I Finally Got Around To Reading Sanderson's Shadows For Silence In The Forests Of Hell (I've Had The

Shallan's Journey: Chapter 4, In Which Pattern Gets to Play

This morning started as the last few had, with Shallan meeting the others for breakfast and then returning to the library to study English with the girls while Molly tried to wrangle the boys into helping her clean the house. Today, however, there was something going on that called Molly out of the house and left the kids to their own devices. Sirius was still home, of course, but he spent most of his time upstairs moping with Buckbeak and when he did come out was rather more likely to cause mischief than to be a responsible adult. As the oldest Weasleys left in the house, Fred and George had decided this meant they had free rein to do as their hearts desired. Naturally, this meant that Ginny had bright green hair and Hermione's pens were dancing away from her every time she reached for one. A few minutes ago, Hermione had finally snapped and begun laying into the twins about how irresponsible they were being and trying to insist that they set everything to rights and then leave them alone. Ginny had joined in and now there was a full scale argument making it difficult for Shallan to think. She narrowed her eyes as she contemplated the best way to handle this.

Shallan had been reluctant to use any of the moderate supply of stormlight she had brought with her in case she ended up really needing it later, but she decided that it probably wouldn't hurt anything to use a small bit of it. She flipped to a clean page of her notebook and drew out a fierce image of Molly shaking her finger along with a few other quick sketches that would allow the image to move. “Pattern,” she whispered, “would you like to startle them?” Pattern buzzed excitedly in response, but Shallan quickly shushed him. “We are going to sneak out into the hall where I'm going to attach an image of their mother to you and then...” she continued to whisper instructions as they sneaked around the argument and out into the hall. She infused Pattern with stormlight and triggered the illusion before quickly slipping back into the room to watch the results.

She had just gotten back to the table when Molly's voice boomed from the door, “Fred! George! What is the meaning of this?! I told you to leave the girls alone!”

Everyone immediately froze and looked toward the door while Fred and George jumped away from the others, “Mum!” “We didn't know” “you were” “already back!” “Of course” “we were” “being nice” “to the girls” “anyway, but...” they trailed off in confusion as the image of their mother flickered out and died and they noticed Shallan trying and failing to hide her snickering.

Ginny was the first to figure out what must have happened, “Whoa! You can do wandless magic? That was a really impressive illusion! How did you do it? What else can you do?!”

Shallan shrugged. She was getting much better at understanding English, but was still shaky when it came that fast and still not particularly confident speaking it herself. “It is... not your magic... Ummm...” she pulled out the sphere she had already pulled some of the stormlight from. “I am a...” she searched briefly for an appropriate English word and gave up “lightweaver, so I use these,” she held up the sphere, “to... to make things.”

Hermione began bouncing on her toes, “Oh! But that's fascinating! May I see it?” She held out her hand in question. Shallan handed the sphere to her and Hermione examined it carefully. “Oh wow. That looks like an emerald! And it glows... Can you show us how you do it?”

Shallan nodded, “Sure,” as she took the sphere back, “um, what should I make?”

Ginny grinned at her, “Can you show us your boyfriend?”

Shallan gave her a slightly sad smile and turned to her notebook to draw out the sketch of Adolin that she would need for the illusion. She breathed more of the stormlight in from the sphere so that she was just slightly glowing and breathed it out as she created an illusion of Adolin standing there grinning at them in his impeccable Kholin blue uniform. Storms. She had been so caught up in dealing with everything that, even when telling the girls about people from Roshar, she hadn't realized how much she missed him. Seeing her illusion standing there now though... It looked just like him, of course, except that the storming man never stood that still...

She sighed and buried her head in her arms on the table as she wondered what Adolin and Jasnah and the all of the others were doing. She knew Jasnah wouldn't give up on her, but, storms, she didn't know where she was, how did Jasnah have any chance? A gentle touch on her shoulder pulled her back and she looked up to see that Ginny had slid into the seat next to her and was now giving her a concerned look. Shallan didn't have the English to fully explain, so she just shrugged as she whispered, “I miss them.” She let Ginny pull her into a hug as she put herself back together. It wasn't easy, but then nothing in her life ever seemed to be.

The others looked on somewhat helplessly as Ginny comforted Shallan. Hermione desperately cast about for a distraction. She wasn't good at these things like Ginny was, but she did know that her own usual response to being upset was to throw herself into a project. From her interactions with Shallan over the last few days, she figured there was a good chance that Shallan was the same way. Her eyes flew around the room for inspiration and finally lit on the wand that Fred was holding loosely at his side. “Oh! Of course!” She blushed as everyone immediately turned to look at her, “Well, it just occurred to me that we know Shallan has something like magical abilities, but we haven't done anything to test whether she can use our magic.” She looked beseechingly up at Fred, “Could Shallan borrow your wand for a minute, just so we can see if she can use it?”

Ginny rolled her eyes at Hermione,“Really? You think this is what we should be doing right now?” In the mean time, Pattern had buzzed over to Shallan and explained what Hermione was suggesting. Shallan gave Ginny a small smile, “It's ok, I want to know too,” and then looked eagerly over to Hermione. This was good. As long as she didn't think about home she would be fine. Pattern would probably fuss at her later for having too many lies, but it wasn't like there was anything productive she could do.

Fred shrugged curiously and handed Shallan his wand, “Just be careful with with.” Shallan nodded seriously as she reached to accept it, “I will.” When her hand closed around the handle, her eyes widened and she stared down at the wand. She swore she could almost feel it vibrating. “Pattern, what is this thing? It looks like a fancy stick, but...”

“Mmmm, it says it is a wand.”

“Well, yes, that is what they told us, but what is it?”

Pattern seemed to shrug. Shallan could never quite figure out how his twisting mass of lines mimicked human gestures, but he managed it some how. “It says it is a wand.”

Shallan rolled her eyes. Sticks, even fancy, magical sticks, were hopeless. She looked back up at her new friends. “Sorry. I was...distracted.”

Hermione smiled, “That's ok. Do you feel anything from the wand?” Shallan pursed her lips, “Yes, but I don't have the words...”

“Ok, well, let's try something. Your magic system seems to involve light, so let's start there.” Hermione grabbed a pencil, “You move the wand like this and say 'lumos' and the tip of the wand should light up.”

Shallan tried unsuccessfully. She gave a slight sigh. There was no promise this was going to work, and even if it did, she shouldn't have been expecting it to work on the first try. George pulled out his own wand and stepped over to her. “First off you should be holding the wand like this,” he held his wand out in front of him so that she could see and imitate. “Then you move it like this.” He demonstrated the motion and the encouraged her to do it with him, “You don't want to whip the wand around too fast, but you do want a nice smooth motion.” They practiced the motion a couple of times before George was satisfied. “Now, when you get to this point in the motion, you say 'lumos'”. George demonstrated and the tip of his wand lit up. Shallan concentrated as she tried again and, to her delight, the wand tip actually lit this time! Interestingly, casting the spell almost felt like pushing stormlight into something...

She grinned before narrowing her eyes briefly at the wand in contemplation and then laying it carefully on the table. She grabbed her sketchbook and drew out a quick sketch of an axehound. She picked the wand, still lit, back up and, imagining that the light on the end of the wand was stormlight, pushed it out into an illusion of an axehound.

Shallan's whoop of victory was drowned out by Ginny's shriek. Even though she knew on some level that it was just an illusion, she leapt backwards and her voice trembled slightly as she squeeked out, “What is that thing?! It looks like something Hagrid would love...” The twins examined the new image excitedly and Hermione looked it over cautiously. Shallan grinned at them, “It's just an axehound. My brother,” her voice caught slightly, but she pushed it away and kept going, “my brother used to raise them. We keep them as pets back home.”

Having recovered from sudden appearance of the strange creature, Hermione looked back up at Shallan with eyes shining in excitement, “Regardless of what it is, you made it with Fred's wand instead of one of your glowing marbles! We have to get you a wand!”

At this point Ron wandered into the room, “What is all the screaming about?” Ginny gave her brother an unreadable look and pointed at the axehound in the corner. “Oh bloody hell!” He scrambled back towards the door. “That thing has way too many legs! Did Hagrid stop by?”

Ginny smirked at him. Her brother's reaction helped her get past her own, “Nope. Shallan used Fred's wand to create it. It is apparently like a dog where she comes from.”

Ron shook his head. “No way anyone would keep something like that as a pet.”

Ginny rolled her eyes, “I know we wouldn't, but if you grew up with them they would seem normal.”

“If that thing is normal, her world must be completely creepy.”

“Ron! Shallan is right here! If you can't be nice you can just bugger off again.”

Ron threw his hands up in the air and grumbled as he stormed off, “The crazy alien girl shows up with creepy creatures and suddenly she is all anyone cares about....”

Ginny shook her head as she turned back to Shallan. “I'm sorry about my brother. He isn't good at accepting new things.” Shallan nodded with a sigh. “I understand. I also have several brothers and, umm.. they are not always exactly...” she trailed off. She did not want to try to explain her family.

Hermione cut in, “Let's go find Sirius. Maybe he will know how we can get Shallan her own wand.” She led them farther up the house than Shallan had yet been. “You've met Sirius at dinner a few times, but he tends to keep to himself. I don't think he's very happy here.”

As they entered the room, Shallan's eyes were immediately drawn to the large creature in the room. Hermione had immediately turned to talk to Sirius, but Ginny caught Shallan's arm before she could rush over to it. “Whoa, Shallan. Buckbeak is friendly, but you have to meet him properly. Like this.”

She walked slowly until she was in Buckbeak's direct line of sight and then bowed. Buckbeak blinked at her and returned the bow, so she stepped in to stroke his neck.

While Shallan was watching this, Pattern buzzed up beside her “Is that a horse chicken?”

“I don't know anymore than you do, but it certainly looks like it. Storms. And they thought my axehound was strange...” Ginny gestured for Shallan to come closer and bow. It took a little longer this time for Buckbeak to respond, but he eventually did and Shallan stepped closer to join Ginny in stroking his neck. “Ginny, what kind of creature is Buckbeak?” Ginny looked at her slightly surprised, but then shook her head, “I guess you wouldn't know, would you... Buckbeak is a hippogriff.”

Shallan frowned as she examined him. “He can't be happy in this room. Does he even have space to stretch his wings?” Ginny sighed. “I think so? The reason he is here is complicated.” Shallan was distracted from her thoughts by the sound of her name.

“Hey, Shallan!” Hermione called. Shallan promised Buckbeak she would be back later, he was a fascinating creature, and walked over to Hermione and Sirius. “Can you show Sirius your axehound?”

She still had Fred's wand so she nodded as she carefully lit it with Lumos and then pushed the light from the wand into the image. Behind her she heard Buckbeak snort and Ginny calm him.

Sirius raised his eyebrows. “That's a mighty unusual way to use magic.”

Shallan shrugged. “It works.”

“Ah, that it does.”

Hermione cut in impatiently, “Do you see why we need to get her a wand? It's silly for her not to have one when she is capable of that!”

Shallan looked at them, “How would I get one?”

Sirius frowned at her, “That's the question, isn't it. I have more money than I know what to do with, so that's not a problem, but people usually get a wand by going to Ollivander's, and I'm not sure how we are going to get you to Diagon Alley. I'd take you, but Dumbledore won't let me leave the house.”

“Why not?”

“I was accused of a crime I didn't commit. You see...” he proceeded to explain the mess his life had been since the decision to make Peter the real secret keeper. At the end of his story he shook his head “I don't know why I'm telling you all of this. It can't be very interesting.”

Pattern buzzed appreciatively “Mmmm... so many layers of lies...I like this one...He would fit with your guards back on Roshar.” Shallan laughed helplessly at Pattern's comment. “He would, wouldn't he...Oh why do I keep finding myself in this kind of position...” She looked back over to Sirius. “I, ah, might be able to help with a disguise that would let you go out without being caught.”

Sirius's eyes lit up at the idea of being able to escape the house, but Hermione cautiously chimed in, “We'll have to make sure it holds long enough and isn't easily dispelled.”

Sirius wilted when Shallan nodded, but looked back up slightly hopeful when she added. “Yes, but we can test it. If we have enough light, I think it could work.”

Hey Cosmere fandom, it’s book rec time.

The book series in question is the Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie. In order, the books are Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy.

It’s a space opera with significant focus on character and relationships. The POV character is Breq, an aro-ace space warship AI in a human body who sets out on an impossible journey to kill the Lord of the Radch (the local 3000 year old space emperor) to revenge her beloved Lieutenant. Along the way she (unintentionally and reluctantly) collects people (humans, ships, aliens,...) in a gloriously messy found family.

* It’s super queer 

* Characters actively struggle with depression, anxiety, addiction, etc.

* Almost everyone is a PoC

* For the sake of Propriety everyone wears gloves and bare hands are super scandalous. 

These books are amazing and you should strongly consider reading them. The audio book versions are also fabulous.

If you’ve already read them, I’ve been Radch posting on my other blog (RithmatistKalyna) and I would love to talk with people both about the books/characters/tea sets/etc and all of the Cosmere crossover potential.

Rithmatics: Part 5 - Curvature, Ellipses and a Guess at the Blad Defense

Let's start by considering a snippit from one of the diagrams in The Rithmatist:

(Note: full diagram can be found at http://brandonsanderson.com/books/the-rithmatist/the-rithmatist/rithmatist-maps-and-illustrations/ )

Now we have a problem, namely, circles don't all have the same curvature. In fact (a slight simplification of) the idea of calculating curvature is to determine what radius circle would best approximate the curvature of the line at that point. A circle of radius r has constant curvature 1/r.

The basic idea here is reasonable though – apparently, lines of warding are stronger when they have a higher curvature. You can think of an ellipse as a circle that has been stretched along one axis. This means that if you start with a circle and then stretch it, we can talk about the resulting ellipse being stronger than the original circle where it curves more and weaker where it curves less. Here is what that diagram might look like if we add in the relevant reference circle:

Assuming this interpretation is correct, there are some important implications. The biggest is probably that the size of the circle used to form a defense matters. If you have two otherwise completely equivalent defenses and one of them is a scaled up version of the other, every point in the wall of the smaller defense will be stronger than the equivalent point in the wall of the larger.

Note: There are at least two potential underlying explanations for what is going on here. One option is that there is a certain strength inherent in a portion of a curve of a given curvature. This is the assumption that I am going to work from here. There is also the possibility that there is a fixed total strength for any closed curve of warding and that this strength distributes itself based on curvature. If we stick to circles and assume that strength and curvature are proportional, the two notions are equivalent. The second option is intriguing, but leads to rather messy calculations when we start looking at more interesting constructions. If I stick with this long enough we may eventually get there. I have no idea which option is correct or whether there is a third one I haven't considered.

One way to think about this (and this is almost certainly an oversimplification of things) is that it might take approximately the same amount of chalkling effort to destroy the entire dark blue segment as to destroy the entire dark green segment in the figure below:

 The important take away is that it should be easier to break a small hole in a large circle than it is to break an equally sized hole in a smaller circle. This means that when you are drawing your initial circle for your defense, you should be actively thinking about how large you really need it to be. It also means that even the weakest point on an ellipse could still be stronger than the wall of a much larger circle.

From an offensive standpoint, this means that the small circles and Mark's crosses added to your opponent's main circle are going to be much harder to affect than their main line of warding. They aren't just in the way – they are actually stronger.

We will talk about ellipses in more depth in future installments, but for now let's close with a guess at what the Blad Defense might look like. All we know about it is that it combines four ellipsoid segments in a non-traditional manner and that it is strong enough that some people think it should be banned from competitions.   

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. 

(Probably Crazy) Nightblood Theory

So, I just had a probably crazy idea.  

What if Nightblood isn't actually completely native to Nalthis? What if Nale is bringing it back home when he gives it to Szeth? Nightblood could have been a Rosharian Shardblade (Szeth doesn't seem to question it being a shardblade) that ended up on Nalthis. Then when Vashar and Shashara awakened it, the process roused the dead/trapped spren in the shardblade.  From what we have seen,  spren require an active bond with a human to remain sentient in the physical realm.  Awakening would interact strangely with this resulting in the spren needing a steady supply of breath to remain active.  This could provide an explanation for why it sucks the breath out of people (something that is never really explained in Warbreaker). 

Nightblood's inability to fully understand what evil is and place it in a human context runs reasonably parallel to Pattern and Syl's attempts to understand the more abstract concepts of the human world.  In Nightblood's case, the spren is still trapped in the sword and since it doesn't have a proper bond with a person, it is even harder for it to learn, so it can't progress as well or as quickly as Pattern and Syl.

The more I think about this the better it is working...

Truth

White people need to tell each other the hard truths. This includes the fact that No, you aren’t colorblind. Nor should you strive to be. The point isn’t whether or not you see that a person is black. They are. The question is what you see when you see that they are black. Do you see competency? Do you see worth? You should.

(paraphrased (because I didn’t write it down during the service) from the sermon at the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta on 25 September 2016)

Rithmatics digression

We've talked about 9-point circles.  Here is a further exploration of 9-point conics in case you are curious:

GUYS.  Ben McSweeney was also at the Atlanta Brandon Sanderson signing!  And was impressed enough with my notebook of rithmatics that he DREW ME A PICTURE!!!!

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.

xkcd’s data recovery program gave me the prompt “Somewhere, this exists.”  hehehe