Where are all the Shardblades?

if you've read The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson then you know all about Shard blades they're massive 6ot long super swords that can cut through nearly anything they're also incredibly rare or are they you see there's evidence that there should be thousands of Shard blades on rosar but the vast majority seem to have gone missing in this video we'll explore some theories about where they are now but first let's determine just how many Shard blades are missing in the way of Kings dinar has a vision of the day of recreance in the vision he sees hundreds of nights Radiance from the orders of ston wards and wind Runners charging toward the walls of fever Stone keep all of them wearing Shard plate he's taken a back by the sight of so many Shard bearers in one place and he thinks about the number of known Shard blades from his own time there look to be a good 200 Shard bearers out there althar owned some 20 blades Yakov a similar number if one added up all the rest in the world there might be enough total to equal the two powerful voren kingdoms that meant so far as he knew there were less than a 100 blades in all of the world and here he saw 200 Shard bearers gathered in one Army it was mind-numbing the radiance eventually come to a halt outside the keep and more wind Runners fall from the sky to join the others bringing their number to around 300 they all silently summoned their Shard blades and drive them Point first into the ground before removing their Shard plate and dropping the pieces of armor next to their blades they turn their backs on their weapons and walk off abandoning their ODS as radiant and killing their Sprint in the process leaving their corpses behind in the form of Shard blades from that Vision we see that there were 300 Shard blades left behind by the radiance at fever Stone keep that's already more than three times the roughly 80 blades dinar knows about and present day roshar and that was just one small part of the recreance indeed nine out of the 10 orders of knights Radiance abandon their Oaths the skybreakers being the only order to hold to them this all happened over the course of a few days so that begs the question how many Shard blades were left behind in total we don't have an exact number but we can come up with a rough estimation based on the information we have we learn in rhythm of war that there were around 2,000 honor spr that were bonded to wind Runners at the time of the recreant this was nearly every honor Sprint in existence at the time we also learned that the ink sprin found it foolish to assign all of their kind as radiant spr so only about half of them bonded humans to create the order of else callers we don't know how many ink sprin there were in total but to keep the number simple we'll guess that there were roughly the same number of ink sprin as there were honor sprin that would mean that there were around 1,000 else callers during the recreant let's be conservative with our estimation and assumed that the other types of sprin acted with even more caution than the ink sprin so we'll guess that there were 500 each of dust brers Edge dancers truth Watchers lightw Weavers will Shapers and ston Wards there was only one bondsmith at the time and their sprin managed to evade death by ending their bond shortly before the recreance so we'll ignore that one adding those numbers up we can estimate that there were around 6,000 radiant that abandoned their o during the recreance this means that there should be thousands of Shard blades that were left behind but delar kin one of the most powerful men on rosar who's privy to more geopolitical knowledge than most knows of less than a 100 blades so where did these thousands of Left Behind Shard blades disappear to one explanation is that they've simply become lost over the 2,000 years since the recreant the ability to add a gemstone to A Shard blade and bond it wasn't discovered until a decade or more after the recreance so it would make sense that some of these 6ft tall unwieldy weapons would get lost in fact we have a word of Brandon that talks about this Brandon says that even though Shard blades are very powerful and valuable they're still going to end up getting lost over a large span of time because of things like blades being left out during High storms causing them to be covered over with CRM shipwrecks leaving them at the bottom of the ocean and Shard Bears dying in remote locations such as up in mountain passes while this is like to be the case with a lot of the missing Shard blades it doesn't explain everything and here's why we know that Shard blades are the corpses of sprin in the Physical Realm and when a blade is bonded to a person and dismissed the sprin shows up as a dead eyee in shadesmar where they wander around seeking out the place in shadesmar that corresponds to the location of the person who bonded their corpse in the Physical Realm when The Shard bear summons The Shard Blade the dead eyee Puffs to mist and is pulled from shadesmar into the physical round where their corpse forms The Shard blade this means that every Dead Eye we've seen in shadesmar throughout the books Must Be A Shard blade that is bonded to someone in the Physical Realm otherwise they wouldn't show up in shadesmar since unbonded chard blades can't be dismissed so any blades that were lost over the time since the recreant won't count towards the dead eyes we've seen in rhythm of War hundreds of dead eyes show up outside the walls of lasting integrity and the weeks leading up to aelin's trial adelin himself thinks about them being Shard blades as he looks down at them from the walls the distance was too great for him to distinguish one scratched out face from another however he did notice when one vanished into mist those sprin were Shard blades hundreds of them more than he known existed when their owner summoned them their bodies evaporated from shadesmar these hundreds of dead eyes showed up to this one location of Shades Mah over the course of 2 weeks so there are possibly hundreds more that were too far away to make it there within that time frame either way this shows that there are a lot of Shard blades that haven't been lost to time and they're bonded to people this brings us to the most important question of this mystery who are these secret Shard bearers one theory is that during the 2,000-year span since the recreance one or more of the functionally immortal beings that inhabit roshar have been going around and bonding as many Shard blades as they can there are a few different possibilities for this one the first group of rosaran Immortals that comes to mind are the Heralds maybe one of them have decided they need to keep Shard blades out of mortal hands Shard blades are after all basically rosh's equivalent of nukes and if they fall into the wrong hands it could be catastophic we already know the Herold nail has spent his time since the recreant seeking out budding Radiance and killing them before they have a chance to progress through their Oaths perhaps he's also been bonding Shard blades as he comes across them another type of roshar and Immortal are the Saia a amans Brandon has said that they tend to dedicate themselves to some kind of task to keep themselves sane axis The Collector is one that we've encountered in the books and he's made it his life's mission to catalog every Sprint on roshar Shard blades just so happen to be sprin albeit dead ones maybe he's been bonding every blade he can to build up his catalog a third possibility are the dizzy and amens more commonly known as the sleepless out of all the RO sh and Immortals the sleepless would probably have the easiest time of finding a bunch of Shard blades scattered across rosar since they can send their hordings to scout out the planet one of them could easily be bonding every blade they find to keep them away from the humans regardless of the immortal if this Theory turns out to be true then I hope we get to see someone who bonded hundreds of Shard blades die and all of them pop into the Physical Realm at once my personal favorite theory is that The Shard blades aren't being bonded by Immortals at all but rather a nation has taken it upon themsel to seek them out and bring them back to their Homeland in order for a nation to keep a secret this big it would have to be largely isolated from the rest of the world it would also need to somehow exercise control over its people who have bonded The Shard blades in order to prevent them from running off with them there's one unassuming Nation that's the perfect fit the nation of shinavar that's right the docile Shin people might have the largest number of Shard bears and all of rosar this Theory sounds a bit wacky at first but there's quite a few Clues pointing towards this being the case you see the shin have controlled and guarded nine of the 10 honor blades for much of the last 4500 years since they were left behind by the Heralds at aari edium though that number is down to seven in the current story honor blades are like the big siblings of Shard blades they do everything A Shard blade does like cut through anything with ease but they also Grant the wielder the powers of surgebinding as you might imagine guarding these Priceless weapons is a big deal to the shin and what better way to keep them safe than by surrounding them with hundreds of secret Shard bearers there's a good chance that we've even seen some of these Shin Shard bearers in the way of Kings when rizen and vem go to shinavar to trade as they approached she was surprised by the variety of their appearance other Shin she'd seen had worn basic Brown robes or other workers clothing at the front of of this group however was a man in what must be Shin finery a bright multicolored cloak that completely enveloped him tied closed at the front it trailed down on either side of his horse drooping almost to the ground only his head was exposed four men rode on horses around him and they wore more subdued clothing still bright just not as bright they wore shirts trousers and colorful capes at least three dozen other men walked alongside them wearing brown tunics Moore drove the three large wagons wow rizen said he brought a lot of servants servants the stem said the fellows in brown her bopa smiled those are his guards child what they look so dull Shin are curious folk he said here Warriors are the lowliest of men kind of like slaves men trade and sell them between houses by way of little stones that signify ownership and any man who picks up a weapon must join them and be treated the same the fellow in the fancy robe he's a farmer as we see in that passage the shin soldiers that approached aren't described as carrying weapons this makes them appear so unassuming that ryen mistook them as servants I find this odd because vem specifically says that any man who picks up a weapon must join them but where are those weapons they picked up now also would weaponless guards really be effective at fending off armed Outsiders maybe the weapons they picked up were shard blades that they then bonded this would explain why they don't carry any visible weapons on their person because they can simply summon their Shard blades within the span of 10 heartbeats later on in the same interlude btim asks one of the shin if they would be willing to trade him one of their soldiers the shin informs him that they cannot be sold to an outsider this is the perfect way for shinavar to keep their secret stockpile of Shard blades safe treat all of their Shard bearers as slaves and forbid them from being sold to anyone outside of shinavar the crazy thing is that in this one passage we see around 36 guards escorting a single farmer that means if all of these guards truly are Shard bearers then shinavar must have a lot of Shard blades at their disposal but how would they have acquired so many it turns out that the shin have had plenty of opportunities to seize Shard blades over the last thousand years or so they've left their isolated Nation multiple times to invade the rest of roshar they even used the honor blade and The Surge binding that the blades Grant to help them during these invasions after each invasion they fell back to shinavar most people in the books think that these invasions were simply the shin attempting to carve out a massive Empire and that they only fell back after collapsing but that doesn't seem like the isolationist Shin we know at all maybe their real goal was never to lay claim to the lands that they invaded But was instead to search for as many Shard blades as they could find and then they simply went back to shinavar when they felt like their mission was complete there's actually a word of Brandon from back in 2019 about this exact topic the questioner asked Brandon if the shin invasions were a cover for Gathering lots of Shard blades and hiding them away the way that Brandon answers the question is rather interesting take a listen to the audio to see what I mean oh was the shin and B in a cover for Gathering lots of card blades and hiting them away Rao for those who don't know rafo stands for read and find out this isn't really a yes or a no and can actually mean that he hasn't decided yet but the way he laughed before saying it makes it seem like this Theory could have some Merit as it stands right now we can only speculate about where these missing Shard blades are being kept maybe we'll find out more and wind in truth when it releases but we'll just have to wait and see let me know in the comments what you think of the theories presented in this video and if you have your own theory about the missing Shard blades I'd love to hear it that concludes this video but there's plenty more cosmere content on the way so be sure to give the video a like hit the Subscribe button and join me on this journey of exploring the [Music] cosmere

Channel: Exploring the Cosmere

Views: 7,285

Keywords: Shardblades, Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson, Cosmere, Cosmere Mysteries, Knights Radiant, Roshar, Honorblades, Shardplate, Shardbearer, Stormlight Mystery, Cosmere Mystery, Missing Shardblades, Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Oathbringer, Rhythm of War, Wind and Truth, The Recreance, Deadeye Spren, Spren, Stormlight Theories, Cosmere Theories, Shadesmar, Shardblade Mystery, Cosmere Lore, Stormlight Lore, Stormlight, The Stormlight Archive, Aimians, Stormlight Heralds

Id: ieKmsfo2HEA

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024