VoltCruelerz

Yay cover art! Regarding the present discussion regarding Jasnah's appearance, I don't mind it, but it isn't what I imagined. As other before have mentioned, I expected her to be more of a groomed elegance than just beautiful. As I recall though, Vorin garb does tend to show off feminine curves, so it does fit the world. Cross-posting from what I put on tor: The Giant: While this was not at all what I imagined a thunderclast to look like (I imagined obsidian quadrupeds), I figure it’s a pretty safe bet that it is one. That said, I can’t imagine whatever else it might be, so I’m going to assume that thunderclasts are basically magical rock mechs now. I’m surprised the main post suggested that a Parshendi was in there. From Dalinar’s vision, I took it to just be animated rock brought about by a voidspren. Another interesting tidbit is that the thunderclast is walking away from the wall. Maybe that’s Rlain helping out? The Lightning: The presence of red lightning is unsurprising enough given the presence of Voidbringers, but the blue lightning suggests that a Highstorm’s stormwall may be approaching. Either that, or someone’s doing something funky with their spren. The Spears and the Wall: The presence of spears clearly indicates a battle, at least of some scale, though we have no idea where. The Parshendi were all over the world before the Everstorm, so there’s not really any place this couldn’t be happening. I’m going to guess though that it’s one of the cities the party can teleport to from Urithiru just because defending anywhere else with their present force is basically impossible unless Navani suddenly gets a whole lot better at making fabrials. We might see her make a new Oathgate by the end of the series, but I seriously doubt she’d be able to in Book 3. The Glove: It’s Jasnah. She’s an atheist and enormously pragmatic. If she’s going into battle, she’s not vain enough to hide her safehand. What’s more interesting to me here though is that she’s not wearing any armor. While by no means a fighter in her own right, she still strikes me as the sort of person that would never willingly go into battle without protection. Honestly, I think Jasnah might be hiding from the thunderclast. The Sword: Ivory is doing something, but we’ve never seen anyone need to summon their blade when they weren’t getting ready to use it for something sword-like. She might have had had Ivory out and is simply turning him into a different shape like Syl did at the end of Book 2. Then again, maybe there are higher powers we don’t know about yet. The Stairs: Well, this is just weird. There’s no real… yeah, I’ve got nothing. I can only imagine she’s creating them on the fly, but then they’d be mounted to the wall. These are floating, which is a power she doesn’t have, so maybe she’s halfway in Shadesmar or something? Alternatively, this could be some new ability we’re not familiar with as mentioned above.

Wouldn't this affected some of the Returned then if it's just caused by not wanting to come back? I'd think Lightsong would have commented on that at some point.

Yes.

Lift also wasn't there at the time to see it, just a guy who'd been recently brought back from the dead.

I'm guessing moving parts. I suspect it has to be a contiguous piece. Though whether it can form itself into a cable or some such, I'm not sure.

Now that we've seen Wyndle become a fork and mention other Spren becoming bows (but not the strings or arrows?), do we have any knowledge of what the upper size limit is on a shard-item? I'd previously assumed it was a constant mass which you could mold however you see fit, but in the end, you'd still have the same amount of it. Unless Wyndle became a superbly dense fork--which I feel like would have been mentioned by Lift were it so--I'm seriously wondering what the upper and lower bounds on the size of shard-items are right now. Did Wyndle only partially become a fork perhaps, leaving most of his Investiture elsewhere?

Honestly, the thing that surprised me most was that the fork was truly sharp at all. Obviously forks do have pointy bits, but magical pointy bits seems excessive. Was this deliberate on Wyndle's part or must there be some sharp part of a shard-item?

So... he's about to Snap? I'm not sure why Endowment would have any particular affinity for the past, unless you counted the resurrection of the Returned, but Nalthis isn't the only place you can return from the grave. Also, with your comments about color, remember that Nightblood sucks the life out of things. For all we know, he could be pumping Investiture from the physical realm into the cognitive realm, hence the glowy bits that only Lift can see. I'm not saying a malatium-shadow-style effect isn't going on, but I don't see any evidence of that. Possible, yes, but I see no justification for that over any other theory. That said, the idea that Nightblood pumps investiture across realms... Given how heavily invested he is, he might actually qualify as a small perpendicularity, so this might actually be possible...

Yeah, probably a powerful splinter of some kind is my guess, though honestly I would not be surprised in the least if he's killed other Heralds. Of course, since they have a history of coming back, that sort of makes it a moot point unless they just dueled to the death for kicks one time or something.

You know you've succeeded as an author in making a compelling world when your fans are so thoroughly enticed by infodumps. This is a good point and makes me wonder just how much time has passed since the Shattering and what the early politics were like of the Shards. While passing a Shard to someone else is exceedingly rare, I can't help but wonder if perhaps this was done by some Shard holder who has long since let go. I don't know. As I think about it though, hauling your Investiture off to some remote world, dropping your Shard in some inaccessible place so you're just a Sliver... I imagine it would be easier to travel through the Cosmere undetected while still carrying enough power to influence things behind the scenes so long as you didn't do anything that would directly attract the attention of a Shard. Given what the Bands of Mourning are capable of (plus apparently time dilation is a thing), I think it well within a Sliver's power to travel the old fashioned way (through space) between worlds. If a Shardholder wanted to spend an extended period flying through space, it might be useful to have waypoints where they'd chunks of Investiture behind where as a Sliver they could "refuel." Perhaps First of the Sun is such a "magical gas station."

Eh, the first name that came to mind for me was the B-21 Nero. Bear in mind that we do have hellfire missiles though. And the first nuclear test was named Trinity.

Well, today we got an image of the new LRSB and it was announced that it would be called the B-21, but no nickname had yet been chosen. As it is a weapon (basically), is black, can be flown autonomously, and will likely do a fair bit of destroying evil, I would personally be a bit gleeful if it was ultimately named the B-21 Nightblood. Anyone else?

Rotation of the planet? I don't know. Like I said, something very strange is going on at the border, but it's not straight spacetime dilation as that'd cause the redshifting which we know isn't there.

OP, that was a delightfully gleeful rant, thank you. Also, I now really want some fanart of Kelsier showing up in Elendel and Sazed facepalming. On topic though, I don't mind. As you said, Kelsier loves Kelsiering. It's perfectly within character for him to claw his way back from the grave and to muck with everything he sees. I'm very interested to see what happens in the future trilogies between him and Hoid. Both are happy to burn down the world to get what they want so the two of them chasing each other around would be fun to see. I recall that Hoid once made a comment on Roshar about coming to see an old friend but ended up doing a lot of running from him instead. I figured at the time that it was just Demoux, Galladon, and/or some other 17th Sharder. Who knows, maybe it was Kelsier?