Welcome back to the Warbreaker reread! Last week, Siri travelled toward Hallandren while Vivenna stewed about her wasted life. This week, we leave the Idrians in their respective muddles, and go to meet Lightsong in the Court of Gods.
This reread will contain spoilers for all of Warbreaker and any other Cosmere book that becomes relevant to the discussion. This is particularly likely to include Words of Radiance, due to certain crossover characters. The index for this reread can be found here.
Click on through to join the discussion!
Chapter 3
Point of View: Lightsong the Bold
Setting: Lightsong’s Palace in the Court of Gods
Timing: Uncertain: the day Siri arrives in T’Telir
Take a Deep Breath
In Chapter 3, Lightsong awakes in his palace, weak and feeling restless from his dreams. While servants dress him, he teases his high priest by being annoyingly flippant. Reluctantly, he relates his dream to the priest, Llarimar, who carefully records it to be examined for anything significant.
Lightsong and Llarimar make their way to the center of the palace, where a little girl waits for them. Though afraid and crying, she plays her part perfectly, transferring her Breath to Lightsong. As he receives it, he is renewed and invigorated, supplied to live another week; as she releases it, she grows dull, color fading slightly from skin and hair, the twinkle gone from her eyes. Lightsong, feeling guilty about his need for her Breath, moves on willingly to the Offerings, feeling that he needs to give something back to the people.
He views a series of paintings and poems, taking this task seriously, trying to be both generous and honest as he reviews them. The final offering, a painting, reminds him of the dream he’d recounted to Llarimar earlier. He prepares to move on to his final task, that of hearing petitions, but Llarimar reminds him that there will be no petitions today: the new queen is arriving. As the Lifeless armies must be arrayed to meet her, Lightsong gives his priest a one-day Command phrase for them.
Before Llarimar leaves, Lightsong asks about his pre-Returned life; he remembers a face, and believes it may have been his wife.
Breathtaking
In the center of the room was a child.
Why does it always have to be a child? Lightsong thought.
I think this is where I begin to like Lightsong. This, and the following scene, seem so sad to me. He does what he has to do, what he’s expected to do, what the child’s family has been paid to allow him to do… but it distresses him that in order for him to live, someone else has to give up their Breath.
In Living Color
This week, we enter the Court (as opposed to the dungeons) of Gods to see what it’s like to be a Returned in Hallandren. It turns out to be a weird mixture of privilege and duty. I’m not saying it’s weird for a position to mix the two; just that this particular mixture strikes me as weird and just a bit creepy.
On the one hand, these gods demand a lot from their people: one Breath per week per god—and at 25 Breaths per week, that has to rack up in terms of depleting the population of Breath. (At least they are paid well for their sacrifice, so I guess there’s that.) On the other hand, there’s an expectation of the gods: each will, at some point, give his or her Divine Breath (and life) to heal and save one person. In between, somewhere, are the offerings: people create or commission artwork to offer the gods, hoping for a blessing and an augury in return. Somehow, the priests are supposed to be able to interpret the god’s reaction to the offering, so that the giver knows whether their plans are good or bad. Oh, and a god’s dreams are supposed to reveal the future, which seems to be the key reason for keeping them around in the first place.
Speaking of priests, what a job they have. Interpreting the dreams and reactions of a Returned so that it theoretically means something… Well, as with most religions, there can be truth, and there can be abuse. In this specific religion, we don’t know (do we?) whether Returned truly do see something of the future, or not; that makes it hard to say whether there’s any in-world validity to the idea.
We’ll get to some of the less trustworthy priests eventually, but for now we’re just looking at Llarimar. Of course my view of him is colored by later revelations, but I have to believe that he is one who at least cares about his task. In a way, this makes me want to smack Lightsong for childishly deciding to dub him “Scoot” and insist on calling him that. It also makes me admire Llarimar more: he’s completely undisturbed by any personal humiliations, but he firmly disapproves any time Lightsong is dismissive of the dignity or obligations of being a god.
Which brings us back to Lightsong. Talk about Impostor Syndrome! Lightsong is revered as one of the gods, and he doesn’t believe in his own divinity. He even tries to make sure no one else takes him seriously, including his priests and servants, but on the whole, they don’t seem to buy it.
This may be the first time I’m deeply, profoundly grateful for not listening to audiobooks a lot. If my first introduction to Lightsong the Bold was the surfer-dude approach, and if that voice is used for his inner thoughts as well as his speech, I’d have a very different perspective on him; worse, that perspective would have been shaped by someone other than the author.
Here’s the thing: as I read this chapter, there’s a sharp contrast between Lightsong’s behavior and his thinking, which is what makes him an interesting character. That contrast gets sharper and sharper throughout the book, until he ultimately brings his behavior in line with his thinking… which I think would be very difficult to pull off with the “surfer dude” persona in his head.
As I Live and Breathe
I wasn’t quite sure if the transfer of Breath constitutes “active magic” or not, but I think it has to. Endowment has, for whatever reason, set it up so that when some people die, they Return with an enormous “Divine Breath,” but they can only transfer that Breath once. And in order to live long enough to decide how best to use that Breath, they need someone else to give them a normal Breath every week. Or so it would seem.
This raises all sorts of questions:
Why did Endowment give them such an enormous Breath? Is that much Investiture necessary to shove them back from the Cognitive to the Physical realm? What did she originally intend for them to do when they Returned? Transfer the breath immediately, and then die? Reveal or do something quickly, and then die? Stick around for a long time to decide what needs to be done, meanwhile consuming Breaths from those around them? (It bugs me not to know the purpose behind the general application.)
Can Endowment see the future very well? If so, does the Divine Breath confer that ability on the Returned as well, or is this mere superstition?
Oh, the questions.
Don’t Hold Your Breath (Give it to me!)
We learn just a little about the Lifeless in this chapter. They require Command phrases for anyone to get them to do anything, and Lightsong is one of the four gods who hold Lifeless Commands. Also, there are different levels of Command phrases: the one in this chapter is limited to a one-day duration, and it only allows the user to control the Lifeless in non-combat situations. Good stuff to know. Also also, I’m going to quote because it’s funny:
“Your Grace,” Llarimar said. “We will need a Lifeless Command in order to arrange our troops on the field outside the city to welcome the queen.”
Lightsong raised an eyebrow. “We plan to attack her?”
Llarimar gave him a stern look.
So typical of their relationship.
Local Color
This week’s annotations touch on the similarities between Elantris and Warbreaker; Lightsong’s origins; the character of Llarimar and the origin of his nickname; and the reason it’s always a child.
On Lightsong, who was intended to be “glib and verbally dexterous without coming across as a jerk,” I thought this was interesting:
So, think of Lightsong as playing a part. When he opens his mouth, he’s usually looking for something flashy to say to distract himself from the problems he feels inside. I think the dichotomy came across very well in the book, as evidenced by how many readers seem to find him as their favorite in the novel.
My experience is that people tend to either love him or hate him, but I’m always a little surprised at how many people dislike him based on the audiobook portrayal. I wonder if perhaps “surfer-dude” links to “jerk” more than one might expect.
I do like learning why it’s always a child, which I didn’t actually expect to be told. Apparently the older a person gets, the less vibrant their Breath is. The Hallandren people, being devout, bring their gods the best—a child old enough to understand, but young enough to have the finest Breath. I always wondered why they didn’t receive Breath from older people, rather than making children Drabs for a whole lifetime; now I know.
Exhale
Other oddments to be noted include the way the palaces are built for the gods, who tend to be oversized—making the priests and servants look out of place in a structure too large for them. Not terribly significant, just… amusing.
Somewhere recently, the subject of colorblindness came up, and whoever-it-was was talking about that being a bit of a curse if you were on Nalthis. While I didn’t get into the conversation, I remember thinking that it shouldn’t matter. If you weren’t an Awakener, you didn’t deal with the magic anyway, and if you were, you didn’t need to tell what color something was to use it. However…
The Hallandren artisan’s script was a specialized system of writing that wasn’t based on form, but on color. Each colored dot represented a different sound in Hallandren’s language. Combined with some double dots—one of each color—it created an alphabet that was a nightmare for the colorblind.
Few people in Hallandren would admit to having that particular ailment. At least, that was what Lightsong had heard.
So if nothing else, it’s a social stigma. There you go.
There’s also one notable moment of foreshadowing, and it’s very interesting (to me, anyway):
“Was there anything else to the dream, Your Grace?” Llarimar asked, looking up from his book.
“You were there, Scoot.”
Llarimar paused, paling just slightly. “I… was?”
Lightsong nodded. “You apologized for bothering me all the time and keeping me from my debauchery. Then you brought me a big bottle of wine and did a dance. It was really quite remarkable.”
Llarimar regarded him with a flat stare.
Hold that thought for… most of the rest of the book. Poor Llarimar; Lightsong hit a nerve there.
You may (or may not) notice that I’ve rearranged the unit order this week. I’m trying things out, to see what works best, so this week the annotations are at the end. What do you think? Meanwhile, that’s it for the blog—now it’s time for the comments! Join us again next week, when we will cover Chapter 4 (and annotations) and Chapter 5 (annotations) in which Siri arrives at the Court and creates complications for Vasher.
Alice Arneson is a SAHM, blogger, beta reader, and literature fan. She hopes you enjoyed yesterday’s dream-casting extravaganza for The Way of Kings.
Thankfully, I’ve never listened to the “surfer-dude” audiobook. I bought the Graphic Audio version and I thought the voice for Lightsong was spot on.
I know I’m definitely in the minority, and I’ve expressed this elsewhere, but I love the surfer persona in the audiobook. I think it plays perfectly into what Brandon said about Lightsong playing a part.
Does anyone have an excerpt of the Surfer Dude that can be posted? Those of us who don’t have the audiobook would love hear it – even just for a short clip.
crapaflapnasti @2 – Does he use the surfer voice for Lightsong’s thoughts as well as his speech? It would affect my perception dramatically.
Likewise, I’ve never heard the “surfer dude” Lightning from the Audio books, but if I try to imagine whatthat would sound like, I think about the turtle from Finding Nemo, which is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. On the chapter itself, I really enjoyed the lighthearted and amusing info dumps we got regarding the world and Biochroma throughout.
On the fact that a person’s Breath drops in quality through their life, I have to wonder if there’s anything to do with how an Awakened object loses Breath over time. Perhaps it gets “used up” throughout life, or Nalthian souls are more leaky…
Not sure as to why the Big Breath is/was needed (perhaps it is merely just a facilitator to dropkick them back into the Physical) but Lightsong at least had a moment of seeing the future before he Returned and saw how something was needed to be done to help people–that’s why he opted to Return. So precognition is at least one factor/reason for it.
Another interesting point: Breaths are not souls, so they can survive people (the huge God-King breath store is a good example). So while you’d have a steady burn rate with a court of Returned, you wouldn’t necessarily have to deprive people of their Breath for their entire lives–they could replace it or arrange for a stored breath “off the market”. It’s just the religion that demands/encourages the child/young Breath donation.
@@.-@: No, just when Lightsong is speaking.
@3: I tried to find it, but only found the first 5 minutes of James’ reading. That does not include Lightsong. I think James’s narration really worked for many of the characters. But surfer-dude was just wrong.
Oh, now I remembered.
The economics of Breath is a really odd thing. Unless we assume that many of the wealthy families pass breath down like an inheritance. So a proportion of the people walking around at the First Heightening are walking around holding the Breath of people dead for centuries.
The consumption of Breath by the Gods is a type of human sacrifice. Every Earth culture that integrated human sacrifice as part of their belief system, tended to be war like. Thus they had a steady flow of sacrifices for their gods.
Here you have a culture that not only gives their Breath’s to gods, but also sells them on the open market to those rich enough to afford one. Even with people buying and selling their own Breath several times as an adult, the population of Hallandran is limited.
But if you include breath passed down in families, then the pool of available Breath does expand. Great-grandpa was able to reach the 4th Heightening, he gave his 2 children enough Breath each to reach the 2nd Heightening. They bought more and were able to gift the 1st Heightening to each of their children.
Any numbers people around?
LLarimar’s reaction to Lightsong’s teasing reference to his being in the dream is a poignant hearkening to the ultimately revealed incident where Lightsong in his former incarnation saves his niece (the face that he saw in his dream) in her father’s presence (LLarimar) from drowning at the cost of his own life. The incident in this chapter involving Lightsong getting a ‘fresh’ breath from the girl to enable him to function another week is, indeed, sad. While a ‘fresh’ breath may be advantageous to a Returned like Lightsong, it is a cruel imposition on a child to deprive her of her lively personality – despite whatever monetary compensation is given to her family. As Alice has noted, the fact that Lightsong is sensitive to and troubled by this prescribed procedure speaks well of his personality that bridles at the overly privileged and seemingly pointless life he feels forced to lead.
Being an avid Audible.com user I have noticed that people hate the “Surfer-dude” voice. The accusation shows up on not just this book but many different book reviews. I have not seen other voices being disparaged nearly as much.
Lightsong’s voice worked for fine for me. (interested in listening to the new version to see if I like it more)
I must have listened to a newer audio version, because a women narrated it. It was quite good, and Lightsong comes across exactly as Alice describes – conflicted.
I have that copy of audio book, the Surfer dude, he is okay. I actually found him funny. Even then, I saw Lightsong as a tragic character. But, I also read the book first. So, since I already knew Lightsong before the Surfer Dude, I saw him as a tragic character and the surfer dude voice as only a facade.
Lightsong has a firm upper class twit accent in my head so I can’t imagine how badly the audiobook’s surfer dude would mess with my perception of him.
@3: I have the entire audiobook in mp3 format. Here’s chapter 3:
https://soundcloud.com/lazerwulf214/warbreaker-chapter-03
Personally, I never thought it came across as “Surfer-Dude”, more “Bored” than anything else, which does seem to suit his personality.
P.S. If you root around in my SoundCloud profile, you’ll see a Q&A Brandon did in Houston 3 years ago that I recorded myself. I have no idea what’s on it, except, apparently, Brandon’s reading of the Words of Radiance Prologue and an excerpt from Shadows of Self.
@8: I was going to write that people can only give all of their breath or none of it, but then I remembered that there’s an easy workaround for that. (Store part of your breath temporarily in an Awakened object, give away everything that’s left, then retake the Awakened object’s store.) I assume this method is well-known within the market community that buys and sells Breath …
@8 If I remember correctly the breath must be given in its entirety at once. Obviously Vasher and the others figured out a way around this, possibly awakening objects temporarily, but I think your average noble would probably not realize how to do that so it would be impossible to split.
So Jimmy gets your grandfather’s breath and you get Aunt Mary’s vase. Remember to off your brother before he gets the breath otherwise it dies with him.
One last thought on this, what is a worse way to spite your relatives; dying with the breath or giving it to someone else?
@16: Denth was lying to Vivenna about the all or nothing. As @15 pointed out. But your two comments came minutes apart, so… :-D
Yes, remember when Vivenna hid her breaths in her shawl while on the streets. That’s how you do it. Or awaken an object, like Vasher does with the tapestry. Gift the breaths you are left, suck the tapestry dry for Breaths and you have hundreds of Breaths again. Able to give a second set away, if you choose.
As for which is worse… I think it depends on your family dynamics and personality. Some would rather take it with them. That way no one else could ever use it. But this could be considered wasteful to others. They are more the “just so YOU don’t have it” school.
Ah Lightsong. If you ever want to see just how much Brandon has grown as an author, look at Lightsong.
While Brandon wanted Lightsong to be a funny character (in the Oscar Wilde sense), he is not. Not at all. When Brandon took over the Wheel of Time, he said explicitly that his experience with Lightsong would help him to write Mat and his humor. We all see how that turned out.
When people critique Brandon’s characters as no being particularly compelling, I look at Lightsong as Exhibit A.
Now compare this to the characters in Stormlight. Compare the lowliest member of Bridge 4 to Lightsong. You will see just how much better Brandon has gotten at characterization over the years.
Lightsong! My favourite character in Warbreaker, save perhaps Vasher. Oddly enough, I don’t find him particularily funny (then again, I’m not overly fond of most of Brandon’s humour), but he’s the most sympathetic for me. I certainly found him and his internal conflict easier to empathize with than either Siri or Vivienna and their issues. It feels more… familiar, I guess? I mean, once you strip it from the general setting, the “I don’t feel like I deserve this” hits closer to home than “I’m about to marry a guy I barely know” or “I’m suddenly useless”.
@14, LazerWulf – thanks for the sample, and ye gods! Lightsong really does sound like a bored surfer in the audiobook. I am really happy now that I wasn’t introduced to him with this, it seems to me that I’d start hating his voice very, very quickly.
The beginning of this chapter when Lightsong gets the breath from that little girl is one of the saddest points of any Sanderson book for me.
Yes they were compensated, but the girl was “nervous… trembling… began to cry” and once she gives up her breath, she “becomes dull, her hair losing it’s color…Her eyes met his as she left, and he could see that the twinkle was gone from them.”
There is just something so soul crushingly sad about this entire scene. I love Lightsong and I love that he feels bad about this… and yet. He takes the breath. And yet, she gives it up… because that is what survival and society demand of them respectively.
SO sad for me.
The early scene of Lightsong taking the child’s Breath made it harder for me to like him later on, despite his snark. It’s necessary for his survival and he feels bad about it, but I found I kept judging whether he was doing something to justify his parasitic existence. Hypocritical of me, since everyone lives at someone’s expense, but this direct confrontation of that factisunsettling.
@18: Agreed. Lightsong may be this novel’s designated Sanderson Snarker, but IMO he doesn’t hold a candle to Wayne, Lopen, Shallan, or Hoid-as-Wit, to name a few.
Hi, everyone! Newbie here.
@18: When the annotations mentioned Oscar Wilde as an inspiration for Lightsong, something about the character finally clicked for me. No, Brandon doesn’t have Wilde’s talent for comedic dialogue (and that’s a pretty high standard to set), but I can see something of Algernon Moncrieff in Lightsong. He’s definitely no surfer dude.
@20: Yes, I found the scene depressing too. The whole magic system disturbs me, and because of that Warbreaker is my least favorite cosmere book. A god or an awakener requires so many other people to be diminished. It’s a much better system than hemalurgy and whatever those monks in Elantris were up to, but those forms of magic were unambiguously evil. Here in Warbreaker, awakening is shown in a much more positive (though sometimes morally ambiguous) light. What’s up with Endowment that she would come up with a system like this?
22. That’s a common misconception (that the Shards “created” the magic systems). It’s more like the shape of waves as they bounce off a shoreline – The Shard itself is the water, the planet they are Invested in is the shoreline, and the magic system is the waves. Endowment sparked a system that gave of itself, and Nalthis determined what shape that system would take (in this case, shucking off a layer or two of your soul on Command). Compare to Honor’s system, which granted power through adherence to a code, and Ruin’s system, which broke the soul of a victim. In both these cases, the fine details are determined by the planet (Roshar determined that Surgebinding happens through the spren, and Scadrial determined that Hemalurgy happens through metal spikes).
So Endowment is basically exonerated of the moral ambiguity inherent in Awakening. Or at least she was until she created the Returned, which let’s be fair are basically soul vampires.
Apparently Lightsong’s surfer dude voice is more interesting than the chapter, if the main topic of the comment thread is any indication.
I’ve always liked Lightsong. From the first few lines of the chapter, he was really interesting to me. The only problem with him was, he was much more interesting and fun to read about when he was being serious than when he was being funny, which IMO is a marked contrast with most of Sanderson’s other funny characters. Sure, Lightsong is still amusing, and I like a lot of his bantering and stuff, but I find him really compelling when he’s being serious and not nearly as much when he’s not. I don’t know, some of his humor just doesn’t really appeal to me. This probably accounts for the fact that on my first read of Warbreaker, despite Lightsong being my favorite character, I didn’t really connect with him as much as I usually do with characters like him in Sanderson books.
I did like how his death was well foreshadowed though, unlike some certain other twists in this book that, as far as I’m concerned, weren’t really foreshadowed at all.
“In this specific religion, we don’t know (do we?) whether Returned truly do see something of the future, or not; that makes it hard to say whether there’s any in-world validity to the idea.”
Well, Lightsong definitely did see the future later on, with his dreams about the tunnels and Blushweaver and all that stuff. It does bring up the question of whether this is what he saw when he died and decided to Return or not. (I’m pretty sure that I read recently in the annotations that the Returned get to see the future and decide to Return to do something because of that. I can’t find it, though. Let me know if I’m wrong.)
“What did she originally intend for them to do when they Returned?”
Did you mean “she” here? Because I don’t recall reading anywhere that Endowment is female.
@5 dashardie – The mention of “leaky souls” makes me think of how Stormlight leaks out of people, and that apparently the Voidbringers can hold it in perfectly. I wonder if there’s a connection there?
@14 LazerWulf – Thanks for the sample! As far as I’m concerned, the narrator is slightly more annoying than Lightsong’s voice. He says everything very slowly and purposefully. Plus, I’m only used to British audiobook narrators. Lightsong’s voice did crack me up a few times, however. Just not right. And it seems to me like the same voice, or an even worse one, is used for his thinking voice.
@19 Rasarr – I would have liked Vasher the most, I think, but there just wasn’t enough of him around until late in the book.
Nice to get some good discussion going on here!
I don’t have a problem with Lightsong in the audio, maybe because I don’t know what a surfer dude is.
It is strange that in a world where color is so important perfect pitch comes before colors in the abilities of Awakeners. Shouldn’t perfect color vision be the First Heightening?
@@@@@ many – I agree, the whole economy of Breath has always given me a bit of the heebie-jeebies in that it requires one person to become “less” overall in order for someone else to benefit. It never bothered me as much as, say, Hemalurgy, which basically requires someone’s death to make someone else more, but it’s still something to contemplate. Especially when we look at the Returned who, as @@@@@Landis613 pointed out, are basically Soul Vampires – it makes me wonder if this is something that Endowment had a lot of control over, and if so, will he/she/it make any changes? I know Brandon has stated that the Returned would still happen regardless of what happens to Endowment, so if he/she/it is still around, perhaps there are some changes that could occur. Maybe we’ll find out in the (eventual) sequel!
@@@@@24 – Thanks, that was the connection (heh) I was making – when a Surgebinder is holding enough Stormlight, it’s stated that it “leaks” from their skin, making them glow; meanwhile on Nalthis when someone has enough Breath, it causes an aura of brighter/enhanced colours around them, and it makes me wonder if that excess Investiture is too much for them to fully hold, causing it to “leak” out into the physical realm. And if that’s the case, that might be why the Returned will only last a week on their single divine Breath, and why, over time, a regular person’s Breath decreases in quality.
theinsolublelurnip @24 – yes, we have WoB confirmation that Edgli, holder of Endowment, is female. (I’d copy it here, but I’m on my phone and its a pain.)
Do we have confirmation that the one breath a week must be someone’s last breath? And do we have any kind of population numbers on Hallandren and the surrounding areas? To run any kind of numbers on how many breaths there are available at a time, we would need that, and would need to make an assumption of how many people choose to die without giving up their breath.
But then I have to wonder, if my grandpa gives me his breath on his deathbed, does my youth somehow restore the breath? Or does that breath now have 80 more years to diminish?
I question this because I think the scene with the little girl is sad because she becomes a drab. But what’s stopping the sacrifice breaths from coming from someone with many? We’ve seen how Vasher’s attitude towards breath changes when he has more, and it takes progressively more breaths to get from one heightening to the next. This girl’s last breath is a bigger sacrifice than somebody’s 784th, but does that mean it’s a “better” one in the eyes of the priests, or is it only her youth that makes it better.
Also, Bible verse about the beggar woman who gave her last coin.
Ok, I went and listened to the chapter (thanks for sharing, LazerWulf!) and I just have to take a minute to LOL at the people who call that “surfer dude”.
Based on the comments I was expecting something akin to the turtle in Finding Nemo — something overly exaggerated. Maybe like Bill and Ted. This is… lethargic. Mellow and disinterested and straying into Buffy-speak territory. Doesn’t sound “surfer” to me at all. I mean, maybe if you live in CA and that’s how real “surfer dudes” sound you might equate it, but I never would have without having been told.
That said, I don’t think it fits how I internally heard Lightsong. I agree with whoever said the posh accent would have suited. But it would not have turned me off to the book as much as it does some people. (In fact, his Llarimar voice is more annoying to me).
@28: Technically, every breath, at one point, was someone’s “last breath”, but Vasher shows that a returned can survive on any breath, not just one taken from someone who only had one. I imagine, if the priests were so inclined, they could find plenty of black-market breaths to sustain their “gods”, but that would defeat the point of having the people “worship” them by sacrificing their own breath.
One thing that always confused me about Breath Economics (Breathonomics?) is how there is still so much breath to use. It seems to me that, like Hemalurgy, Awakening is an end-negative type magic system. Everyone is born with ONE breath, and it doesn’t regenerate if you give it away. Furthermore, The Returned are consuming one breath a week, creating a lifeless costs one breath you can’t take back, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who are dying without passing their breath on to someone else (especially among societies like Idris that frown on awakening). Are we to believe that the birth rate on Nalthis is high enough to overcome all this?
My feelings on this book regarding Investiture tends to make me ramble. This is his first published Cosmere work with no shard interactions. Therefore I assumed that the way Investiture manifests on this planet was standard on single shard worlds instead of the nature of the Shardic intent.
What I mean is that on this planet everyone has Investiture automatically, no activation necessary. In Silence in the Forests of Hell, it seems all the dead have Investiture, no activation necessary. But White Sand threw me for a loop though. Is that because Badvian is a not so nice Shard? Or is it the nature of the tidal locked planet that he has to essentially splinter himself to make the magic work on the light side and the dark side of the planet?
Hopefully something I typed makes sense to someone. I find myself unable to refine my thoughts further at the moment.
@30 – Considering the Breath’s been around for some 300 years (if I recall the Manywar time correctly), and Hallandren is likely not a small country, they probably have a lot of Breath available – keep in mind that Vasher had enough on the outset to give the first God King some fifty thousand. In addition to that, I’m guessing that with Iridescent Tones being so focused on fuelling their gods with Breath, preserving Breath – for example, by passing it over to someone when you’re close to death – might be considered a serious religious duty, which would be a great help increasing the amount of them.
Just a quick question on that matter, do we know where the Five Scholars got all those ridiculous amounts of Breath from? Fifty thousand for the God King, another thousand for Nightblood… What did they do, turn all of their followers drab, or tortured captured foes until they gave up their Breaths?
A thousand people turned into drabs to give us Nightblood. The more I think about it, the more horrible it sounds.
Has it ever been said how any weeks make up a year on this planet ?
The God-Kings didn’t start with 50K breaths.
But has been feed 2 breaths a week for 300+ years that adds up.
Makes me think the 5 Scholars were given a boost in their heightenings.
Because how did Vacheron have enough breath to: create the statues, gift the God-Kings their extreme foundation breaths, and still leave him with enough to survive for a few decades at least?
My audio book has a female narrator and not a surfer dude. I think that would be distracting.
It seems that the drabs would want to move to Idris. They would be considered quite pious there. The whole concept though is somewhat distasteful. Being a drab seems to imply more than just losing your sparkle or zest for life. It means losing the ability to create and be inventive. The Aztec culture had to constantly focus on war and capture of more people to sacrifice to appease their gods. Wouldn’t Hallendren run into the same problem? The religion is consuming the population in a sense by creating a growing number of people who have little to give back to society.
What chapters will be covered next week?
@36: Chapters 4 and 5. Links are in the very last paragraph.
I missed that part. Thanks but I have my own copy of the book so I don’t need the links. I just wanted to be ready when the next post came
The last thing in every week’s post will be what’s planned for next week, with links to the online chapters for those who need them, and links to the annotations likewise. There may be occasions when I’ll decide that I can’t do as much as I thought, but I’ll do my best to be realistic about what I plan for each chunk.
What I found distracting about the audio LazerWulf posted @14 was the way the reader pronounced ‘Le-larimar’. I have always assumed that the double L at the beginning of the pries’s name was sounded as a single L, not as if each L much be pronounced separately. Am I wrong?
@40: The naming convention for Nalthis, at least among the upper class, seems to be names that start with a repeated consonant sound. Whether those names are separated by a vowel (Vivena), an apostrophe (T’Telir), or nothing at all (Llarimar), each consonant is to be pronounced individually. I believe Brandon goes into this in one of the annotations, though I forget where.
That said, Brandon has also stated that there is no “official” pronunciation of any names in his books, that you are free to pronounce them whatever way you wish. For instance, Brandon prefers the French-type proununciation of Kelsier (Kell-see-ay), but will not object or correct you if you say Kell-see-err.
And I totally get where you’re coming from with the one-L-sound Llarimar. After all, we say “Lloyd”, not “Luh-loyd”.
The explanation for the names is in the annotations for the next chapter. Before I read that I always assumed it was pronounced like Spanish ll.
I mentally pronounce it like a Welsh Ll, purely out of trained reaction to “Ll” at the start of a word, which English doesn’t do.
We can always call him “Scoot” if it gets too confusing.
@41: Interesting. My Mistborn audiobooks say “Kell-see-err.” But there’s a prominent pseudo-French section of that society, especially in the second trilogy, so “Kell-see-ay” would also make sense.
So this was where I fell off of this book and I hope we talk later about this – as I really saw the magic system here as evil. It may be my religious convictions but I couldn’t help but see the transfer of breath this way as evil. You are taking someone’s life almost the spark, the soul. No God should need this. I know from reading the annotations this was not intended and he adds a character later that tries to show how it is no different that doing things for the poor – but yeah. I didn’t buy it. At all. This was very much evil to me and not at all good. I think our introduction to lightsong also being our introduction to this system may be why people hate him partially.
Also in many parts of the US (certainly here in the South) surfer dude is an example of a lazy good for nothing hippie like person. So yes – surfer dude relates to jerk for many people. The choice of voice might have been intentional that way.
@dwcole I was creeped out by it at first as well. It wasn’t until later in the book that I began to reconsider.
I can’t even imagine how frustrated I’d be with Lightsong if I also had to deal with the ‘surfer dude’ voice. I had a hard time with him even in the book. I certainly understood that he was being willfully annoying most of the time, but it was still annoying.
Come to think of it, he reminds me a lot of Mat from Wheel of Time (and not even just Sanderson’s portrayal of him). It took me a long time to like that character, and the way you describe Lightsong – a sharp contrast between his behavior and his thinking – is actually very similar. Hmm.
It still sucks that it’s a child. Don’t care about the reason. :P
I heard the first audio version and just pictured a young Owen Wilson, and the character kind of just fit right away for me. I really didn’t ever find the voice off putting, but I know a lot of people did.
Who reads this book? The person who reads the book that i have is by James Yaegashi in 2009 by recorded books., and i got itfrom audible.com. they don’t have it anymore on their webcite.
@50: That’s the version I have, the one everyone is talking about.
Thanks, LazerWulf for posting that audio clip. I wouldn’t have liked Lighsong at all if that was my first exposure to him. I especially hated the way Llarimar sounded like he had a stuffy nose. Not the way I pictured him speaking at all. I have the voice of the priest from The Hunchback of Norte Dame (Disney) in my head for him. More pompous sounding. After all he is a God’s head priest
Lightsong is the best, imo. Him and Hoid are my favorite characters, because of their wittiness. I think Lightsong only sees the change in the girl because he’s at the 5th heightening, otherwise it would be imperceptible to anyone else. Maybe he just imagined the change because he knows the girl is changing. It seems sad that the girl is losing her breath, but then she will probably grow to be proud of that moment like Jewels. I did not know about the breath growing weaker, that’s very interesting.
About the Divine Breath, it probably as you state has to do with the Cognitive realm. Because the Returned are displayed how they feel “Gods” should be, the breath to fuel them and the sacrifice probably is part of sustaining them. The Cult of the Returned must know about Endowment and her agendas, or why else would they try to interpret the dreams of the Returned?
@18 – Humor is a thing of perspective. There is no standard for “funny,” and declarative statements of the quality of Lightsong’s humor are nothing more than opinion.
On Breathonomics: Scarcity is an actual principle of economics. As a good becomes more and more scarce, the price of that good increases – so a Breath becomes very expensive and difficult to obtain, but is still available to those who can afford it, such as individuals worshipped as gods.
Furthermore, Breath is in fact a renewable resource – want more breaths in the economy? Have more babies. Between babies being born, and people passing Breath on as a kind of inheritance, I don’t see a problem with 25 breaths a week being consumed, in relation to the number of births & inherited Breaths per week. Hallandren is presumably large enough that I imagine there are more than enough births per week to offset the consumption – U.S. birth rate is roughly 12.6 per 1,000 people.
Of course, the death of an Awakener who is holding a significant number of Breaths would be a much more significant and serious blow to the economy. However, since these people will be relatively rare, and the goal would typically be not to kill them outright, but instead to coerce them into giving away their Breaths, it doesn’t seem particularly insurmountable.
None of which, of course, should be construed as me looking favorably upon the practice of selling a child’s Breath. That said, there is much that I am willing to give up to my religion, given my level of conviction towards it.
I have always wondered exactly how old the child was. At what age does a child understand just what they are giving up? Who determines that a child comprehends the sacrifice? Is it a set age or determined for each individual? It seems to me like a system that would create a lot of resentful people once they grow up. It is a system almost designed to prevent people from escaping poverty.
I’m just catching up with the reread. I totally agree about Lightsong. When i first read the book he was my absolute favorite character. Now, for this reread, I’m listening to the audiobooks. It’s like nails on chalkboard. He’s not so bad at the beginning, but I listened ahead (on chapter 31 now) and I absolutely cannot stand him. His surfer boy accent just gets more and more pronounced with each chapter. Next time someone tells me they don’t like Lightsong, my first question will be if they listened to the book on audio.
@54
Breathenomics. I like that.
But would the death of an awakener and loss of his breaths really affect the economy that much? Maybe a bit if this was someone who was actively involved in the breath market, buying and selling breath in order to fund his own personal hoard but if he inherited them or bought them long ago as a young man, those breaths have been out of circulation for a while.
Imagine someone like Warren Buffet decided to liquidate all his assets, sell all his stocks, properties and possessions for solid gold, take the gold out to a deep sea trench and dump it all. I suspect gold prices would go through the roof. But what if instead a young Buffet inherited that huge vault of gold and did nothing with it all his life. Never sold any of it or bought any more, never loaned it out to anyone or used it as collateral.Just let it sit there for 60 years before secretly dumping it all. It wouldn’t change anything because it’s been out of circulation for decades anyway.
I realize that I’m seriously behind on this re-read, so probably no one will see this…
I first listened to the “surfer dude” version of the audiobook. I didn’t have the negative reaction that a lot of people did. On a re-read a few years later, using the annotations, I noticed that there was a new version on audible. I paid for the new one, but a couple of chapters in I didn’t feel like it was much of an upgrade, definitely not worth paying for the audiobook twice and I ended up returning it.
It was especially the new narrator’s Nightblood that disappointed me. I had the original version in my head and the new one just didn’t live up to it for me.