MitchBade

Thanks. A divine breath gives a Returned the benefits received from 5th heightening but it isn't comparable to having ~2k breaths across the board. It's a splinter of Endowment, a more concentrated form of investiture, and is more powerful than normal breaths in some ways. Its unique ability to heal sort of transcends the bounds of regular breath, so I think it could be enough. Can normal investiture even change Nightblood? If it could he's consumed so much by now one would think we would see a change haha.

I am putting this in Cosmere Discussion rather than the Warbreaker forum because these topics and characters are not restricted to that book. If you are are looking at this and you haven't read Warbreaker and the Stormlight Archive this may contain spoilers. Also this may have already been brought up but I couldn't find anything. I was thinking about what Vasher might use his divine breath for, as he has lived for hundreds of years and still doesn't know why he Returned, and realized that a rather poetic (and paradoxical) end for him would be to heal Nightblood. Nightblood has been described as a poor or inaccurate replica of a shardblade, as broken or opposite compared to them. The abilities and qualities of a divine breath are not fulled defined or understood, so it may be possible for one to essentially fix Nightblood to match the intent of its creation. This would be possible because divine breaths seem to heal across all three realms, as seen with Susebron; when Lightsong healed Susebron he didn't just grow back a physical tongue, but was able to speak intuitively, as if he had never been without one. If a normal person gained a tongue after living without one since birth they would need extensive speech therapy to be able to speak, and even then they may never get to baseline. The flaws with Nightblood aren't physical, they have to do with how he interacts with the cognitive and spiritual realm, so the holistic healing offered by the divine breaths could fix his inability to understand time and morality, as well as stop him from killing his wielder unintentionally after being consumed by his command. This would make him a more powerful true shardblade like Shashara and Vasher intended. In order for this to work a divine breath would need to be able to act on a sentient splinter in the same way it does a human. Since they can act on a Returned which are splinters of Endowment it may work on Nightblood, but this could also be explained by the Returned being cognitive shadows, so who knows. It appears that Nightblood has an important role to play in the fight against Odium and maybe in a greater overarching conflict throughout the Cosmere, so it would make sense that Vasher was returned to heal Nightblood. This would be a cool paradox because it means that he was returned to fix a future problem that wouldn't come to pass if he wasn't returned. The one caveat is that it's possible that Shashara would have created Nightblood even without Vasher's involvement. This was fun to think about, I love the character of Vasher and hope to see more of him going forward. If something like this does happen I doubt it would take place in Stormlight Archive because that would be a bit more crossover than Sanderson is probably comfortable with.

If the Elantrians can somehow pull the seons more fully into the physical realm like spren and create shardblades, maybe it could also end the geographical limitations to their magic. It might not allow them full range of ability, but perhaps something akin to surges but with aons.

In response to the original post, I don't have a real answer. However I think there would be a decent chance, as a shardblade only severs the spiritual connection on the first pass, not the physical or cognitive. The limp arm still has oxygenated, nutrient filled blood flowing through it which is obviously better than ichor alcohol, and if it has a cognitive identity separate from the main body would still think of itself as the person's arm, and would want to function.

I doubt that the entire vorin church will turn against the kholins. Most world leaders have recognized that they are in another desolation, and thusly their ardents would probably be disinclined to join the enemies' side. It's a fairly delineated conflict: parshendi versus humans, and the parshendi have the fused, who probably seem like the vorin equivalent of demons. For the ardentia to take the side of Odium there would need to be a significant cognitive disconnect or a lot of weird literary shenanigans on Sanderson's part. I do however agree with you on the insight regarding dalinar and the kholins.

I think there is definitely more to the story, I doubt Chaser was fleeing due to cowardice. However, there's been some context clues suggesting that the setting is actually the world of Firstborn, despite there being no aliens in the story. I'm not sure either way as I'm not quite familiar with Defending Elysium.

The slug will definitely be pertinent to the story, and it being a synthetic lifeform or AI is a good guess, I like it. For some reason as I was reading the chapters I couldn't help but feel that it had something to do with the Krell though. Like that was what the Krell actually looked like and the "wicked armor" referenced in other chapters was an exoskeletal suit they operate. Probably not the case, because I also feel like the Krell might be other humans.

I think that the Krell being humans or human constructs has definite merit, but the whole world being a convoluted training simulation in which people are actually killed seems like a stretch. Then again it's been done before. I'm hoping it doesn't turn out that way.

I agree that something is fishy about there only ever being "wicked armor" left over and no actual bodies. It leaves a lot of options open for Sanderson as to the real identity of the enemies coming from space, and I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being other humans. Justifying a multigenerational war in which your side makes no real attempt to end the conflict is easier when the other side are aliens bent on your destruction. Perhaps there was some sort of civil war or rebellious faction and they were chased into space, eventually crashing in Detritus. All speculation of course.

I think it's a nice nod to Pern. If I recall correctly in that world people had come to the planet on spaceships anyways.

Treledees could have been a modern version of VaraTreledees in the Pahn Kahl culture. Maybe it was a common name.

@Kidpen Evidence: they are after Hoid, who appears to be assembling his own Frankenstein shard. Theory: Reassembling Adonalsium will not be a good thing, and if it is Hoid's goal then he will end up as the primary antagonist of the series. Sorry if formatting is bad, am on mobile.

Since being spiked alters your sdna would the child of a male and female inquisitor have the potential to inherit all ofntheur stolen alloamntic/feruchemical abilities?

To answer the original question, the old phrase 'it takes a village' is appropriate here. In a lot of labor intensive communities in real life adults would switch off watching all the kids at once. One of the reasons why communities used to be more tight knit.

"Be." Attempting to control what it does seems like a good idea on the surface and it would be cool to have a badass fiery/lightning/thunder/death sword but it probably wouldn't work, as we have seen. Endowing sentience doesn't imply the ability to reason, only to feel and experience subjectively. You could try "think" or "use reason" but that honestly might make something even scarier due to its intelligence. The problem with nightblood is it is trying to understand its command even though it doesn't really have the ability to. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.