TheOneKEA

Apparently Harmony didn’t reshape the planet as much as I thought They did at the end of HoA.

I agree; it all comes down to Intent. I believe that Wax had the Intent to create lerasium and atium, and that this Intent was expressed when he set up the experiment and executed it. Everyone else seems to be expressing the Intent to create atium only, or are not expressing the Intent to create lerasium “properly”.

Personally I think the best way to fix the imbalance is for Harmony to directly expend Their Ruinous Investiture in some way that separates it from Their Cognitive perception, and prevents it from easily returning to the Shard. During Era Two, I was expecting Them to use the excess Investiture to modify the spirit webs of the kandra and mistwraiths so that they would no longer depend on Hemalurgy to be sapient. Now that we know that Hemalurgic expressions of the Metallic Arts are being suppressed in order to prevent a hemalurgist from performing Compounding, it seems that the most likely outcome would be a deliberate Splintering of the Ruin Shard by forcibly Investing someone with Hemalurgic spikes and then pulling the spikes out and tossing them into a blood bag inside of a Pulser bubble, so that the Investiture is sequestered. It would be pretty gross and brutal but we have WoBs that support this hypothesized way to get some of the Ruin Shard’s Investiture away from it.

I was beyond pleased to see so many deliberate and obvious Cosmere references in this story. I feel like Brandon has finally reached the point where he simply isn’t concerned any longer about fans not being able to figure out what’s going on. He probably feels that it’s pretty straightforward for newer fans to find inexpensive copies of his books so that they can learn more about the references they encountered in TLM.

But that’s what I’m wondering about - was it really Autonomy’s Investiture? Or was it unkeyed Investiture? Or was it Preservation’s Investiture, harvested using the new Hemalurgy technique we saw in the book?

I have read the wider cosmere but not recently. But I do remember several examples of Realmatic Transition that don’t require a perpendicularity. The existence of the purified Dor in the story pretty strongly implies that it is much less difficult now to get ahold of large stores of Investiture, which is a new wrinkle that unlocks a lot of opportunities to visit planets that don’t have perpendicularities of their own.

We still don’t know a lot about how Realmatic Transition works. Individuals might need a lot less Investiture to enter the Physical Realm than small, or large, groups of people. We’ve already seen one character return to the Physical Realm without any blatant evidence in-text that it required a perpendicularity’s worth of Investiture to do so.

During the climax, when Marasi and the other Allomancers were draining the unkeyed(?) Investiture pool in the ballroom, where did it go once it was used? Will it return to the Shard of Preservation because it was expended by Allomancy? Will it go somewhere else? Will it return to that spot in the ballroom after a few years?

If the fabrial has enough Investiture left inside then it could be the way back. If it ran out of Investiture for the transition between realms, it might have the same Investiture siphon as the Allomantic grenades used by Marasi, and could therefore consume Kinetic Investiture from its user to recharge.

Not necessarily! One of the broadsheet stories includes a reference to a device that allows the user to enter the “ghostly realm”. That could be a Scadrian fabrial that allows the user to enter the Cognitive Realm without the use of a perpendicularity.

It seems that way, but how do we know it’s a real perpendicularity? I wonder if harmonium’s upinstability is in part caused by Harmony’s attempts to resist the formation of Their perpendicularity, and in so doing, the Investiture that does coalesce at the site of the perpendicularity is subsequently very unstable as a result.

Good catch! That seems very significant.

Where is Harmony’s perpendicularity? I’m almost certain that the pool in Entrone’s ballroom was formed from unkeyed Investiture brought to Scadrial by Autonomy’s agents and that it had none of Harmony’s Investiture in it. So where is Their perpendicularity? Why have we never seen it directly in the texts? Is it plausible that Harmony is deliberately trying to hold back the formation of Their perpendicularity because of Their mistaken belief that it will merely be used as a means of invading Scadrial via the Cognitive Realm? Or do They know that the Ruinous aspect of Theirself might be able to fully express itself via a perpendicularity and continue imbalancing the Vessel? So many questions……..

I have a feeling that this one will appear in the climax, and that it refers either to a failure of one of Odium’s spren to achieve its goals on Roshar, or to the breaking of the Voidspren bonds using the same mechanism used during the Recreance.

I am utterly shocked. This feels like a major watershed moment for the publishing industry. Does Dragonsteel have ambitions to become an independent publishing house? Are we going to start seeing Dragonsteel sign other authors writing in the fantasy and sci-if genres and start publishing their works? Even after all of their expenses are subtracted and taxes are paid, this is a STAGGERING amount of money for an author to get for four books that aren’t even done yet! Brandon, the mad lad….!