But he talks about the horizon.

So right, so he's a navigator.

So the horizon's a big deal.

He's kind of always trying to keep track of where he's at.

So he looks out at the horizon, but they're not on a globe -shaped planet anymore.

It's all perfectly flat.

And so there's an infinite horizon.

The horizon isn't even really a horizon like we think about it on our planet Earth, because Earth is round.

Or maybe there's a few of you out here that don't believe that Earth is round.

I might try and convince you right now that it's round.

Welcome back to Following Noodon, a Stormlight podcast.

This is episode 280.

We are digging further into Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson.

We're going to talk about chapters 17 through 21, and we've got a doozy of a reveal in these chapters, rather different than maybe some of the reveals we've had in previous Brandon Sanderson books.

So I'm very excited to talk about it and hear with me are Paul and Trevor, as always.

Trevor, you're unmuted, so I'll call you first.

How are you?

I am unmuted.

I will give a full disclaimer.

on what we will talk about in a second.

But yeah, I'm doing well.

I put up Christmas lights today.

It's the 16th of November when we're recording this.

So whether that's sacrilegious to you, I apologize.

Or, you know, it's the border of the gray area.

So yeah, good.

Paul, how are you?

I'm doing well.

I'm doing as well as I can be.

Tonight is a Sunday night.

And on Thursday, I got my wisdom teeth pulled.

So I'm a little swollen.

Oof.

A little discomfort currently after some pain medicine.

But we have not missed a normally scheduled week.

This podcast and I don't intend to start now.

Therefore, I am doing great.

I think I missed one.

I think I have missed one episode on this podcast.

You guys recorded without me, like Tim or something.

Maybe so.

Who needs wisdom anyway?

True.

Definitely not on this podcast.

Here's the disclaimer that we're going to be talking about in this episode.

We'll talk about our giveaway in a second.

But, there, Elliot alluded to it last week, and we will be talking explicitly about it this week.

There is a reason why you should read the physical book on chapter 21 specifically.

and if you have not done so and can do so if you're reading along with us or listening along with us and have access to dragon seals edition of the physical book which we're giving away or probably have given away if you're listening to this do go pick it up and use your physical book for chapter 21.

even if you've read it already go reread it with your dragon still copy because We're about to reveal exactly what is going on in the book in about five minutes here.

So if you haven't done so, go read chapter 21 in the physical book.

There's my disclaimer.

I'll throw back to Elliot.

Yeah, special, special spoiler warning for you audiobook only listeners.

Like Trevor said, go grab your physical book.

It is worth pausing this episode right now to go quickly reread that chapter because there is something really cool.

I did have Paul and Trevor.

They were given specific instructions to pause their audiobooks and read the physical copy.

We're going to talk about why in a second.

But before we do that, and so that maybe you can experience this cool moment in the book, we are giving away a copy of this if you're listening to this episode when it comes out, like the day of it comes out.

About a week from the day this episode we're recording right now comes out, we're going to be closing entries for our giveaway.

If you're listening to us in the future, obviously this has all happened in the past, but you do have another week -ish, if you're listening to this the day it comes out, to get your entry into our book giveaway.

You can go back to our first Isle of Emberdark episode for the details on how to do that, or in the link that's in the description of this video, I'm sure, we'll take you to the form with all the details on how to enter.

There are some kind of quiz questions you have to answer, and you have to decide whether you have more faith in Paul or whether you have more faith in Trevor.

Big questions.

Go do it.

We're going to mail somebody a very cool copy of a Brandon Sanderson secret project.

Hold on.

I had a listener of the podcast reach out to me, and he told me that he said that he thought that I missed the page by four pages.

He had that much faith in me that I missed it by four pages.

That is a lot of faith in you.

I will say the last time I checked the numbers, there were more people picking Paul as a more accurate guess.

No, the meme that I was looking at at the time was divinely ordained, and that was the answer.

Elliot, I didn't know that, and that really made my day.

Thank you, everybody.

That was like a week ago, and I'm sure a bunch more people are piling here.

We're going to look at it.

We'll look and see.

We have the final week push.

I'm not concerned.

Even though I'm behind in the polls, we'll be fine.

I was going to say, honestly, I just was hoping for maybe one or two people to trust me on this, so I feel good.

I've at least got that.

All right.

Well, we should jump into the chapters.

pretty quickly here talk about the thing that we've been teasing for a little bit here but before we do that trevor do you want to quickly summarize these five chapters yeah sure so i'll do our flashbacks first because we've seen those before chapter 18 and chapter 20 flashback six of the dusk excerpts from the the end of that novella from whatever's in this point the missborne secret history book our kingdom about it Dusk and Vathi are being chased by the Nightmaws.

They run to, I think it's called Patchy's Tear, or the pool.

Patchy's Eye.

Thank you, Patchy's Eye.

And they run to the pool.

They're hiding there from the Nightmaws.

Vathi gets the revelation that it's actually the worms in the fruit that are the key to all this, not the birds.

So we get that reveal.

Patchy's fingers, one of them's blooming for some reason.

So then we shoot it with our cannon over across the island.

So then the night moths go chase that instead of us and eat us.

And then in chapter 20, we deliver Vathi back to the camp.

Vathi goes and looks at the machine and says, oh, hey, they left a blueprint in here or a manual on how it works.

Oopsies.

Yeah, you're right, Dusk.

They're really just going to try to destroy us and exploit us for what we have.

And that's how the novella ends.

So that's our two flashback chapters.

We'll talk about any differences here shortly.

But chapter 17 through 21 is current day.

And Dusk is resolved to go.

and he's going to try to wait for Vathi to give him a crew.

And then in Chapter 19, Vathi gets some political news that her presidency is going to be voted on.

Somebody's forcing a vote in the Senate or whatever, and Vathi might get ousted from office or whatever.

So that forces their hand to send Dusk out alone.

Dusk says, okay.

If we're going to send a voyage, it needs to go now because you have the authority to do so now.

So I am going to go.

And he goes by himself.

He brings his two birds or one bird and one borrowed bird, I believe.

And then in chapter 21, they say their goodbyes.

And yeah, I think that's about it.

He grabs a bunch of supplies.

We can talk about specifics, but yeah, he's off into the ember dark.

There you go.

Well, you're getting good at those summaries.

You're doing good.

Time.

Speed run.

There you go.

Nice job.

Okay.

Do we want to jump to the end and talk about the crazy reveal, or do you want to hold on to that until we get to chapter 21?

No, we can go ahead and talk about it, and then we'll back up the content.

So let me phrase this this way.

One at a time, Tell me about your experience of reading chapter one in the physical book, because I definitely had a special moment when I read 21, and I was hoping you guys might get the same.

I don't know who wants to go first.

You can arm wrestle for it.

But what did you guys think of reading those physical pages?

We know for sure that if Trevor and I arm wrestled, I would win.

So I'll go ahead and go first.

So, yeah, Elliot, I'm really glad you had us do this.

So as Dusk sets off into Shadesmar, the Ember Dark, right?

As he sets off into Shadesmar, the book...

Well, we learned recently that this is divided into multiple books.

It's in the same physical published book, but there's multiple books in this.

This first book being Dusks, and we learn as you turn the page who book two is about.

But as we enter Shadesmar, the pages go from a normal white with black text that you are used to to all jet black pages.

Yes.

Silver ink.

Yes.

And it looks stunning.

It looks amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

This is really cool.

I've never gotten to read a book that's quite like this.

We've had some fun use of colors and use of cool design choices in a book to convey things like dress.

There's some neat things in other books.

There's some cool details.

This was like total jet black.

I wonder how much it costs to print it.

Like, I don't actually know if there's a single thing, but maybe it's like the same thing, like just your color page and choice of ink.

But I feel like that's probably a big upcharge to do this, like black pages with the silver ink, right?

I am very curious.

Is it like black paper or is it like a fully inked page?

with white ink on top of it?

I don't actually know the answer to that.

I'm assuming it is black paper, but I don't know how exactly.

I don't know how you do that.

They made it black.

And my goodness, I have to give so much credit to the Dragonsteel book design team.

Not just the stylistic choices at here, but yeah, like the materials.

The pages, they feel a little bit differently to your fingers, at least to mine.

But somehow when you close the book, you don't note it.

It doesn't stand out.

It's all still cut perfectly clean and smooth.

So this is what I want to talk about.

Gentlemen, if you didn't know, the opposite of the spine of a book is called the fore edge.

The fore edge of the book.

And as I flipped through chapter 21, obviously there's no way that Elliot could have assigned to this without us getting suspicious on something that was going to happen.

But as I flipped the page, I was quite wowed, even though I knew something was coming.

In fact, the way that Elliot worded it, I was expecting the content of chapter 21 to have something.

And so he, he kept it a little bit of secret, but as you finish chapter 21 and you flip and the book becomes black, I then looked at my four edge.

of my book and i was like that's really cool they made the the the tips of the white pages black so as to conceal what is going on here and if you look really close if you know what you're looking for you can see the divide you can see the divide in the material or the thickness of the page i don't know but you can like You can even tell just me holding it up exactly where the split is, but you have to know what you're looking for.

It is a successful hide that as you look at this book, you're like, Oh, that's cool.

They made the pages dark, like sunlit man.

Sunlit man is, has dark black pages, but as a, like on a, on a four edge, but as white paper.

So when this looks, it just sits on your bookshelf.

You're like, Oh, that's cool.

It just has, you know, a black footprint like Sunlit Man, and it looks great with the black cover.

And you assume that's the extent of it.

No.

The Dragonsteel design team did an incredible job here.

Yeah.

And I haven't flipped ahead to see if it changes again.

I'm assuming...

My guess is this is the only change.

No, no, no.

Do none of that.

Do none of that.

I have not.

I promise I have not.

But I was just saying.

I was thinking about that too.

According to my now fore edge in like looking, it doesn't actually flip back from what I can tell.

I was going to say, so they make this shift as we go into Shadesmar.

I assume we're going to stay there because of this, right?

Which is cool, you know.

Really, really exciting stuff.

But yeah, that was a really cool special edition book perk, I guess.

A really cool storytelling element as we switch over.

I like that it's also the clean divide of we're finishing Dusk's book, we'll see if he comes back into the fray.

I expect he will at some point.

But now we flip the book and we're on to Starling, which is what we'll be talking about.

next episode um but that was really cool and as an audiobook uh listener it was it was really cool to to get to experience that so i also appreciated seeing a lot of the art i was looking through what we've read so far more in looking at it and it's a gorgeous book really cool really adds to The many elements and scenery that we have so far.

Yeah, that and the other big reveal is that Ruin is in this, apparently.

The big reveal is that Ruin is not in it.

We'll get to that.

We'll get to that.

Yeah, I do plan on pulling up the art piece that's at the end of Chapter 21 here on the screen.

We'll take a look at that too.

But just really quick on my experience of the color change.

I'll admit I was slightly spoiled on this because it's really easy to do.

especially if you're not a bookmark person i am sometimes a bookmark person i'm sometimes a lazy not bookmark person so when you pick up the book and you go to kind of do the you know flip through to find your your space it's really easy to accidentally grab a few more pages and that's what i exactly what i did one time and i kind of like skimmed through a few that were black and went what the heck what was that and then i realized at that moment oh I need to be more careful how I flipped those books.

So I didn't quite know what was coming.

So I think I still got that experience of turning that page as dusk sets out into the darkness of Ember Dark and you turn the page over and the page just goes black.

It's like, oh, that's so cool.

There was one more thing in my book that was super cool.

I don't know if you guys did this too.

When I first pulled it out of the shrink wrap, as I was turning the pages, some of that...

that blackness on the edges of the pages kind of stuck together a little bit.

And a bunch of my pages as I turned them had this really satisfying, like crackling sound as I peeled them kind of apart and turn them over.

Did you guys book do that at all?

It was, I was getting a lot out of that.

I, I remember that happening with my sunlit man.

I don't, I couldn't tell you if that happened by Ember dark, but I think I had that with, with Ember dark.

Yeah.

It's funny because you described that, and I know exactly what you're talking about.

It's absolutely crisp.

Yeah, I don't know why it's so satisfying.

It just was.

I just turned the page, and you just hear this slight little crackle.

It's like, yes, ha -ha.

I don't know why.

Super weird.

Anyway, okay.

Let's go ahead and jump into the chapters, and we'll talk more about the content of Chapter 21 when we get there.

So Chapter 17, let's go ahead and go there.

This is modern day Dusk.

They've gone through the perpendicularity.

They're in the Ember Dark.

I keep having to kind of shift my mindset from thinking Shadesmar to trying to immerse myself in this world and say Ember Dark in my head.

In the Ember Dark, they're feeling around.

What the heck is this place?

What's going on?

What did you guys notice in Chapter 17?

Dusk is...

excited by the fact that there's some super creepy long thing moving down in the shadows and i think it's like second of the fist or something somebody who's talking to him and they're surprised that he's encouraged by that and dusk has well if there's predators then that means there's prey and then the second of the fist guy says well yeah unless they're like these butterflies and their butterflies are like not actually real they're in ember dark but they're not really in it's like a if a spren was in the physical realm but it's a butterfly that's in this cognitive realm what is going on with these butterflies what is going on with the butterflies indeed?

No, come on.

I was hoping that I was hoping they wouldn't be relevant and you'd have the same question, but if they are relevant, then you're not allowed to answer the question.

I, I don't know if you read a few other chapter fiscal chapters in your book, but I will point out that the chapter header for chapter 17, remember that these little like excerpts from a nature's guide, the, the excerpt is glowing butterfly.

We get an audio description in our audiobook.

Oh, you do?

Where the narrator has to verbally tell you exactly what's on page.

He gets a little excerpt that he has to say for the audiobook listeners.

Yeah, so the incorporeal butterflies.

I don't know what's going on with that.

And the other thing I noticed about Shadesmore as we walk in here is If you remember on Roshar, everything has an impression on the cognitive realm.

Everything is a bead.

If it's made by someone, if it has someone thinking about it, even in the back of their head, it's got a bead on Shadesmar.

Doesn't matter if it's a lamp, doesn't matter if it's a rock, doesn't matter if it's a person.

Everybody has a bead or an impression on Shadesmar.

that is not the case here the only thing that has an impression on shades more i forget exactly how they describe it but there's some sort of impression and they always move in groups of two and they're like oh that's weird the answer to that is because everybody's got an avr so everybody who's walking around allow walking along with their avr on their shoulder there's two little i don't know if they called them wisps or impressions or whatever but there's two indications on Ember Dark of a person and their AVR.

That does not include anything else, though.

I thought that was really interesting.

And specifically, those impressions are in the shape of fish hooks.

Did you catch that?

I did not catch that, but yes.

So they're little like fisherman cognitive realm edition stuff.

Instead of beads, we have floating glowing fish hooks which that definitely got me thinking moana for some reason just because that fish hook emblem is everywhere so that i kind of chalked that one up as there's there's one of the moana isms that did not get deleted in the edit some of this has me questioning thinking thinking of shades more right thinking of the beads Those being akin to the spheres, do we have any knowledge of what currency is here?

Like patchy currency?

I'm wondering, it got me thinking a little bit of, are fishhooks at all tied to currency or things here?

And is that like a cognitive thing?

Like, are these fishhooks because of something in sixth?

sub the dusk's brain?

Or are they fishhooks because they're fishhooks here?

That is a great question that I did not think about.

Tying it to the currency and how value is exchanged is a great way to think about it that I did not...

I don't even know what the currency here on Burst of the Sun is.

I don't know that it's really come up at all.

I was going to say, I don't think they really use much currency right now.

Dusk mentions that he gets paid by the government to run his little park thing, terrarium thing, but he doesn't mention any money.

He just says he gets a stipend from the government or something like that.

Yeah, I don't remember that at all.

Yeah.

Interesting idea.

So there is something in this chapter that I actually wanted to do a little engineering deep dive on yet again.

Is there anything else in 17 before I steal the screen and take you guys through that?

Well, I'll mention it quick before you go.

It's either in 17 or 21, but I'll go ahead and talk about it.

There's some markings on a rock that they go look at and they're like, oh, this is proof that someone was here and came through.

And then the other guy's like, or it's proof that someone was on the other side and came back through.

So it's a little bit of proof that.

This perpendicularity has been used in the past before, but what they talk about is some, you know, prehistoric engravings of, you know, little stick figures and snakes and stuff like that.

And that's the opening of your book.

So if you open to, I don't know what this first page is called.

That's not actually a page, but this is the engraving that they see on a rock on the Island before they set out.

if we're throwing out all the book nerd terms i think these are the end papers uh they're not paper this is an end paper i don't know what this is this is part of this fine this is i think it's still it's a piece of paper that's been glued to the to the cover right cardboard cover but this is a paper that's been glued on there yeah all right Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

I mean, the heralds in Stormlight are the endpapers, so you're probably right.

If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.

Jump on here and let me know what these art pieces are on the end.

And if you're listening to us audio only, you probably have no idea what we're talking about because we're holding up books and pointing to them.

Anyway, yes.

Cave drawings.

Markings.

These are important.

These are important because, and I'll tell you this, Dusk is hanging a lot on, was Kakoban real?

He's doing a lot of what he's doing because he's thinking in his head, if Kakoban did it, then I can do it.

And so stuff like this is an encouragement to him because if the legend is real, his chances are way higher of succeeding here.

If the legends are all made up, then he might just be headed off to die.

Engineering explanation.

Oh, let's do it.

Okay.

So before I share the screen here, I got excited, even in my first read, but more so in my second read, because there's a bit in this chapter where Dusk is just staring off into the horizon.

He's kind of trying to process the world of the Ember Dark, which, as you can imagine, would be kind of weird.

We've already kind of processed this a little bit because we've been to Shadesmar with our Rajaran characters, but I think this one might be even more stark because you're looking out over this.

not water ocean, but you've got a darkness -ish water.

You've got a darkness -ish sky all around you in every direction.

And so that uniformity, that's going to mess with your head.

I guarantee it.

As you stand in this place, it's going to be weird to try and keep your orientation.

for sure but he talks about the horizon so right so he's a navigator so the horizon's a big deal he's kind of always trying to keep track of where he's at so he looks out at the horizon but they're not on a globe -shaped planet anymore it's all perfectly flat and so there's an infinite horizon the horizon isn't even really a horizon like we think about it on our planet earth because earth is round or maybe there's a few of you out here that don't believe that earth is round i might try and convince you right now that it's so think about this when he puts like a telescope up to his eye the horizon that he sees is going to look exactly the same it's just with the naked eye and how trippy that would be so let's pull out some math equations and see if i can help you understand this so Trevor, can you bring my screen up here?

Okay.

Let me walk you through this a little bit.

A little breakdown on the infinite horizon in Ember Dark.

Depending on how involved Elliot's graphic is here, you may or may not see this as your title for audio only listeners.

So if you are audio only listening to our episode now.

I would encourage you, if you care about this, jump over to our YouTube video and check out this video because I am going to share some visuals here.

If you're audio only, I'm going to kind of describe what's going on here, but I'm going to draw some equations and triangles and things on the slide here.

So it might not make a lot of sense if you're just audio only.

I'll post a version of this into our Discord as well if you just want to go grab that image to reference as you listen along.

But here we go.

Here's a planet.

It's round.

First, the sun.

right this is where we're kind of used to our normal view of where we stand there's a horizon there's a point where it's the farthest that we can see where the earth drops away and we can't see anything further than that so if you're on earth it's you can calculate just how far away from you the horizon is so if we stick our guy on the planet here maybe this is dusk maybe it's somebody else i don't know he's ready for adventure he's got his backpack on If he wants to know how far away the horizon is, he's got to look out as far as he can go.

There's going to be a point where he can see.

And you might think that this calculation of how far away that horizon is is going to be fairly complex.

We're standing on a circle.

Circles are not the easiest when it comes to math.

However, actually, the points that we're talking about here make a rather convenient triangle shape.

Which is rather easy to calculate.

So if we take the point, which is the viewpoint that we have, our eyes, the horizon that we see directly out in front of us, and the center of the Earth, all of those make a perfect right triangle.

You guys remember how you calculate the lengths of the sides of a right triangle?

A squared plus B squared equals C squared.

Look at you.

You're even skipping ahead to my next question.

So the Pythagorean theorem.

is the name of the equation that Trevor just rattled off there.

A squared plus B squared equals C squared with A and B being the short legs of your triangle and C being the hypotenuse.

I don't know why that name stuck with me so much from elementary school or wherever we learned it from.

Middle school.

Hypotenuse.

Silly word.

Ninth grade geometry.

There we go.

For me at least.

Well, we're going to use it.

We're going to use it right now.

You thought that you'd never used math in your life.

Well, here we go.

So...

We can calculate this pretty easy.

Actually, we just need three bits of data.

The only trick here is that one of our sides of the triangle is kind of two -part.

So we break out our A, B, and C.

A is our distance to the horizon.

B is our distance from the center of the Earth to that point on the horizon.

And C is going to be the distance from the center of the Earth to our viewpoint, so our eyeballs.

which is going to be the radius of Earth plus that little bit of additional height that you go from the surface of Earth up to our eyes.

So I broke that up into like a C1 and a C2.

So if you take C1 and C2 together, then you'll get our hypotenuse here.

So we can crunch all these numbers, and I did.

You'll just have to trust me here.

If we assume our radius of the Earth...

Oh, by the way, I tried to look up what the...

size of first of the sun here in the dromonad system is because most of our planets in the cosmere actually do have that information and nerds like us out there have compiled it and put it on the copper mind i could not find a cosmere standard number for first of the sun so if somebody out there knows it please send it our way but as far as i could tell that is not a known fact how big chris doesn't mention it in I don't believe so.

On a lot of the other planets, she does, but she does not for this one.

Now, this is a little bit tricky, though, because Google searching first of the sun comes up with a lot of things that are not Cosmere.

Yeah, that's funny.

So a little hard to Google search for that, whereas you type in schedule and you're immediately in Cosmere results.

So yeah, if I missed that, somebody please find it for me.

But I'm going to assume just for this math here that we're equivalent to Earth because I at least know what the radius of Earth is.

So the rough average radius of planet Earth is 3 ,959 miles.

So we're going to use that.

I'm adding to that the height of our viewpoints in my C2 number.

I use 10 feet.

Now you might say, well, why are we using 10 feet?

Nobody's 10 feet tall.

most people are like what, five to six feet tall, but most of the time you're not standing right on the ocean level, sea level of earth.

Even if you're standing on the beach, you're a couple of feet up above that.

So I'm assuming that you're like standing on the beach and maybe you're five feet above the sea level.

So five feet above sea level, plus maybe you're five feet tall.

So 10 feet up, we're 10 feet up.

So if you're 10 feet up, you're looking out, crunch that math.

The horizon is exactly, 3 .87 miles away from you.

Or if miles don't mean anything to you, I converted that to 6 .23 kilometers, which is not actually that far.

That is as far as you can see.

Now let's jump over to the Ember Dark.

So here we go.

We've got the Ember Dark.

The Ember Dark is flat as far as we know.

And so if we look out from the Ember Dark, it's going to be a little different.

But first, we've got our little adventure guy.

Maybe it's dusk again.

We better put him in a boat.

So got him in his boat.

He's in the boat on Ember Dark.

When he looks out, he's looking out just straight ahead.

There's no curvature involved.

There's no triangles involved.

There's no Pythagorean theorem.

In fact, this equation is so simple that it's just infinity.

I can do that math.

It does it.

I don't think you can actually, Trevor.

No, that one makes a lot more sense than 3 ,959 miles.

So, yeah.

This is kind of crazy.

You look straightforward, and there is no limitation to what you would be able to see in the ember dark.

Physically.

Like, mathematically.

Right.

But...

But...

That is assuming...

that your brain is not creating a horizon line for you which i would argue it probably is so because we're in the cognitive realm you're going to create your own horizon line because you've never seen one without it i think you're still there's still going to be some kind of horizon line i do think it's going to mess with your brain and i think a couple a couple of things here are probably going to come into play such that you can't just see everything right you can't stand on the perpendicularity from first to the sun and see roshar millions and millions of miles away i don't think that's going to work for a couple of reasons one yeah your brain probably is just going to break a little bit right probably can't do that but let's put this into perspective a little bit our our eyes here on earth we can see things that are millions and millions and millions of miles away yeah that's stars yeah that's true and so but but there's two things going on here two things two things first So brightness becomes very, very important.

As light travels and travels, it's going to scatter.

And so the only reason that we can see stars in the night sky that are millions and millions and millions of miles away is because they're so bright, like crazy, crazy, crazy bright.

So anything that's not the brightness of a star, you're not going to be able to see it, even if you have a perfectly straight sight line.

The second thing that I think is going to stop Dusk from seeing a lot of things is...

This is assuming perfectly crystal clear space that you're looking through.

Right.

Which I don't know that that's going to be true necessarily in the Ember Dark.

If there's things at all in a space, this is true of the air here on Earth.

You sometimes often can't see all the way to the horizon because there's stuff in your way, whether it's clouds or rain or even just particles in the air.

The air is not always that clear.

If you live in maybe a big city, you're like, duh, yeah, obviously I can't even see the other side of my city because the sky is just smoggy all the time.

So even just a little bit, like the slightest bit of haze is going to stop you from seeing infinite distance.

But mathematically, there's nothing stopping you from seeing an infinite distance.

Everything, everything in all of the ember dark mathematically could be visible to you.

Pretty cool.

Yeah, the particles in the air, I think, is actually the best explanation of this is you won't be able to see to infinity just because air is air and he's still breathing it.

So there's particles in the air.

Right.

So a lot of other things going on here, but I thought this was kind of cool and a little crazy to try and wrap my brain around.

So there you go.

Is that the extent of your visual there?

That is the extent of our engineering explanation with Elliot.

Wonderful.

I can, I can, but that isn't something.

Okay.

I don't know.

What else?

We have a cool.

Well, is okay.

Who's the bird that.

Dusk takes with him.

Is it the, is it Vathi's new bird or just Vathi give him a different bird?

I didn't catch that.

So he takes with him Sok.

Right.

His Raven bird.

And then, yes, Vathi gives him her bird, whose name is...

Rock?

Rocka?

They say Roke.

Roke?

Isn't Roke Vathi's new bird, like the chick?

Doesn't she give him a different bird?

Yes.

Now you're making me second guess myself.

I might be.

I might be incorrect, but I specifically remember in chapter 20 or chapter 19 that Roke is Vathi's new tiny bird.

And then he gets a different bird and I didn't remember which one it was.

I'm 90 % sure that Roke.

Yes, it is right here.

It is Roke.

It is a small bird.

And yeah, I think you're right that it's a.

Like young, I don't know if it's quite a chick, but young bird that Vathi hasn't had all that long.

Got it.

Got it.

But we should talk about this.

Sok's power is to show Dusk his impending deaths.

Rake's power is the same as Dusk's old bird, Cokerly, which is to shield his mind.

So he does still have the same set of powers.

that he used to shield mind and see your death just with a much less well -trained bird correct correct yes uh okay yeah where are we on our notes here we've covered 17 we talked about 18 and we covered everything that was in 18 yeah it's okay i wanted to talk about the worms so i remembered this from six of the dusk novella the the worms are the answer the birds come to patchy to roost or whatever whatever the technical term is and then they eat the worms that are sitting that are hanging out in the perpendicularity the worms are invested therefore the birds get invested are these the same worms that we're spreading on worm paste on on our canoe yes they are the same okay so presumably they're just investiture worms apparently What would happen if I ate the worms?

That's my next question.

I can't eat this one.

You can.

The answer to that is Raffo.

You got me on that one.

I would assume that you do in some way get or obtain that investiture.

I don't know exactly if that's how you'd use it or what, but it seems like it, right?

If these worms could have the effect on the aviar, then they could on other living things, right?

Give me 10 seconds or more each.

What do you guys think would happen if you ate the worms?

I assume that I do become invested.

but I have to have the proper intent to use said investiture.

So if I know what I'm doing, I can then use a power.

If I'm eating worms because I'm hungry and I don't know about investiture, then it's not going to do anything for me.

Okay.

So you guys are thinking it's similar, maybe the same -ish, as I take my Stormlight and I breathe it in on Roshar?

I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be.

I'm questioning this.

So does it specify...

So the birds, right, have their powers.

Are they always eating these worms?

Or are these worms, like, parasitic in the birds?

They're, like, parasitic, right?

Right.

The bird comes to Patchy, eats the worm once, and then has powers for life, as far as I know.

Okay.

That makes me wonder a bit.

if this is kind of gross, but like, would you be letting the worms kind of be parasitic within you?

Or is it just, are you consuming them as like a snack?

Invest at your tapeworms.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Um, cause I don't know.

I feel like it'd be odd.

I feel like it'd be a little overpowered in the cosmere.

If you could just, all right, I just got to eat like two, three worms.

And then I've got these powers for life, you know?

Well, that's why everybody's here.

They want to figure out why everybody has permanent investiture.

They're trying to nerf the overpowered first of the sun.

That's fair.

Well, there you go.

All right.

We're going to be talking about worms again later.

So, Raffo.

Well, just real quick.

It specifically uses the term worm and not caterpillar.

And if it used the term caterpillar, I'd be more suspicious of our butterflies.

But they're not.

They're worms.

And worms don't turn into butterflies, no matter how much you want them to.

Worms on Earth, at least.

Could this be...

I think I've heard people refer to caterpillars as worms before.

Could this be a case of every bird on Roshar is a chicken, so every bug on First the Sun is a worm?

Touche.

Yeah, I could see that unironically.

I didn't think of that before, Trevor, but I'd hold on.

I'm going to hold on to that a bit.

No, no, but they're not death worms.

They're death ants.

So we have our scientific pyramid or whatever that is of life figured out, at least a little bit.

That is true.

All right, let's move on.

We do have other chapters to get through here.

Trevor, you do have a bit more in Chapter 18, though.

Did you want to say anything else?

I did have a quote I was going to read, but do you have anything else to add before I do that?

Yeah, okay.

So back to my two episodes ago where I talked about Patchy being an avatar of autonomy at some point in the past.

This might have changed again.

I'll say that again.

But at some point in the past in the Cosmere, the...

The perpendicularity on Patchy was supposed to be attributed to autonomy.

And Patchy is a some personification of autonomy.

Made me think in chapter 18 and chapter 20, Dusk has an internal dialogue that he's so frustrated with Patchy.

And Patchy's trying to kill him.

Patchy's trying to kill him.

Patchy's trying to, you know.

punish everybody who's trying their best to help him out and he yells out loud at the island in chapter 20 like why are you so frustrating patchy i'm i'm the one trying to help you and it made me think more about the autonomy thing of autonomy putting seeds in multiple different systems very early on in the cosmere of Seeing who's the best candidate to be there.

I don't remember what the term is in the Lost Metal, but it might just be Avatar.

So it's making me lean more into the idea that autonomy is active in the system at the moment and testing Dusk specifically and maybe tested Kakaban back in the day.

And to add to your thought process there, there's the moment you talk about where Dusk is getting really frustrated, shouting at the planet, at the being.

And then at the very end of the chapter, after they successfully shoot the fruit away and they draw the Nightmaws away, Dusk hears a voice that says, well done.

Yes, I did hear that as well.

It's almost like there's a bit of a dialogue going on here.

And there's one conspicuous fruit blooming that may or may not be whatever that term is.

There's a literary term for the whatever.

Anyway, there's one patchy finger blooming when it's not supposed to bloom and then they figure it out what they're supposed to do and then it says well done.

There's one other thing in this chapter that I keyed into which was I thought a pretty good quote.

Our theme of this book is already emerging.

We'll see if it stays the same or if it deviates.

But the theme of change is definitely prevalent throughout all these Dusk chapters of the past versus the present versus the future, innovation versus tradition, all these things.

Vathi and Dusk are talking, and their dialogue here I thought was actually pretty cool to think about.

Here's what they say.

It starts with Dusk.

He whispered.

Everything could just stay the same.

Nothing can.

I can.

No, she said.

Dusk, we're each a new person every day.

The world changes and is new each day.

And we must change with it.

That's the blessing the gods give us.

The blessing to be able to become someone new.

I thought that was pretty cool.

And...

I think maybe we've already seen in these chapters a growth, a change in Dusk from the five years previous versus the modern day.

That's flashback Dusk there where he goes, no, I'm not going to change.

I can proceed without changing.

I think the five years later Dusk, the modern day, has already changed that outlook.

He's already in the mindset of change is inevitable.

It just kind of matters.

what i do in the face of it but the the new everyday bit i thought was pretty encouraging i liked it a lot i would also point out that i think current day dusk has taken that to heart whereas flashback dusk was certainly a stick in the mud current day dusk is more fluid yeah i think so paul any thoughts on 18 before we move on My main thoughts have just been surrounding these worms.

Nothing else on top of what y 'all have been saying.

I have one final time to ask this question.

Is there anything different between Six of the Dusk and Isle of Emberdark in these flashback chapters?

Yeah, let's go ahead and hit that, which I think will take us into 20.

We've kind of already talked chapter 19.

Chapter 19 has just revealed that, Trevor, you said this in your summary, Vathi's presidency is getting challenged and she has a new bird.

That's about all I wrote down for that chapter too.

So yeah, 20 takes us into the final flashback chapter that we have in the book one of Isles of the Ember Dark.

So yeah, I've been comparing still to Back to Six of the Dusk.

I noticed two very minor changes in these two flashback chapters that don't really change much.

The first is that in the Six of the Dust novella, the company refers to Vathi as Lady Vathi.

And in the new version, they refer to her as Director Vathi, which I think just more closely ties in her position in the company and where we pick up with her five years later.

So I don't read anything into that change, really.

The only other thing is at the very end, I don't know if you guys remember this.

They have kind of this special moment where Vati has come back out.

I think it's when she comes back out of the fortress.

And we're going to talk about this in a second.

But they've discovered the machine, the manual on the machine.

And they both pull out their medallions.

And they have this kind of special moment where they touch their medallions together.

And they go, we're going to face this together.

If you remember in the novella, the medallions weren't a thing.

That's the biggest add to all this is those Kakuba medallions.

So in the old version.

Do you guys remember what they touch together?

They're mating plumes.

Yeah.

Oh, good memory.

Very good memory.

That's exactly what they do.

They have a, I'm so smart feather, that special mating plume feather.

And they both pull those out and like, oh, I am, I'm the symbol of the old and I'm a symbol of the new bring it together.

So yeah, that's the only change, but I think it was just tying in the elements that he's added.

So other than that, they were very close to identical, like word for word, whole sections, whole multiple paragraphs together are identical.

Well, thanks for reading the same content three or four times together to get all that information for us.

All right.

Anything in Chapter 21 that we haven't hit?

Okay.

So, yeah.

Audiobook listeners, we're not talking about Ruin.

We're talking about Ruin.

Paul, did you have the same experience?

I honestly tried.

listening and tried my best to find the difference to find that they're not just saying ruin like the shard of ruin yeah it's exactly what they're saying he's just saying ruin i i heard it and i'm like okay we're talking about a person named ruined i i didn't think we were talking about the shard i just assumed that the person was named ruin like r -u -i -n but if you have read chapter 21 physically then r -u -e -n his name is just ruin and yeah i thought the exact same thing like this is just a person like i knew this wasn't the shard of ruin by any means it did not ever seem that way but the name was identical so yeah sneaky one there well it's funny how different the experience of me as a physical book reader because I don't even know who you guys are talking about.

This character is so minor, I don't even remember who they are, because when I saw that name, it didn't even register that that was a name I even needed to care about.

He's Vathi's second -in -command.

He's telling Vathi about the politics situation in Chapter 8.

If you were led to believe that this person...

If it was spelled R -U -I -N, you'd probably have the same reaction we have of like, hold on, this guy's name is Ruin.

What's...

What's going on here?

Is there something important and big?

And you just find out, no, it doesn't matter.

It was just there to throw off audiobook listeners.

I'm convinced.

I think as Dusk sets out, the two things that he's going to run very short on very fast is food and water.

I think he can handle himself rather well as he sets out here.

Except for food and water.

And they mention the food.

If there's things out here to hunt.

That solves my food problem.

In theory.

They specifically mention water.

And they don't give a solution.

I don't think.

There's no.

I don't know if there's a.

Little contraption that he can use.

To capture some water in the air.

On the cognitive realm.

I don't think they mention a solution to water besides grabbing a bunch of water jugs, which is what he does.

I will tell you, he does not have a water capture device of any kind.

Yeah, and they specifically say it doesn't rain.

So, yeah, I think water is going to be the issue here.

Either that, they didn't dwell on it too long, so it might be possible.

that he has two months worth of water, but that's a lot of water.

Like two, two months, two months of water for a one human is a lot.

So I don't think he has that much water.

He has a finite amount of water.

He has a finite amount of food.

He also has a, not a lot of worm paste.

The jar that gave him.

If they don't describe it in this chapter, they describe it shortly after this.

It's not very large.

It's, I don't know, a liter, it sounds like.

I think they did say that, yeah.

Worm paste.

So he's got pretty finite resources, and he's heading out who knows where.

He spreads the worm paste on his ore to see if it would start diminishing somehow.

And we didn't get an answer to that yet.

So we'll see if using it makes it go away or if just exposing it to air somehow like dries it out.

I don't know.

We'll figure that out.

Really quick as we wrap this up, Trevor, you want to pull my screen share back up again.

There is another piece of art here as we move from book one into book two.

This is at the very end of chapter 21 and not.

Not quite as much going on in some of these art pieces as some of the ones from other books, I feel like.

But the vibe, that's the best word I can come up with to describe it, is spot on in all of these art pieces.

I love the kind of artistic style that is getting portrayed here of just this.

It's gloomy, but it's not completely gloomy.

There's still hope that I see in this art piece.

He's still sitting off into the darkness.

I think it's quite comical that it's literally just a rowboat with a motor on the back.

They just discovered motors, so it's nothing fancy.

It's literally a wooden rowboat with a metal rudder on the back.

Yep.

Yeah, it's a good art piece.

I don't even know if the sky is that pronounced, but you have to do something in your art, right?

It specifically says you can't navigate by the sky.

They do specifically say, and this is consistent with Shadesmire, I think, on Roshar, that there are wispy white things up in the sky.

They can't quite compare them to clouds, but there is still something that's up there.

Yeah, there you go.

More cool art.

I'm a huge fan of the art in this book, so I really liked seeing this.

Well, we've got more on the way as we read.

All right, what else?

Anything else worth mentioning here?

Right at the end of chapter 21, I'm going to say it now.

Surely this is the most iconic quote from this book, where Dusk says, the old technologies, muscles, and determination were always the most reliable.

And I was like, I mean, that's got to be Dusk in a nutshell.

He's the old grouchy, just give me my rowboat and my muscles and I'll figure everything else out.

Keep your technology.

I assume that was the most iconic quote of the book.

And I will stake my flag there.

Most iconic quote of the book.

Paul, do we need to remind him what a sanderlanch is and how it works?

Yeah, I'm sure there will be many more.

It was a fun quote.

I feel like we're going to get a quote later on in this book of maybe some kind of change of tune.

We've got to have some kind of notable development, right?

He's going to get back after this crazy journey and be like, wow, I'm so grateful for modern technology.

No, he's going to die.

Wow.

Wow, if only I had modern technology, I wouldn't be dying right now.

I wouldn't be dead.

Well, there is one way to find out these answers.

Yeah, pull up the Goodreads page and see what most voted quote from the book is.

Okay, so we could spoil the whole thing for ourselves if we wanted to, or we could read and find out.

Move on to the next chapters.

What are our next chapters next week?

What are our next chapters for next week?

Next week, we are slowing it down a little bit.

We've covered a lot of chapters.

I intentionally moved us fairly quickly through the first book of this book because we'd read a lot of it before.

So next week, we're slowing down a bit.

Only three chapters.

Chapters 22, 23, and 24 move into the black pages with...

Brilliant silver writing in them.

Paul, Trevor, anything else for this episode?

No further questions, Your Honor.

That's it for me.

I'm excited to go listen and imagine my black pages as I listen to my audiobook and not read them.

Alrighty.

Well, that will do it for this episode.

Thank you for joining me, Paul and Trevor.

Toodles.

Thanks.