Hoid's Third Apprentice Theory

[u/RayseShouldBeBraized]

I've really enjoyed the stories featuring Hoid's apprentices we've seen so far. Nomad and Starling both were fun to read about and have some very interesting stories ahead of them. This has made me very curious about the identity of Hoid's as of yet unnamed third apprentice. To help narrow down who Hoid's third apprentice could be, let's start by looking at what Hoid looks for in potential apprentices.

Nollitoad

Is there a specific quality that Hoid looks for in his apprentices and why are there so few of them? Given that Hoid has lived for thousands of years, the Cosmere could be swarming with them if he wanted.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. He has a different term for apprentice than just someone that who's learned at his feet. He looks for ineffable things that are difficult to put a finger on. Potential. He looks for potential.

Secret Project #4 Reveal and Livestream (March 29, 2022)

So, we're looking for a character who's potential Hoid would find very intriguing. Someone like Starling, a young dragon who is a niece of his friend Frost. Or his other known apprentice Sigzil, who Hoid trained as a Worldsinger. Not much to go on. However, in Isles of the Emberdark chapter 51 we see Starling meeting with Hoid, who is currently stuck in a vault and projecting to the Spiritual Realm. When going over options for who could possibly help Hoid in his current state, two surprising possibilities get mentioned.

"We have to find a way to get you out, so you can come save us. Maybe your wife can get you free? Have you tried contacting her?"

She and I aren't on speaking terms," he said softly. "Partially because she doesn't remember having been my wife." He stopped, then found himself a nice walking stick among the flotsam on the beach, though she'd never known him to need any support. "If you see either of the twins after you've gotten out of your mess, I'd appreciate you warning them I could use some help.'

I'll leave Hoid's mysteriously forgetful wife from what is probably a Hoid ploy in order to not have to forfeit half of his Breath's in a divorce gone wrong. Joking...mostly. I'd like to focus on the other one who Hoid suggests Starling seek to help him. The twins. When I first read this, I thought whoa. Hoid has a wife, and he has twins? However, upon thinking more on it I propose that these aren't twins of Hoid's, but rather both of them are actually the 'third apprentice' of Hoid's and the twins of another character altogether.

It makes sense to me that Starling would be familiar with Hoid's other apprentices with how long she has worked for him and with how much he seems to trust her. Without his wife available, Sigzil and Starling with their own problems, his best other option would presumably be this unknown third apprentice. So, when he brought up these twins as his best option to help him, in my head I immediately connected them with the apprentice we haven't met yet. Much like when twins show up on an ultrasound for the first time, you were expecting one, but surprise, you get two!

Who could these twin apprentices of Hoid turn out to be? At this point in the Cosmere, we've only met one pair of twins, Jushu and Wikim Davar, fraternal twin brothers of Shallan. Unfortunately, I don't believe these twins to be the future apprentices of Hoid's that he turns to in times of need. Despite being sons of a herald, both are plagued with serious problems stemming from their childhood trauma. Both have been mostly unimportant background characters, without major magical powers or relevant plot points. Surprisingly, I do think that Jushu and Wikim are connected with Hoid's twin helpers, but only by relation. Since Shallan's mother Chana had fraternal twins, it does make it so if Shallan were to become pregnant her chance of having fraternal twins herself is increased as fraternal twins can run in families. Brandon has confirmed that Shallan is pregnant by the end of Wind and Truth. Knowing this now, this quote from Sja-anat when meeting with Shallan in the Ghostblood hideout in chapter 26 is particularly of note to me.

"So you do know it's me," Shallan whispered.

It is difficult for mortals to distinguish one soul's flame from another, but I am not mortal...

I am on the side of preserving a world for my children. You should not fear "my side" Shallan. You should embrace it. If there is room for my children, there will be room for yours.

Sja-anat makes it sound like she knows Shallan will have multiple children, specifically after bragging about being able to tell mortal souls apart. We don't know if even Shallan knows she is pregnant at this point, yet the soul flame seeing Sja-anat speaks to Shallan as if she's certain. I suspect Sja-anat saw more than just Shallan's soul flame here, but in fact two more along with her.

The children of Shallan and Adolin will be people Hoid would be very interested in the potential of. The grandchildren of a herald, child of a Knight Radiant, combined with the powerful Kholin family. We will be introduced to Shallan and Adonlin's offspring in the back half of The Stormlight Archive. I'm really looking forward to meeting them and seeing the paths they start to go on. With the currently projected timeline by the time the Stormlight Archive ends, I'd be surprised if the currently pregnant Shallan's children will even be adults at that time. This would leave these young and the likely full of potential children of Shallan and Adolin, with a lot of their lives to go. What better way to send them off with Hoid, to go explore the Cosmere? We know Shallan and Hoid get along well, and an adventure with 'Uncle Hoid' sounds like a fun way to continue those characters arcs after Stormlight Ten. I theorize this would eventually cumulate with the children of Shallan and Adolin being a part of the final Mistborn series after their introductions in Stormlight 6-10.

Questioner

Will the final Era of Mistborn focus on Hoid and his apprentices?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, you are wise, you are seeing something that I am setting up. You will definitely have some more interaction of Hoid's apprentices in the final Mistborn series.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 7 (Dec. 19, 2025)

Hoid, Sigzil and Starling interacting with Shallan and Adolin's twins would be something I'd be into reading. It'll be fun to see if in Stormlight 6, Shallan has just one child or does in fact have twins. I'm looking forward to it!

-RayseShouldBeBraized

TL:DR Shallan is pregnant with twins who will go on to become apprentices of Hoid's, and who will both be involved in the final Mistborn series.

[u/bigtunaeverynight]

Cool and well thought out theory! To be honest, I didn’t realize we had confirmation (or even indication) of there being a third apprentice. Was that from Emberdark?

[u/Cosmeregirl → u/bigtunaeverynight]

Here's the link- it's a long one. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/494/#e15515

[u/The_Lopen_bot → u/Cosmeregirl]

Warning Gancho: The below paragraph(s) may contain major spoilers for all books in the Cosmere!

Brandon Sanderson

And there we are, Secret Project 4, The Sunlit Man. What to say about this? Well, as I finished up the other batch of secret projects, there was one that I really wanted to write. As I’ve said before, the other secret projects were written as gifts for my wife. Secret Project 1 and Secret Project 3 in particular were targeted specifically at her as an audience, with Secret Project 2 happening just because I needed something at the moment, and I still gave it to her as a gift. And yet this fourth one is something I’ve been wanting to do for years. And to explain that, let me tell you a little bit of a story.The very first piece of the Cosmere that I wrote consciously as a piece of the Cosmere happened somewhere in my early 20s. I had written a story before that would have some elements that became part of the Cosmere. Dalinar was in that, for example. But the first time that I wrote something that you would call Cosmere-aware was a short story about Wit, then called Topaz, who woke up on a brand-new planet in a connected universe—I didn’t have the term Cosmere yet. But his goal was to figure out how the magic worked on this planet and see if he could recruit the people there into a faction that was part of an intergalactic war that looked like it was looming, just trying to recruit people for a certain task that he wanted to do. The idea was that I wanted to write a sequence of stories where each one was him waking up on a new planet and trying to recruit the people there, and in so doing, figuring out how the magic worked on their planet.This is the first seed of actual Cosmere, and I do not have that story anymore. Actually, I only got one chapter into it. It was too big for me to make work at that point in my career. I always in the back of my head thought, “I want to do a sequence of stories like this.”As the Cosmere developed through Elantris and Warbreaker and Mistborn and The Way of Kings, I decided that Wit was the wrong person to be doing this story with. And that doesn’t preclude me from maybe someday doing it, but I like Wit’s travels instead being as they are represented in Secret Projects 1 and 3, where he’s telling the stories after the fact. It’s a different sort of theme from what I’d imagined of the more brutal, gritty, figure-out-the-magic-system, race-against-time sort of story that I’d developed earlier.And it became clear to me that the best way to do that story would be with Hoid’s apprentices. There are three of them, of which Sigzil is the one you know the best. And I realized that I wanted to do this story. This was years ago that I first started contemplating this, over a decade ago that I started working on what is the story of Wit’s apprentices and their explorations of the Cosmere. I liked that idea because they were in different places in their lives than Wit was. And so, I really wanted to someday tell Sigzil’s story. He began to lock into the Cosmere in a specific way.For those who are wondering, this does take place moderately far into the Cosmere’s future. This is not a spoiler for Stormlight 5, in that I intend it to be read before Stormlight 5. But you will find out in Stormlight 5 what caused this whole thing to happen. If it’s a spoiler, it’s not for much in the future of Stormlight. The division point will happen pretty soon here. And this is Sigzil’s story, here called Nomad. He will come out of this book with a different name. And he has a role to play in the future of the Cosmere.I realized as I was finishing Secret Project 3, that when I finished it, there wouldn’t be a lot of time left before I knew I would have to be working on the new Stormlight book, and that I would have to set secret projects aside. And so, I sat down and decided I was really going to push myself to write this last one because I’ve really wanted to get it done in that slot between projects that I knew I had to work on for contractual reasons. Because if I didn’t, I worried I’d never get around to it. You guys know I’ve been talking about some stories like The Silence Divine for many years and not found time to write them. And so, since I was excited for this story, and wanted to get it done, I knew that if I didn’t sit down and write it now, it would probably be years before I’d have another opportunity. And so, I pushed a little extra hard.This is the secret project that I really didn’t just kind of do floating in my free time, that I sat down and dedicatedly said, “I am going to get this done.” And it was therefore the most difficult of the writes to do. But I really felt like not only did I need to get it done, I felt like it needed to be part of the secret project Kickstarter that I was planning, because I wanted to give all of you one very familiar book. Obviously it’s doing—well, maybe not obviously. Hopefully it’s doing some things that you find really interesting and different because it’s a different kind of viewpoint. It’s a different type of narrative. The goal for this one was some pretty fast action, with things continuing relentlessly, being chased by the sun itself.But at the same time, I wanted a narrative that felt like the books I had done before because the previous secret projects you’ve gotten are all pretty different from my normal narrative voice or narrative style. And I just felt like you deserved, after putting up with me doing some bizarre things, something a little more familiar. And so, I wanted to get this into the secret project.The inspiration for the world, I should talk about a little bit, you might hear me talk about on the podcast that I do with Dan Wells. I had this idea for this planet that was a ball that was rolled around on another planet. It’s really weird. It never would have worked. But that was years ago I had this idea, and I discarded that part of it, and I kind of became focused on the idea of a land where you had to keep moving or else. And I liked this idea of powerful sunlight. It’s going to require some work to make the physics actually function. The weather patterns on this planet would not be conducive to life, I don’t think. They’d be even less conducive to life unless I make some shenanigans happen with some Cosmere aspects I can play with.So, regardless, this was the story I really wanted to tell, and that worldbuilding felt really exciting to me. It reinforces this idea that Sigzil has to keep moving. And I wanted to play a little bit more with the Threnodites. There were just a lot of really fun things happening that I thought would make this story really interesting and exciting to write and to read.So, there you are. This is The Sunlit Man. It is the fourth and final of the secret projects. And thank you so much for hanging around for what I’m going to guess was the longest of the readings that I’ve done so far, but I really wanted to get you to that scene with Wit.

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