I have been very impressed with the book design yet again on this book.

So there's going to be a way for you guys out there, anybody of you guys out there listening to, enter into a little friendly competition here to see if you can win a copy of this book.

I'm going to explain more at the end.

It's going to have to do with the competition between my co -hosts here.

So stick around to the end of this episode and I will spell out how you can win a copy of Isles of Enderdark and maybe laugh at Paul and Trevor along the way.

So it'll be great.

Welcome back to Following Noah Don, a Stormlight podcast.

Although this is episode 277 and we are not reading from the Stormlight Archive, we are diving into Isles of the Ember Dark.

And I have gotten a promotion.

I am now in the driver's seat of this podcast because I have read this book and my co -hosts, Paul and Trevor, have not.

How does it feel, gentlemen, to be in the new reader seat?

Trevor, what are you feeling over there?

Has no one ever been to First of the Sun?

Ooh, there's a question.

Ooh, we're starting out with the spicy ones right off the beginning.

I am feeling more nervous than I thought I would be.

I'm going to get ridiculed for my predictions.

I have never been in this seat.

I have a bold prediction.

This episode...

And I'm going to get laughed at for it.

I've never had this feeling.

Trevor, you have had this feeling.

Not for your lousy predictions, but for your lousy feedback on things in previous books, such as your feelings about 12124, etc.

You're used to it.

It's just a new flavor.

I feel differently than Stormlight Predictions.

Because Stormlight Predictions, I was like 95 % that I was correct.

Even if I would trip and fall on my face, I still felt confident when I made them.

Now I feel 3 % confident and 97 % self -conscious.

That's fair.

I, for one, feel 90 % confident in my predictions, so we can follow me as the leading example.

There we go.

There we go.

Well, I am going to pitch you two guys against each other later in this episode.

So we'll get plenty of that.

There'll be some good competition to compare between Paul and Trevor over here.

But I'm very excited to be jumping into this book with you guys.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit.

It was quite a different experience for me to be able to binge read a Brandon Sanderson book.

I read the entirety of the book in about six days with the large bulk of it over the course of two.

And that is a...

Far cry from how I've read all the rest of these books with wind and truth taking us 11 months to read through 10 307 days.

There you go.

So it was a very different experience for me.

And I got a lot out of it.

I enjoyed it quite a bit.

So I'm excited to attempt to guide you guys through it here as we go.

Today, we're covering the prologue through chapter three.

And then on top of that, I'm going to ask you guys some big questions up front here right at the beginning of the book to try and see what you guys think we might be heading into.

And also, I just want soundbites for later.

That I have to edit.

Correct.

Sounds great.

We should do our announcement before my brief summary.

We can do that.

We can do that.

So I do have a big announcement.

We are going to do something on this podcast that we have never done before.

we are going to give away a book.

We have a fresh in the shrink wrap copy of Isles of the Ember Dark.

You want a copy of this book.

It is super cool.

I have been very impressed with the book design yet again on this book.

So there's going to be a way for you guys out there, anybody of you guys out there listening to and turned a little.

a friendly competition here to see if you can win a copy of this book.

I'm going to explain more at the end.

It's going to have to do with the competition between my co -hosts here.

So stick around to the end of this episode and I will spell out how you can win a copy of Isles of Enderdark and maybe laugh at Paul and Trevor along the way.

So it'll be great.

This is not how the competition is going to work, but vote for me.

I don't even have to ask you to vote for me.

I'm just going to say you know what to do.

Get you a podcast host that knows the Cosmere.

That's all I'll say.

I want to briefly add the book.

Isn't this a signed copy?

Or am I making that up?

I think you're making that up.

Although I haven't opened it, so I don't know.

I'm sorry.

It may or may not be signed.

I'll go back to you.

Let me check my copy and see if it's signed.

I don't think it is.

My copy that was ordered at the same time is not signed.

I'm guessing it is not.

Okay.

Well, regardless, it's a gorgeous book.

I have taken mine under the shrink wrap, but I've been a good boy and I have not flipped through it, but it looks stunning at the front.

So, yeah.

Well, without any further ado, let's get into the chapters and talk about them.

Trevor, do you want to take a shot at summarizing the events of these chapters for us?

Yes, I do.

And right off the bat, I have to say something that Elliot would not have experienced yet.

Maybe Paul, although Paul hasn't read Skyward.

The audio narrator for Starling is Jennifer Jill Araya.

And I was astounded to learn that it is not the same narrator as...

suzy jackson who does uh skyward because they sound identical they i i was stunned when they were not the same when i when i went to listen to this book and listen to the prologue i was like oh cool they got the same narrator as did skyward and i was like wait but the name didn't sound familiar at all so then i went looked two completely different people they sound identical somebody back me up here in the comments i know there's more audiobook listeners out there who have listened to skyward susie jackson jennifer gillariah you ladies sound identical okay my brief summary we start off with starling in the prologue who is on yolin thank you brandon sanderson for finally putting yolin in a book i appreciate that she is a super excited eight year old girl but she's also 30 and she's not a girl she's a dragon so i hope that wasn't confusing for you this is her day of ascension or whatever they call it she runs out and absorbs sunlight and becomes her full white dragon self hooray and then we can leave forget about her so back to chapter one through three we are with as no one is surprised six of the dusk This was leaked very early to me, so I knew this was Six of the Dusk's book.

Except it's five years after Six of the Dusk, the novella.

In the foreword of this book, Brandon Sanderson made me laugh.

I listened to this at work, and Brandon gives explicit permission to skip the flashback chapters, which I thought was really funny.

He acknowledges that I needed to incorporate the novella, but in a way that would make sense to people who haven't read the novella.

So if you've read the novella, especially recently, feel free to skip the flashback chapters.

I'm going to explain later why you shouldn't do that.

You're going to disagree with Brandon Sanderson?

Yes, I'm going to directly disagree with Brandon Sanderson.

Okay.

Wouldn't be the first time either.

So chapter one.

And Chapter 3, our current day dusk.

Chapter 2 is flashback dusk.

In Chapter 1 and 3, Six of the Dusk is running his little terrarium exhibit at the fair.

And he is explaining how dark and creepy and sinister Patchy is and how crazy that's Painter.

Are you pointing to Painter in our artwork?

no i'm putting in my title but you're oh you're mirrored i see oh well i don't know which side my there you go is it over here yeah okay now i'm just pointing at nothing but sorry to interrupt for those who aren't watching audio listeners got nothing out of that anyway dusk is running his terrarium exhibit and explaining to all the bored children how dark and creepy and sinister these death ants are And how anything can kill you on Patchy.

And he kind of misses it.

He's like, man, those are the good old days.

I didn't have to worry about society and normal life and cars.

I guess we've got cars.

I'm going to have to work on how to shorten these summaries.

And Chapter 3.

It's not as easy as it looks.

Chapter 3, we go and talk to Mother Frond, who tells a whimsical story.

Shout out to the Wandersail.

About Kokoban.

And he's got Kokoban sailing around and fooling all the gods and giants and stuff like that.

Flashback Dusk is the opening of Six of the Dusk.

He is approaching Patchy on his canoe with his two birds and one of the birds is shielding him from a big shark thing in the water.

The end.

What's my time?

Ten minutes?

I wasn't timing you, but...

You did fine.

You did fine.

I need to shorten those.

You'll get there.

You'll get there.

All right.

So before we jump into talking about these chapters in a little more detail, there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about first, just to set the stage, give you guys a few little nuggets to chew on as we head into this book.

And all these nuggets that I'm referring to come out of Arcanum Unbounded.

that we read, at least the vast majority of, quite a long time ago on the podcast.

So everything I'm about to tell you, we've already seen and read in Arcanum Unbounded.

But they're about to get a lot more relevant, so I'm going to bring them to your attention now.

The first thing I want to mention is in the Dromenad section of Arcanum Unbounded, where we get a little bit more information about the Dromenad system, which is where we are now.

Brandon includes a postscript to Sixth of the Dusk, the short story that we're getting regurgitated at us here in the beginning of this book.

In that postscript, he specifically talks about how this was not intended to be part of the Cosmere and that he added it into the Cosmere later or decided it was going to be part of the Cosmere later on.

But I actually find that really fascinating that the genesis of the story was supposed to be a standalone.

non -Cosmere story, and that it actually came from a writing ideas segment from his writing excuses podcast.

That is where this entire book came from, or at least the start of it was from his podcast.

I thought that was kind of cool.

The other bit I'm going to bring to your information is the notes we get from Chris.

about the Dromenad system.

If you haven't read Arcanum Unbounded, different systems in the Cosmere get little blurbs from the scholar Chris about them.

I'm going to read you now the entirety of her note.

It's only one page.

Listen, pay attention, and then remember this for the rest of the book.

Good luck.

Got it.

The Dromenad system.

There are many planets in the Cosmere that are inhabited, but upon which no shards currently reside.

Though the lives, passions, and beliefs of the people are, of course, important regardless of which planet they reside on, only a few of these planets have relevance to the greater Cosmere at large.

This is mostly due to the fact that travel on and off the planet, at least in the physical realm, is dependent upon perpendicularities, places where a person can transition from Shadesmar onto the planet itself.

If a world doesn't have a perpendicularity, then it can be studied from the Cosmere.

cognitive realm, but cannot truly be visited.

In general, perpendicularities are created by the presence of a shard on the planet.

The concentration of so much investiture on the cognitive and physical realms create points of friction where a kind of tunneling exists.

At these points, physical matter, cognitive thought, and spiritual essence become one, and a being can slide between realms.

The existence of a perpendicularity, which often take the form of pools of concentrated power on the physical realm on a planet, is a hallmark of a shard's presence.

This is what makes First of the Sun so interesting.

The system, nicknamed Dromenad, has a remarkable three planets inhabited by fully developed human societies.

There's also a fourth planet in the habitable zone.

This is unique in the Cosmere, only the Rosharan system can rival it, and there, one of the planets is inhabited solely by splinters.

All four of these planets have water as a dominant feature, and one of them, the first planet, has a perpendicularity.

I have not been able to discover why or how this perpendicularity exists.

There is certainly no shard residing in the system.

I cannot say what is happening, only that this feature must hint at things that occurred in the past on the planet.

There is likely investiture here somewhere as well, though I have not yet had a chance to investigate First of the Sun myself.

The area around the perpendicularity is extremely dangerous, and the few expeditions sent there from Silverlight have not returned.

There you go.

There's a bit of outsider information on Dromenad.

And with that, let's jump into our prologue, which is not on Dromenad.

It's on Yolen.

What did you guys think about getting to see a little bit of Yolen?

What a treat.

I've been waiting however many years for this.

I was a little confused.

Is there a sun on Yolen or not?

Unclear.

Yes.

Yes.

That's the whole thing.

It's a sunrise that's coming up.

Yeah, but she never refers to it as such.

She refers to it as first light.

So I feel like it was light without a sun.

No, you're just grasping, Trevor.

Perhaps, but I was confused by the writing that there was light without a sun.

First light.

I mean, Yolen would have to be some extra kind of mythical if that's the case.

I wouldn't walk too far with that.

Even though that'd be crazy.

What if there's just no suns, period?

I don't know.

I'm trying to help you out.

What if there's like two trees?

One's silver and one's gold.

And they light the planet.

Illuminate the world.

Just put a spitball in here.

I bet that's never been done before.

So props to Brandon.

I was also super excited to see Yolen.

As soon as the name is mentioned, I'm sure everyone reading this who's all in on the Cosmere leapt out of their seat and was like, yeah, we're there.

We're at Yolen.

We get some notable characters we've always gotten mention of, too.

We see Frost, right?

So everyone's like, the name drop, the planet we're on, this is epic.

We're surrounded by dragons.

Like, this is some...

crazy cosmic wish list stuff and we're in the first couple pages so i thought this was fascinating so what the dragons have to be human for a little while so they understand the humans before then becoming a full -fledged dragon is that right that's what i was understanding yeah that's what starling was doing here yeah it appears to be almost like a metamorphosis moment it's but go ahead hold on back to what paul said for those of you who are not all in on the cosmere and for some reason listening to this podcast which is probably zero people that i have to shout out this one one random person in this facebook stormlight group that keeps showing up on my feed even though i say i don't want it on my feed there's this lady who i have to tell this story there's this lady who read the entirety of Stormlight in this Facebook group, and then read Tress, and then read Isles of Emberdark, and she is now going to start reading Mistborn.

And I was like, excuse me, Watts.

Your order, ma 'am, is a little suspect.

I have been waiting for Yolen for eight years, and this lady...

Waltz is in and gets to Yolen in five months.

Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.

I appreciate being on Yolen.

I am 100 % sure this lady had no idea the treat she got when she opened the first page and it said Yolen.

Sorry.

Carry on.

Something I'm very interested to talk with you guys about that we have a long ways to go before we can is whether or not, well, let me rephrase.

Where in your reading order does this book need to be?

Or like, what are the options?

Can you read in that order like you just threw out there?

Or I've heard multiple people now claim that this is, as it stands right now, the capstone Cosmere book, that you need to read absolutely everything else before you pick this book up.

I'm going to be very curious to your guys' take on that.

I'm not going to weigh in anything on that right now, but we will for sure be talking about that when we finish.

excited about it that was my assumption was that this was the last thing you're supposed to read no matter the order that you read previously sorry i'm getting going on too many tangents we haven't made any progress my fault you're right you're right for what it's worth i am notably unconvinced of that and although yolen and frost are names that should have have a lot of significance to us now I'm thinking that this might be not a capstone, but we're only a couple chapters in.

Just one more thing I'll add on the prologue before we jump into our Dusk chapters is I was a little caught off guard, a little surprised pleasantly at the likableness of Uncle Frost.

Our only experience we'd had of that dude before was letters between him and Hoid.

Where he's a little, dare I say it, frosty towards Hoyt.

Like he is.

He's a little standoffish.

He's a little, you know, hey, man, I wish I could help you, bro, but I can't.

It's kind of all your show.

You got this.

Good job.

Good luck.

And so I was a little bit when I saw the name Frost thinking, oh, he's going to be, you know, the same kind of standoffish a little bit.

He's like super friendly.

Chummy, cool uncle Frost.

Got someone to cover the prayers for today so we can go hang out and celebrate Extension Day.

Super chill.

Super great uncle award.

This is actually something I want to talk about in regards to Stormlight.

If you haven't read Stormlight, go read Stormlight.

Odium's out of the genie bottle.

And that was Frost's entire excuse before of not getting involved was, hey, we got to keep Odium in the genie bottle.

And at the end of Stormlight, Hoid comes to the conclusion of, after he talks to his bone phone, wait a minute, now people will get involved.

So now we're at some future date, and Frost is here taking some prayers on Yolen.

Presumably he's out of...

excuses to not get involved i'm expecting frost to be a player like he has either previously done things or is currently doing things in the cosmere on grand scale that's what i'm expecting uh -huh now we're asking some questions this is this is the part where i now have to learn to have as good of a poker face as trevor has for five whole years never betraying anything Let's see if I can meet that bar.

If it wasn't obvious with the amount of talking I've done in this episode so far, I am greatly enjoying the second or tertiary seat, whichever one I'm in, and get to talk about whatever the heck I want.

You do get to do that.

All right, we do have some questions.

I want to get to the end of this episode, so let's jump into our Dusk chapters.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3.

We can kind of probably hit all these together.

We pick up with Dusk.

Trevor, you summarized this pretty well.

Modern times, five years ahead of the Dusk we've seen before from the little novella of the Dusk.

He's, yeah, struggling a little bit in a new world, a world that is quickly passing him by.

What do you guys think about Dusk and how he's perceiving the world around him?

I was, okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about all the chapters at once, briefly.

We're dropped in to this.

Brandon does a good job.

I figured Elliot that you would praise this because I feel like I had pretty clear imagery of what's happening.

He's giving a little show and tell about these ants.

He's a trapper and he's got these ants and he's showing these kids and their parents.

And the kids are just, they don't care.

There's like kids crying in the back.

Nobody cares, but he's going on and on about these death ants and how if you take a bite, it has this like, it was like the Crocodile Hunter.

The good old Crocodile Hunter show is like the imagery I'm getting of him.

Crikey, mate.

Crikey, these death ants, if you get bit by one, you won't take three steps before you die.

You know?

And these kids just don't care.

I'm like, man, y 'all are missing it.

This is awesome.

Field trips are wasted on the young.

Let me put it out there that kids should not go to the aquarium for the day.

I should go to the aquarium for the day during work.

Anyways, so they're getting this whole presentation about these death ants, and no one's really paying him much heed.

No one's really paying attention.

No one's engaged.

And he thinks to himself, like, how surreal is it?

that these ants in this jar were what struck the biggest amount of fear into even the most skilled trappers for years, for centuries and such.

And now they're simply just bugs in a jar, right?

Like the development of time and technique and whatnot, they've been able to catch these death ants.

It changes the perspective.

People are comfortable with it.

And I thought it was setting a really, really neat scene.

One for that, but I love this imagery.

As a boy who grew up loving the Crocodile Hunter and any kind of nature show I could watch on Animal Planet, watching animals, particularly reptiles and stuff, I'm like a kid in a candy shop.

I feel like with this and with...

I have to admit that I...

Starting these chapters...

This felt like a breath of fresh air and it's not necessarily peaceful at times, but like, I don't know, slow paced and just, just a bit peaceful, relaxed in chapter two, you get the imagery, the beautiful imagery of just the sound of the oars in the water and how that brings him so much peace, just kind of this open water rowing.

And using his sextant and these things like that to guide, being a navigator.

I was enthralled by the imagery.

And so I'm already, we're three chapters in, I have very high hopes for my investment in this secret project.

I think it's beautiful.

I'm like, Dusk is just so cool.

If I had an occupation in the Cosmere, I think I would want to be a trapper.

Like, that's what he talks about here.

It wouldn't be the most glamorous.

It wouldn't be the coolest thing to do in the Cosmere.

But, man, I think it's so cool.

So there's my two cents there.

Paul, you've done yourself a disservice.

One of the big points in Chapter 2 is he's not using his compass.

He's not using his text.

He doesn't use his stars, but he has it.

He has them, and he's achieved to the point where he doesn't need them.

You are right about that.

You are correct.

I'm thinking about myself there.

I think, I don't know if y 'all agree with this, but I've had a theory for a long time that every man deep down would totally be on board if they could hypothetically drop responsibilities and go like sail the open sea with some sextant and ornaments.

Like, yeah, absolutely.

That's what I want to do.

You know, that'd be awesome.

So this is really scratching that itch for me.

All right.

Let me set the scene of Six of the Dusk and see if I, well, I'm going to keep calling this book Six of the Dusk, even though it's not.

Isles of Everdark.

And let me see if I got this correct.

We have the ones above who want desperately to trade with First of the Sun.

They want the birds.

They are so keen on grabbing these birds.

The problem is.

There's some treaty, which I don't know if we learned about this in Sunlit Man or if I made this up or where, but you're not allowed to impede on developing planets and freak them out.

In the Cosmere, Silverlight, Elantris, Cell, I guess, whoever is leading the...

technology isn't allowed to impede on the developing planets.

Once you have reached a certain level, then you're allowed to go talk to them.

I don't know where I got that from.

I don't know if that's canon or not, so let me know.

Whoever the ones above are can't help themselves.

They can't wait for these AVR.

Therefore, they're going to conveniently drop The Starship, I think, is what is in Six of the Dusk novella.

And they drop updated maps we see in Chapter 2 that are way more accurate than anything that they've come up with for their navigating.

And then they drop cars on us in Chapter 1.

And we're just supposed to deal with that.

So from what I understand, we have this planet who...

timeline wise is like the 1700s we're just discovering the new world we're sailing the oceans we're we're on the cusp of like the the renaissance of of navigation and you know all of the technology that goes along with that but the ones above can't wait and they're super impatient so they're trying to hurry us on our merry way and Get us up to speed so that they can trade with us.

So now we have Sixth of Dusk, who is our protagonist, who prided himself on being a trapper, and then the ones above showed up, and now being a trapper doesn't mean anything.

So that's the problem.

And how do you deal with that as a person who was raised to be a trapper, told this is the pinnacle of being a professional, is wayfinding the old -fashioned way, and now none of it matters.

That's really fascinating.

And folks, that is Isles of Emberdark.

We will move on to the next book in the Cosmere.

Next book in the Cosmere?

Yeah, if you're hiding one over there, let me know.

Yeah, this is it, isn't it?

We better take our time.

I don't feel like I need to correct you on any of that.

All that to say, I think it'll be really fascinating what Brandon does with this.

How do you handle someone who was raised to be in the old world and was thrown into the new one.

And what does that do to your identity?

Fascinating.

I'm excited about it.

So I guess that leaves...

Go ahead, Paul.

So I was going to say, I feel like that leaves us with...

By the way, Trevor, well done with that summary.

I think that was actually very succinct.

The questions I have remaining are some of the...

things in chapter three one because you have a crazy accusation i do in the outline two because elliot has a good question in the outline about some of our characters that we see here i don't know if that's what we're ready to talk about or elliot if you have other things you want us to focus on before we move forward let's touch on one thing real quick because i think our chapter three questions are going to lead us well into kind of some speculation of this book as a whole real quick before we go there chapter two is a flash flashback so if this wasn't already apparent it's kind of spelled out in brandon's preface or intro or whatever he he wrote there at the beginning we are going to see the entirety of six of the dust the novella kind of reprinted here in this book as flashback however i did not read reread The sixth of the dust novella prior to reading this book.

I am doing so now.

So as I'm rereading these chapters for these episodes, I am reading them side by side with the novella to see if I can find what he changed.

Okay.

Interesting.

In this very first one, he changed a lot.

Not really content of like the story, but he added.

almost an entire page which is a lot because this entire that entire chapter is like four pages he added an entire page all about the wayfinding all right i was gonna say that the whole hand in the water thing was new yes yes so the the little bits about kind of comparing the technologies the the compass and the sextant versus the sticking your hand in the water and feeling the direction of the waves so that you know kind of where the land is.

He goes into much more detail here than he did in the Sixth of the Dust novella.

So this is my little plug of, I think it might be a little dangerous to skip these chapters.

It might be tempting, especially if you've read Sixth of the Dust recently, just like Brandon says, to go, oh, wait, I know this, skip.

Just based on this first one, this is the first time I've done this where I've read them side by side.

There is a solid 250 words that he added.

So it might be a little dangerous for us to assume that we know everything.

I know what the important addition was.

What?

When he sticks his hand in the water, he's like, it's almost as if the islands are talking to me.

Ah.

Moving on.

I was like, hold up.

That was not the original.

So I just wanted to highlight that.

I'll keep doing this as we go and bring to you what some of the differences are as we go.

But the Polynesian wayfinding, how do you sail the ocean when all you have is a notebook, your two eyes, and the waves beneath you?

And the Polynesians did this.

And Brandon, I think, says he's very fascinated by this and wanted to write books about it.

I think that's in the little postscript from Arcanum Unbounded as well as his fascination with that.

So more details coming through in that.

And I think that's all I'm going to say for now.

So we can jump into our questions, accusations, predictions, whatever you want to call them from Chapter 3.

And then Disney came out with Moana and Stole a Slender.

Okay, so hold on.

Yes, we have to talk about this real quick before we go any further.

Brandon has posted an entire video on social media addressing this.

There are maybe some easy -to -draw comparisons between Isles of the Underdark and the Disney movie Moana.

Brandon hopped on a video to kind of say, hang on, even though my thing was published later, I actually wrote it first.

So...

According to Brandon, he wrote most of this book prior to the movie Moana coming out.

And after the movie did come out, a lot of his readers, his beta readers or whatever, were giving him a lot of feedback of, hey, man, this is a lot like Moana.

So he actually rewrote this book.

He talks about this in this video on social media.

He had to go back and do a hefty edit of this book to, these are his words, de -Moanify it.

I want your reactions.

That's a good word.

I want your takes at the end of the entire book of how Moana -esque you feel like it ended up being, because I have thoughts on that that we won't talk about until the very end.

But there you go.

Brandon has addressed specifically that, yes, this seems a lot like Moana.

He had to rewrite sections of it to try to make it not Moana.

I did hear the deep Moana five miles of emerald arc line.

I don't know when it came up on my social media feed, but I did hear that before.

Okay, chapter three.

I'm very excited about this.

So the first actual character that Dusk talks to is Mother Frond, I think is her name.

And she is briefly described as an older lady with darker skin than Dusk.

Nobody knows who her actual close family is.

Some far off island.

She's kind of always been here.

Her real job is giving lore drops to chieftains and stuff like that.

But her real favorite pastime is telling stories to kids.

I was like, all right, hold up.

That's cultivation.

Has to be.

It's a pretty quick prediction there.

Quick off the hip.

I am fully prepared for everyone to be somebody else in disguise in this book.

That is my...

I am suspect of every single person in this book.

All right, so just so I get this straight, you think we've found Cultivation because she is a woman, has dark skin, and tells stories?

It specifically says she's a little overweight, which I think Cultivation...

More accurately, let me say this more accurately.

More accurately, what's her face?

Coravellium.

This is Coravellium.

Not necessarily cultivate.

She may not have cultivation at the time.

And to put the cherry on top, she's a dragon.

She's a dragon.

We have dragons in human form already in this book.

And Coravellium's a dragon in human form.

currently I cannot prove you wrong.

It doesn't mean anything coming from me right now.

Literally means nothing.

So yeah, could be, that could be cool.

So next chapter, do you think she's turning back into a dragon and flying away?

No, no, it's like chapter six at least, but it would explain some of the weird perpendicularity stuff that Chris doesn't know what to do with.

It just depends on.

So, okay, now we're metagaming this.

When did Chris write these excerpts on the planets?

Because she's like, all right, there's definitely not a shard here, but there's definitely a perpendicularity.

And then when she writes the Rosharan one, she's like, yeah, there's three shards on the planet, which there were at the time when Arcade Unbound was published.

So we can't spoil Stormlight.

I get that.

But it's cultivation.

All right.

I am going to read a quote here.

I was wanting to read this whether you made a bold prediction here or not.

Do whatever you will with it.

There was just one thing that Mother Frond says that I thought worth pointing out.

It's very brief.

At the very end of Chapter 3, she's talking with Dusk, and she says, Sometimes...

We need a person who looks in from yesterday.

Ooh.

And that is all I'm going to do.

Point that quote out.

I am also fascinated by Mother Frond.

Mother Frond tells a story.

You guys remember who the story was about?

Kakabon.

Kakabon.

Kakabon.

A .K .A.

Darethil of the Wandersail.

We already know it.

This is a story passed down from Urshar.

Okay.

Doubling down on my cultivation theory.

I wanted your guys' takes on Kakabon.

Kakabon the Navigator.

Trevor, you seem to have already given me yours.

Paul, what was your initial reaction to Mother Frond and her story of Kakabon the Navigator?

Well, I did not initially put someone else's image on there.

But if I had to pick someone, it would of course be Lightsong.

Well, hold on a second.

That's Shalon?

Wait a second.

Flash that out for me.

How can Shalon be in three places at once?

Well, that was just fully a joke.

I can't back that one up, I'm afraid.

Until Brendan Sanderson confirms it with some...

nifty stuff.

There was probably an easy answer to that.

Shallan can definitely be in three places once she does it all the time.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

I just missed a straight down the middle pitch.

I can't believe it.

It got accusatory.

Elliot has more pressure asking these questions than Trevor had.

Let me say this real quick.

On our...

that we're going to have at the end of this episode.

I feel like I'm either swaying a lot of people to have a lot of faith in me because of how accurate I am or pushing so many people away with how crazy I'm getting with this book.

One of the two.

You guys are kind of campaigning a little bit for the competition we're about to have at this end of this episode.

So yeah, you're right.

You may or may not be doing yourself some favors.

No, my actual prediction.

It's not Darethil.

We can't all in on the Wondersail.

Not everybody is a Wondersail fan like myself.

My actual prediction, genuine prediction here.

The same world as What's -Her -Face from The Girl Who Stood Up.

There is no daytime in both stories.

And both stories go and look for the light.

Kakamon sails the waters.

and goes and looks for the sun, I think.

There's no sun at the time, so he always sails at night.

The girl who stood up always lives in darkness, goes and climbs the wall to go find Stormlight, I think, and brings it back to her village.

Same planet, same lore, same thing going on.

Wherever those two stories are from are the same location.

Okay, okay.

Is there a quote we're supposed to get to contribute to this as well, or are we just rolling with the thoughts?

No, my quote was for Mother Frond.

I don't have a quote from Kakaban.

There's just a story that tells of Kakaban, the navigator sailing the Endless Night, and Trevor summarized it pretty well in his summaries where he's fighting monsters, and he goes up against the...

This is where I have to make sure I don't spoil things.

The Dakwara and the giants that he sails in between.

Those kinds of things.

I just remembered what I, okay, because you said, all right, here we go.

Because you said Dakwara and not Dakara, like they say in the audio book, that reminds me of the Uvala that are in the Wondersail.

Now we are talking about the same place, I'm sure of it.

The Uvala are the people who live where the storm drains, where Darethil goes, and they go talk to the emperor in the top room or whatever.

Go read the water show.

The Uvara, Dukara, that is definitely the same language.

Surely.

Just different words, but same language.

Is that what you're saying, Trevor?

Right.

Like, same...

Same race.

Same ethnic language we're talking here.

All right.

I hadn't put those two together, but I'll follow.

I'll follow.

So naturally, my instinct would want...

This is not my answer.

My instinct would always be to say Hoid.

There's a lot of legend that has Hoid as some messenger or some spirit or something.

But it's hard for me to picture Hoid skirting around fighting giants and things.

He's a little too...

We have seen him fist fight, you know, and he's actually really good.

But it's hard for me to stick him here.

I wonder if we're actually going to get some crazy lore dropped in here.

And this is going to be Frost.

And that's going to be some of the cool connections.

Frost is the old loving uncle now.

But back in the day, he was this giant fighting, gallivanting champion.

So then this book becomes a bit of a lore drop in context of Frost, thus setting up the future of the Cosmere as Frost will get involved.

All right.

I'm liking those juicy thoughts there on Mother Frond and Cacobram.

Anything else on these chapters from you guys before I throw some kind of bigger book prediction questions at you?

Read your quote that backs up my Mother Frond theory, please.

Oh, I already did.

You did?

Yep.

It doesn't necessarily directly back you up, back up anything.

It was more of a, hey, brain tickler.

Sometimes we need a person who looks in from yesterday.

Got it, yeah.

Yeah, I guess I was assuming it was like a description thing or something.

Okay, got it.

All right.

Let's shift gears a little bit and answer for me a few of the bigger questions.

We've already gotten into quite a bit of this, so if you wrap this into stuff we've already said, great.

Four questions here before our big...

book giveaway competition at the end four quick questions we don't necessarily need to rapid fire these but i don't want to spend too long spinning crazy theories on these just give me kind of your initial takes on each one of these each one of these questions first question how many planets do you think we're going to visit over the course of this book point of clarification i haven't i assume we is like we the reader will see these planets right sure And secondly, we're three chapters in.

Haven't we already seen three planets?

Haven't we seen Yolen?

Patchy?

He's rolling up to Patchy, isn't he, in the flashback?

That's an island on first to the sun.

Oh, okay, okay.

My apologies.

So just two.

Okay.

Okay.

My gut instinct is that I'm wondering if this is a red herring of a question.

I'm going to go with three.

I'm going to go say something crazy that we're going to see the third one somewhere, somehow.

Yeah, I'm going to go with three.

Okay.

Is this the price is right rules?

These ones are not competitive.

I'm not defining any super specific rules on these ones.

What do you mean they're not competitive?

The competitive one is coming, and I will spell out some rules for you.

I'm going to go with 3 .1.

Okay.

Wow.

Nice.

No, my genuine prediction is 4.

That's what I was going to say before Paul said 3.

Okay.

3, 4.

All right.

Reasonable answer.

No, because of the thing you read.

where Dromonad has three inhabitable planets, or four inhabitable planets, and three of them were already inhabited, plus Yolen, so four.

You were paying attention.

I was thinking about four because there's four in the system, and I was thinking we were going to see one more than we already have.

But I was thinking, for some reason, that Patchy was a planet, and First of the Sun was a planet, which was my bad.

So, yeah.

I was really hoping one of you guys was just going to YOLO it and say 12.

You're 14?

Yeah, okay.

Anyway.

Oh, we got to find the magic number for the Germanette system.

You know how, like, Skadrill's 16 and Roshar is 10?

We got to find the Germanette system.

We mentioned Investiture somewhere, but we haven't found it yet.

I have ideas already.

Anyway, moving on.

Moving on.

Moving on.

Okay, second question.

How many familiar characters do you think we will see or hear mentioned?

Again, I'm not going to hold you to a specific number here.

Gut feel.

How many familiar faces are we going to see?

So Frost would count as one?

Sure.

I was going to ask the same question about Cokerly.

Like, do Aviar...

Oh, yeah, the two birds you've seen already.

I wouldn't count anything we've seen from Sixth of the Dusk.

Right.

Outside of that story.

That's a good distinction.

Okay.

Twelve.

Everybody's going to be here.

Fairly high.

I had nine written down.

But that was like, okay, we've already seen Dusk and Cokerly and Frost, right?

Who else is going to be in here that we already know?

If we're taking out six of the Dusk characters and just looking at others, I'm going to go with five.

We're going to have the Ghostbloods or something stroll up, and we'll see a crew of two or three people we know.

Okay.

Okay.

The Ghostbuzz is a good shout out because I do think the ones above are Scadrian.

I have vague memories of that.

But 12 is a little crazy.

I'll stick with it.

I don't think it's that crazy.

I'll be honest.

Really?

Well, if you're taking out Six of the Dust characters, yeah, it's a little crazy.

I will keep a straight face.

There's one specific question.

One specific character.

I want to ask you about that is a very familiar face, Hoyd.

How do you think Hoyd will appear in this book, or will he at all?

Okay, I'm going to jump on this right away.

Yes, he is going to appear in this book, and I would like bonus points if he appears as either...

Well, okay, my prediction is I think he's going to appear as an animal.

I would like bonus points if he's either a bug or a fish.

I could see a talking fish, Hoid, appearing.

Like Wind Waker style, where every time you sail around to each island, the same fish pops up?

Yes.

Tells you something interesting about the island?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So if it's a bug or a fish, I get a bonus point, an imaginary bonus point.

I'll give you lots of bonus points if he's a bug or a fish.

I mean, he was a coat rack in a previous book.

It's not that crazy.

Trust me, I'm not crazy, guys.

Playing tricks on Hoid is a favorite pastime of every antagonist in the Cosmere.

Yeah, absolutely.

We're seeing Hoid.

If you don't, I will be very disappointed.

If we get Frost and no Hoid, that will be very sad.

Oh, yeah.

I mean...

I assume it'll be late in a cameo, but I don't think he's actually in the story, but he will be here somewhere.

Okay.

So like not, not Tress level, but not if he writes a letter to Frost, that counts.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Well, we shall see.

We will.

raffle our way towards finding out if Hoyt is in this book or not.

Here's another question that I definitely wanted to ask you guys.

How many characters do you think might die in the course of this book?

Does Coke really count?

I mean, you can either factor that in or not.

We have learned already, actually, in the difference between our flashback and current day that Coker Lee is no longer with us.

So I guess factor that out.

It's beyond Coker Lee.

Does, does Hoyd as a fish and then re grouping himself on schedule or Petri dish count?

No, like a definite, we're talking definitive death.

Right.

Or somewhat non -definitive death.

Like if they die, but they come back at a later book or something.

I'm going to say if we're talking notable characters, which I assume we are, not like some, ooh, this happened and five random people went flying.

Correct.

I'm going to stick with zero.

Brandon Sanderson does not kill his characters.

It's a bold guess, yeah.

I'm hoping for an honorable death, but I'm going to go with zero.

Surely this is the book where we reverse the tides.

Surely.

I'm going to go with a bold two.

Two?

A huge guess of two.

Actually, I'm going to go with a bold guess of 1 .9, so I beat the tiebreaker if it's one.

You and your decimals.

You are getting competitive here for my last question.

Then I change mine to 0 .2.

Characters will die.

You can have one.

I'll hold two, and you can have 0 .1.

0 .1 deaths.

Okay.

All right.

Well said.

Well guessed.

We will find out how accurate you may or may not be as we go.

All right.

That brings us to the big moment.

We announced this at the beginning of the episode, and we are now here.

We are giving away a copy of the book, Isles of the Emberdark.

However, you're going to have to win it.

We are going to have a little competition here.

We're going to have a competition between our two friendly co -hosts that I've got here, Paul and Trevor.

They are fighting for bragging rights.

You guys out there are fighting to try to win the book.

I'm going to ask them a question.

I'm going to ask them this question right now.

They are going to answer it.

They're not going to reveal their answers right now because we're going to keep this going.

And the challenge to you guys out there is going to be to guess how wrong they are.

It's going to make sense in a second.

You mean how right we are?

What kind of phrasing is that?

You have no faith.

I'm a little offended.

I have some faith.

I have faith in my co -hosts.

You guys out there are guessing how right they are, how spot on they are going to be with their answers here.

Okay, here's the question.

Here's the question.

We're going to centralize all this around.

I'm going to spoil something very, very tiny for you guys right now.

Starling is going to be a main character in this book, a primary character.

That's not immediately apparent from the chapters that you guys have read so far.

She's in the prologue.

Brandon probably wouldn't have introduced her if she wasn't going to be, but I'm going to spoil it now.

There are going to be two main characters in this book.

One is Dusk.

One is Starling.

My question for you guys.

On what page of this book will Dusk first speak directly to Starling?

The book I'm using for this, of course, is the book that I have in my hand, which is the Kickstarter edition of the book.

There are 461 pages in this book.

It is very possible for you guys to guess that Dusk does not speak directly to Starling at all in this book.

If you want to make that your guess, I want you to write down 462.

The numbers are going to matter here because you guys out there doing this challenge for this book giveaway, I want you guys to guess how many pages off that you think Trevor and Paul's guesses are going to be.

Trevor and Paul, you guys have already written down your answers for this.

I'm going to have you talk about a little bit of your thoughts going into this here in a second to give all of you listeners out there a little something to go off.

Listen to what Paul and Trevor are saying.

Get inside their heads.

Put your Paul cap on, your Trevor hood on.

He's in a hoodie right now.

And think how they would think.

How many pages off are they going to be the actual answer?

If you're curious what the actual answer is, feel free to jump in our Discord and come ask me.

We will have a channel where we are full spoilers on this book.

I'd be happy to point you to the page that I found that I am using as my marker for when this happens, if it does at all.

And so with that, Paul and Trevor, talk us through some of your thoughts.

Maybe Paul, give us your thoughts first.

What do you think?

Without fully revealing your answer.

Okay, without revealing...

what my page number guess is.

My thoughts with this book were that it's not going to be a series, a long ongoing series.

So my, my, my matter predictions that our characters will meet, but it'll be down the road aways.

So I don't know when exactly, but I think I got really close.

I don't think I got exactly the page, but probably just a couple of pages off.

if not right on the money.

So later on, to metagame it a little bit, if he's asking this question and then we open the page to book four and then they're talking, I think that'd be lame.

So yeah, we're going to build up to it.

The suspense is going to build, and then we're going to reveal that Paul was right on the money with his guess.

All right.

Here's my logic.

Ready?

Elliot gave away too much when he designed this game.

He explicitly said, in the same breath, I'm going to orchestrate a game for you and Paul.

And then he said, don't flip through your book no matter what, on the same breath.

So, what does that tell me?

It tells me exactly one page that it's not, and it's that last page that they do at some point meet.

So that is off the table.

There's art of them meeting.

That's the conclusion I've come to.

Now, as I thought about this, I was scrolling Facebook.

And I got the question from Elliot the same time I was scrolling Facebook.

And I saw a meme.

And it was a meme about a book.

And the meme went to the tune of when you are fill in the blank amount of pages into the book.

And I don't remember how the meme ended.

And I used that number.

So whatever that number is, that's the idea I came up with, and there's my logic.

So you picked your number based off of a random meme you saw on Facebook.

Correct.

Okay.

When you are this many numbers into a book and something happens.

I don't remember what the meme was, but there you go.

That's the number I used.

Well, there you have it, guys.

Read whatever you want.

That's my educated guess.

I see.

Very curious how this is going to play out now.

All right, there you go.

You have some thoughts.

What I want all of you guys to do for this challenge, I am going to link everybody to a Google form where you guys can jump in and give me answers to this question.

We will link it in the description of this video.

We'll put it in our Discord.

You'll be able to find it in either of those places.

So YouTube or Discord.

Trevor assured me he could put it on like Spotify and things like that too.

Yeah, I can put links in Spotify descriptions, but I'm not sure they're actually links.

I I'm, I'm not confident people can actually click on them.

They'd have to like do it the old fashioned way and copy paste it into something.

So you might have to do a little bit of digging to find my, find my links, but our YouTube video for sure.

Our discord channel, that's two places that you will definitely be able to find this link.

Hop on there and tell me how far off you think Trevor and Paul are going to be.

How many pages, how many pages away is Paul's guess from the actual answer of when.

dusk first speaks to starling and remember if that never happens in this book we're treating that as the imaginary page after the end of the book so we will count from that non -existent page for that if that is the case what did you say 460 pages or something like that there are 461 pages in the story so 462 will be the number we treat for not having Oh, there's one more bit.

One more bit, and this is important too, especially with everything that Trevor just spelled out for his methodology.

It's possible we could have a tie, so I do actually need a tiebreaker.

I'm going to slap a tiebreaker on this as well.

As a tiebreaker, I would like you to pick which of the two guesses, Paul or Trevor, you want to be your tiebreaker score.

You could think of this as your following note on fantasy team captain, if you will.

If it comes down to a tie, I need to use one of your answers to be your tiebreaker.

Please tell me whether you have more faith in Paul or you have more faith in Trevor.

I'm so glad.

We've waited 277 episodes to finally pit off the popularity contest between me and Trevor.

We'll see.

Do you have more faith in Paul's brain or the meme that Trevor was looking at at the time you got the question?

There you go.

And we're not going to leave the Google form open up for too long.

We will need to close that fairly soon.

So we will keep that open for probably about a month from when this episode goes live.

So if you're listening to this after a month from when it was first posted, you might have missed it, but go check our link.

If there's still time, get your answers in for a chance to win a copy, beautiful copy of Isles of the Ember Dark.

The scene where they meet is in about a month, is what he's telling us.

And so he has to close it before then.

You're trying to meta this so hard.

You are looking for every little bit of info you can get out of this.

I've already written my answer, so it doesn't matter.

You can read all you want into any of this.

I'm three steps ahead of you already.

Let me put it this way.

I know how Brandon thinks.

I know...

I am confident in my answer.

And the number that came up fit approximately what my guess was going to be.

That's why I used it.

Trevor, I grant you part of that.

I think you do understand how Brandon thinks.

But I don't know that you have the best recall of that after the fact.

My evidence is you read Wind and Truth.

and said, Kalada didn't do anything in this book.

And that is my case against Trevor in this argument.

I also said two people would die in this book, so I don't know if...

We're going big.

We are going big.

Alrighty.

Well, that'll do it, I think, for chapters prologue through three of Isles of the Ember Dark.

I'm very excited to keep going into this book with you guys.

Next week, we are going to be moving a little bit faster because we are going to have some flashback chapters with content that we're at least a little bit familiar with.

So we're going to speed up the pace a little bit through a few of these intro episodes.

So next week, we're going to be covering chapters four through nine of Isles of Ember Dark.

And with that, thank you for joining me, Paul and Trevor.

see you next month see you next week