The Silence Divine

The Silence Divine
Setting	Ashyn, Cosmere

This page or section contains details from the unpublished work The Silence Divine!

This information has the potential to ruin plot elements of both published works and upcoming book releases for the reader. It should also be considered uncanonical and could completely change in the future.

The Silence Divine is an unpublished cosmere work by Brandon Sanderson about humans gaining magical powers from diseases. It was originally planned to be a standalone novel. However, Brandon has since downgraded it to a novella like The Emperor's Soul. It will be renamed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Brandon said that he got much more interested in working on The Silence Divine but had to keep himself focused on Rhythm of War.

Description

“What if viruses and bacteria evolved to give people magical talents when you caught the disease. This idea that a bacteria doesn’t actually want to kill you, or a virus doesn’t want to kill you. It wants you to live and spread it. You getting sick is a side effect. What if the side effect is, you got the common cold, all the sniffles and everything, but you could fly as long as you had the common cold? What would that do to society? What happens when someone invents penicillin and can wipe out half of these magical talents? What happens if people start catching a disease that makes everything they touch start on fire?

So it was a story about basically fantasy Jack Bauer, who’s a member of the fantasy CDC, who tries to stop diseases and the problems they cause. But in order to do his job, he has to keep his immune system terrible, like this weakling who can barely get up the steps, so that he can quickly catch diseases to get the powers he needs to with the outbreaks of these things.

”

—Brandon

Setting

It is set on the planet Ashyn, which is located in the Rosharan system.

The magic system involves illnesses granting people powers as long as they are sick. The premise of the story involves someone developing penicillin, which could potentially cause Ashyn's floating cities to crash down due to them being held aloft by groups infected with a certain disease.

It is currently set to take place around the time of book 8 of The Stormlight Archive, but this could change in the future.

Behind the Scenes

Brandon wrote, and read, a few test scenes while touring for Words of Radiance.

Trivia

• The book's title comes from the fact that the disease that gives Ashyn's inhabitants the ability to keep their cities afloat also causes hearing loss.

Notes

This meta article is complete, but has yet to be reviewed.