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  1. Spoilers for Mistborn (both era one and two)
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  2. 5 likes
  3. I forgot the name of the Day of Pentecost (from the Bible) and accidentally said the Day of Recreance instead... (none of my family has read Stormlight yet, so they didn't notice) I feel really dumb but am laughing at the same time.
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  4. As both El and I need more time to finish our portions of the writeup, the aftermath is getting delayed again; sorry. In the interest of satisfying immediate curiosity, the Eliminators have won, but the writeup is proving quite involved and not easy to tackle quickly. We hope the end product is worth your time, which is the only reason we’re delaying
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  5. It was time. Silence echoed through the room. Grey read through words written on the pages of guide on his mind one final time. Viv pushed Sierra into position at the center of the circle. He sucked in some Stormlight and readied the lightweave. The words that emerged came from everywhere and no where. “Ryleh Thrlis Tetyqpo.” Reality began to split like an eggshell. Cracks spread throughout the space of the room, coming from the ceiling and spreading. With each of the hairthin fractures, the air fuzzed. “Wzxert Ylard Vtre.” Iridescent blades slid from the cracks, slick with the blood of reality that left puddles of pasts, presents, and futures as they dropped with the sound of centuries. “Sierra Kvclthe Crtiop.” The knives bent, or rather reality curved to their will as they elongated, converging on a central point. They seemed to bend from afar, but if Grey followed a single blade with his eyes, it followed a straight vector. Ghostly flames erupted from the ceiling, silently burning in the shape of the pentacle. “Tgjkil Frtyew Xbved” With the final words upon the air, the daggers met their confluence. Sierra’s eyes were filled with the blades, and she uttered a guttural scream from a closed mouth. Around the room, eyes began to open. From the depths of the darkness they fixed their gaze. On Sierra. White noise emanated. Grey felt his vision begin to fuzz, filled with black and white static. His mind flickered. Images, faded like those of an old television appeared in his minds eye. They were of his childhood, of his home in a land long ago forgotten and lost to even himself. Time, experience itself skipped like a scratchy record, and the when the showtune resumed, a single florescent light lit up the crumpled figure on the floor. Grey walked over to Sierra's form, and pushed her over with his foot. She gazed at him with eyes of iridecent knives. The same blood that had leaked when the experiment had begun now formed the tears leaking down Sierra's face. Grey felt the ghost of an impossible smile slip across his face. Success @Shard of Thought @ZincAboutIt
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  6. When your new favorite emoji is the mushroom and you send large mushroom forests to all your friends with absolutely no explanation whatsoever and also respond to everything in M-Bot lines. Edit: l just started at the very beginning of Shardcast and have been listening to it for the last four straight hours. I have never felt so knowledgeable about the Cosmere.
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  7. “Indeed, Viv, it is fact time for some divine Cinnamon Rolls.” Grey pulled out a small ruler, then measured the longest of the shards that had replaced the girl’s eye. He measured a few more, then figured the average. “2 inches extending from the socket,” He said, pulling out a test tube and collecting some of the tears. He would send them down to the interns to analyze. He paused as Sierra stood suddenly and vomited. And all over his shoes. He sighed, then looked to her form on the ground, crumpled as it. “Well, Sierra best to get up now. You’ll get used to the pain soon. I know I did. One day it will become your greatest companion. But it is not this day. Today your greatest companion will be Cinnamon Rolls, and that is fact.” He out his hand to help Sierra up. @Shard of Thought @ZincAboutIt
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  8. Vivica watched the world fracture with awe and delight, grinning wild and hard as the cracks widened and time dribbled out in viscous ribbons. The iridescent blades shuddered through the air in a maddening and transfixing trajectory, casting the room into half-light and static. It threw odd shadows across the walls and the floor, bending her own into a strange thing indeed. Through the tears in reality, Vivica caught glimpses of other times and places. She was five, sharing a cone of sweet ice with her brother on the side of the street. She was seven, doodling strange creatures into a notebook while her mother cooked dinner. It was night, and the world was full of choking smoke and screaming. She was fifteen, and the other children had locked her into the closet when she'd had another fit. From out of the corner of the darkened wardrobe, something glowing and violet drew nearer as she sobbed. Vivica blinked as the glowing points of sharp light continued to grow and draw closer together. She laughed, then looked over to Bennington, who had grown very still, transfixed by iridescent blades and the white noise. The light flickered again, and Vivica saw another shadow thrown across the floor. It was vast, and possessing an anatomy that seemed anathema to anything the human mind could process in its entirety. It seemed to hover, rounded yet sharp, and full of dozens, possibly even hundreds, of wicked-looking tendrils. Or, perhaps, tentacles. Vivica cocked her head, smile faltering for just a moment. Was that...? The blades converged, and the scream that tore from Sierra's being was enough to drive every other thought out of Vivica's mind. Her eyes snapped back to the girl, who had fallen on the floor. The world had righted itself, and in the sudden silence Vivica could hear herself breathing hard. She looked over at Grey, then pulled her notebook into her hands and began furiously scribbling down what had happened. Grey walked forward, flipping Sierra over with the toe of one shoe. Over to her left, Bennington began swimming smooth, satisfied loops around the room. He, of course, cast no shadow. "Success, then?" Vivica chirped, noting down Sierra's sharp, iridescent eyes in her report. The girl was still silent, but alive. "Does that mean it's time for cinnamon rolls?" @Snipexe @Shard of Thought
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  9. I can't recall it off the top of my head, but it was about how Worldhoppers extend their lifespans, right? Edit: found it
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  10. Sierra Thorne had thought she knew pain. She had thought she knew pain because of what she suffered at the hands of her mother. She had thought she knew pain because of her anorexia. And she had thought she knew pain because of the guilt she felt over her sister's death. For indeed, she did feel guilt over it, stoic as she may have acted about it. None of that came close to what she felt now. Nothing she had gone though, nor, she believed, anything she could have gone through, had in anyway prepared her for the pure agony of the moments passed. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't move. She couldn't speak. She could only tremble on the ground, utterly shaken to the core. She found that, more than ever before, she wished for death. The world was a blur around her. Sound had lost all meaning. The only thing she knew with utmost clarity was that, awful, horrid pain. Still, it seemed, her body would not let her pause for that pain. She felt her mouth begin to water and knew immediately to get on her hands and knees before she threw up all over the ground. She nearly collapsed right into her own vomit, completely unprepared to have to support herself. She barely managed to shove herself to the side before her bony arms gave way and her face hit the ground. She gasped, still trembling and unable to speak.
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  11. From the album: The Longest Thread (Misadventures)

    A lot of you probably recognize this from my Shardiversary post. When I posted that, this picture wasn't actually all the way completed... But now that I've added the last four faces to the bottom, I'm ready to post it! Props (or upvotes, I guess ) to anyone who can successfully name everyone in this drawing! (and make sure you remember that there are 18 people in this drawing, not sixteen.. )
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  12. Question: How much wood could a feruchemical-steel-spiked woodchuck chuck if a feruchemical-steel-spiked woodchuck could chuck wood?
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  13. In moments, they faded, replaced with a hundreds of thousands of other images and thoughts. Slowly they swirled around Max, trapped in his state of stasis. "I have need of your services," said the voice. Said Fate.
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  14. Reckoners (major spoilers) Edgedancer (life changing spoilers)
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  15. RAFOspren. Or in Glys's specific case, WTFspren.
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  16. i didn't want to actually follow up that discussion, but now i have to. because if your idea of grey is "stalin was aiming for utopia", well, of course that's stupid (and by the way, he probably wasn't, he just wanted power). you want an example of someone fairly gray, take kelsier before he died. he killed people he didn't have to and his motives weren't the most sterling. then again, his motives weren't also really bad, he mostly fought bad people, and he made a better world. take vin at the beginning. she was as decent as she could while being a thief, but still she had no higher goal than "do what it takes to survive". later she becomes fully good, but she certainly wasn't back then. i wouldn't call her evil either though, especially considering the kind of world she has to survive in take egwene from the wheel of time. an arrogant brat and a bully who always wanted to be in power. an hypocrite who kept telling rand how is head had swelled big for not obeying moiraine all the time, right when she was disdaining aes sedai with 10 times her age and experience. a hero who willingly (she could have quit/run away many times) went to fight an evil much powerful than herself, helped those she could whenever she could, and committed self-sacrificed in the last battle. but mostly, shades of grey means that even though you can tag most people as good or evil, most good people aren't perfectly good and most evil people aren't perfectly evil. breeze is a good person, but he's still a lazy edonist who expect others to cater to him. wayne is a good person, but besides being a kleptomaniac, he's still... wayne. he once broke into a home because he needed a lodging. while he did no damage and left some food, i doubt you'd be happy to discover that someone has been using your home while you were away. another time he tricked a boatman into bringing him where he wanted without charge, and other minor acts that are very annoying on the receiving end. and on the other side you have rashek. he's certainly evil, but he was trying to fight ruin. when he ascended, he became cosmere-aware. he could have escaped scadrial, and he would have kept his power intact. instead he kept struggling with a voice in his head slowly eroding his sanity. or taravangian, who - despite your lamentations that ends don't justify the means - is certainly not stalin. and speaking of end not justifying the means, this sentence, taken at the extreme it literally means, is absurd. going by that concept, waging war on the nazis was wrong, because it hurt people. much better to let them take over the world. going by that concept, any kind of criminal punishment is wrong. a verdict is never 100% certain, and you are guaranteed that any justice system, even the most fair and sensible, will end up condemning an innocent every once in a while. so, if the end does not justify the mean, then you should never condemn anyone, ever. of course this would result in social collapse, but condemning innocents is not justified by keeping order. you should also not kill animals, they certainly did nothing wrong to deserve it. this includes swatting mosquitoes. or using any kind of pest control on crops. we should probably avoid walking around, the goal of going on with our lives does not justify the mean of accidentally swatting dozens of innocent bugs for that matter, how do you decide what is an end and what is an evil mean to reach it? in the aforementioned justice example, is accidentally condemning some innocents an evil mean to the end of keeping social order? or is allowing for social disruption an evil mean to the end of avoiding the slightest bit of culpability? the way you phrase it changes everything. putting taxes that hurt the working people to finance important public projects, inflicting punishments to criminals to keep crime in check, compromising your values in foreign politics to avoid a war - over a disagreement stemming from the other nation having different values than yours, in which they believe no less strongly -, forcing people to work to earn a living because you need someone to carry out some work, those are cases that can be phrased as "means to an end". but i do not think you mean the sentence taken to that extreme. I assume you take a more reasonable interpretation. which means that ultimately you agree with me in having to choose between imperfect alternatives. You simply have a skewed concept of what "shades of grey" entails. As for helping evil, sure, there is evil who attempts to hide in the blurred line. There is much more evil that hides underneath moral absolutism. You mentioned stalin and hitler, but they did not present their crimes as "means to a good end". No, they presented their crimes as justified ways to pursue and punish enemies of the state. they used moral absolutes to claim that those people were "evil", and acted accordingly. same goes for the crusades, the inquisition, or modern day islamic terrorists. in their distorted ideologies they do not claim that the world is grey and they are making sacrifices for a just cause. no, they claim, as you do, that the world is black and white, and since they clearly are white, anything different from them is black and ought to be righteously exterminated. never take moral relativism for defending evil. while it has brought some excess itself, it was born specifically as a reaction to the evils of moral absolutism.
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  17. YKYASW your aunt texts you at midnight last night after finishing Elantris (her first book by Sanderson) to say "I hate Hrathen. I love Hrathen. SO SO SO GOOD." and then sends you a list of cosmere books and asks if that's a good order to read them.
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  18. Totally get your interpretation. I am just stating the order I read things and why I believe as I do. First Jasnah sees the shadow point towards the lamp. Then it goes back to normal. She runs into Amaram and Gavilar. Speaks with them. Then she continues. Her shadow then points the wrong direction again. Then several distant shadows (not the one attached to her), lengthen and form into figures standing. One takes the shape of a man and he strode towards her with an unsheathed sword. Jasnah then falls among the beads, regains control, makes a raft of beads. The lead spren then comes back for her. She summons the form of a statue with a sword. The lead spren then sheathes his sword, bows and touches his forehead with his fingers as a sign of respect. At no point did Jasnah's personal shadow form into anything. That scene leads me to believe the lead spren was Ivory. This leads me to believe that Jasnah's personal shadow was just reacting to the cognitive realm. However I acknowledge that it could be said that the lead spren was not Ivory, and that Ivory was still hidden in Jasnah's shadow. Though it is later stated that Ivory is the only one of his kind to want to have anything to do with humans. So if that is the case, then why would an ink spren other than Ivory treat Jasnah with respect? It could also be said maybe the lead spren is ivory, and ivory was manipulating Jasnah's shadow from afar. Personally I do not think this is within Ink's spren power wheelhouse, but as we know very little about spren, I cannot really say that definitively. So TLDR, I am personally opting for the simpler answer being Jasnah's shadow just pointed the wrong way because in the cognitive realm, shadows point towards the cognitive "sun", and we see with Aimians that is their natural state. But I acknowledge the scene could be interpreted in other ways.
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  19. From the album: The Longest Thread (Misadventures)

    Gotta love Astral. Top notch villain. I'm very excited to see her interact with... well, literally everyone on CBST. Star, you'd better watch out because your past self is coming back to haunt you.
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  20. My feet pound the ground as I run away from Kenod. I scream and yell on top of my lungs, try to draw them away, to get clear a path Kenod can take. There is no direction left, we checked them all and the beasts were everywhere. But they want to have a scene, so I'll give it to them. "Come on!" I scream and pick up a branch. "I'll show you who is stronger!" Pointless words, but I need to perform if I want for this to mean something. It's suicide, and at the same time it's not. It's a sacrifice but I need to do it the right way, or they will kill my mom and dad, my brothers. So I yell again, wave my hands, hope that they all watch, that I deliver some great piece of footage they can use. Lifting a hand I wipe some tears of my face and continue to run. The ground is uneven, and there, I can see some scales, a wet surface moving through the ground. And here another one. They take your time, but I know at least some spot me, and when I turn my head, I see Kenod run away the other direction. He is still running. I suppose that counts as good. "I won't be cowed by you!" I scream, the words a lie, such a plain lie that I would have laughed at myself. I am scared, so scared that my hands shake so much, I have to grab the branch with both hands. I lift the branch and smack it down on the first worm, and the beast screeches and moves. It so fast I can barely follow it's movement with my eyes. Something wraps itself around my ankles and I yelp in fear, try to bring down the branch on it and miss when it pulls, drags me to the ground. Something else wraps itself around my chest and then a bright pain blazes in my arm. There is a tearing sound and then I scream, scream when there is another sharp pain in my leg and then another in my thing and then my ear. I scream and scream until I am out of breath, until my head feels light and stars dance in front of my eyes. Somehow I still go on, try to get them of me, my hands reaching out for the slithering wet mass, unable to grasp something, unable to stop them from tearing me apart. Darkness creeps closer, covers when I am seeing when I finally manage to grasp one of them, weakly try to pull it away and fail. More pain in my arms, but it's nearly insignificant, nearly unimportant compared to the rest. There is nothing but pain, desperation and I regret my decision, if I had slain Kenod, I could have left him for these things to feed upon. I couldh have walked away and I could have killed again, until I would have been the winner. I would have made a good winner, a perfect one. But in this game, I loose.
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  21. I am actually just hopping for a moment of collective realization.
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  22. Silence was a constant state for Aln, similar to breathing or having arms. She had no way to distinguish sounds, or even to really understand the concept of noise. Nevertheless, the room was the quietest she had ever heard it. She could see the flickers of conversation out of the corner of her eye. The others in the room had ignored her panic. Well, why wouldn't they? She was nothing to them. The Sleepless - it was the Sleepless, right? - was ignoring her too, crawling aimlessly across the floor. Her breath came fast, all remnants of her previous calm vanishing from her mind. Her spren might have said something, but she couldn't hear him over the silence. She felt the ghost of pressure on her eyelid, saw the shadow of a demonic grin. For a moment, bullets filled the air around her. She was fifteen again, completely alone, in a world she couldn't understand, listening to people she couldn't hear. From her hands streamed her brother's blood and her own ineffective Stormlight. The faces of all those whom she had failed to help drifted into her mind. Trent. Nultūk. Xena. That Worldhopper girl. The friendly soldier from Roshar. The countless innocents who had died in the war. Temeria. Knowledge is power, whispered the echo of a distant memory. Well, it wasn't. Because she had devoted her whole life to learning, and she was still helpless. She was so storming helpless. She stared at the bug, hands shaking. She remembered the hatred in Temeria's eyes that morning. Her sister's expression had carried contempt for the coward whom she saw. Aln's eyes flickered up, taking in the room. She saw rows of thick books in plain bindings, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. They were from all over the universe. Once, she had run away from those who wanted to hide her in library, sealed off from the outside. She had left her home, seeking adventure, searching for the sort of knowledge that could only be found by living it, not just by reading it. Each fragment of information had been a precious gem, a hard-won victory. Now sshesat, like those books, on a dusty shelf, forgetting and being forgotten by the world. Because it had been hard, and it had been scary, and she had been alone. But she was still afraid. And she was still alone. Hardly realizing what she was doing, she rounded the desk, her purposeful stride carrying her towards the insect. She was tired of the fear. She was tired of being helpless. Her foot raised, and she slammed it into the dark carapace, again and again, and again. The terror remained, but there was something stronger behind it. Aln was done with hiding. @Ark1002
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  23. This I kind of doubt. Kelseir would not have needed to openly attack Elend and he was to smart to do so. Additionally Elend was a member of their group at the time and Kelseir was very strongly against inter group fighting. Breeze is paranoid. This is a necessary attribute for someone in his profession but it makes him an unreliable PoV. He had been locked up for months and was sort of dead. He also lacked any real human contact for a long period of time. Irrationality and aggression are normal symptoms of those kinds of conditions. This is especially true for someone like Kelseir who felt deeply that being trapped was a death sentence. He had some decent information from Marsh on her and he probably had met many boys and girls in similar situations. They could but Kelseir did not know that they could and in point of fact they did not. 1. Not really comparable situations. The American colonies were some of the least taxed places on earth at the time and the people their enjoyed good diets and a healthy lifestyle with a high level of education. Additionally many of the funding fathers spent most of their pre revolution days trying to be British. In temperament and procedure no. In ethics yes. Remember Suit was an extraordinarily wealthy and well connected individual. He had the capacity to achieve many of his goals without bloodshead. He actively chose not to.
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  24. She had been offered another option. In her foolishness, she had taken it, believing that clinging to this flimsy world was worth anything.
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  25. Terror. Complete terror.
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  26. Yes we have. First assault on the rift. Scribes can estimate altitude by measuring air pressure as of Oathbringer. Also stormwardens would almost certainly need to have a way of measuring accurately to get weather predictions.
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  27. She was experimenting in the CR at that time, right? wasn't that when she learned how to form stuff out of beads?
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  28. Exactly. I made that point. Her shadow was backwards in the prologue of WoR... she wasn’t in the cognitive realm. She was in a hallway in Kholinar palace.
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  29. You do know that the 2nd book had come out in 2010, right?
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  30. Szeth: former critic now most Zealous minister.
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  31. Nice, airguns should definitely be possible via fabrials. The air pressure fabrial sounds good too. I wonder if the same could also work with the Everstorm or how Odium would react to that
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  32. Welcome to the shard officially @Cosmoriente So basically you are all set and waiting for SA 4 to hit the shelves like all of us!
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  33. That is amazing! I love Renarin!
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  34. This is just awesome. Really makes me wish for a Stormlight anime.
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  35. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join or not since I haven’t read Alcatraz yet, but I can’t resist with how fun those rules are! I probably won’t be able to do any RP, partly because I haven’t read Alcatraz but also because the game will go by too fast for me to because of school. @The_God_King Welcome to SE! I’m glad to have you!
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  36. Yes he has met Hoid for sure ! He told sigzil as much. The god of mischief!
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  37. Makes me think of the thread about Horneater forms. Could they really have a gemstone and get different forms, be of them allowing you to see spren ? But may be their forms, unlike singer forms, are less potent and causes less outwardly changes to be very noticeable!?
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  38. I thought that not every horneater can see the spren! Rock is amongst those few who can.... Yes he mentioned something like the hot water lakes are normal water on the surface but after certain depth they are water of life. Gods live there and come to our world from there. So I think swimming at that depth in the shardpool somehow grants them the ability to see spren.
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  39. It's because Horneaters are human/singer hybrids. Some are genetically closer to singers, and so can see spren like singers can. Rock even mentions almost being able to hear the Rhythms.
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  40. Betray his friends. Give up on those he cares for. Sacrifice those he cares for. Let his world die.
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