robardin

I see what you did there... Well, don't Push yourself too hard. You might find yourself tapped out, eh? (And avoid the Mistborn / Q&A / Cosmere forums until you finish, we're spoilerific about the original Mistborn trilogy for sure!!)

Well obviously Maya’s Edgedancer at the time of the Recreance must have been of at least the Third Ideal, otherwise she wouldn’t have manifested as a Shardblade. (I think?) Other than that we have little to go on. The furtther a Radiant is with the progression of Ideals, the deeper the bond; Notum even says to Kaladin about Syl’s bond to him that “killing you would free her—though it would be painful for her. There are other ways, at least until the Final Ideal is sworn.” So given how Maya has “come around” so much, it’d be most plausible if she had been at the shallowest Ideal possible to become a Blade, i.e., the Third. That said - what happened to all the spren bonded only to the first and second Ideals at the time of the Recreance? It seems implausible that all but ten honorspren were not only bonded to a Windrunner at that time, but to Windrunners of the 3+ Ideal?

Yeah, Ati was consumed by Ruin by then. And yes I agree, the "line of probability" that Preservation set up was "slim" - but also from a direction Ruin wouldn't be considering at all (similar to what Kelsier is shown as having set up to happen in HoA while "backstage" in Secret History). Perhaps Ati just "missed it" (seeing what Preservation was going for), but really I don't think he ever even really LOOKED very hard for a subtle counterplan of his: all his planning centered around figuring out the most satisfying way to achieve his inevitable victory, now that Preservation was on a slow slide downwards. To him, he could afford a few setbacks or delays on that front, for that purpose, because he WOULD win in the end, inevitable as a clock winding down. As he says to Vin, what is time to a god? Nothing. As for acquiring the Keepers and making spikes from them: we first see this happening from Marsh's POV in the prologue to Hero of Ages, which is presumably after the end of TWaA, and it's in Ch. 10 of HoA that Sazed refers to it as being from a year ago: Which coincides very closely with when Ruin got free of the Well, for earlier he had reflected that "one year ago, the woman Sazed loved had died" (Tindwyl, in the koloss assault on Luthadel that immediately preceded Vin's finding the Well). So it's hard to say. Still, harvesting spikes from Mistings (skaa or otherwise) would be much easier/numerous than harvesting one Feruchemical power at a time from the Keepers, eh? The Inquisitors probably had a stash of skaa Mistings towards making the Next Inquisitor at any given time; and if not, spikes could be pulled and reused from another Inquisitor. Sure it'd kill that one, but from Ruin's POV it'd be an in-place upgrade of Inquisitor A with spikes for Allomancy and steelsight and all, to Inquisitor B who's got all that PLUS Feruchemy and Compounding in all the Allomantic metals they now had access to.

Yes, I know (but was restricting myself to what we see in Mistborn 1). Also, the two are not necessarily opposite; everybody has moments when they're "dark" or mean-spirited, and holding Ruin brought that side of Ati out to the forefront. Like, if you imagined a certain "Mr. T" somehow taking up Ruin, I don't think he'd go an inefficient route to victory or fail to try to explore all avenues to defeat, while trying to think like his enemy does. For Ruin to be "gullible" in the way that he was requires a certain personality and attitude to go along with it. We see this attitude more explicitly in Misborn: Secret History:

It's a good question to be having, after reading just the original Mistborn trilogy and "part of" Elantris. (What, you didn't finish it?!) The nature of what it means when "Cosmere gods (called Shards) seeing the future" is fleshed out further in other works, and you would probably like to read "Mistborn: Secret History" too (which is from the POV of Kelsier, who if you picked up on various hints in The Hero of Ages, was somehow still able to talk to Spook and to Vin at various points, as he "went backstage" to the realm of gods and... travelers after being killed by the Lord Ruler and before Sazed's Ascension). Though it occurs to me, you should want to finish Elantris first before reading that. Long story short: as mentioned above, when another being also has "future sight" it becomes a mutual cloudying (is that a verb?) of what is seen, but also different gods have different levels of strength/accuracy in perceiving the threads. Unlike with humans burning atium, where the cloud causes complete confusion (so that two Mistborn burning atium or electrum give up on the clouds as being a distraction and just fight normally), a god can still pick through the clouds to some degree and plan for some "balance of probability" and trust that things could, might, will play out that way with the right nudging. Preservation's plan was never "guaranteed" - however, he carefully seeded hints and placed things along the way (which his "ghost" or "shadow" was able to help with, even as it no longer remembered the full plan). The origins of the Terris religion (how did they even know so much about Preservation and Ruin, down even to their names?) is an open question, too. And then there's the question not just of "what could Ruin see" (as a god), but "what did Ruin want to do (and how he wanted to do it)", and "what he didn't bother looking ahead to because he assumed he already knew". As events in THoA should make clear, just as Sazed was born mortal and ended up Ascending into (double) godhood, so did Preservation (whose body slumped out of the mists, sharp nosed, dark hair, etc.) and Ruin (red hair, slight build) Ascend to those states from being originally human. The powers they took up shape their actions, but not other elements of their personalities... ...and I'm going to say, Ati the Vessel of Ruin (whence the derived god-metal atium gets its name) had something of a bullying, entitled, overconfident side to him, independent of being Ruin, as if he'd originally been some kind of aristocrat. For example, in addition to expending the effort to gloat/monologue at Vin, why did he use Marsh as his chief pawn, putting 20-odd hemalurgic spikes in him, among all the Inquisitors left to him by TLR or that he could create anew? Was there no Mistborn Inquisitor who'd have more/stronger powers than Marsh to begin with? Instead, it's stated that he harvested a Mistborn to create a spike to grant A-duralumin (A for Allomancy) to Marsh, which was "a waste" but he did it anyway. I think it had to do with Ruin wanting to "rub it in" to Kelsier's crew, Preservation's pawns in trying to resist him, by using their own former friend. Or, if he wanted to go the route of building Super Inquisitors that were each "like another Lord Ruler", it'd have been even better to create new Inquisitors not from a Mistborn, but from the captured Keepers, who were all full Feruchemists. Instead of spiking a single Feruchemical power out of each Keeper to give an Inquisitor F-gold, F-steel, F-pewter, etc., as we see several of them using (Marsh having multiple), he could have given each Keeper a bunch of Allomantic spikes from captured Mistings (far more common), and gained many more Compounding pawns that way. Why didn't he do this? Because like the classic evil overlord of fantasy stories, including Rashek at the end (who could have smeared Vin and Marsh six ways to Sunday but chose to taunt and to monologue along the way), he was so overconfident of his overwhelming advantage he chose the route that would "shock and awe" his opponents the most, instead of giving the greatest possible advantage.

Brandon has tried several times to write a story centered around heavy metal music and taking place in an "urban fantasy environment" - Songs of the Dead, that has been in different drafts/forms that didn't quite work and is presently "in limbo" - so maybe Mistborn Era 3 (the 1980s-ish era) will be his chance. I mean, what's more metal a Shardic name than DiSCoRD? It'll be the lashing-out-at-everything phase that Sazed the Rebellious Terrisman never really went through in life, LOL.

Actually, this detail has crossed my mind before. It's stated or implied a few times in Mistborn that Preservation and Ruin had to work together to create Scadrial and all the life on it ex nihilo, from nothing, because separately, their Intents would not allow for it. OK that makes sense - you can't Ruin what's not already there, nor Preserve it. And the reason given for Preservation's "weakening" versus Ruin was not because of what he did to imprison Ruin, but because Preservation "gave of himself" just a bit more power into creating humanity on Scadrial - patterned after "that which we'd seen before", Yolen-based humans, which both Leras and Ati originally were - so that they'd exist not just physically, but spiritually, as given by the epigraph to Ch. 54 of The Hero of Ages (in the voice of Harmony, who ought to know): That certainly implies to me that had Preservation NOT given "a tiny bit" of himself more to Scadrian humans, that they would NOT have had "awareness and independent thought" - that is to say, had "souls". Or, read another way (perhaps more likely), that humans would not have been created on Scadrial at all! For had Preservation not done so, Scadrial would not even have been at risk, as he would have been able to "cancel out" Ruin's attempts at destroying it. As Ruin also monologues to Vin in Ch. 76 of HoA, Ergo, the "extra bit of Preservation" either (a) enabled the humans created on Scadrial to be more than soulless and mindless simulacra of Yolen-formed people, or (b) having independent thought/will is part and parcel of creating Yolenish humans at all, and also required that "extra bit". Now, Scadrial is the only world we've seen (so far) that has actually been created, and peopled, by Shards of Adonalsium, rather than dating to before the Shattering. That would further imply that all Yolen humans were either created by Adonalsium - the way the singers on Roshar were, per linked WoBs stating that Roshar was specifically crafted by Adonalsium and that the singers were an integral part of that designed ecosystem - or, in fact, pre-dated Adonalsium! If creating humans from nothing required "a bit more Preservation than Ruin", which represented two of sixteen Shards of Adonalsium, what does that imply about all other humans? Do they all have "a bit extra" of one or more of the Shardic essences to throw them out of balance? Perhaps it's moot because the Shattering happened after the creation of humans - in fact, was largely perpetrated by Yolenish humans, on Yolen. So each Shard is 1/16 of whatever power Adonalsium retained AFTER imparting consciousness to mankind and singers and other sentient species/races in the Cosmere. But would it matter for Scadrians to have an admixture of just Preservation and Ruin, slightly tilted to Preservation, while all other humans have some "pre-Shattering blend of Spiritual Investiture"? I mean yes, we know this is the reason that Preservation/Ruin/Harmony can hear thoughts/project thoughts into Scadrians, and that it somehow forms the Spirtual Connection basis for enabling Allomancy and Feruchemy (Hemalurgy is actually usable anywhere and by anyone in the Cosmere who knows the right metals and binding points). But in terms of their "essential nature"?

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the Solo Fullborn can actually conquer France. To borrow the maxim from Stormlight Archives, “Shardbearers can’t hold ground.” Neither can Rashek the Super-Fullborn: he needs the support base of people to form a government behind/under him to form a Final Empire, instead of just Rashek Rampaging As He Will.

Indeed, nothing disrupts steam locomotive rail lines (if they existed) like, oh, moving around land masses and creating enormous Ashmounts out of whatever used to be there…! We know that he basically formed the core of the final Empire starting with the Empire that Alendi had assembled before going up that mountain with him, convincing ten (all?) “lieutenant kings” under Alendi to serve him instead with a display of Fullborn power and the lure of lerasium beads for them and their descendants to become Mistborn and Allomancers. So with that plan in mind, he likely shuffled things around to preserve that core Empire more than other areas he intended to conquer. That would also explain how he could have twiddled humanity into “noble” and “skaa” subgroups while Ascended, but only providing the lerasium beads for Allomancy to founders of the Ten Great Houses afterward: “noble blood” was identified with Allomancy after a couple of hundred years, but initially, the “nobles” were probably just people from that core existing “Empire” he inherited (and expected to garner quick support from), and “skaa” were the people from the other areas to be conquered into the FE. And the spread of Allomancy among the nobles was due to the strict Steel Ministry laws requiring nobles only marrying/breeding with other nobles, in order to concentrate that power only among Rashek’s core supporters.

Well. A Fullborn already conquered an 1800s tech level world in the past ... AFTER LITERALLY REMODELING THE WORLD, changing its toplogy and ecology (and even to some degree, its biology), blocking out the sun with ash, and so on. That gave him rather a bit more advantage than "just" being a full Feruchemist who ingested a lerasium bead, you know: that world-changing development massively disrupted all his targets for conquest. It's not like Rashek personally kicked everyone's butt from Urteau to Seran, he had troops (koloss and human alllies) and followers to establish his rule after the fighting was done. And as Tindwyl and Sazed noted in reviewing a biography of one King Wednegon, "one of the last leaders who resisted the Lord Ruler in any sort of meaningful combat": His soldiers could not stand against the Conqueror's koloss, and his men had been beaten back repeatedly ever since FellSpire. However, the king didn't blame his soldiers. He thought that his problems came from another source: food. He mentioned this idea several times during those last days. He thought that if he'd had more food, he could have held out. In this, Wednegon blamed the Deepness. ... its touch had depleted Darrelnai's food stores. His people could not both raise food and resist the Conqueror's demon armies. In the end, that was why they fell. Sazed and Tindwyl reviewed this passage in the context of determining that "the Deepness" (from before Rashek's Ascension) referred to the mist choking the plants from growing, but it could also be that the writer - writing in a just-post-Ascension time, after the world was remade by Rashek - was also using the term to refer to the fact that all their crops, originally seeded to grow under a yellow sun and clear skies and already reduced by the mist effects earlier, could no longer grow well in a world of ash afterward either. They needed to change the plants raised and the methods used to raise them to feed themselves, and Rashek could well have set himself up to do so more quickly with his allies than his enemies.

Compounding is a tempting way to get a free, infinite cycling store of an attribute, making dual gold or zinc the obvious choice... But tbh I suspect running an overclocked mind constantly would rapidly get boring. It'd be like being Leonardo da Vinci from Futurama, where it is revealed that he was actually from another planet full of genius polymaths ("Vinci") where he was the stupidest person alive, and had left to come to Earth in the 15th-16th Centuries as a respite. Asked why he'd gone back to Vinci after a few decades, he replied: "I went to Earth because I could no longer stand the ridicule, but being surrounded by even stupider people was equally infuriating!" So, I'll take A-pewter and F-zinc. I can get by with just ordinary banking of mental speed while watching YouTube or Netflix, LOL. Hopefully A-pewter is enough healthwise that I won't regret not opting for F-gold in my lifetime (until the day I get hit by a bus, right?).

I think the Identity barrier for Breath would prevent that, similar to how Vin couldn't burn the pewtermind that Sazed gave her to try, unless it was Breath that Lift had obtained and then stored there herself. Barring some special Command that an advanced Awakener like Vasher might know to strip the Breath store of Identity, or some other magical winnowing process, she'd feel there was some extra power there in the food, but be unable to access it. That's a scenario like if someone else had Awakened a gingerbread man to run around or something, and Lift grabbed and ate it. If Lift obtained her own store of Breath and put it into some food and ate it, so that it was keyed to her, I'm not sure that would result in a Compounding effect... But it is plausible. The mechanics of her converting Food into Lifelight and then to use Lifelight instead of Stormlight to power her Surgebinding are not really known.

”The prime battle metals” are flashy and usually unsuited to Hoid’s modus operandi. I wouldn't be surprised if Hoid's most frequently used metal was copper, given how much he wants to “avoid detection” by Shards and other powerful Cosmere forces/agencies, and we'd never know it as a reader unless we had a POV from him. Second most would be bronze, to detect unshielded use of Investiture, as part of his being alert. And finally, if he’s become practiced enough with it to be really subtle, the use of emotional Allomancy. The risk there is that it takes practice to become subtle. Even after 350 years, Marsh is pretty raw with them and still refers to Breeze as his master model in Alloy of Law - and people tend to be really annoyed when they discover someone pulling or pushing on their emotions. As for the example in the OP, unnaturally bouncing a coin like it was a basketball while on Roshar (waiting in Elhokar’s abandoned “palace” at the former Alethi warcamps on the Shattered Plains for Odium to come and confront him), that was definitely done for Rayse’s sake. The very notion of a coin is foreign to Rosharans; didn’t he have to explain it to Kaladin for one of his parables to him, when his CAM unit (Connection-based Autotranslation Module) didn’t convert it to “sphere” due to his referencing its shape? (I forget where exactly this happens, though.) So if he was doing Allomantic Yo-Yo Tricks with it, that would also basically be for Rayse’s benefit, I think. Hoid certainly intended that interaction to be private between the two of them.

This confused me heavily the first time I read Mistborn. I believe I was only set straight on the way his atiummind cycle worked after discovering this forum: invest some youth in an atiummind, burn it to compound up by around 10x of the invested youth; put most of it back into an atiummind and tap it at a 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, etc., multiplier in a constant tapping; when the metalmind starts running low, repeat the Compounding. Until I thought about that mechanism, I assumed TLR had to spend some time aged while storing youth into an atiummind as part of the mechanics, like maybe he couldn't burn an atiummind (to Compound) at the same time as tapping an atiummind (to stay young), or perhaps couldn't tap one atiummind while filling another one. But the "needed contrast" angle is subtle and insightful as to the psychology of a human who's lived far, far beyond a normal span. And not like Hoid who apparently "skims" through time, or like a Shard that has Ascended beyond mortality, or a dragon or a Sleepless or even a kandra who is functionally immortal by nature. As Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy reflected: "Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but [he] was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards." As we saw with his monologuing and "toying" with Vin and Marsh in his throne room, he's BORED, he's jaded, he's super OP, and yet at some level, still a petty and angry person. He's long outlived anyone he ever knew or cared about. He has literally nothing to really challenge him, except the frustration of having given up on figuring out how to defeat Ruin for good, because he can't (not as a Sliver, not even as one that takes the power at the Well every thousand years or so). Unless he can tap his atiummind while unconscious, he can't even SLEEP. Which means he's also constantly compounding a bronzemind as well as an atiummind, just to stay alive. Spending an hour here and there as an old man, while in his ancient Terris hut surrounded by artifacts from his past, is probably the closest he ever gets to feeling normal and alive any more - the way Vin saw him when she burned malatium.

Just to reply to the poll question phrasing in the OP - I voted "Sazed" because If you are worried about what's becoming of Harmony 340 years after taking up pretty much the full shard of Ruin (no more atium trap-cycle) and the slightly debased power level of Preservation (the Donation of Leras to the humans of Scadrial) - that it's skewing Sazed over time to become "Discord" due to the imbalance... ...Shouldn't you be even MORE worried about how long that would have taken to "imbalance" Kelsier, who aside from being a Cognitive Ghost instead of a living Vessel, was already heavily Connected to Ruin ("why, you're merely an aspect of me!", said Ati/Ruin, and it was not just a deflection)?