natc

Did the honorblades come during, after, or before the Oathpact? Because apparently Ishar was already called Binder of Gods before becoming the Herald of Luck and founding the Oathpact . . . and the war was presumably already going on when the pact was made . . .

You said you never thought of the shards as being remotely close to gods . . . then proceeded to list five shards as gods you know?

They're basically all normal mortals (well okay not all of them were human and some might not have been actually mortal but you know what I mean) that have taken a massive power into themselves. Shards are really only gods insofar as having almighty power, and even that power suffers limitations all over the place depending on circumstances, and is but 1/16 of the original power of Adonalsium.

Well Stormfather himself is largely a splinter, but the cognitive shadow of Tanavast in him would have been a sliver as well . . . And yeah they call any sentient power spren here. Stormfather even hesitantly described himself to Dalinar as the spren of the Almighty which is rather inaccurate, but easier to understand.

As far as being unique amongst the Unmade go, uniqueness isn't black and white, it's a range. Every person is unique, but some are more unusual to others. I don't believe we know of another Unmade that can corrupt other splinters, do we? The rest either cause cognitive influence of some kind, bond people to grant power (Yelig-nar), or simply don't appear to interact with other individuals directly at all (Re-Shephir).

Hoid has Perfect Pitch, he almost certainly has breath to spare. Plus I wouldn't put it past him having developed the trick. Just because you're on a planet with stormlight doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. Especially if you haven't figured out how.

He's apparently tried, and hasn't figured it out, IIRC. I imagine it shouldn't be impossible but . . . well science doesn't find the one way something works until you get over the thousand ways where it doesn't.

Using Breath to sustain himself was, to my knowledge, the primary reason he came to Roshar in the first place.

Do we actually know voidbinding uses voidlight explicitly? The Fused seem to use surges with voidlight as well . . .

"Found that he couldn't be bitter" does not at all refer to finding bitterness. It refers to finding out that he couldn't feel bitterness from seeing what he did, in spite of expecting to have felt as such.

He's a big mystery close to the most central mysteries of a canon that has had enough mysteries to attract a community of theory-loving fans.

Adhesion does in fact function based on pressure and vacuum as its basis for sticking things. It's a pretty bad name, but then again "lashings" cover two completely different surges outright, so I suspect they originated from people who never studied their powers in depth . . .

I thought it was established fact?

Literally haven't logged in in months, but since this is going on might as well join in on the hype . . . Gavilar is a lot more cuckoo than I anticipated.

Well, Eshonai might be a bit of a missing persons case right now (no body!) but perhaps Rlain might still . . .

I would reckon that, as a scholar on such matters, Khriss may have more in-depth knowledge on the mechanics of investiture, various planets' biospheres, etc. The sciency stuff. But Hoid would know enough to get by from past experience alone, and he almost certainly knows history better. Especially pre-shattering knowledge . . .

Well the blade's cutting and plate's self-protection are active whether you like it or not, but I'm not sure the physical strength enhancements could actually work (so the plate is too heavy anyway) and the blade needs a soul to bind to for obvious reasons.

Interfacing with cognitive aspects would logically be an innate function of Transformation (which causes soulcasting), and popping your senses over there to pick out the aspect seems like the most intuitive way for a surgebinder to experience it. Soulcasting can't really be completely cheap but clearly one fabrial's worth of infused gemstones is enough to get the job done several times in a row on simple changes. Elsecalling to its full limit would entail using up massive amounts of power to instantaneously create a perpendicularity and force your physical aspect through, and I don't think even the books have shown it done it more than . . . once? They don't even directly mention it, because the viewpoint character didn't know it happened.

The way I'm kind of seeing it, while feruchemy does sort of preserve parts of your innate investiture (or whatever they actually use for odd things like muscle mass and calories), it outright separates them from you in the process to store them externally. Preservation through a ruinous means. Allomancy keeps your innate investiture completely untouched and is if anything trying to plug investiture into a gaping hole that was left in your soul (which does actually damage your soul further if continuously flared, but user error can't really be blamed for things like this). Hemalurgy being the indisputable one that just tears souls apart.

. . . but the microorganisms on the sand ARE the plants. So they're clearly supernatural from the start regardless of the water.

I saw nothing in the paragraph to suggest the water is invested. The ability to transfer bodily water into the plant seems fairly supernatural, but the phenomenon seems inherent to the plant. Wouldn't be the first time a species in the cosmere involves investiture-drawing bonds as part of its life cycle. We have a whole planet's worth of those on Roshar, though those are fauna and not flora.

Uh, not at all really. There's nothing suggesting that allomantically unviable metal doesn't glow. I mean the vast majority of metal isn't allomantically viable. The strictness of composition is so high that I doubt anything but gold could possibly work straight out of the ground. Yet entire mines can glow.

To begin with Allomancy basically does not mess with innate investiture of the person. Souls or what have you. Whether you kill your physical body using it is a completely different problem entirely; you can burn the right metals and still die from misuse stemming from sheer idiocy. Burning the metal is what shapes power, so it's still part of using the ability. It is merely a heavily automated aspect. If you mess up even something this basic I imagine Hoid facepalming somewhere out there. On that note, Mistings can't seem to burn at all past a certain margin of error in chemical makeup. Mistborn literally have all "safeties" off in this regard, and since they're a naturally all but impossible irregularity using them to judge the system hardly seems fair.

That's . . . almost a given to be honest. That Roshar was Adonalsium's creation. Hell, most things in the cosmere are in that category. With that said massively altering planets or even moving orbits is not very difficult for Shards, assuming they actually know enough astrophysics to do it without ruining it all.

One is a very painfully distorted human-ish thing from what I can tell, while Midnight Essence seems very much like what the name suggests; jet black and filled with/made from smoke.