story reason, kind of. So the Kholin family is in Alethkar, which was the hereditary-- one of the homes of the Knights Radiant. It's still kind of in the forefront of the-- how shall we say-- the collective unconscious and things like this. Plus there's--
And then they are on the forefront of that.
Yes. I mean-- Yeah. And so the spren, some of them are naturally looking for where a lot of Radiants used to be. So it's just a higher concentration of spren around the area, if that makes sense?
