Proletariat

I do wonder if it would be possible for a kandra to use tin medallions to fill up on the more unusual animal senses, like the ability of eels and platypuses to sense electric fields or the sonar skills of the whales. I'm sure there'd be a bizarre market in tin medallions with super senses from animals.

And these Skybreakers are not Hoid, and Design is not their highspren. If we accept the hint that they are Skybreakers, then the simplest presumption is that they've substituted their dead, missing, left behind, yet to be bonded or whatever spren with hemalurgic spikes to give them allomantic abilities. I'm aware that you have a very strong opinion that Rosharan innovation means that getting spren off world on a population wide scale is imminent, but there is no suggestion in-text or by Brandon that this has seriously happened as of the Lost Metal. Insisting otherwise will make this a very circular discussion.

No one but Hoid has gotten off Roshar with their abilities intact as spren are still locked. WoB is pretty clear you generally can't get spren off world yet.

I'm a kandra (5) with strength blessings, and mistborn (192) & feruchemy (192) abilities plus a primer cube charged with a pulse. I have a painrial fabrial (10) embedded under my skin to target opponents with as well as a soulcaster (20), and lift's boon (12) to power my abilities directly and see into the cognitive realm. I spend the rest of my points on shardplate (24), the ninth heightening (400) and a midnight aether (24) and I guess spend the rest on a spare 7 heightenings (100). I set up dual time bubbles of a pulse and then within a speed bubble while tapping speed and burning pewter. I vomit out a midnight aether in the shape of a zombie velociraptor, soulcast to create a nuclear bomb with traces of aluminium in it and awaken to button to go off one second after the bubble goes, attach it to the midnight zombie raptor and tell it to run toward the enemy, and then I run in the opposite direction as quickly as possible using combinations of a-pewter, strength blessing, stored speed, and whatever buff I get from shardplate and heightenings while using speed bubbles intermittently so that I can get max distance from epicentre of blast, have max endurance and healing to deal with whatever I get hit with, and avoid getting attacked until enemies are hit by the nuke.

MeLaan suggests they need help, and there's a lot of them. There's also a group of spren-less Skybreakers on Scadrial who now seem to be allomancers (by way of hemalurgy?). Travel via shardpools has also become increasingly difficult of late. So something happens, but it's unclear what it is that has happened.

I mean, there's a limited number of ways that humans can extend their lives beyond a century or so in the cosmere and still be human. The three that we've seen on screen are getting a shitload of Breath, becoming an atium compounder, become an Elantrian, or otherwise become a cognitive shadow or shard. It's honestly just as hard to artificially become an atium compounder or Elantrian as it is to become some kind of spirit, so I suspect that a bunch of worldhoppers have been through customs on Nalthis to get themselves a life extension.

If Harmony falls into Discord it's vaguely possible that it becomes a self-solving cycle. Ettmetal will become easier to split if it becomes more imbalanced, and thereby easier to produce more 'nukes' and atium. As there's more atium and more death, then more ruin is distributed in the physical world and less preservation which eventually leads back to Harmony. It's pretty ugly as a way forward, though.

I mean, if it's spiritual, then it seems like it'd have to be a direct link to the Shards since those are the only beings that inhabit that space, right? So the relationship that Kandra, Heralds, Returned etc. have with their Shard feels like it would kind of fit the description.

It could be a way to extract water from them - a bit like the slatrification process - by destabilising the Luhel bond?

I'd suggest neck bracers, and light chain mail would be useful for countering shardblade users since so long as you're not decapitated you have a chance to heal from pretty much any wound with gold. Duralumin is another one I'd also emphasise further in that if you accrue enough in your metalmind then you can not only communicate with others, but it's suggested you get the potential to persuade or even compel others if you have enough stored.

I think that would altogether depend on how much investiture she chucked into the Soulstamp. My impression is that the powers of the Elantrians and the Forgers are both functionally limited only by the volume of investiture they can access, and how good they are at crafting stories or doing equations. As far as OP and what happened with Hoid and the Sorceress ... the fact that the Ire predate the downfall of Elantris, and potentially even Odium's splintering of Devotion and Dominion means that the rules might be different for them and how Elantrians are chosen now and into the future as the Dor slowly gains more sentience. We've seen how a shift in how the same shards are held in Scadrial changed the nature of hemalurgy for e.g so it's worth being cautious in applying what happened in this book to the Elantrians we've seen on Sel.

Did anyone else catch this line in TOTES? It essentially confirms Hoid not only was the founder of the Worldsingers on Roshar, but is part of the Terris order of Worldbringers. We know that Hoid doesn't rely on copperminds due to his trick with breath, but is this a hint that he may have his own access to feruchemy? And given the present tense reference to Worldbringers perhaps they were a world hopping order and there were a not insignificant number of full feruchemists around the cosmere whose ancestors weren't impacted by the transformation of the rest of their peers into mistwraiths? Is this where the scholars of Silverlight come from? It also puts an extra layer of possibility on the feruchemist in stormlight archive who was killed by the ghostbloods, and was able to use atium to disguise himself as an old dude during the assassination of Gavilar. The dude had an Aviar and predated Sazed's agents on the planet, clearly wasn't aligned with Kelsier, and is implied to have used a form of feruchemy otherwise gone for 300 years. What faction is he aligned with? Is that faction the Worldbringers?

I mean, we know that silver does nothing to surges, or the Dor, and can also be moved around with steelpushes with no resistance so it's something a bit more complex than its relationship with investiture which sets it apart from the sixteen standard metals. Imo it definitely has to be something specific to the cognitive relationship given what it can do with anomalies, shades, and potentially spren and it doesn't physically damage spores but it does cut their link to the aether and render them inert.

I think it just reinforces the point that the sixteen metals are a key for controlling the expression of investiture, whether it's burnt in allomancy, used to control (non-sentient) pieces of investiture like spren and aethers, or is invested via hemalurgy, feruchemy or breath. I suspect you could also use the metals to control the white sand or 'bone aether' on Taldain in a way that's similar to these mindless aethers.

The impression that I've gotten is that Autonomy incorporates existing systems of Investiture into her bag of tricks, like turning Patji into an avatar or investing on Scadrial to add a new element to hemalurgy. I'm guessing that her army is a bunch of awakened constructs like Riina has but made more aware.

The terrain in Scadrial is going to be a massive pain in the ass for an invading force from Roshar at this time. The restriction on spren not only means no fabrials or radiants as per WOB, but maybe even rules out the chulls that many Rosharans rely upon for transport and labour. They are not going to move so swiftly that they'll be unnoticed and have the opportunity to build boats to navigate the waterways when the local population has the option of sending notice about an invading force by car, bird, horse, flying allomancer, or maybe even a ship or seon. At this stage of development Nalthis would be a higher threat to Scadrial as an invading force as they have an army that doesn't need to eat or sleep, and can be replaced with fallen enemy forces. They can essentially run an invasion with next to no supply lines, and if they do any conscription of breath from the population they could turn any Scadrian they kill on the way into a soldier while destroying Scadrial's crop supplies. No other world's invading army could be so cavalier about destroying local food supply. As the two super powers innovate that will change quite rapidly but the portability of Nalthis' forces at this current stage makes them punch above their weight.

There's a leap of logic here. The original atium is proposed to have been an alloy, and it was burned by Mistings, but at no point is it said that it's burned by electrum Mistings. We are never shown a gold misting burning malatium, and aren't given any evidence that a Misting could burn an atium alloy of their own metal either in text or via WoB. What's said to have changed is the metal, not the system of Era 1 allomancy whereby atium and an atium alloy (now two atium alloys) products became part of the sixteen with their own Mistings, one in sixteen (not in eight) came out of the mist sickness with the ability to burn atium, and electrum and 'atium' Mistings still have different names and such. On the creation of Feruchemy, there's also this: It also seems that the Terris, before Rashek, were Cosmere aware and had some interaction both with Hoid who was involved in founding the Worldbringers but also Preservation in order to have access to the prophecies. This means they also had direct access to Ati's shardpool and the atium alloy, and presumably must have found some use for it that didn't involve burning it. The lerasium beads also existed before Rashek's ascension, and only twelve have been accounted for out of a likely sixteen given the below: There's also a further hint in that Hoid seems to use Fortune to get where he's going and there is only one invested art that is known to have this ability, and the medallion method hadn't been developed yet by the time that Hoid starts doing this. It's likely that whatever process was done to the Terris to give them this ability was also experienced by Hoid.

I think that's getting into the weeds a little bit about why these things get introduced. Marasi has essentially had an arc where she is restricted by her gender, allomancy, and family circumstances from being an independent person which by Bands of Mourning had progressed to her seeing her ability could be useful, that she didn't need or even genuinely want to follow a relationship with Wax, and that she and Steris are genuinely family which is shown to us through her detaining Miles, her not only getting over Wax but rather than becoming his sidekick developing as a detective herself, and her heart to heart with Steris. At the beginning of the novel we are shown a very confident Marasi in the beginning whose powers combined with ettmetal can take down groups of opponents, and her detective skills are arguably better than Wax's were and her political goals are much loftier. But these are the kind of ongoing depictions of someone's development you expect in a serial rather than a book, because the development that these things are trying to foster has already been more or less done. This is why Marasi exists as a whole character with these traits from the beginning of the book, and the Ghostbloods plotline is a way of saying 'well did she really develop?!' and then five minutes later that question is answered by her expressing her arc by once more doing what Wax does but better just like before. The plot details of her specifically experiencing an adventure with the Ghostbloods given that it's the last book, and she says no so there's not an implicit story the next trilogy can relate to, then leave us with the reality that the Ghostbloods' plot will continue but hers will not and therefore this adventure didn't contribute to our cast per se but to a group who will be characters in different novels. This becomes even more blatant if we contrast this with how the Ghostbloods have been set up in other books as meaningful for ongoing character development. I'm not saying the scenes were bad or are counter to Marasi's story, but they were a bit extraneous and more what you'd expect for a novella or a Secret History. It's fine to acknowledge that a dessert doesn't need to be part of dinner for us to get our daily intake.

I think it's clear that the southerners use hemalurgy given they only have the seeds of the metallic arts like everyone else (and we have never seen a non-Terris with feruchemy despite having it as a 'seed'). They either received some donated spikes from Kelsier for the necessary abilities that they've been reusing ever since, or they have been trying a lethal version of what the Set were doing in these scenes to produce the abilities in the first instance. It's worth noting that the medallions also start failing at 4 abilities much like standard hemalurgy in this Era. But that said this innovation is new to Kelsier as well, so obviously it's not quite what he offered to the Malwish.

I would suggest that the implications of the title 'The Lost Metal' might disagree with you. A god metal was split in a science lab into its constituent parts to produce what might be called ... two lost metals while a kandra gives a lecture about how energy, matter, and investiture all follow certain rules and can be converted into one another.

Yeah, I mean as far as the narrative I think that BoM was actually a better note to end Era 2 upon had the Malwish kept the bands. I loved the book and we got great moments that I really enjoyed, but aside from Wayne the character arcs were a bit directionless with Marasi being the great example of having an adventure with the Ghostbloods that didn't actually progress her character (and a senior politician aligned with the Ghostbloods actually could've been significant for Era 3). A part of me wonders if we got this much Ghostbloods stuff at once because of the delays to Elantris 2 and 3, which presumably otherwise would've introduced Autonomy and the Selish worldhoppers and built upon the things simmering in Stormlight Archive about Thaidakar. On the broader topic I think Harmony was and is somewhat unsure as to what exactly happened with Wax after the explosion, and withheld information so that it wouldn't be discovered that the experiment not only can create incredible bombs but also create Mistborn and atium alloys with which Mistborn can become almost unstoppable killers. It makes sense why he's wary of technological development in that light. I can see him putting only traces of the other metals in the first 15 vials just to experiment upon him in the short time between sending him off to Bilming and his expected death on the ship (until Wayne replaced him) where he would've super charged him with a second dose of lerasium.

I think this is true, but now most immortals who could make it into a story on Scadrial are pretty extensively foreshadowed as not being able to solve major issues in Era 3. Marsh is entirely dependent on getting small flakes of atium out of explosions in order to survive, plus due to spikes can be controlled by anyone who can soothe/riot or use connection at a certain level, and needs constant rest. Kelsier is a fraud whose only real ability is to see metal and he cannot leave the area. The Kandra cannot use the metallic arts without access to pure godmetals, and have been socially conditioned against being able to use any kind of violence. The Selish immortals on planet are entirely dependent on getting rare bottles of Dor to do anything, any Nalthis immortals who pop up will have similar dependency issues to Marsh, and Sazed is about to fall into Discord and has no 'sword' anymore. It poses a bigger risk for Roshar, imo, where there's so much free investiture just floating around. Any mortal character without surges is just a bit irrelevant.

I suspect this thread might be simpler if you detailed the scenario a bit further, because arguing between a Scadrial published in-text and what is effectively a fan version of Roshar that's not published anywhere for us all to look at the same thing is a bit impossible. We don't know if Roshar technically even exists by the time of the Mistborn books. All we actually have to confirm is a brief scene of red haired refugees, a Ghostblood saying they can't go there anymore, and some unpublished content of what seems like a Skybreaker thousands of years in the future.

Kelsier only arrived in South Scadrial twelve years after the end of the first trilogy. In the short time frame there wouldn't have been enough time for Ferrings to be born, grow up, and discover their powers for the first time following the extermination of every Feruchemist in Terris society.

I think it's definitely a Mistwraith he's created by giving it a special kind of blessing, and then devouring Kelsier's remains. Most kandra seem to be able to somewhat connect to the person whose body they've taken in an uncanny way, and in this case it's taken up to a million because Kelsier is literally a ghost of the body it's using. And if there weren't that connection, then I can't see how Kelsier could take over this body.