Timewaster's Guide Archive

Assuming you're good enough with soulcasting organic compounds... could you just make the horse?

Navani's map of the Battle of the Tower sort of foreshadows the chapter immediately following.
"Hey... what's that third arrow there?  The one labeled Parshendi Army that's cutting right through Dalinar's Army..."

Could also explain why other cultures (Shin, Horneaters) do not value warriors as much as other, less-tainted Callings.

If this is Alethi script there is a question of why Shallan's notebooks had normal english writing unless it's meant to be two different styles of writing that they use.

Probably the same reason all the Nazis  in WWII movies speak English as well -- so that the audience can understand. 
Shallan's pages are directly relevant to the plot, so they need to be readily understandable. There are also a couple pages by Navani in plain English.  The Shattered Plains battle map comes to mind.  Again, these are directly related to the story.
The Alethi script pages seem like much more of an Easter egg for the hardcore fans, just like the snippet of Dula language in that Interlude chapter.

Not to mention that the English language, especially American English, is (as the singer put it) ka-RAAAYY-zeeee... it's loaded with synonymic idiosyncrasies and pronunciation/definition tricks that you generally only pick up in context.

Exactly.  Even native English speakers have trouble keeping all the rules straight.  I mean, you hear ordinary words like ghoti and ghoughpteighbteau spoken all the time, but they always get written down as something convoluted like fish and potato instead. (This is part of a nefarious Librarian scheme, I'm fairly certain.)

Oh, of course!  This makes much more sense.


I had overlooked two classes of grapheme: symbol-hash and symbol-double-hash.  Incorporating them into the key makes it much more systematic and eliminates all the clunky letter replacement rules.  (Though in my defense, the symbol-hash combinations do closely resemble a consonant-vowel sequence.)

Now that we know from the Navani translation page that spren are trapped in Soulcasters, what if the reason that Shallan attracted the transforming spren was because she freed it/them from the Soulcaster by accidentally breaking it?

The line-head spren have made a couple other appearances as well.
One of the death visions references a figure with a "head of lines", and I think there was also a passing mention of Elhokar  seeing squiggle-heads in the mirror -- possibly the cause of his assassination paranoia.  It's quite possible Gavilar saw them too -- right around when he started acting strangely.

I suspect that they're a "natural phenomena" related to Shadesmar and the transactions involved with Soulcasting.

As far as the Shardblade -- There are a few examples of Shardbearers commanding their Blades to remain intact when they set them down.  This is generally not such a great thing do do because it's so risky -- anyone could just pick it up and stab you with it (like, for instance... a daughter who you have just driven to the brink of murderous rage?).

I will be monitoring this thread for the appearance of spren-rights spren. 

...
The existence of such "meta-spren", could revolutionize the science of fabrial creation.  (Muahahaha.)