IndigoAjah

He's gone as far as Zillion can tell in the Cognitive which is different to Syl and Maya imo (the former seemed when "dead" to basically be what Aux was, the latter was present in Shadesmar and thus the Cognitive). However: this story kind of emphasized the unknowable aspect of the Spiritual at points and that's a life line. Is he recoverable on that plane?

I don't agree If Nightblood is also technically not a Spren or a Shardblade as I'm pretty sure Brandon has said, then as an artificial Dawnshard like thing that acts mostly but not exactly like one, he is also very specifically NOT a Dawnshard. I mean, Dawnshard already implies existence from the Dawn of time But still kind of is He's Nightblood. He's unique, but he is also accidentally a lot of unintended things.

The defining difference between Shards and Dawnshards is that Shards are Aspects, nouns defined by an adjective, that are heavily based on Intent and Being a certain way Dawnshards are verbs, Commands that need a degree of Intent to drive them, and which are inimical to certain Intents Shards seem to be driven by inherent aspects of an omnipotent God and fit with traditional attributes given to God. Thus I agree that actions probably fit the picture for Dawnshards but probably on a more metaphysical level than Forces of Physics (which Rosharan Surges cover), either forces that define sapience, or life, or God. I'm inclined to think the latter. Not what God (as he is imagined, whether you think one exists or not) IS (Honourable/Honest, Passionate - I still Odium is corrupted from his original Shard possibly by the act of attack on Adonalsium-, Preserving etc) and more on what actions set God apart. In that regard, God is usually set apart not by what he can do (everything!) Or must do (nothing) but what cannot be done to God. After all, in the Cosmere these things WERE done to God and it made him God no longer, and the Dawnshards are what did this. By some schools of thought, God is unchangeable - giving us Change as a Command. He also can't be Created, which I think might be another DS. He can't be Broken, which might be something similar to the Command used to do the Shattering we have seen, though maybe that's too simple given how all the DS were needed to Shatter Adonalsium. An alternative would be Bound. And he can't be Understood. I think Empathise/Understand/Know could be Hoid/Sigzil's Command, it fits the divine and "people" in general, it fits the Shattering (you have to understand Adonalsium or know how to break it to break it), it fits the characters of Hoid and Sigzil to a tee, and it fits their Torment imo - the more you understand the more you feel what they feel and the less able you are to harm them

Personally I like the idea but think it's more likely that in addition to kind of creating an artificial Spren, by creating something Sentient like that and so powerful but also given such a binding (if poorly defined) Intent and indeed Command (which is what defined the Dawnshards), the Scholars actually accidentally created an artificial Dawnshard too So NB is a new, 5th Dawnshard,.Destroy, that doesn't act exactly like a normal one

I kind of agree Also I think it answers part of the "Cognitive Shadow anchor" problem. I'm not sure that Yumi is a Cognitive Shadow in the simple term (I think she's something unique) but we've seen CS use a non-physical bond to tether them - the Oathpact. Yumi ALREADY has some such an anchor, one she has explicitly used as an anchor already - her Connection to Painter. That may have been (though who knows if fully?) cut by the machine but it's explicitly reformed after that, seen in how the two can mentally communicate. Why would she need any other anchor?

I'm not sure that it does make that clear. Just that it isn't yet and Saze can't consciously do it, but he has still formed Atium via Wax and planning to try to make more It implies that Sazed is currently unbalanced and Ruin already taking over and that excess still has to go somewhere...

I actually think that Autonomy's long term plan is to unbalance Saze so he feels he cannot hold the two Shards together or they are driven apart without him wishing. Driving him to be Discord, where the Shards are in opposition and presumably Ruin is in excess, would seem a decent broad way of doing this.

My bad re Malatium, I was sure it was silver but I am wrong. It would be easier to know re the spores of the Aethers if we knew what exactly was "wrong" with them, as has been implied. Given Shades probably exist as a result of Odium's fight with (where he splintered) Ambition, it is conjecture but not, imo, pushing it. And re the Returned, has anyone asked Brandon? Do we see Silver on Nalthis? And we've probably seen Splinters on every world, except, according to the Coppermind, Scadrial, where we've seen Slivers (I had to remind myself on the difference, and I made no distinction in the first post, sorry) That said, searching for Silver in Nalthis online brought up the concept of a cognitive anomaly, Silver Chains from Threnody can be used to anchor things to get through. That implies Silver from Threnody (but maybe not just Threnody? What does Lumar share with Threnody?) IS special. And could we say Shades and Spores are Cognitive Anomalies?

Whose to say as part of making a deal with him a Shard hasn't given him a Splinter to corrupt? And even Voidbinding ACTS like Surgebinding, which also sounds like it was linked to Odium once but has Surges unique to Honor. We don't know enough about Voidbinding and the history of Ashynn to know whether Odium corrupted Honor's magic or Honor copied Odium's but the similarities are clear that one is a copy of the other

Those are things he's invested in, none are things he's made. (Explicitly, the ones we know anything about seem to be things already present like Parshendi, who turned to him from their original Shards, corrupted by him.) And we don't know how the "magic numbers" for Shards work. Is there an unavoidable element? Can they pick to a degree? Even if it's a pure coincidence, it doesn't really affect the theory. And Odium's exact aim is to end up as the ONLY Shard. Why do you think corrupting some of their essence is going to upset all the Shards more than knowing he plans to eventually kill them all?

Sounds like Silver kills slivers, somehow. The thing about Scadrial that's current unique in the Cosmere as we know it is that we think Ruin, Preservation and Harmony didn't have any Slivers/splinters so maybe that's why it isn't seen to do anything there? Allomantic inertia isn't Investiture inertia, after all. That said, given that the Lord Ruler is a pseudo Splinter of P, holding and changed by much of its Power, if that element is what makes beings vulnerable to Silver (presumably with a Cognitive and/or Spiritual component) then maybe if someone had stabbed the Lord Ruler with a seemingly pointless silver knife years ago it would have solved a lot of problems! Indeed Silver's main impact in Scadrial to date was its compound with Atium which directly led to TLR's death, maybe that's a metaphor?

Maybe each is an unmaking/corruption of a Spren like entity from various Shardworlds/similar? With Shards paired up, and Aethers probably not being Shard-alligned, 9 might be the number of worlds represented by Shardworlds+Aether. So you get a corrupted Aether, super-spren (allá Stormfather/Nightwatcher/Sibling), Seon/Skaze/Elantrian, Kandra?, Returned, Shades etc? Makes Odium like Morgoth who cannot create, only warp creation, stealing from all the other Shards. Currently this is just a throw away concept that hasn't been bulked out,.but it has an elegance that appeals to me

Anyone else get Princess Bride as a starting point for style and content? Until the Cosmere craziness amped up of course

Well, 2 seas made up of small, spherical solid matter that's all basically unique invested objects and acts like a fluid.

Anyone think the similarities between the seas of spores/Aethers and the sea of beads in Shadesmar in Roshar means anything?

20% through and my main thought so far is how lovely the prose is! Something that, for all his strengths, I didn't expect from a BranSan book

Given that Duralumin Ferrings can store Connection, and Coppermind implies that when you are storing it people become less aware of you and their friendship with you, could you max store Connection to become a Gray Man, essentially undetectable and the perfect scout/spy/assassin?

Excisor sounds like a Misting/Ferring Term, just like Leecher etc Maybe a Harmonium Alloy Misting/Ferring?

Necrons then Muy scary

Some bits, like some of the humour and the voice of some of the characters earlier on I understand. They annoyed me a little at the beginning but once the plot picked up I forgot and stopped paying attention to them. The OTT cartoon (sub)villain was a bit of a drop back after recent Cosmere villains too. But Autonomy was the real villain (or maybe Saze and Kel set up for the future) and that worked well. As for Cosmere stuff, the plot is explicitly about Cosmeric worlds colliding. There's absolutely no way to write this book in a Cosmere -naive way

Yes but we see them perfectly equal through HoA because so much of Ruin is trapped in Atium, hence why he was trying to find the Atium. However when El burned it all, Ruin and Preservation were still equal: he prevented Ruin from achieving his goal and Vin could destroy herself and Ati by forcing the two equal but opposite forces together. The entire premise of that book doesn't work unless Ruin and Preservation start the book equal and end it equal and the Atium is the difference. Ati is explicit about it. Why this is the case is unclear but Harmony started off with a truly balanced Shard. Overtime that Atium would regrow, in theory, but the Pits were destroyed and Kel told us (whether informed or not) that it would take 300 years for new Atium to form. So where that Investiture is for 300 years is a mystery. Nonetheless, 300 years has passed now, and Atium doesn't spontaneously regrow anymore as it doesn't exist outside of Harmonium. But it seems likely that this Ruin Investiture is back in the world, and possibly back in Saze, unbalancing him

It's worth noting that either now or in the near future, Harmony CAN'T be balanced (unless he destroys humanity) He's due to regain some Investiture from Ruin any moment, and once that happens then he will be more Ruin than Preservation and the Shards cannot be balanced. I'm personally sure that this subtle inclination towards Ruin is what denotes the change from Harmony to Discord and therefore the differences between them.

This is a stretch, and I think the complete picture will be wrong but I hope I've picked up on some small things that might end up being part of the truth when Brandon explains it all... One of the mysteries of the Lost Metal is exactly what happens when Wax splits Ettmetal, and when Harmony and others try to do the same thing with different results. The biggest inconsistency between results was that almost all the explosions from such experiments resulted in reasonable amounts of Atium being formed but no Lerasium. Except Wax's. There are a few theories floating around about this. One involves Intent, and Wax's specific intent to split the Godmetals rather than get an explosion. But surely Harmony or Kelsier, if not the Set, would have the same Intent? Another I have come up with is that Lerasium formed generally vaporises and binds with other metals to form alloys that the likes of Wax absorbed. I think this is happening. But again this doesn't directly explain how Wax alone ends up with pure Lerasium. But Harmonium isn't necessarily currently in balance as equal parts Atium and Lerasium, is it? Indeed maybe Discordium would be a better name. I think it's fair to assume that the Godmetal represents the Shard attached to it, so Harmonium was could have originally been equal parts A and L, depending whether we think Harmony was originally in true balance or not (what the burnt Atium in HoA Vs the Preservation in humanity ends up meaning is unclear, but the fact that Vin and Ati were equal in Power when it was burnt away implies that this did in some way balance their powers. And we know that Atium would, if Ruin had remained separate, be building up again at approximately the time of this book, given the original trilogy said it would take 300 years for the Pits of Hathsin to form Atium again). But there have been heavy hints dropped that Harmony is not in balance at all, not just struggling with two Shards that reject each other but a slight excess of Ruin, and that Discord is a "shadow" behind him that is threatening to take over (and may have by the end of the book). Logically, the same applies to current Harmonium, which must have an excess of A compared to L. If A and L neutralise each other as exact opposites (when in a volatile enough state to interact, as in this explosion), then you'd lose all L and end up with trace A (and a lot of annihilation energy, explaining the supernuclear forces we see in Harmonium Bombs). That's why nobody else can find any L. So why Wax? Well it's possible that when interacting with Wax we see a shift in HARMONY'S Intent. Certainly symbolically, in him using him to Preserve, and also in counterbalance - if he is Saze's Sword then he takes on some of Saze's Ruin. And thus, in that moment, Saze has an excess of Preservation and so Lerasium is saved. Maybe even in making that Lerasium, or Wayne using it, or Wax stepping down as his Sword, is what pushes Saze into possible Discord in the final scene? What do we think? Is the imbalance of Ruin and Preservation part of why spitting Harmonium doesn't typically form Lerasium but does form Atium?

I also think once you get crossover with other Investitures and worlds in such a hypothetical conflict, Scadrial has some really interesting applications and really useful applications of power. Feruchemy has some really wicked abilities and with medallions can be used to stack up some truly potent combos but on a relatively large scale. Haematurgy is applicable to other people's powers (though not unique to Scadrial, they probably have the best knowledge of it). Allomancy has some so far unique time manipulation abilities as well as Leeching, Nicrosil boosting, emotional allomancy and copperclouding/seeking all being really versatile techniques that are hard to counter. They would wage an unconventional Invested War (and have the additional troops of Kandra spies) but one that could be hard to defend against, especially when backed up with a really potent capacity for traditional warfare with guns, bombs, airships, mechanisation etc

I like the implication that what Wax inhaled was Lerasium alloy from various metals, making him multiple Mistings but not a true Mistborn. We've been told that Lerasium alloyed with another allomantic metal makes you a Misting in said metal and I can't see why we would have that confirmed if it never became relevant and I can't see any time it is more likely to be relevant: nobody is going to INTENTIONALLY make a Lerasium alloy that is less useful than pure Lerasium, so the way it was made with an uncontrolled explosion is the best mechanism for that occuring that I can imagine, and it fits into Saze telling (whilst omitting the fact that Wax did make some pure Lerasium that Wayne burned) Kel about the Lerasium being used up in the explosion. That doesn't really make sense if the Atium isn't, tbough obviously God Metals could act oddly, but if it were alloyed... The safe box is described as Aluminium and Steel, and so those seem the most likely to be alloyed, it seems almost certain that Iron, Tin and Pewter, very common metals, could be present in the box.