#szeth flashback

First, we know that Szeth followed the Oathstone for over seven years. For most of that time, he didn’t allow himself to entertain conscious questions about what he was doing. If he did, it would lead to a collapse of everything he’d held to so unwaveringly, which would lead to the end of his own personal world. Of course, that came to a head both times he fought Kaladin in Words of Radiance. Him realizing that he was never wrong was part of what ended their second fight.

In Oathbringer, Szeth has to consciously remind himself that he was never Truthless a few times. When he’s conflicted over what he should choose as his Third Skybreaker Ideal, Nightblood is actually the one that directs him to make the choice he does. The sword reminds Szeth of his years following the Oathstone, and Szeth starts to justify it by saying that he had no choice. Then he realizes that, ‘it had always been nothing more than a rock.’ So Szeth makes a decision other than the one Nale expected him to make, and swears himself to Dalinar instead.

In Rhythm of War, Szeth confronts Taravangian after Taravangian bates him by asking for an Oathstone. Szeth ignores most of what Taravangian tells and asks him, demanding to know why Taravangian wanted an Oathstone. At one point, Szeth says something like, “My stone…was only ever a stone.” He goes on to hint at something his father said in the past, but Taravangian interrupts by saying that Szeth’s father is dead.

I find two things interesting about that moment. First, this is the first time since that realization at the Battle of Thaylen Field that Szeth has verbally stated, on page, that his Oathstone was just a rock. True, he does tell Navani that he was never Truthless earlier on in RoW, but that verbal declaration still feels important, especially since Szeth says it to Taravangian, who played a large roll in making Szeth’s mental state even worse than it was before.

The second thing that interests me is that Szeth mentions his father, and (presumably) something he might have said about the Oathstone. In the reading of a Szeth flashback Brando did at NYCC, it seems that Szeth’s family doesn’t share Szeth’s level of commitment/devotion/adherence to the teachings of Stone Shamanism. They’re more willing to leave things up to interpretation/bend the prohibitions than Szeth is. So I wonder if at some point, Neturo tried to encourage Szeth to think of the Oathstone in a different way. We don’t know how long it took for Szeth to be named Truthless or what might have been involved in that process, so I can’t say much more about this. I’m just intrigued that Neturo might have had a different view on things. Whatever it might have been, we’ll have to wait for KOWT to be released before the pieces come together.