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Oathbringer Speculation: Soulcasters

We know that people who consistently use soulcasters over a long period of time are...changed. My theory is that they are being slowly turned into spren and sucked into Shadesmar and further that this is the source of Syl’s comment about how the power coalesces slowly  and parts become sentient and a spren is born.

First off, let’s visit our friend Kaza in Interlude 4. We learn that she is slowly turning to smoke, but it seems to hold together well enough that she can wear a glove over her smoke fingers and still use her hand. She is forgetting the “ordinary passions of human life” and increasingly not needing to eat or drink. The she says that “I have begun to see the dark sky and the second sun, the creatures that lurk, hidden, around the cities of men.” It is clear that she is starting to see into Shadesmar and it isn’t too much of a stretch that in Shadesmar there might start also being evidence of her. The Aimian cook notes that she is “barely human anymore.” At the end of the interlude she chooses to “go with the smoke,” but the other times that she almost goes it sounds like she almost goes all the way into shadesmar and doesn’t come back, not that she almost turns into smoke in the physical realm and drifts off. Later in Celebrant (chapter 102) Kaladin finds himself in a tent with a “single bewildered spren made of smoke,” confirming that smoke spren are a thing.

In chapter 81 Kaladin meets a grain soulcaster and notes that “The woman had an inhuman look to her; she seemed to be growing vines under her skin, and they peeked out around her eyes, growing from the corners and spreading down her face like runners of ivy.” Then in Celebrant we meet spren that “were made entirely of vines, though they had crystal hands and wore human clothing.”

In chapter 105, we meet a soulcaster that makes stone and learn that his “skin beneath [his cloak] was colored like granite, cracked and chipped, and seemed to glow from within.”   In Celebrant there “were other spren with skin like cracked stone, molten light shining from within.”

We don’t have a description of the Azish soulcaster that makes bronze, but it seems like a good bet that their description would match that of the Reachers, who “looked like humans with strange bronze skin—metallic, as if they were living statues.”

In Chapter 35 of Words of Radiance we meet a soulcaster that doesn’t quite fit any of the descriptions of spren that we meet in Celebrant, though she could potentially be in an earlier stage of the granite type: “Prolonged use of the Soulcaster had transformed the eyes so that they sparkled like gemstones themselves. The woman’s skin had hardened to something like stone, smooth, with fine cracks. It was as if the person were a living statue.”

We also hear about Honor and then the Stormfather making Honorspren, so soulcasters wouldn’t be the only way that sentient spren are formed, but I’m fairly convinced that it is at least one way that spren are born. 

For reference and as a side note, in Celebrant they meet Cryptics, Honorspren, Reachers (bronze), Cultivationspren (vines), Inkspren, the ones whose skin turns to ash, the glowing granite ones, the ones made of smoke and possibly also ones made of fog/mist, though I’m not completely convinced those aren’t the same as smoke. If the fog/mist ones are different from the smoke ones, then this gives us 9 different types of sentient spren to correspond to the 9 non-bondsmith orders of the Knights Radiant. 

Inspired by a conversation with Ashiok in the chat :-)

Ok.  Completely new post because the other one keeps reverting to the cut off version.  This is my interpretation of Shallan's Lullaby from Words of Radiance. So far as I am aware the tune doesn't belong to anything else.

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Nangong Jingnu/Qiyan Agula- Clear and Muddy Loss of Love/Jing Wei Qing Shang by Please Don't Laugh/Qing Jun Mo Xiao

Dr. Arada/Overse- The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Gideon Nav- The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir

Renarin Kholin/Rlain- The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson

So I saw @ultimateinferno theorizing about this, and I want spoilers hidden under a cut on my blog, so I’m making a new post rather than reblogging to add to his excellent theory/meta. There are *major Rhythm of War spoilers* mixed with theorizing under the cut.

Ultimateinferno makes a good argument that Lift is the one who is eventually going to deal with Taravangian!Odium. This is *perfect*.

Lift’s “I don’t want to ever change.” You know what? If she kills Taravangian she’s going to get the opportunity to absorb Odium and ascend. Either her boon is going to give her the strength to resist taking the power so that she can deal with it some other way (maybe she could team up with Rysn??? I wonder what kind of affect shattering Odium would have...) OR she *will* take the power, but because of Cultivation’s boon it won’t affect her ability to think clearly.    

Heh, although, Lift, as she is right now, but with the power of a shard might be a whole different kind of problem. As Yanagawn points out, “She often does what she isn’t supposed to.”

From Words of Radiance, Ch. 41.

Spy Girls

Shallan:  Daughter of rural minor noble family who goes on a journey and ends up in the court of the current political center of her world where she is slightly overwhelmed by everything and is trying to figure out how to save her family.  In the process, she discovers a plot of some sort in the underworld of the society and create and alter-ego to infiltrate it.

Vin: Daughter of the underworld who finds herself in a new crew where the rules aren't quite what they used to be and she has to adapt as they plot to completely overthrow society. As part of this, she creates an alter-ego in which she infiltrates the court as a daughter of a rural minor noble family who is here to further her family's interests.  

These girls are like two sides of the same fantastic coin and there are two things I really want to read:

1) Shallan and Vin curled up with coffee or tea or something trading infiltration stories and tips with Pattern providing commentary.

2) A scenario where these two are moving in the same court and are initially on opposite sides and they start getting suspicious of each other and eventually one confronts the other (I can't decide which way).  After talking they discover that there is more going on than either realized and essentially end up forming their own faction.

I'm slightly late, but here you go!  Have a little story :-)

Adolin's first reaction was to stare blankly at her. After what felt like ages, he shook himself and asked slowly, “I...don't think I heard you right...could you say that again?”

Shallan rolled her eyes, “I want to find a way to actually watch and document the highstorms.”

He took a deep breath. “Ok. That's what I thought you said... Why?! Wasn't being stuck out in one in the chasms enough?”

She laughed, “Nope – it just made me realize how much we don't know.”

"Of course it did." Adolin groaned. “If I don't help you with this, you're just going to find a way on your own, aren't you?” He sighed. “Fine. At least this way I'll know what's going on. Knowing you, you already have at least half of a plan. Let's hear it.”

OMH THAT IS ABSOLUTELY STORMING ADORABLE!!!!! You’re amazing :D

“anything about axehounds or chulls or skyeels or other stormlight critters”

For kalynaanne! Here’s an axehound pup taking a nap in the afternoon sun. :D

Rithmatics: Part 6, 9 Point Conics and Triangle Centers

Note: From this point on we are drifting farther and farther from what we know from the book. The math is all solid, but its application to Rithmatics is much more speculative.

In rithmatics, the 9-point circle plays an important role in constructing lines of warding and identifying bind points.  We also know that there exist elliptical lines of warding and that they "only have two bind points."  Now, in math we are frequently told things like "You can't take a square root of a negative number", which are true in the given system (real numbers) but not true in general.  The construction for the 9-point circle, as described in the book, doesn't work for ellipses.  However, there is a generalized 9-point conic construction.  To understand it, we need to start with a little bit of terminology.

A complete quadrangle is a collection of 4 points and the 6 lines that can be formed from them.  For our purposes, we will be concerned with complete quadrangles formed from the vertices of the triangle and a point inside the triangle.  The 6 lines are then the sides of the triangles and the three lines connecting the center point to the vertices.

The diagonal points of a complete quadrangle are the three intersection points formed by extending opposite sides of the quadrangle.  If we have a triangle ABC with center P, then the intersection of AB with PC is a  diagonal point.

If you take the midpoints of the 6 sides of a complete quadrangle and the 3 diagonal points of that quadrangle, these 9 points will always lie on a conic. This conic is the 9-point conic associated with the complete quadrangle.

Note that if we choose our point in the center of the triangle to be the point where the altitudes meet (known as the orthocenter), then this construction is exactly what we have been doing to create 9-point circles.

There are four classical and easily constructable triangle centers - the orthocenter, circumcenter, centroid, and the incenter.  There are over 5000 other possible notions of the center of a triangle, but most of them cannot be easily geometrically constructed and they get increasingly complicated. 

Let's look at each of these 4 triangle centers and the conic they produce for a particular triangle. We will use a 40-60-80 triangle in each case for illustration purposes, but the results will be very similar for any acute triangle with 3 distinct angles.

Orthocenter: We already know about the orthocenter (that is what most of this series has been focused on so far).  For reference, here is what the 9-point circle for this triangle looks like:

Circumcenter: The circumcenter of a triangle is found by finding the midpoint of each side of the triangle and drawing in the perpendicular bisectors.  The points where the perpendicular bisectors meet is the circumcenter.  Note: This point is also the center of the circle that can be circumscribed around the triangle.

Unlike with the orthocenter, the lines we use to construct the circumcenter (the dashed lines in the diagram) are not part of the complete quadrangle, so we have to finish the quadrangle after we have identified the circumcenter.  The resulting conic is an ellipse.

Centroid: The centroid of a triangle is formed by finding the midpoint of each side of the triangle and connecting it to the opposite vertex.  The intersection of these median lines is the centroid.

The lines used to construct the centroid are part of the complete quadrangle, but we have the interesting situation where the centers of each side are also the diagonal points of the complete quadrangle.  This means that, regardless of the triangle used, we will only ever have 6 distinct points.  The resulting conic is an ellipse that is tangent to all three sides of the triangle.

Incenter: The incenter of a triangle is the intersection of the  angle bisectors of the triangle.  

Note that the lines used to construct the incenter of the triangle are also the additional lines of the complete quadrangle.  In addition, as long as the angles of the original triangle are distinct, the 9 points in the construction will all be distinct.  The resulting conic is an ellipse.

In Summary:  There are lots of ways that we could potentially construct a 9-point ellipse from a triangle.  Of these options, I would guess that the construction using the  incenter of the triangle is the most likely to produce valid rithmatic structures.  I lean this way because, as with the orthocenter, constructing the incenter also constructs the complete quadrangle and its diagonal points.  Furthermore, the 9 points of the construction will all be distinct (except in special cases). As such, we will explore 9-point ellipses constructed with the incenter more thoroughly in the next post.