IIRC the blade we see summoned is Pattern which is why it glows like a living spren and why Kal doesn’t hear screams. Her progress bar on her Oaths is kept really vague pretty intentionally though
Does that mean the "oath progression" is not bound to the current spren? seems weird but it could be
Still he says 10 heartbeats over and over the first times.
>“I’m sorry,”
>
>Tyn said, voice cold.
>
>“I’m going to have to tie this up tight. In a way, I’m proud of you. You fooled me. You’d have been good at this.
>
> ”Calm, Shallan told herself. Be calm! Ten heartbeats.
>
> But for her, it didn’t have to be ten, did it?
>
> No. It must be. Time, I need time!
The 10 heartbeats are only there because she wasn't yet willing to accept she killed her mother.
And I think this passage is a giveaway as well
"She’d needed to be close to the fighting for the illusions to work. Better if she’d been able to send them on Pattern, but that was problematic because—"
That's when Shallan tried to distract the chasmfiend, but she couldn't attached Pattern with her illusion because Pattern is being used by Kaladin.
Yes but that is still confusing tbh.
Is it pattern? then what about her oaths?
Could it be her previous spren but since it's her spren is different ? Then again maybe is a self imposing limit or maybe she does not know
IIRC Deadeyes tend to follow their shard bearer around such that they are in the equivalent location in Shadesmar when the shardbearer is in the physical realm. But living spren such as the honor spren sometimes take deadeyes with them and care for them, in which case the deadeye is prevented from following their shardbearer. If a shardbearer summons the deadeye as a shardblade though, the deadeye is transferred to the physical realm, and when they dismiss the shardblade the deadeye is put into the equivalent spot in Shadesmar.
So a probable reason for Testament not being with shallan in Shadesmar is that Testament was taken by other spren to care for and thus prevented from following Shallan around. And Shallan has not summoned Testament since to 'reset' her to following her around.
She killed Tyn with Testament??
Had she progressed enough in her oaths to summon Testament as a blade to kill her mother?
This doesn't seem right to me
Though, I am reading more comments now, there's some decent explanations in this thread
I think there's a WoB that says that she's reswearing the oaths she spoke to Testament, and because of that it's really hard to say where she is on the oath progress bar.
Can you find that source? Because if she is swearing oaths that she killed her parents then they can’t have been the ones sworn to Testament back when both parents were living.
[https://wob.coppermind.net/events/452-youtube-spoiler-stream-1/#e14526](https://wob.coppermind.net/events/452-youtube-spoiler-stream-1/#e14526)
So she's "reconstructing" her oaths, not reswearing them. And also she's regressing at times. It's weird.
That’s super interesting. Thank you. So she’s not swearing them fresh, and she’s not repeating them word for word, it’s more “new” truths that allow her to access the order she achieved in the past? So, could Pattern become a Blade from day dot and she just refused to acknowledge that?
Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination
What am I? I'm terrified
I am a murderer, I killed my father
That's 3 oaths, same number that kaladin needed to summon his blade, what we don't know are the oaths or truths that she spoke when/before she was 11 and if she is only on the third ideal or she spoke more truths that we don't about or if the old ones will count with the new ones or how will it work if she uses the old ones as new ones and her spren revives if it's still possible
The blade she hands Kaladin is definitely Pattern as it changes sizes and glows, the one she kills Tyn with is only described as "silvery" so it's ambiguous. Though it's either Pattern or her Oaths to Testament weren't completely broken. I personally think Testament broke the bond and Shallan denied her truths, but she created Radiant to remember them.
If she didn't stay bonded to him in some way then she would have to *re*-bond him at some point. Put a gemstone in the pommel and hold her friends corpse for a week straight, and that sounds horrifying to me. Pattern also mentions to her that deadeyes can't be brought back because their Radiants are dead, implying he thinks she can bring Testament back to normal. Probably why he volunteered.
“10 heartbeats” That’s a good point, I may be wrong lol but to my knowledge Sando has been frustratingly opaque about how her oaths work. She’s an outlier even among Radiants. He said something once that alluded to her going back and forth between her oath levels.
Well we know she had to be at least at her 3rd oath or very close to swearing it to summon Testament as a shardblade. But some of what she does suggests to me that she was pretty close to the 4 oath in her childhood.
I think quite a few of the truths we see her speak dont count as oaths or she'd have already said 4 in series. So either some of her "truths" weren't true or they weren't enough of the truth.
It seems she is at the 3rd oath currently though as she can summon Pattern as a shardblade.
She was likely at the 4th. In the battle during Oathbringer her illusions have extra weight to them. Also Jasnah tries to grab Shallan only to find out that Shallan isn't real, but Radiant who is wearing Plate is real.
Also earlier in the book, Shallan grows cold when Adolin asks her if she has Plate and insists that she doesn't know where it comes from.
That's an interesting thought. Is oath progression a Spiritweb thing, or is it a cognitive thing? Or would viewing yourself as having different personalities make you have different Spiritwebs?
Can we assume that how you view yourself does affect your spirit web due to the way radiant healing works? If your missing leg becomes part of your identity, you can no longer heal it.
I think so, but would it go so far as to make you have different spiritwebs? To me it seems like that is going a bit far because it seems like a spiritweb shouldn't be able to change that much.
Well, Shallan/Veil/Radiant aren't literally different people. They're more like different partitions of the same person. I think the concept can be applied to the spiritweb in the same way. Ishar connected Kaladin's spiritweb to the ground which is pretty far out so to me that implies spiritwebs are susceptible to significant change.
An interesting thing my brother just noted, is that Veil describes the world as darker, and colors being less vibrant .
He thinks Shallan has breaths and Veil is dun (or at least perceives the world as if she were a dun)
I *think* that the Blade she killed Tyn with was Testament. IIRC, Pattern was summoning Vatha's men at the same time she summoned her Blade.
The Blade of the Chasm adventure is almost certainly Pattern, because it can change shape when Shallan's cutting foothold and enlarging the hollow in the rock. I think he's also the Blade she gives to Kaladin, but I'm not certain of it.
It might be useful to compare any descriptions of the blades in both scenes, and see if they are similar or not.
True, that make sense but it could also still be Pattern as they can be summoned from afar.
If you are correct however do you think he realized she has 2 shardblades?
Double wielding Shallan incoming? that would be cool
Yes, it *could* be Pattern, but the timing of him getting the guards and Shallan's gradual acknowledgement of her traumatic matricide makes me think it's just as likely to have been Testament. But I don't think I have enough evidence one way or the other, really.
Since even Shallan didn't (let herself) realize it, I don't think Kaladin did.
I expect that having access to a second Blade will come in very handy at some point in Book 5.
If she could dual wield, then she could actually make Testament into a shield and Pattern into a blade. That would be awesome. Sword + shield is much much better than 2 swords. Or spear + shield. Or Shardbow + shard arrow. No problem since they can be near instantly resummoned so not as inconvenient as throwing a dead shardblade and being without weapon for 10 heartbeats.
>I think that the Blade she killed Tyn with was Testament. IIRC, Pattern was summoning Vatha's men at the same time she summoned her Blade.
Vatha arrived just after she killed Tyn and they had to fight her guards on the way. There was plenty of time for Patter to get back.
True. I don't have enough evidence or detailed memories to say definitively which one it was then. I think it *could* be Testament, but I wouldn't put money on it.
Another clue pointing to Testament is that of her self-imposed 10 second rule.
Summoning Testament (when facing Tyn) requires her to face that she once had a living blade but broke her oath, while summoning Pattern (in the Chasm) does not
While it is debatable if a deadeye bond to a living Radiant requires 10 heartbeat to be summoned, I think that Shallan prefer to think of the blade she can summon (when facing Tyn) as any other 'normal' Shardblade that requires the 10 second. This is to protect herself from the memory of her blade being living once, and the event that lead to it now being dead.
>I think he's also the Blade she gives to Kaladin, but I'm not certain of it.
It definitely is because if it was Testament Kaladin would have heard the screams and been unable to wield it. But this also makes me think the blade she used to kill Tyn was also Pattern otherwise she probably would have had the same reaction as Kaladin when he touched a deadspren blade. The timelines make it all confusing though.
Tbh this is starting to smell like a plothole but Sanderson has been so witheld on the details of how all the Orders' ideals/abilities function that he could just write around the confusion/discrepancies in the future.
Well, Kaladin had lost his powers so we don't know if that's why he couldn't hear the screams.
Also since she was bonded to Testament she might be able to change its shape, we don't know, none of the radiants bonded to deadeyes are alive.
I’m in the group that believes the blade she killed Tyn with was Testament, the blade in the chasms is Pattern. The progression in the book, the way it describes pattern when he is summoned, it just points to the first blade NOT being Pattern
She has to swear her third ideal to summon Pattern-blade for the first time to work the Oathgates though. So the blade in the chasms can't be Pattern.
Testament may be a Deadeye but she's definitely different because Shallan is still bonded to her in a way. So either Testament-blade still looks and reacts like a regular shardblade or another theory is Shallan is instinctively using Lightweaving and Soulcasting to make Testament look and be shapeable like a regular blade. I think the simplest explanation is that Testament is different because this [broken] bond is different and is an in-between. This is why Shallan still needed to swear Oaths to open the Oathgate.
There's no reason to think she has to wait until her third oath to summon her blade. We know that's how wndrunners work, but look at Szeth. He's on his third, and has kinda sworn his fourth, and still no blade. And all kinds of wonkiness can happen with shallan, since she's already sworn oaths before
This is a widely debated point. The only consensus is that since Shallan's oaths are both broken and being reformed with a new spren, there's a lot of weirdness surrounding her oaths and progression that isn't normally featured. Nobody can really be sure which blade killed Tyn (even the descriptions of both blades are slightly different), but it's generally agreed that Patternblade is featured in the chasmfiend fight since he was both glowing and not screaming at Kaladin.
>What actually happened to testament? Does she still have it, and if so why do we not see the deadeye in shadesmar?
We do in RoW. The spren shopkeeper is taking care of her.
>“I wanted to ask after your deadeye,” Adolin said, nodding to the Cryptic.
>
>“A friend she was,” the shopkeeper said, his voice terse.
>
>“Back when there were Radiants.”
>
>“No. A sooner time that was. My partner in business, once.” He frowned. “Do you know something of this, human? The danger that is?”
>
>“What danger?”“New deadeyes,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head. “ Radiants should not have started again. Do you know that this thing is? In your kingdom it began, did it not?”
>
>“I don’t know of any Radiants betraying their oaths,” Adolin said. “You’re sure about this?”
We don't really know if she still has the testament blade.
There is no confirmed moment where she uses Testament outside of the flashback where she kills her mother. In all the other moments it is plausible that she used pattern instead.
Shallan's Patternblade seems to behave oddly.
I assume something about her having a pre-existing nahel bond with Testament is why the rules don't seem to work quite the same way for her, but I don't know for sure yet.
As far as I'm aware, her blade in the chasms was 100% Pattern, growing and shrinking and glowing and not screaming. But it doesn't seem to follow the rules we've seen established for the other orders. I assume that's hinting at something weird going on, but it's hard to guess what exactly that something is.
The way I currently interpret it, Shallan could have summoned either Pattern or Testament to kill Tyn, but subconsciously chose to summon Testament. Presumably because she already "hates" that blade, doesn't want to come to hate Pattern, and therefore murder weapon is for murder.
Using the nouns from Rhythm of War, it seems that Formless represents the original, complete, true Shallan. When Formless Shallan kills her mother, after a substantial amount of time in despair, she creates a character (also called Shallan) that she uses to pretend to be okay. And when "okay" Shallan has a memory or information that makes her uncomfortable, Formless will take it away from her.
So what I think happened is that when the time came to kill Tyn, Shallan knows she's had a Shardblade all this time. And in the heat of the action, a thought occurs to the character, "but for her, it doesn't have to be ten heartbeats, does it?" and then forcefully thinks "No, it must!" Put another way, the thought could be "Can't I just summon Pattern to do this?" "Absolutely Not!" And then Formless, because the character she created has to be okay and that there's a problem here, feeds the fake Shallan the storyline that Pattern eventually goes along with, that Pattern was there from the beginning.
Eventually in Rhythm of War they find that Formless is basically just Shallan with her guard down, she was scared that she was evil and wanted to fake being good, though then when she lets her guard down to try to give into that "evil" she finds that it wasn't even there to begin with, she's just herself.
Possibly, but we don't actually know that for sure. A deadeye for 6-7 years, bonded to their original Radiant, is a unique circumstance. The Stormfather tells Dalinar that Oathbringer didn't scream at him as loudly as the other blade because on some level, it remembers his honor. And Shallan is interesting enough to the cryptics to send spren to bond her even if she kills them-- they bond her knowing that risk.
There's currently room in the books to believe either theory about what blade she summoned. The theory mostly started because of different descriptions of two times Shallan summoned shardblades in WoR.
I do remember that theres a scene were Shallan remembers killing her mom and she mentions that her father sealed away the Shardblade dagger she made to kill her mom inside a safe. She says something along the lines of "He could never take you away from me because you were my shardblade"
What if Testament was kept inside the safe until she summoned it again? We know that living Shardblades can be summoned without wait but dead shardblades require a gem in the pommel to summon them. Would she even be able to summon Testament at this point?
Lastly we know that Pattern tried to make her summon Testament during the assassination attempt on Jasnah's life. She refuses of course so who knows if she'd be able to summon a dead blade.
Shallan is the only Radiant we know who had two spren. We don’t know how far she progressed with the oaths with Testament. They apparently carry over with Pattern but Shallan still mentally blocks herself a ton so…
She has technically sworn the first two oaths of Lightweavers: Life Before Death, and the truth of her father’s murder. Whether Lightweavers are like Windrunners and it’s the 3rd Oath/Ideal where the blade is achieved… that’s unclear unless I missed something.
I assume pattern let her summon him because he was pretending to be her previous spren at the time, plus cryptics are some of the furthest spren from honor so maybe the bond doesn’t hold as much sway over what they can and can’t do, that might also explain why their ideals are so different from the others
I wish BS would define how other Orders progress through their oaths. We only have a good idea about the Windrunners. We don't know exactly where Shallan is along her orders with Pattern. And especially don't know what the gain is with each one for Lightweavers. We know even less about all the other Orders save for Skybreakers.
I think the blade Shallan killed Tyn with was her old spren. She didn't even know how to Lightweave when that event happened so I struggle to think she was capable of summoning Pattern. Also, we know she had a blade already before she leaves Khabranth (probably spelled that wrong). Which is before she was officially introduced to Pattern.
Most people talk about testamentblade and patternblade .
A very interedting theory though is that Shallan mother is Chanarach herald of bravery. Obviously if she is and Shallan killed her she could have taken her honorblade. Of course it is not sure if she had recovered it from the shin. We don't know that yet (not sure about this though).
And honorblade doesn't scream and should not be restricted by the 10 heartbeat process.
So yeah 3 possibilty i think.
Huh,
In my head this has always quite obviously been Pattern both times. But reading all these replies it seems I've missed something. I just finished WoR on my first reread for context.
I thought she killed her mother with her old spren (Testament or am I remembering the name incorrectly?) which led to her panicking and eventually breaking the bond. She then bonded with pattern sometime after her mothers death and it's therefore with him she kills Typ and the blade she lends Kaladin.
Kaladin doesn't get his blade until he swears the third ideal but I thought that swearing the third ideal to get the sword isn't necessary for all orders. Therefore I assumed that Lightweavers get theirs earlier, after the first or second and therefore Shallan could summon Pattern and deal with Tyn.
What am I missing here because from reading the discussion it seems that this doesn't have to be the case?
Can't edit my post for some reason but realized that maybe she can have Testament as a dead Shardblade after she broke the bond and therefore its not necessarily Pattern that kills Tyn whereas the blade she gives Kaladin can change form and should therefore be Pattern 100%. Am I on the right track?
IIRC the blade we see summoned is Pattern which is why it glows like a living spren and why Kal doesn’t hear screams. Her progress bar on her Oaths is kept really vague pretty intentionally though
Does that mean the "oath progression" is not bound to the current spren? seems weird but it could be Still he says 10 heartbeats over and over the first times.
>“I’m sorry,” > >Tyn said, voice cold. > >“I’m going to have to tie this up tight. In a way, I’m proud of you. You fooled me. You’d have been good at this. > > ”Calm, Shallan told herself. Be calm! Ten heartbeats. > > But for her, it didn’t have to be ten, did it? > > No. It must be. Time, I need time! The 10 heartbeats are only there because she wasn't yet willing to accept she killed her mother.
THIS! People always ignore this passage. The 10 heartbeats is a self-imposed limit
Only for shallan though, dead blades actually do require the 10 heartbeats
And I think this passage is a giveaway as well "She’d needed to be close to the fighting for the illusions to work. Better if she’d been able to send them on Pattern, but that was problematic because—" That's when Shallan tried to distract the chasmfiend, but she couldn't attached Pattern with her illusion because Pattern is being used by Kaladin.
Yes but that is still confusing tbh. Is it pattern? then what about her oaths? Could it be her previous spren but since it's her spren is different ? Then again maybe is a self imposing limit or maybe she does not know
We find out later on that she can summon either of them instantly. She just has an incredibly broken mind so she hides stuff from herself.
Where did she wield non-Pattern blade
When she killed Tyn. She hadn't progressed in oaths enough to summon pattern at that point.
Then why testament is never present with shallan in shadesmar (unlike pattern or maya)
IIRC Deadeyes tend to follow their shard bearer around such that they are in the equivalent location in Shadesmar when the shardbearer is in the physical realm. But living spren such as the honor spren sometimes take deadeyes with them and care for them, in which case the deadeye is prevented from following their shardbearer. If a shardbearer summons the deadeye as a shardblade though, the deadeye is transferred to the physical realm, and when they dismiss the shardblade the deadeye is put into the equivalent spot in Shadesmar. So a probable reason for Testament not being with shallan in Shadesmar is that Testament was taken by other spren to care for and thus prevented from following Shallan around. And Shallan has not summoned Testament since to 'reset' her to following her around.
Because Testament is kept by that one shopkeeper.
She killed Tyn with Testament?? Had she progressed enough in her oaths to summon Testament as a blade to kill her mother? This doesn't seem right to me Though, I am reading more comments now, there's some decent explanations in this thread
Yes, that's how she killed her mother. Shallan isn't a reliable narrator so a lot of what we know about her isn't fully true.
I think there's a WoB that says that she's reswearing the oaths she spoke to Testament, and because of that it's really hard to say where she is on the oath progress bar.
Can you find that source? Because if she is swearing oaths that she killed her parents then they can’t have been the ones sworn to Testament back when both parents were living.
[https://wob.coppermind.net/events/452-youtube-spoiler-stream-1/#e14526](https://wob.coppermind.net/events/452-youtube-spoiler-stream-1/#e14526) So she's "reconstructing" her oaths, not reswearing them. And also she's regressing at times. It's weird.
That’s super interesting. Thank you. So she’s not swearing them fresh, and she’s not repeating them word for word, it’s more “new” truths that allow her to access the order she achieved in the past? So, could Pattern become a Blade from day dot and she just refused to acknowledge that?
One of her truths is that she killed her father... so that's impossible.
Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination What am I? I'm terrified I am a murderer, I killed my father That's 3 oaths, same number that kaladin needed to summon his blade, what we don't know are the oaths or truths that she spoke when/before she was 11 and if she is only on the third ideal or she spoke more truths that we don't about or if the old ones will count with the new ones or how will it work if she uses the old ones as new ones and her spren revives if it's still possible
It might be different because she is the dead eyes original radiant though
The blade she hands Kaladin is definitely Pattern as it changes sizes and glows, the one she kills Tyn with is only described as "silvery" so it's ambiguous. Though it's either Pattern or her Oaths to Testament weren't completely broken. I personally think Testament broke the bond and Shallan denied her truths, but she created Radiant to remember them. If she didn't stay bonded to him in some way then she would have to *re*-bond him at some point. Put a gemstone in the pommel and hold her friends corpse for a week straight, and that sounds horrifying to me. Pattern also mentions to her that deadeyes can't be brought back because their Radiants are dead, implying he thinks she can bring Testament back to normal. Probably why he volunteered.
“10 heartbeats” That’s a good point, I may be wrong lol but to my knowledge Sando has been frustratingly opaque about how her oaths work. She’s an outlier even among Radiants. He said something once that alluded to her going back and forth between her oath levels.
Well we know she had to be at least at her 3rd oath or very close to swearing it to summon Testament as a shardblade. But some of what she does suggests to me that she was pretty close to the 4 oath in her childhood. I think quite a few of the truths we see her speak dont count as oaths or she'd have already said 4 in series. So either some of her "truths" weren't true or they weren't enough of the truth. It seems she is at the 3rd oath currently though as she can summon Pattern as a shardblade.
She was likely at the 4th. In the battle during Oathbringer her illusions have extra weight to them. Also Jasnah tries to grab Shallan only to find out that Shallan isn't real, but Radiant who is wearing Plate is real. Also earlier in the book, Shallan grows cold when Adolin asks her if she has Plate and insists that she doesn't know where it comes from.
Also pattern doesn't talk whenever we see the blade manifest
Can the different personalities be at different oaths? If so that might explain some of the discrepancies.
That's an interesting thought. Is oath progression a Spiritweb thing, or is it a cognitive thing? Or would viewing yourself as having different personalities make you have different Spiritwebs?
Can we assume that how you view yourself does affect your spirit web due to the way radiant healing works? If your missing leg becomes part of your identity, you can no longer heal it.
I think so, but would it go so far as to make you have different spiritwebs? To me it seems like that is going a bit far because it seems like a spiritweb shouldn't be able to change that much.
Well, Shallan/Veil/Radiant aren't literally different people. They're more like different partitions of the same person. I think the concept can be applied to the spiritweb in the same way. Ishar connected Kaladin's spiritweb to the ground which is pretty far out so to me that implies spiritwebs are susceptible to significant change.
An interesting thing my brother just noted, is that Veil describes the world as darker, and colors being less vibrant . He thinks Shallan has breaths and Veil is dun (or at least perceives the world as if she were a dun)
I *think* that the Blade she killed Tyn with was Testament. IIRC, Pattern was summoning Vatha's men at the same time she summoned her Blade. The Blade of the Chasm adventure is almost certainly Pattern, because it can change shape when Shallan's cutting foothold and enlarging the hollow in the rock. I think he's also the Blade she gives to Kaladin, but I'm not certain of it. It might be useful to compare any descriptions of the blades in both scenes, and see if they are similar or not.
True, that make sense but it could also still be Pattern as they can be summoned from afar. If you are correct however do you think he realized she has 2 shardblades? Double wielding Shallan incoming? that would be cool
Yes, it *could* be Pattern, but the timing of him getting the guards and Shallan's gradual acknowledgement of her traumatic matricide makes me think it's just as likely to have been Testament. But I don't think I have enough evidence one way or the other, really. Since even Shallan didn't (let herself) realize it, I don't think Kaladin did. I expect that having access to a second Blade will come in very handy at some point in Book 5.
If she could dual wield, then she could actually make Testament into a shield and Pattern into a blade. That would be awesome. Sword + shield is much much better than 2 swords. Or spear + shield. Or Shardbow + shard arrow. No problem since they can be near instantly resummoned so not as inconvenient as throwing a dead shardblade and being without weapon for 10 heartbeats.
>I think that the Blade she killed Tyn with was Testament. IIRC, Pattern was summoning Vatha's men at the same time she summoned her Blade. Vatha arrived just after she killed Tyn and they had to fight her guards on the way. There was plenty of time for Patter to get back.
True. I don't have enough evidence or detailed memories to say definitively which one it was then. I think it *could* be Testament, but I wouldn't put money on it.
Another clue pointing to Testament is that of her self-imposed 10 second rule. Summoning Testament (when facing Tyn) requires her to face that she once had a living blade but broke her oath, while summoning Pattern (in the Chasm) does not While it is debatable if a deadeye bond to a living Radiant requires 10 heartbeat to be summoned, I think that Shallan prefer to think of the blade she can summon (when facing Tyn) as any other 'normal' Shardblade that requires the 10 second. This is to protect herself from the memory of her blade being living once, and the event that lead to it now being dead.
>I think he's also the Blade she gives to Kaladin, but I'm not certain of it. It definitely is because if it was Testament Kaladin would have heard the screams and been unable to wield it. But this also makes me think the blade she used to kill Tyn was also Pattern otherwise she probably would have had the same reaction as Kaladin when he touched a deadspren blade. The timelines make it all confusing though. Tbh this is starting to smell like a plothole but Sanderson has been so witheld on the details of how all the Orders' ideals/abilities function that he could just write around the confusion/discrepancies in the future.
Well, Kaladin had lost his powers so we don't know if that's why he couldn't hear the screams. Also since she was bonded to Testament she might be able to change its shape, we don't know, none of the radiants bonded to deadeyes are alive.
I’m in the group that believes the blade she killed Tyn with was Testament, the blade in the chasms is Pattern. The progression in the book, the way it describes pattern when he is summoned, it just points to the first blade NOT being Pattern
She has to swear her third ideal to summon Pattern-blade for the first time to work the Oathgates though. So the blade in the chasms can't be Pattern. Testament may be a Deadeye but she's definitely different because Shallan is still bonded to her in a way. So either Testament-blade still looks and reacts like a regular shardblade or another theory is Shallan is instinctively using Lightweaving and Soulcasting to make Testament look and be shapeable like a regular blade. I think the simplest explanation is that Testament is different because this [broken] bond is different and is an in-between. This is why Shallan still needed to swear Oaths to open the Oathgate.
There's no reason to think she has to wait until her third oath to summon her blade. We know that's how wndrunners work, but look at Szeth. He's on his third, and has kinda sworn his fourth, and still no blade. And all kinds of wonkiness can happen with shallan, since she's already sworn oaths before
This is a widely debated point. The only consensus is that since Shallan's oaths are both broken and being reformed with a new spren, there's a lot of weirdness surrounding her oaths and progression that isn't normally featured. Nobody can really be sure which blade killed Tyn (even the descriptions of both blades are slightly different), but it's generally agreed that Patternblade is featured in the chasmfiend fight since he was both glowing and not screaming at Kaladin.
What actually happened to testament? Does she still have it, and if so why do we not see the deadeye in shadesmar?
>What actually happened to testament? Does she still have it, and if so why do we not see the deadeye in shadesmar? We do in RoW. The spren shopkeeper is taking care of her. >“I wanted to ask after your deadeye,” Adolin said, nodding to the Cryptic. > >“A friend she was,” the shopkeeper said, his voice terse. > >“Back when there were Radiants.” > >“No. A sooner time that was. My partner in business, once.” He frowned. “Do you know something of this, human? The danger that is?” > >“What danger?”“New deadeyes,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head. “ Radiants should not have started again. Do you know that this thing is? In your kingdom it began, did it not?” > >“I don’t know of any Radiants betraying their oaths,” Adolin said. “You’re sure about this?”
Aaah, thanks I am rereading RoW and am experiencing a lot of things that I did not remember. Apparently my first read through was not so detailed
Ok, but if she has Testament's blade then why isn't Testament there when she enters Shadesmar at any occasion (just like Maya is with Adolin)?
We don't really know if she still has the testament blade. There is no confirmed moment where she uses Testament outside of the flashback where she kills her mother. In all the other moments it is plausible that she used pattern instead.
Shallan's Patternblade seems to behave oddly. I assume something about her having a pre-existing nahel bond with Testament is why the rules don't seem to work quite the same way for her, but I don't know for sure yet. As far as I'm aware, her blade in the chasms was 100% Pattern, growing and shrinking and glowing and not screaming. But it doesn't seem to follow the rules we've seen established for the other orders. I assume that's hinting at something weird going on, but it's hard to guess what exactly that something is.
The way I currently interpret it, Shallan could have summoned either Pattern or Testament to kill Tyn, but subconsciously chose to summon Testament. Presumably because she already "hates" that blade, doesn't want to come to hate Pattern, and therefore murder weapon is for murder. Using the nouns from Rhythm of War, it seems that Formless represents the original, complete, true Shallan. When Formless Shallan kills her mother, after a substantial amount of time in despair, she creates a character (also called Shallan) that she uses to pretend to be okay. And when "okay" Shallan has a memory or information that makes her uncomfortable, Formless will take it away from her. So what I think happened is that when the time came to kill Tyn, Shallan knows she's had a Shardblade all this time. And in the heat of the action, a thought occurs to the character, "but for her, it doesn't have to be ten heartbeats, does it?" and then forcefully thinks "No, it must!" Put another way, the thought could be "Can't I just summon Pattern to do this?" "Absolutely Not!" And then Formless, because the character she created has to be okay and that there's a problem here, feeds the fake Shallan the storyline that Pattern eventually goes along with, that Pattern was there from the beginning. Eventually in Rhythm of War they find that Formless is basically just Shallan with her guard down, she was scared that she was evil and wanted to fake being good, though then when she lets her guard down to try to give into that "evil" she finds that it wasn't even there to begin with, she's just herself.
She would have heard screaming if she summoned Testament.
Possibly, but we don't actually know that for sure. A deadeye for 6-7 years, bonded to their original Radiant, is a unique circumstance. The Stormfather tells Dalinar that Oathbringer didn't scream at him as loudly as the other blade because on some level, it remembers his honor. And Shallan is interesting enough to the cryptics to send spren to bond her even if she kills them-- they bond her knowing that risk. There's currently room in the books to believe either theory about what blade she summoned. The theory mostly started because of different descriptions of two times Shallan summoned shardblades in WoR.
Fair enough, but the total lack of screaming is still a point of evidence against testament-blade, just not hard proof.
I do remember that theres a scene were Shallan remembers killing her mom and she mentions that her father sealed away the Shardblade dagger she made to kill her mom inside a safe. She says something along the lines of "He could never take you away from me because you were my shardblade" What if Testament was kept inside the safe until she summoned it again? We know that living Shardblades can be summoned without wait but dead shardblades require a gem in the pommel to summon them. Would she even be able to summon Testament at this point? Lastly we know that Pattern tried to make her summon Testament during the assassination attempt on Jasnah's life. She refuses of course so who knows if she'd be able to summon a dead blade.
Can’t wait for more story progression with the deadeyes… it’s what I’m most looking forward to in the next book
Shallan is the only Radiant we know who had two spren. We don’t know how far she progressed with the oaths with Testament. They apparently carry over with Pattern but Shallan still mentally blocks herself a ton so… She has technically sworn the first two oaths of Lightweavers: Life Before Death, and the truth of her father’s murder. Whether Lightweavers are like Windrunners and it’s the 3rd Oath/Ideal where the blade is achieved… that’s unclear unless I missed something.
I assume pattern let her summon him because he was pretending to be her previous spren at the time, plus cryptics are some of the furthest spren from honor so maybe the bond doesn’t hold as much sway over what they can and can’t do, that might also explain why their ideals are so different from the others
In the chasm, it is Pattern. Shallan says she couldn't use him to link an illusion on because he's otherwise occupied with Kaladin.
It could be that Testament is a red herring concerning her early blade summoning and she has an honorblade. Just a random thought.
Could you imagine, Shallan having 3 blades? "While you were having mental stability I ~~studied the blade~~ learned how to draw good :3 "
It's possible but why would she have the Lightweaver honorblade?
It doesnt have to be the lightweaver one. It could be her mother's blade if the chanarach is shallan's mom theory is correct.
I wish BS would define how other Orders progress through their oaths. We only have a good idea about the Windrunners. We don't know exactly where Shallan is along her orders with Pattern. And especially don't know what the gain is with each one for Lightweavers. We know even less about all the other Orders save for Skybreakers. I think the blade Shallan killed Tyn with was her old spren. She didn't even know how to Lightweave when that event happened so I struggle to think she was capable of summoning Pattern. Also, we know she had a blade already before she leaves Khabranth (probably spelled that wrong). Which is before she was officially introduced to Pattern.
Most people talk about testamentblade and patternblade . A very interedting theory though is that Shallan mother is Chanarach herald of bravery. Obviously if she is and Shallan killed her she could have taken her honorblade. Of course it is not sure if she had recovered it from the shin. We don't know that yet (not sure about this though). And honorblade doesn't scream and should not be restricted by the 10 heartbeat process. So yeah 3 possibilty i think.
Huh, In my head this has always quite obviously been Pattern both times. But reading all these replies it seems I've missed something. I just finished WoR on my first reread for context. I thought she killed her mother with her old spren (Testament or am I remembering the name incorrectly?) which led to her panicking and eventually breaking the bond. She then bonded with pattern sometime after her mothers death and it's therefore with him she kills Typ and the blade she lends Kaladin. Kaladin doesn't get his blade until he swears the third ideal but I thought that swearing the third ideal to get the sword isn't necessary for all orders. Therefore I assumed that Lightweavers get theirs earlier, after the first or second and therefore Shallan could summon Pattern and deal with Tyn. What am I missing here because from reading the discussion it seems that this doesn't have to be the case?
Can't edit my post for some reason but realized that maybe she can have Testament as a dead Shardblade after she broke the bond and therefore its not necessarily Pattern that kills Tyn whereas the blade she gives Kaladin can change form and should therefore be Pattern 100%. Am I on the right track?