TheOneKEA

If Brandon is willing to take questions during his livestream tomorrow, I plan to ask him about this topic.

My only negative thought about this announcement so far is Apple’s current policy of not releasing all of its content on physical media. I believe strongly in owning the media that one consumes, and when it is available for sale I try to get a copy for myself. If the Cosmere works produced by Apple are not available in physical form, I will be sorely disappointed.

I blame Hoid, as many others might. I suspect that his rejection of a Shard was not the act of a single individual, and that several other people also walked away from holding the Shards, resulting in a mad scramble to find others who wanted to try. After all, there's no explicit mention in any published work that the sixteen people who shattered Adonalsium were the same sixteen who ascended and became Vessels for the resulting Shards.

I think both Rayse and Odium recognized the echoes of Tanavast's Cognitive Shadow in the explosion of Honor's Investiture across all three Realms, and was afraid that they didn't actually kill him. We now know that the Stormfather contained Tanavast's memories and a portion of his self, and because of Dalinar's Connection to the Stormfather, both the Vessel and the Shard likely felt Tanavast's presence when the perpendicularity was opened. Rayse and Tanavast would have had their own Connection as a result of their dealings after the Shattering and that Connection may have been triggered when the perpendicularity was formed.

I think that's exactly how it will work!

I suspect that the Shattered Plains will see some inexplicably successful plant growth due to the presence of Retribution's Shardpool.

I am curious to know where Cultivation went. Could she have fled to another Shardworld to regroup, or has she completely withdrawn from the Physical and Cognitive Realms?

We now know that the Honor Shard has begun to build an independent, sapient mind for itself, as the WoBs have repeatedly alluded to over the years, and that this mind and the unbuilt Cognitive aspects of the other Shards maintain a semi-independent existence apart from the Vessel. The text takes pains to state that the other remaining Shards immediately focused their attention on Retribution upon his creation, but it doesn't specifically state any more detail than that. Does this imply that the Dor, superheated and Cognitively confined as it is, could have also noticed the creation of Retribution? Is this why Brandon has said that that the sequels to Elantris needed to be written after the completion of the first arc of the Stormlight Archive? Could we potentially see the Dor begin to act independently as a Shard for the first time "on screen"?

At the climax of Wind and Truth, when Taravangian began melding the Shards of Honor and Odium into Retribution, the text specifically called out some portions of the Shard that splintered away and went somewhere unknown. This happened just before Kaladin joined the Oathpact and swore the Oath that bound Retribution's power to absorb the spren of Roshar. What were those splinters and where did they go? I have two theories about what happened to those splinters: 1. My first theory is that those splinters were the counterparts of the Shard held within the spiritwebs of the Heralds, the tanavastium and the spiritwebs of the Honorblades and the newly formed Honorspear, and the spiritwebs of Syl and Nale's unnamed highspren, drawn to them by their Connections to the Shard before Taravangian absorbed it. My theory rests on the fact that Syl was suddenly empowered to accept Kaladin's oath to Ishar; it's not clear from the timeline of the text that the splintering of the power of Honor occurred at the same time that Kaladin swore the oath. But where else would the Investiture to create the Windrunner Honorspear have come from? 2. My second theory is that those splinters were the expression of Dalinar's final gambit, and that they represented Honor's Connections to the other Shards and the means by which he had begged the others for help in the past, sent away by the power as a tangible message to the others that Retribution had been born. This theory is much flimsier since it seems much more plausible that the Shards would have felt the reverberations through the Spiritual Realm entirely on their own, but it makes sense that the Shard could act on its own to send away a more tangible message. 3. My third theory is that those splinters represent the final remnant of the original godspren of Roshar, taken in by Honor when he Invested Roshar and modified the godspren from their original design by Adonalsium. This one is the flimsiest of all since the Wind doesn't seem to react in-text to the return of any lost Investiture. What does everyone think?

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I suspect that her Cognitive presence is hiding within the interference caused by the Investiture from the Shardpool.

Does Lift count as a large chunk of her power? If Lift is able to accept her perceived dysmorphia and allow herself to grow and change, she may discover that her ability to generate Lifelight also grows and changes, and might be sufficient to do something awesome.

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.