Spanreed

A spanreed is a type of pairing fabrial, used for communication over long distances, although it can't be used while traveling across the ocean, nor while moving whatsoever.

Spanreeds look like ordinary writing reeds, except that each has a small infused ruby affixed to it. The other part of the same ruby is attached to its pair. This way, when someone writes with one of the reeds in the pair, the conjoined reed mimics its exact movements.

Request for communication, acknowledgment, and indicating whose turn it is to write is done by turning the spanreed gemstone to correct setting. When a request for communication is made, it causes the conjoined Spanreed to pulse slowly.

Spanreeds are one of the most common forms of pairing fabrials. Highprince Dalinar Kholin had five spanreeds in his study, one of them conjoined with Jasnah's. Shallan Davar and her brother Nan Balat are also known to have a pair.

Portent

During a spanreed conversation, Tyn discovers that Shallan is, in fact, Jasnah Kholin's ward, while - at the same time - Shallan discovers that it was Tyn who sent assassins after Jasnah. Between them, a fight ensues and Shallan winds up killing Tyn with her Shardblade.

Notes

When asked whether he had any specific inspirations for spanreeds, Brandon replied with the following:

“

Writerly inspiration for spanreeds is me acknowledging that I wanted to have a society that acted more like a post-Industrial Revolution society (or very close to it) than a Medieval society. And there's lots of ways to do this. Fantasy worlds do not have to progress socially the same way that we progressed. A lot of people want to tie technology to social progression, which you don't have to do. You don't necessarily have to say people from the Industrial Revolution in our world acted this way; therefore people in this world ... . You just don't have to do that. But there are certain technological revolutions that happened that do form a technological basis for some of these things. For instance, trade was very essential to the expanding political entity that was a world economy. We needed people to at least be travelling consistently to Asia before that could happen. And I really think a lot of what makes people act the way we do, perhaps, in some of our societies is this kind of mass communication. And I didn't want to be there yet, but I wanted to give a way that news and ideas could travel around the world in a consistent way on Roshar, to make the continent feel like a single entity. Because otherwise, I would probably have to tell the story as not a worldwide story. You just can't travel, and ideas can't move fast enough. Even if you look back at Roman times ... Roman times took place in a fairly small geographical area, and even that, it was really hard for them to know what was happening. And you would have to spend months and months getting information that was then months and months out of date. And there's a lot of sitting around and waiting in those cultures for things to happen, even with having the Mediterranean to sail around and bring this information. I just wanted information to move fast, both culturally and narratively. And so I said, I've gotta find a way to do this. I did it with Seons in Elantris; I need find a way to do something similar to that on Roshar. Real-world inspiration, if there is one, is an auto-pen. Where authors can have a little machine sign books for them; it moves on its own. I've never used one, but politicians use them quite a bit. When you get that hand-signed letter when you've donated whatever to whatever political party. That hand-signed letter was probably machine-signed with a real pen, rather than hand-signed by the individual.

”

Trivia

Aluminum can block spanreed communication.