Listener

Listener
World of Origin	Roshar

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The listeners are a species of sapient creatures on Roshar. There are two main groups of listeners, the Parshendi on the Shattered Plains, and the docile parshmen. The Stormfather called them the Old Ones.

The listeners can communicate their emotions through certain rhythms to each other and can keep perfectly in time with these rhythms even when apart, although the parshmen do not have this ability. Male listeners grew beards, which they thread through beads infused with Stormlight.

History

Listeners have existed on Roshar a very long time, even before humans existed there.^{[citation needed]}

At some point, after listeners felt spren betrayed them, giving Surges to humans instead of them, the listeners turned to other gods. These gods, perhaps the Unmade -- though definitely something of Odium, changed them, into what became the Voidbringers. Later, after the Desolations, Jasnah Kholin theorized that these Voidbringers were not eliminated, but enslaved into what were called the parshmen.

After the Desolations, not all listeners were the unintelligent parshmen; there were several tribes of the dullform listeners, having thrown off the forms of their gods. Raids and assassinations were commonplace, and this later created norms as to how assassinations should have been carried out. These disparate listener tribes eventually unified and moved near the Shattered Plains.

The Alethi discovered this tribe of listeners, shocked that there existed sapient versions of the parshmen. They named the listeners Parshendi. Eventually Alethkar formed a treaty with these Parshendi, but on the eve of the treaty, King Gavilar was assassinated, in an attempt to prevent the listener gods from returning. This led to the Alethi forming the Vengeance Pact, and the War of Reckoning to destroy the assassins.

During the war, these listeners moved their population to Narak from the western edge of the Shattered Plains, where the Alethi warcamps are now situated, though hundreds of thousands of listeners had lived scattered across the entirety of the Plains. Eventually, Venli persuaded Eshonai that they would die unless they did something drastic. Venli had discovered stormform, one of their old gods' forms, and Eshonai took the form and was controlled by the form, forcing many other listeners to adopt it as well in order to stop the Alethi and the destruction of their species.

At the Battle of Narak, where Highprince Dalinar Kholin led an expedition to end the War of Reckoning, the listeners in stormform, now referred to as Voidbringers, summoned a storm. Eshonai thought the stormform abilities would summon a highstorm, but they instead summoned the Everstorm, leading to the start of the True Desolation.

Parshendi at some point in their history interbred with humans. The descendants of these Parshendi-human hybrids are modern Roshar's Unkalaki and Herdazian peoples.

The Parshendi learned how to capture spren in gemstones by watching humans, then working out the process for themselves. This allowed them to make changes to their forms much more reliably, where before there was an element of chance with the transformation.

See Also

• Parshendi
• Voidbringers
• Herdaz
• Unkalaki

Notes

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