"The burdens of the 9" Death Rattle

[The Stick]

I was looking through the death rattles and was suddenly struck by a different interpretation of the following death rattle.

"The burdens of nine become mine. Why must I carry the madness of them all? Oh, Almighty, release me."

The most accepted interpretation I have seen of this generally agrees this is from Talenel's perspective.

However, I would like to propose this could possibly be from Dalinar's perspective in book five. We know that Odium's champion has the 9 shadows of the 9 Unmade. If Sanderson does go down the path of Dalinar losing and serving Odium, then I think it is shockingly likely this could be from his perspective in response to being burdened by the Unmade.

I am interested to see if there is anything else significant on this.

[Duxredux he/him]

Interesting. I hadn't been looking for alternative interpretations, but if we start looking for an individual carrying burdens of nine entities, it could be Taln carrying the burdens of the other Heralds, it could be the champion of nine shadows, it could be a successor to the Nine Fused that form a council. Madness could be associated with them all.

The wording though... the Almighty is the Vorin term for Honor, right? Dalinar believes the Almighty to be dead, or that the being originally thought to be the Almighty wasn't and that there is something beyond Honor. I'm not sure if we have enough info on Taln's belief system or the exact mechanism of Death Rattles to know if this is being filtered through Connection or something similar. Is it really the Almighty they call to or is it "Oh, <insert relevant diety>, release me"?

That said, we don't have any particular metric to estimate the probable accuracy of the Death Rattles compared to other forms of future sight, including Renarin's vision of his own death and Dalinar's fall. It's not guaranteed that all of them will be fulfilled, so it wouldn't surprise me if this Death Rattle predicted the same event as Renarin's vision... with similar uncertainty on if Dalinar completely dodged it.

Edited April 16 by Duxredux

[alder24]

9 hours ago, The Stick said:

I was looking through the death rattles and was suddenly struck by a different interpretation of the following death rattle.

"The burdens of nine become mine. Why must I carry the madness of them all? Oh, Almighty, release me."

The most accepted interpretation I have seen of this generally agrees this is from Talenel's perspective.

However, I would like to propose this could possibly be from Dalinar's perspective in book five. We know that Odium's champion has the 9 shadows of the 9 Unmade. If Sanderson does go down the path of Dalinar losing and serving Odium, then I think it is shockingly likely this could be from his perspective in response to being burdened by the Unmade.

I am interested to see if there is anything else significant on this.

Ohhh, I like this! Yes, it makes sense in that context. 

[The Stick]

The only other good interpretation I could really think of was maybe Leshwi and Venli with the singers in book 5 referencing the The Nine, or potentially even a Fused becoming part of the Nine.

[Dreamwa1ker she/her]

I've thought that death rattles might always be for future events which would rule out Taln and make him a red herring. I've always had a nagging concern that Kaladin is being set up to take on all this suffering on himself and endure but not break so my bet would be its him, and maybe he is new Herald and has to hold out solo between front and back half.