robardin

I'm going to guess that the Fifth Ideal represents enhanced resonance. So for Windrunners where the resonance of the two Surges of Adhesion and Gravitation results in squad-squiring, maybe a Fifth Ideal Windrunner can squire at will instead of "it just kind of, I dunno, happens?" Like, Kaladin was at a loss to figure out why Skar took longer than Lyn to squire to him even though Skar was OG Bridge Four; why Rlain and Dabbid never have at all (he thought Dabbid was held back by being mute, but in fact he's not); and all of Bridge Thirteen just "up and squired" to Teft as soon as he swore the Third Ideal. So maybe Fifth Ideal Kaladin could just point at Dabbid and squire him up?

Well, according to Yomen who wasn't surprised at all about the fixed and recurring 16% figure in the "mistfallen", because "it figures prominently in Church doctrine". Yomen was as devout a Minstry obligator as they came - even founding the post-Catacendre religion of "Sliverism" that continued to revere Rashek, The Lord Ruler - so figuring out there were (or must be) sixteen Allomantic metals in total, with some unknown to them for reasons of God (Rashek), was hardly "heretical", and Yomen felt free to drop that on someone not of the priestly caste in Elend. In fact, as a high nobleman, he may even has been subtly chastising Elend for not knowing his doctrine well enough!

Oh, and back to the actual topic of the OP of this thread: I would say the obvious answer is, through practical experimentation. Remember, Kwaan was able to see through or past Ruin's changes in writen texts and the contents of copperminds (that even if Ruin couldn't "see" well directly, he could evidently see/modify the Investiture within them just fine at the Spiritual level) because he naturally possessed eidetic recall - a "photographic memory" - in which he was fully confident. Alone among all Feruchemists, he could say "yo, my coppermind got hacked" instead of "eh, guess I didn't remember what my coppermind had it in it the last time I tapped it, because I put that memory back into the coppermind, that's just how it goes, yup yup". And once he suspected this was going on (since at that time, the Worldbringers were fully aware of the nature and intent of Ruin in their religious doctrine - just not of how he had subtly altered the Terris Prophecies over time), I could see him trying to write what he remembered the original prophecies to be in various ways, to see if any of them would "stick" First on paper (immediately changed); on paper, weighed down by metal (changed); written indoors in a wood frame house (changed); written in a cave he was hiding in (changed... but only after he left the cave) ... Wait, what was that? What was special about that cave? Ah, it had veins of iron ore in the walls?! Whoa... Well if it was the metal that made the difference, how about writing it directly on metal in the first place?

Not gonna lie, occasionally I had fun constructing a scene in my head where that one king from 1,000 years ago got frozen out of a lerasium bead for some petty reason of Rashek's, like taking too long to come around. King10: All right, Rashek, I've reconsidered your offer, and have decided it's too attractive to pass up. (Kneeling) I will join my nation to yours, and swear fealty to you as The Lord Ruler. Rashek: That's right, I'm The Lord Ruler to you now, don't you ever call me Rashek again. EVER. Your service is accepted, and your house shall be Great in my Final Empire! King10: Yes, Lord Ruler! Thank you, Lord Ruler! (bows deeply, waits expectantly) Rashek: Well? Why are you still here? King10: Ah, well, you see, when you got all of us kings together in a room yesterday and offered us positions of power under you if we would be the first to kneel, well, Eric Kell and Haestentz agreed immediately, and this morning I saw them flying - Rashek: Yes, those who supported my rule immediately were given great power. I call it Allomancy. I made them dominant! King10: Umm... That was... Just yesterday.... Rashek: Sorry, I'm all out of upgrades. King10: What? Rashek: You heard me. The Allomancy Dispensary is no longer open for business. Bye-bye! Walky-walky out the doorie for King10! No magic powers! King10: But... But --- Rashek: Do you dare to retract your fealty to my face?! (Begins Steelpushing King10 out the door) NARRATOR: King10 kept whining to TLR, and eventually, was made into the first Inquisitor to shut him up.

Or perhaps the tenth noble house was founded by one of Rashek's children, because (which blew my mind) there's a WoB that Rashek did indeed father some after becoming The Lord Ruler. But you'd think that house (and the other houses) would remember that house as being special. But I see your point, there's no reason to assume the "nine original Allomancers", even if referring to mortal, non-Rashek ones, are the founding basis for all the ten last-stage FE "Great Houses" a thousand years later. The first explanation of that term in TFE reads: So there could well have been just nine, or indeed eight, original lerasium-eaters who founded noble houses that branched/split over time, settling into the list of ten most prominent ones by Vin and Elend's time.

I agree, ten is not "Leras' number". And I also think the text is inconsistent and maybe in need of some kind of retcon in terms of the number of "original Allomancers" and "foreign kings". The text mentioned at one point there were "nine original Allomancers" in Ministry doctrine, which number you might think included Rashek. But you could also justify that statement excluding The Lord Ruler from that reckoning and meaning "nine mortal Allomancers", because yanno, TLR is God, yeah?. However, it's also mentioned that there are TEN "great" noble houses in The Final Empire, from which all other lesser houses have branched off from. And that TLR views them as the children of his original circle of friends/allies, kings who supported his reign from the get-go. So unless TLR was a massive jerk as to freeze out one of the ten original "foreign kings who supported him" from an Allomancy upgrade while he sat on a couple of spare beads in his basement, requiring them to intermarry to inject Allomancy into their house, I think that is basically an error that should be fixed. There surely were TEN "foreign kings" who founded the TEN great houses, each given a lerasium bead over 1,000 years ago, thus founding the noble bloodlines for Allomancy.

In response to this cite, The thing is, does 1,024 years count as "way before" Alendi's time, whose time after all is the same as Rashek's and Haddek's time (the era of "The Deepness" as the Well neared filling up)? Since clearly that time, to Sazed, Vin, and Kelsier, is indeed "way before" their own time. But yeah, on the Cosmere timeline, it's been implied or suggested that Ruin and Preservation got together to do their little construction project partnership shortly after the Shattering, and that had to have been more than 2,500 years or so earlier than the Wax and Wayne Era of Scadrial, which in turn we know is after SA5 takes place. So either the Well had filled and been used at least once if not multiple times before Rashek, or Leras only sprang his little Ati Trap - what some might call a dishonorable backstab - after a few millenia (not immediately upon finishing building the world). The latter is not impossible or unreasonable. Ruin wouldn't want to destroy Scadrial until there was something worth "ruining", for humans to build societies and whatnot. It's only "ruining" if it'd be something missed! But I think this is the WoB addressing the question of whether or not there were earlier "Heroes of Ages" who Did The Right Thing before Ruin managed to corrupt the Terris religion's words enough: This WoB doesn't actually say that there WERE such "avatars" before Rashek who "did it right", just that that was the intended model. And of course, per Sazed's final epiphany, Leras had foreseen an even longer game where "The" Hero of Ages, not just a millennial avatar, would finally put the threat of Ruin to Scadrial's existence to rest forever. (...maybe?)

The beads were not at the Well to begin with, nor were they created by Rashek with the power of the Well with the intention of distributing them. This is based on a WoB that Rashek had to go "get" them, and then left the reserve beads he kept in reserve in the safest, most secret place he could construct. He's been cagey about the presumption that there should, or must, have been 16 beads of lerasium originally, leaving several unaccounted for (ten for "foreign kings", two at the Well, that's twelve, where's the other four?) RAFO, no doubt! I have looked for this again as well (get it? as Well? ... never mind), if you find something I'd like to see it

There is no evidence or mention of this in-world or via WoBs, though. The only reference to anybody using the power of the Well before Rashek is to deny any such person ever existed, when Haddek of the First Generation of kandra said to Sazed, "Rashek saw the future. He held the power of Preservation and wielded it. He is the sole man ever to have done so! Even this woman of whom the Keeper speaks did not use the power. Only Rashek! The Father." Of course a lot of knowledge can be lost over 1,024 years, especially with Ruin being "close to the surface" and touching Scadrial to manipulate things towards the endd. Haddek (like Rashek) was born into the end of the previous era of the Well's gathering power, when "the Deepness" had become a problem threatening mass starvation, moving Alendi to try to end it by fulfilling what he thought was the role of The Hero of Ages. So for all we know, maybe Feruchemy exists because an earlier Terris person from 1,024 years before Haddek's time had taken up the power, and used it to grant a subset of the Terris people a new Metalborn power (similar to Rashek, a favored inner circle?). And then somehow, whether by act of Ruin or whatever else, this was forgotten by the Terris people themselves, even the self-designated Worldbringers who had this power? (Never mind taking on the humble roles of being mountain packmen!) But we do NOT know this. At the same time, I don't think we have any WoBs definitively stating that the power at the Well was only ever taken up twice, by Rashek (wielded), and then by Vin (released). But then, why would he bother saying that, when the books themselves do? Albeit in the form of in-world (and hence unreliable) knowledge. "There's always another secret", and maybe this is one of them! EDIT: oh, there is one other clue. When Sazed ascends and fixes Scadrial's position in the solar system, restores the arrangement of the world's continents, and undoes the changes to the flora/fauna of the world to survive in a world of ash, and also when Kelsier and Vin take up Preservation briefly, they also see "all the actions previously done with the power" - Rashek frustrated at moving the planet too close, then too far from the sun, and settling on ash-filled skies to balance things out. None of those Ascendants were described as seeing anything done with the power by a Scadrian mortal wielding the power of the Well prior to Rashek. That doesn't mean there wasn't one, just that it'd be "off-screen" so far and unrevealed to us readers.

Exactly. It's a pretty big assumption for a poll!

Poll is meaningless without context. Are we talking about "you, as regular person, would you ingest lerasium or atium?" or "which metal is more useful in the Cosmere?" All the mention in the OP about insta-gaining deep Realmatic knowledge and how to apply it suggests the first one, and I would question that that would be the result of ingesting atium. Look, burning "pure atium" (now that FE era atium has been essentially retconned into an atium-electrum alloy), the god-metal of Ruin, can't possibly do more - at the very most - than to give you the "future sight and ability to process it" that Ati the Vessel of Ruin possessed full-time, except just for the duration of burning it. Right? And even if you did... If you could become as the full Shard of Ruin, knowledge-wise if not power-wise, for just a few seconds by burning it... That doesn't mean you'd retain all of that after it was gone (a la Taravangian after his Day Of Brilliance in Stormlight Archive). ...Ati still got tricked and defeated by Leras' long game, at the hands of Kelsier, Vin, and Marsh, despite the full future vision from the shard of Ruin held for thousands of years, plus his active and subtle machination over a lot of that time, plus whispering things into Rashek's ear, etc. In short, if you are an ordinary mortal human given the choice between ingesting a bead of pure lerasium vs. a bead of pure atium, based on what we know or can infer as to the results, take the lerasium and become Mistborn. But, if you are a well-backed, Realmatically knowledgeable worldhopper type human with "industrial purposes" for pure atium, like the knowledge and ability to leverage it into making a bunch of supremely flexible hemalurgic spikes that you have specific plans for using... That's different.

We still don't fully know who created the Bands, how, and why. In BoM Allik said that the Sovereign created the Bands. That would mean Kelsier. ...Who then left it at that frozen temple, extra-forbidding to any Southerner, in the Northern hemisphere? Does that sound like Kelsier to you? Why would he do that, and then be now the one behind the shenanigans to bring the Bands back into the the hands of the Malwish? I mean, he knew where it was all those years (didn't he?) - until maybe five years earlier, he could have just popped over to that temple and unscrewed the spearhead off of the statue and nobody on Scadrial would have even known, much less have done anything about it! It feels like he was somehow doing Harmony's Work at the time, over 300 years ago, in creating and then depositing the Bands how and where he did. Or perhaps kandra did all that booby-trapped temple stuff under direct orders from Harmony, secret from Kelsier, who knew the Bands existed but not where. In any case, it seems Kelsier wants the Bands to "democratize access to Metalborn powers" and maybe machinated something to get them into the hands of the Malwish. Kelsier does seem to be in charge of something or some group down there, as when they contacted him by seon from Bilming, he was on an airship in flight from the South and wouldn't reach them physically for quite a while yet. And who, by the way, don't seem to have some kind of reciprocal monitor from Elendel to demand the Bands be flipped back again to them should the Malwish refill and then use them. The agreement cited was "alternating turns", not "you get one shot and then we take them - ohhh they're drained, too bad you can't refill them like we can with medallion tech, LOL and L8R losers!".

Shallan may be the central Lightweaver in the Stormlight Archive, but that's far from saying she's a typical or even prototypical Lightweaver in-world. She seems quite exceptional in a number of ways. Like, we see that both Vathah and Gaz have become full Lighweavers bonded to a Crytpic, and Elhokar was about to bond one as well. Yes, they all have difficult pasts and done Things They Regret and thus lie to themselves about how it happened - Ye Olde Cognitive Dissonance - and thus, had nasty truths they have (or would have) had to admit to themselves. Desertion. Murder. Cruel, even slightly sadistic indifference to bridgemen suffering. Poor decisions that cost people's lives. But Shallan's lies to herself are on a whole other level. She lied to herself about already being a Lightweaver... And ended up a redoubled Lightweaver?! Never mind the suspicions about her mother being Chana!

I don't think spren are capable of breaking oaths the way that humans are, it's part of what makes them spren! And yet, bonding to a human to gain experience, to become more flexible, and more... entangled with the Physical World is part of the reason they enter the Nahel bond (at least for some spren). As @Treamayne said we don't "really know" yet what Aux meant by that, but can fan-theorize. My personal take is, whether it's a "highspren thing" or an Aux thing, or an "Aux after being maimed in whatever incident happened to him" thing, is that Aux views the oaths Sigzil swore in bonding with him as an equal partnership. They (Aux and Sigzil) were in it together, every step of the way. And if "Nomad" has fallen away from some of his former ideals, the "truth he once knew", well Aux can't, and hasn't. Thus, Aux is (still) a Knight Radiant from his POV, while Nomad is the wayward squire. (Maybe something has happened in/since SA5 to eliminate the "deadeye" phenomenon of the Recreance, which Kalak noted had never happened before binding of B-A-M when Surgebinders forswore their oaths.) As evidence, Aux says "I swore to be better than I was". That is not part of the First Ideal, nor any of the Skybreaker Ideals that we know of (and we know all five), nor any Windrunner Ideal through the Fourth. If anything, it most closely resembles Dalinar's Third Ideal of the Bondsmiths, "If I must fall, I will rise each time a better man." I think that speaks to the spren's POV that the very act of entering a Nahel bond is a kind of un-sprenlike commitment to grow and to change, to progress, which can be viewed as the spren being just as much a Knight Radiant as the human half of the bond.

We have only ever seen, or even know about for sure, one Radiant of the Fifth Ideal of any order: Nalan of the Skybreakers. Who is also a crazy Herald in a post-Honor world, so it's hard to separate what's special about Nalan between "Herald Who Reclaimed His Honorblade and without Honor Around to Check Things", vs. his being of the Fifth Ideal. Or even if his doubling up as a Fifth Ideal Skybreaker while ALSO holding the Skybreaker Honorblade is a factor. Still, the one example that stands out to me, as a unique exhibited ability, was when he immediately sensed Lift drawing Investiture from eating food (after he'd carefully removed all spheres of Stormlight from the area) the first time they met. It wasn't through use of a fabrial. And while he had used a larkin or some similar creature to suck her empty of Investiture earlier, it's not like that creature "perked up" when she became Invested - he'd given it to "one of his minions" who stuffed it into a sack, and then pocketed the sack. I dunno. Could this could be some extra-sensitive extension or resonance of the Surge of Division, in conjunction with his "Becoming the Law" at the Fifth Ideal, and having decided to Divide the world between Skybreakers (Nalan-approved Surgebinders) and all others?

Yes. I got it. And... The puns that hit the hardest are the ones you least expected. Especially the ones I wished I'd thought of first. *golf clap*

What. Did. You. Say? AAARRRGGGHHHHH

Well it depends what you mean by "broken soul" versus "cracks" in the soul. As that WoB says, " it's usually traumatic experience. So crazy is not required, but there's got to be a place for the magic to go, to get in." "Usually" traumatic experience, but not necessarily, and "crazy is not required", sure - but there still has to be "a place for the magic to go" in the soul. It could be something positive or happy - as per other WoBs as to ways that "Snapping" can happen for an Allomancer - and I think "seeping in" is a way of saying, it would take longer, eh? As for whether or not Kaladin counted as having "broken his ideals" in WoR in the same way that Shallan had done with her first Cryptic, that's an interesting question. You might say he went FURTHER along than Shallan in doing so: she was still able to summon her "Testamentblade" and to soulcast the goblet into blood and so on, while Kaladin couldn't do any Surgebinding or even to draw in Stormlight. Then again, he had only reached the Second Ideal with Syl up to that point, while clearly Shallan had gotten to at least the Third Ideal with Testament as a child (maybe even further, as her first-ever imagining of herself as "Radiant" at Thaylen Fields included being in glowing garnet armor.) Either way, the statement "I was only as dead as your oaths", and the repeated theme in WoBs about reviving deadeyes as being nigh impossible without their original bonded Radiant, suggests that the "cabling" of the bond is still there, just dormant/blocked and not severed. (Also that deadeyes were not a thing until the Recreance, hmmm.)

That Moash scenario made we wonder, though: supposing Kaladin had gotten recruited by the Skybreakers right after “killing” Syl (no longer holding an active Nahel bond), upon emerging from the chasms with Shallan, and something causes Moash’s plot to be delayed by a few weeks. Imagine if he progresses rapidly as Szeth did, and then does in fact swear the Third Ideal of the Skyhbreakers to follow Dalinar’s vision of justice (which results in protecting Elhokar, but for a different reason). He then swears to pursue a Crusade against Amaram, Roshone, and other “lying lighteyes” who have abused their station… …and then somewhere along the way, feels compelled to protect Roshone against Moash despite his Crusade, after finding him doing his best to help the people of Hearthstone deal with the singer occupation. I will protect even those I hate, so long as it is right. I was only as dead as your oaths, Kaladin. Could he revive his “dead” bond with Syl at that point, and become a Windrunner and a Skybreaker of the Third Ideal? It would certainly mess up his pursuit of his Crussde, though! And what would you call him? A Skyrunner? Windbreaker? LOL

But see, the cracks are the cracks - they are part of the Surgebinder's personal growth. The two different spren, representing different Ideals, would then be competing, so to speak, to fill that crack with their respective interpretations of how to fill it. For example, Kaladin's angst over the Moash plot could have been resolved differently with a different type of spren, right? It was because he was bonded to Syl, an honorspren, that meant he had to realize/bridge his soul-crack by resolving to "protect even those I hate". Supposing he had bonded a highspren, where the Third Ideal is of Dedication, and the "resolution" a highspren might seek is "follow Dalinar's or Nalan's guidance on what constitutes Justice (the Second Ideal)" - if he was OK with it or commanded it, then so be it. You can't resolve the same soul-crack in a way that satisfies both Ideals at the same time. That's probably why the spren won't even enter the bond in the first place with another one lodged there, i.e. the First Ideal, because they instinctively want to avoid such a clash of orientation. Shallan, of course, is a very special case - her bonds are both to Cryptics, and her crack to bond with Pattern was based on lying to herself/suppressing the memory that she had ever had a bond with Testament earlier. (Pretty messed up, right? That's Shallan to a T. Pretty, and messed up. LOL)

The way the Nahel bond has been described to work, by analogy, is that the spren "fills in the cracks" in a person's soul. Which requires "cracking" the soul in the first place, with pain, conflict, doubt, etc. And each advancement in Ideal represents a further, deeper "soul cracking". When Kaladin is struggling to reach the Third Ideal, to reconcile and to overcome his feeling that he's betrayed his Second Ideal in agreeing to stand by and let Moash proceed with his plot with Graves to murder Elhokar, he complains to Syl that she's asking too much of him, that he's not like the Radiants of old, "some glorious knight of ancient days". That he's a broken man. And she replies, "That's what they all were, silly." To bond different kinds of living, sentient spren at the same time seems very difficult, then. As we saw in RoW, spren can even decline to engage in an otherwise possible bond because the person is already "spoken for" by another one. I think to do this might require some force. As in, something on the level of Crazy Unchained Ishar Doing Nahel Bond Manipulation, as he nearly did in RoW with Dalinar/SF.

From the little we know, or see characters speculating, about how "unsealed metalminds" could be constructed, you don't even need Compounding except for leveraging up the generation of stored attributes instead of it being at the normal Feruchemist storage pace/cost. A (full) Feruchemist could shunt off Identity by filling an aluminummind, fill a metalmind (say, a goldmind for health), and fill the Investiture for for that metal (e.g., F-gold to use a goldmind) into a nicrosilmind. At the end of it, you'd have a goldmind/nicrosil ring medallion that anyone could tap for healing, if they knew that's what it was, at the cost of having to spend time recovering from the missing health you'd stored into the goldmind. Given that, then, obviously the most powerful (useful to society) combo would be A-gold with full Feruchemy, eh? Unless filling a nicrosilmind with a Feruchemical ability meant you lost that power (or its full use) until/unless you tapped it back, and one would need nicrosil Compounding in order to do the Excisor Trick (since we never found out about that)?

I don't think we know how squiring works - it varies by Order, no doubt. It is curious why neither Rlain nor Dabbid ever "went squire" to Kaladin, when every other member of Bridge Four - well, except Moash, who by then had removed himself from that reckoning - did so relatively quickly. It's one thing for an honorspren like Riah to refuse to consider bonding Rlain for being a listener, but not even squiring? And what's Dabbid's deal in never becoming a squire, either? Because he wouldn't speak aloud, he couldn't Speak the Words? Is saying the First Ideal a necessary step towards squiring? It seem likely - we saw the Skybreaker squiring candidates that Szeth was a part of doing so in unison. Does that mean all of Bridge Four (and Bridge Thirteen, before Teft reached the Third Ideal) had done so, "off-screen?" Because later, when Lopen is talking to an amputee Thaylen soldier at the end of Oathbringer about how Stormlight could heal even such a wound, advised him to do like Lyn, and just "start following us around - but you have to say the Words."

That makes sense, that WoK-Prime would be the work he had in mind as "backlash" against the trend of gritty, low-magic fantasy circa 1999-2002 I fear to read WoK-Prime because it might futz with my image/recollection of "actual canon" Stormlight Archive, or is that not something I should worry about (since it seems like you've read it)?

This is basically what I'm calling out. Brandon explicitly said in multiple contexts, that he came up with this aspect of SA as "big magic knights" and that his definition specifically required a horse. Then he puts in magic horses in his world, but it's not his Knights that are riding them! I just think it's a funny irony the way it's worked out!