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  1. (Note: This post was originally titled "Investiture-Attunement in Metal", but I have since decided, due to the discussion below with Tempus, that "Investiture Resonance" sounds much cooler and can be tied with the scientific concept of a resonator.) This little idea came to me while I was reading Tempus' Focus Pattern theory. Tempus' main idea is that a Focus of Investiture contains a pattern through which Invested Power can be modified. One of his examples is the Stormlight pattern found in fabrials. Each Stormlight pattern corresponds to a particular fabrial effect. Several weeks ago, I posted a theory in the Words of Radiance sub-forum stating that a fabrial's Stormlight pattern is imprinted on its metal setting. That theory was meant to explain why fabrial gemstones always have some sort of metal setting attached to them. After reading Tempus' pattern thread, I realized that it could be the key to generalize my fabrial metal setting theory into a Cosmere-wide theory. Basically, I would like to propose that metal (or at least, certain types of metal) is Realmatically special in that it is possible to either imprint an Investiture pattern on a piece of metal or map an Intent of Investiture to a metal, making the piece of metal attuned to that particular Investiture. And this can be done anywhere in the Cosmere. Fabrials are the manifestations of this metallic Investiture-attunement phenomenon on Roshar. On Scadrial, it is of course manifested by the Metallic Arts. Metalminds and Hemalurgic spikes are attuned to specific Invested attributes taken from humans. Regular metals (while not necessarily Invested themselves), are attuned to specific Allomantic powers. The God Metals lerasium and atium (and any other God Metals that might exist) are attuned to their specific Shard. Note that the specific types of metal that can be used in this way may differ across the Shardworlds. On Threnody, for example, silver (which doesn't seem to have an Allomantic use) seems to be the only metal attuned to Hell-type Investiture, although there may be others we haven't seen. But is that all? What about the other Shardworlds? Am I once again committing the sin of taking a specific form of Investiture on one Shardworld and applying it to the Cosmere with little basis? Well, not this time. Here is a WoB about aluminum: And that's not all. From Elantris: From the Emperor's Soul: That leaves us with Nalthis and BioChroma. In Warbreaker, we find that metal can only be Awakened by people with the Ninth Heightening. This is because things that were never alive are extremely resistant to Awakening. Can this fact be used as proof that my theory on metals isn't universal after all? Not really. For one thing, the Scadrian Metallic Arts show that a certain metal might only be attuned to a specific subset of a particular form of Investiture. We don't know what specific metal is attuned to Awakening, or if each type of Awakening Command has a specific metal on which it can be used. More importantly, the limitation of metal Awakening is not necessarily a limitation of Investiture-attuning, because being attuned to Investiture does not necessarily mean being targeted by it. A fabrial's metal setting is not the target of the fabrial's effect. The metal plate linked to an Essence Mark is not the target of the Essence Mark. The problem is that all attempts to use metal objects in Awakening so far have been targeting the metal objects themselves. The sad reality is that unlike Sel, Roshar, and Scadrial, we haven't seen anybody try to use metal as a mere Investiture pattern-holder on Nalthis. (Edit: Come to think of it, Nightblood's silver sheath is capable of keeping his destructive impulses in check. Perhaps it's a pattern-holder for anti-destruction Investiture.) What if an Awakener could store a relatively complex Command, say, "Upon call, become my fingers and grip that which I must" on a metal plate, but without intending to Awaken the plate? The metal plate then becomes a pattern-holder for the Command. Now, if there is a simple Command (preferrably requiring very little Breath) to link other objects to a Command pattern-holder, then that metal plate suddenly becomes something that other Awakeners can use to create a specific type of BioChromatic entity (in this case, one that acts as an extra hand) with less Breath. I'll leave it to you guys to imagine what types of BioChromatic technology can be created using that technique. Edit: Here's an idea I got from the discussion below: A metal attuned to a specific Investiture pattern can be seen as the Realmatic version of a resonant circuit, or at least an Investiture resonator. If you don't like to think about electronics terms, you could instead visualize an Investiture-attuned metal as something like an Investiture tuning fork, resonating only a particular Investiture Intent/pattern/frequency when hit by raw Investiture.
  2. Magic Pictures Symbology and Patterns as Focal Filters Premise I've never really bought all the talk about the Focus of a magic. Every once and a while a Cosmere terms creeps in from a Brandon interview, and Focus is one of these. He uses the word focus a lot, but only rarely does he talk about it in a Cosmere sense. We've learned some things: metals are a Focus on Scadrial, Commands are a Focus on Nalthis, Aons or shapes on Sel are a Focus, and no one is sure what's going on on Roshar yet.[1] The more we learned, though, the more I felt our fundamental understanding of what was going on with a Focus was wrong. Especially with metals. First metal was a key, and the sDNA of the Allomancer was what you needed.[anno] Then metals weren't a focus after all, the molecular pattern of the metal was.[WoB][WoB] But the mists let you use Allomancy with no metals at all, so where was the necessary pattern? And people started talking about how a Focus was Physical or Cognitive, and no one seems to be able to find the source of that. I can't see any evidence supporting a single realm focus either - Investiture is known to transcend realms itself.[3] I've been gathering a lot of notes about everything, and I have a lot of theories on em'. I can't share my whole framework of Focuses - not only do I not have all the pieces I want yet, but it's super frickin' long, just for the overview. I'd like to share my notes here on one aspect that I've been talking about on IRC a bunch lately, that is very intriguing. Hypothesis The only necessary Focus for any given magic is a pattern. Assumptions Gonna lay down some assumptions here first, each one of these is a theory or two of their own, really. But we're gonna roll with it. Investiture is a waveform, that gets passed through a Focus to produce a magic effect.[Elantris] A Focus does not filter Investiture like a prism, or a piece of red glass. It modifies the frequency like an AC adapter.[WoB] A Focus exists on a scale of Explicit to Implicit, where implicit basically means more Cognitive visualization. This is not an intrinsic value, it's a descriptor. Investiture expands mental capacities, and scales by quantity.[Ars Arcanum] This is different from Mental Speed (zinc). Brandon is imprecise in his descriptions on occasion, because he doesn't want to reveal too much about the underlying system. Logic and Evidence I've long been interested in the role of symbols in the Cosmere, and my interest peaked when I found the Word of Brandon that says that symbols are built into his books to help make the magic systems of the Cosmere feel unified.[4] My theory starts at a bit of a strange place. When Kaladin speaks the third Ideal in Words of Radiance, a large symbol in frost appears around his feet.[WoR] The glyph is recognizable as the symbol for the Windrunners. That's pretty strange, and convenient, isn't it? That the use of magic should naturally produce readable language. How odd. Of course with a weather eye out for it, I looked for more instances of this. Of which there are plenty. According to one Word of Brandon, the first Aon to be discovered by the first Elantrian, Aon Ehe, apparently appeared on a coal in her fireplace when she was taken by the Shaod.[WoB] Aon Ehe brings flame. Aons, as we know, eventually became the basis for written language in Elantris. It's also been noted that the constellations are Aons as well.[Elantris] We're starting to see a link here - symbols appear naturally near magic, and those symbols are often used for language. What other instances do we have of this? The Dahkor monks use a strange magic where the develop bone growths, growths that simulate their alphabet. On Scadrial, the letters they use, the Steel Alphabet, are symbolically attached to each Allomantic metal. On Roshar, as we've seen, the general language of glyphs is associated with both Radiants, Surges, Heralds, it is seen on Shardplates and Shardblades, and burnt in effigy as prayers. In a much more tenuous connection, on Nalthis there is a language of colours. There is a clear link here between magic, symbols, and languages. The original Word of Brandon led me to believe that this link is causative - people are not developing words in language to describe magic, they are developing language to mirror the magic they see all around them. Indeed, we know that Aons exist independent of mankind.[WoB] So why do these symbols appear, though? What makes them show up, how are they important? For a long time, we believed that the Focus on Scadrial was metal, on Nalthis it was Commands, and on Sel it was the Aons (or generally form based). Then Brandon swooped in, and said "Sort of, guys, but not really." It turns out, the focus on Scadrial was not a metal - it was the molecular pattern of the metal. And the focus on Sel was really more about programming than form. And Nalthis? We don't need a Word of Brandon to see that if the Focus is Commands, and Commands require spoken words in your native language, that the Mental Command ability of the God King shouldn't work at all. And when Vin and Elend absorb the Mists, they don't need a focus at all, they've got power to spare and it naturally takes the form of the Allomantic powers, as if they already had the focus available. So what's going on? Deduction The metals, the Aons, the Focuses as we know them are distractions from the underlying foundation at play here. The true heart of a Focus is that it takes Investiture, and changes the frequency of it to a new one. And how it does that is by passing the Investiture through a pattern. These patterns are the true Focus, and are represented by the symbols and glyphs we see the magical effects in nature create. This doesn't mean that the symbols we have are all magical in nature, and putting some Investiture in a Surge glyph would make a fabrial. Instead I suggest what we're seeing is a shadow of the pattern. In the same way as a shadow puppet looks like a rabbit, but our hands do not, we get the appearance of a symbol when certain criteria are met during a manifestation of magic. These are the symbols we know. Now, the idea of a pattern being the focus is strongly supported by the Word of Brandon talking about the molecular pattern of metals. Do we have any other instances where a pattern is mentioned as being very clearly associated with magic? You know I wouldn't ask unless I had something to tell, and I do! In Navanni's notes, she talks extensively about the Stormlight generated pattern of Fabrials, a pattern which is apparently not normally visible.[link] Each pattern corresponds to a Fabrial usage. Of course as well, let's not forget Sel. All the visible Foci on Sel are drawn like a symbol or pattern. Commands are perhaps linguistic patterns too. Back up the truck! If Commands are linguistic patterns, then Mental Command should be even less possible. Hahah, your arguments are invalid! In every magic system, there are parts of magic that don't seem to require being explicitly focused. And there are parts that do. What's most interesting is that the explicit/implicit requirement seems to shift. Soulstamps must be painstakingly drawn in detail, precisely, to determine the effect. Aons are similar. Awakening doesn't seem to care much at all, as long as you have a strong picture in your head, one or two words will produce extremely complex effects. Allomancy is pretty rigid, each metal does one thing and one thing only. Yet how do Allomancers choose which metal to push on when burning Iron? Burning it doesn't push everything, it just shows some blue lines. And people don't have some kind of built-in sudo-magnetic orfice to use. The answer is that patterns do not require a specific manifestation. The pattern for metal is not required to be in metal - in fact, the entire pattern is not in the metal at all. The necessary patterns can be generated entirely by the mind. We know that Investiture gives expanded mental capacity - I'll write up the full theory about that sometime. It's this ability that allows people to substitute mental patterns to supplement the physical ones. It is these mental patterns that allow the illusion Aons to have so much detail compared to the symbol. It is these mental patterns that let a coinshot choose what to push. These are the patterns that let an Awakener use only a few words instead of the long paragraphs Brandon originally envisioned.[anno] And it's this mental capacity increase that explains the Heightenings. As the Investiture increases, the mental capacity increases, and the ability to create mental patterns as a Focus increases. First they gain instinctive basic Awakening Commands. Then they discover other Commands easier. Then they gain instinctive understanding of other Commands, learn to Command newer and more complex things, Command from a distance, and finally they do not even need to speak, they can Command with their mental patterns alone. This exposes the true nature of the Focus as we seem them - metal, Commands, etc, they are naturally occurring instances of the pattern (or a portion of the pattern) needed to Focus the Investiture in a given way. They're crutches. The more mental capacity a magic user has, the easier it is for them to dispose of the crutch and use their mind instead. It's quite plausible that we've seen this in another instance from the God King. When Vin and Elend absorb the Mists, they gain a massive amount of Investiture, and no longer need metals to Focus the power they gain from Preservation. The facility of Surgebinders in using their powers in a variety of unique and odd methods may also be an instance of this - they ingest Stormlight, show expanded mental capacity when doing so, and have an extreme level of flexibility in the use of their Surges compared to other rigid systems such as Allomancy. It's notable that Fabrials are not nearly so flexible with their use of Surges. Conclusion For those who thought this theory was far too long to read, here's the tl:dr; A Focus is actually fundamentally a pattern The known Focus (metals, Aons, etc) are an already existing instance or partial instance of the needed pattern, and are simply ways to express that pattern easier With enough mental capacity, the pattern can be generated entirely mentally The natural symbols observed in magic are the shadows cast by the pattern of the Focus Extrapolations This theory is pretty interesting in that extrapolating it is cool. It suggests that, if you could make a person hold a lot of Investiture, such a person could use their magic mentally - an Elantrian could use an Aon without drawing it. In addition, it suggests that mental capacity is essential for using magic with more fine control and finding esoteric skills, such as the ability of a coppercloud to shield emotions. Furthermore, it suggests that people with Shardic levels of Investiture can create powers outside of the known and expressed Foci - thus why Preservation-level power has no problem moving a branch (or a planet) with magic, but the Lord Ruler is limited to pushing on metals. And for technology... Lots of fun stuff implied here, but I'll leave all that for another day! Quotes and References:
  3. The Tranquiline Halls are the place in mythology that humans were cast out of, to be sent to Roshar by the Voidbringers. According to Vorin mythology, the Voidbringers aimed to cast mankind into Damnation (Braize, one of the other two worlds in the Greater Roshar system), except humans went to Roshar instead. Now the Voidbringers are trying to 'finish the job'. Ashyn is the other world in the greater Roshar system, besides Roshar and Braize. It stands to reason that is Damnation is real, then the Tranquiline Halls would be real too. And where would it be if it weren't for Ashyn. Ashyn does sound like a place the Tranquiline Halls would be. The magic system in the Silence Divine (set on Ashyn) is one where people with disabilities get powers. If any place could be considered a 'perfect' place, it would be there. Also, it is known that Cultivation and Honor moved to Roshar from somewhere else. Is it possible that they moved to Roshar from Ashyn when humans were 'cast out'. Once again, this is all speculation, and not confirmed.
  4. Shardplate is a Radiant’s Spiritweb Introduction There’s been a lot of speculation about what Shardplate actually is made up of. I had posted parts of this in another thread, but I decided to take those parts and expand them out here. As noted in the thread title, I believe that Shardplate is actually composed of the Radiant’s spirtweb, made manifest in the Physical Realm. Logic We already know that a Shardblade is actually a spren in the Physical realm. When the Recreance happened, the spren “died” and were left as the Shardblades that are currently used in most of Roshar. These Shardblades act a bit different than the spren version we see Kaladin wield (they can’t change shape, need ten heartbeats to be summoned, etc). Shardplate acted differently in the times before the Recreance. They glowed with Stormlight and Radiants were able to manipulate the Plate at will, adding and removing their helmet in the blink of an eye, for instance. The Plate changed shape similar to how a live Shardblade could change shape. This changed during the Recreance as the Plate no longer could appear or disappear at will and no longer glowed with glyphs. In essence, the Plate died in much the same way that Shardblades died. So why do I think that the Plate was/is the spiritweb? First, take a look at how the Radiants acted directly after disposing of their Plate. The Radiant that Dalinar caught up with simply ignored him, not speaking to him. This is very similar to how a Lifeless acts. Vivenna notes that Clod had an “emotionless face”. The Lifeless have a bit of their spiritweb left[1]. The Radiants giving up their Shardplate would likely be in the exact same situation. The Shardplate has certain points on it that, in modern times, contain gemstones to power it with Stormlight. I believe that these points are the exact same points that would be the Hemalurgic points in the spiritweb. They are focal points for Investiture. Szeth noted that Shardplate would have interfered with his lashings[2], but we see a Windrunner in Dalinar’s vision that could clearly lash. Why? Because the Windrunner had his soul as his plate. Shardplate for Szeth would be another person’s spiritweb and would not work for him. When the Plate is cracked, the cracks show up as a web. This is circumstantial evidence, but I believe it serves to back up everything else. There is a reason it’s called a “spiritweb” after all. Additionally, Plate can be regrown from using Stormlight. This is very similar to what we see with Kaladin, healing his Shardblade severed limb with Stormlight, essentially reconnecting the Spiritual with the Physical. The breastplate, as well, mirrors this. A strike to the chest (or spine) with a Shardblade is a killing blow. Shardplate ceases to function when the breastplate is destroyed[3]. Each Radiant’s soul was unique. This would manifest itself in the different shapes and patterns of the Shardplate. The sets of Plate were unique enough that Dalinar could recognize Adolin’s set in the vision of the battle where the Dustbringer fought[4]. Finally, every order of the Radiants had access to Shardplate, even if they did not use it[5]. This, quite simply, is because each Radiant had a soul (spiritweb). I think this makes for a very nice situation where the a Radiant would fight using aspects of all three Realms. Physical with his body. Cognitive with his spren Shardblade. Spiritual with his spiritweb Shardplate. References Edit: Fixed typos
  5. The theory is rather simple, Shardplate is made of stormlight, made by the Radiants who use it but only available after a certain oath. I have a few pieces of evidence that support this theory, the first and in my opinion strongest, is that you can regrow shard plate using Stormlight, you can grow an entire set of plate from one piece of armour: This quote also shows that there can be only one complete set of each set of Shardplate. This supports the idea that each Radiant made their own plate, and that it is individual supports this again, it would probably also be able to reform into different kinds of armour depending on the radiant's wishes. The second piece of evidence that supports this is from Dalinar's visions, he sees a Knight's helm just appear, or at least notices that it wasn't there and then it was, It is possible that the Knight just breathed it in converting it back to Stormlight before approaching, and then breathing it back out forming it back into a helm. With those two things established on with the theory, after a Radiant swears a certain oath, he or she is then told by their spren to breath in an exorbitant amount of stormlight, this will eventually burst out of them guided by their spren and will be formed into the plate. The plate would then remain that way permanently, the Knight would not be able to or ever want to hold that much stormlight ever again (in my imagination it is not a pleasant experience). I say above that the Knight breathed in her, helm banishing it, yes that would be possible as it is not that much Stormlight, but the whole suit is a completely different beast. In the chapter 69 quote it says it takes days to regrow even a gauntlet, that seems awfully in efficient, well of course it is, it isn't the way it was designed to happen. Shardplate on a Radiant would regenerate from the stormlight that leaks from the Radiant's body. In modern Roshar shard plate is powered by Gems like a fabrial, these gems were not there whit the Radiant's Shardplate, they were added as a substitute and are horribly inefficient. I say this as this was done to Shardblades also the gem was added so that a normal human could bond the blade. We see Kaladin fuel Shardplate from his body in the duel, but it sucked all his stormlight this happened as it was not his specific set and followed the same rules as a gem fueling the plate. This theory is a lot longer than I expected but if you read it all then thank you please reply and discuss feel free to tear it to shreds, I will be around to discuss.
  6. I have developed a new theory, one accounting for the purple chart in Way of Kings that is so similar to the Radiant chart. I call it: The Knights Absorbent The Voidbinding equivalent of the Knights Radiant Premise The Way of Kings comes with two similar chart illustrations included within. One is a chart detailing the ten Surges, and the glyphs for the ten orders of Knights Radiant, who are Surgebinders. It is highly likely the purple chart corresponds to the Voidbinders. On the chart (seen below), we have ten corresponding icons to the Surges, and ten corresponding Glyphs for the Orders. Thus, there must be equivalents to the Surges and the Knights Radiant - enter the Knights Absorbent. Logic The term given to the users of Surges are called Surgebinders. Why are they called Surges? When a Surgebinder activates their abilities, they begin by concentrating Stormlight and gathering power. This high concentration of power leaks from them, and they can release it through Surgebinding. The Surge in Surgebinding is this concentration of power release - the power is Surging. We know that the opposing force is called Voidbinding. It stands to reason then, that the opposite of the ten Surges would be the ten Voids. Indeed, we can see that the glyphs for the Voids are oppositely symmetrical as compared to the Surges. If Surges are an increased concentration, it makes sense that Voids are the opposite - a lack, an area of decreased concentration. We can logically see then that Voidbinding creates a low density area where Surgebinding created a high density area. The Knights Radiant earned their name by their Radiance. Nothing is more sensible. They Radiate light and power, because of how a concentration works - it wants to diffuse into areas of lower concentration (e.g. everything else in this case) Voidbinding then, would have the opposite effect. Nearby concentrations of power would seem to be drawn into the Voidbinder, it would seem that instead of Radiating, they Absorb. The ten Glyphs of the Knights Radiant demand an equal and opposing order of Knights from the Voidbinders ten glyphs. If the Knights Radiant are termed such because they radiate, then we must call this opposing order the Knights Absorbent. But without the Heralds to model themselves after, any spren with which they bonded would have no shape on which to base their Shardblade, no form on which to base their Shardplate. No, they could not have made Shardplate or Blade at all - they must look to the weaponry which defines their order. The Knights Absorbent and then spren then, must be equipped with a deadly weapon, well known to many, which comes from an item with an absorbency like no other: The cardboard tube sword taken from a roll of paper towels. This weapon has a long history, of being used both in mighty wars and conflicts, and by some of the most renowned duelists in history. It is truly a weapon with an unimpeachable past, with a Bounty of techniques passed down from father to son through the ages. But what of Shardplate? The Knights Absorbent must have armor as well, but not hard armor to stop a blow - no, they must have armor that absorbs all impacts, armor that can take any punishment given to them, armor which has been associated with cardboard tube swords for eons. Yes, it must be pillow armor. There is no other option, and the evidence is clear. Below, we display an artist's rendition of the fearsome Knights Absorbent, which we will likely not see for several books. Beware of spoilers! And beware of nightmares, for their depiction is truly the stuff of terror. Radiants be warned, your doom is at hand! Sources: All Evidence comes directly from the purest of Logic and the Gospel of Brandon, may the Everstorm Reign forever.
  7. TL;DR - Spiritwebs mystify me. This is going to be pretty long, and I'll probably add more that I forget or leave out later. I'll just be throwing some of my wild ideas, speculations, and ramblings down here to see if anyone has any input. First off, if this has been done and discussed before, I apologize. I just needed to put all my scattered thoughts in one place. Also, if any of this has been confirmed or denied, please let me know. I need to put my wearied mind to rest. I can't recall any times when we see someone survive being used to charge a Hemalurgic spike. I'm unsure if this is because they die from the physical aspect (such as bleeding to death from having a chunk of metal stabbed into a bindpoint and such), or through the spiritual aspect. Tied to this is the question of whether someone who is used to charge a Hemalurgic spike loses all of their Power (read: access to their magic system). I assume they do, but if we took a Twinborn, would it be possible to steal only their Allomantic power, but leave their Feruchemical Power? Unless, of course, being the "chargee" for the spike is inherently fatal. I seem to recall there being mentions of preferring to use Mistborn in the creation of Inquisitors. These Mistborn clearly don't survive, but is it because they die from the physical side or the spiritual? I know that snapping is a near-literal term, in that your spiritweb receives "cracks" that investiture can now fill. I see most (if not all) of the Investiture in the Cosmere as falling into one of two main categories. 1) Your Spiritweb receives "cracks" so that Investiture can fill them, granting access to the relative magic system or 2) You are born already Invested Under number one, we have Allomancy, Surgebinding, the Returned, and Elantrians. You have the obvious Snapping, the need to be "broken" to form a Nahel Bond, dying and receiving the Divine Breath, and the Shaod (more on this in a moment). Under number two, you have Breaths, Feruchemy, and Soul Stamping. As far as I know, you are born with the ability to use these without the need for a damaged Spiritweb. I suppose you could add a third category for things such as Hemalurgy and potentially the Dakhor Monks, where you intentionally alter your spiritweb at the cost of another's. (Interestingly enough, the categories appear to line up with the net-positive/ neutral/ negative system. I'm not sure whether that applies to all magic in the Cosmere, or specifically the magic on Scadrial.) Back to the subject of the Shaod. I briefly mentioned my thoughts on it in a reply to a post, but I'll put them here as well. I have two highly speculative theories. The first is that the Shaod is/ is guided by some (more or less) sentient being/ force, perhaps like the mist in the Mistborn Trilogy, the Highstorms in the Stormlight Archive, and Returning in Warbreaker. The second is that the Dor, being described multiple times as a force trying to push it's way through the Aons, is... "corrosive" to the local's spiritwebs. That, or simply being surrounded(?) by the Dor alters spiritwebs over time. Plenty of holes in both, they're just food for thought. Sorry for the wall of text. If you read that entire thing, I'd love any thoughts, ideas, counter-theories, or suggestions. (I'll add in supporting quotes from the texts, WOB, and other theories when my brain isn't melting out of my head.)
  8. (Warning 1: I will try my best to avoid talking about the plot of Words of Radiance here, but if you think new magic system-related revelations are spoilers, then I suggest you stay away from this thread. Warning 2: I am not a physicist. Do not take physics lessons from code monkeys posting on fantasy fiction fansites.) IRL, Most physicists believe that the four fundamental physical interactions (the electromagnetic, weak, strong, and gravitational forces) were once combined as a single unified force. A "unified field theory" is one that tries to explain how these fundamental interactions (that seem to work in their own fields) can be described within the framework of a single field, as a single unified force. According to the currently-accepted model of physics, the unified force first split into the gravitational force and the electronuclear force. Then the electronuclear force split into the strong force and the electroweak force. Finally, the electroweak force split into the electromagnetic and weak forces. All of that supposedly happened well within the first second after the Big Bang. Cool, eh? So why am I talking about real world fundamental forces in the Stormlight Archive forum? It's because I think the ten Surges on Roshar are Brandon's way of playing with the concept of fundamental forces in a fantasy setting. Here's a WoB from a Seattle signing last year: So, if Brandon thinks fundamental forces are cool, then maybe he finds the idea of a unified field theory to be cool as well. I'd like to propose that he somehow incorporated that concept into his Surge system. With that, allow me to present my own take on a Unified Surge Theory. Table of Contents Part I: The Unified Surge and Decay Part II: The Unified Surge and Transformation Part III: The Unified Surge and Energy Conclusion Part I: The Unified Surge and Decay IRL, the apparent breakdown of the hypothesized unified field into its separate aspects is explained by theories filled with all sorts of crazy (but fascinating) math. Fortunately, Roshar is a fictional world where things (e.g. the mechanism by which a Unified Surge separates into the ten Surges) can be made a lot more simple using fantasy logic. *commences fantasy logic* Since a Unified Surge should contain the potential of all the Surges, it must have the power of Division inside of it, by which it could divide itself. Simple, eh? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. A Unified Surge would also have the power of Cohesion, and therefore resist Division. But the fact still remains that there are ten separate Surges instead of just one. It means that the forces within the hypothetical Unified Surge cannot be perfectly symmetrical, and it is therefore not perfectly stable. This suggests that the Surge of Division is stronger than the Surge of Cohesion on Roshar, and that the Unified Surge decays via a series of divisions occuring right after Division overcomes Cohesion. Still with me? So far we've determined that a hypothetical Unified Surge combines all the Surges, and that it somehow decays. Have we seen anything like this? Why, yes. We have seen something like this. I think it's very likely (if not obvious) that Stormlight itself is the Unified Surge. It is through the infusion of Stormlight, after all, that Surgebinders and fabrials access the Surges. Also, we know that after a certain period of apparent stability, Stormlight eventually degrades, dissipating into the atmosphere. This is consistent with the previously described decay of the Unified Surge. This fits really well with the fact that Stormlight is a form of Investiture. I believe that the Surges are manifestations of various aspects of the Power of Creation that Adonalsium Invested on Roshar along with his spren, and Stormlight is the concentration of those aspects. In other words, Stormlight is exactly the thing that Surgebinders bind. Stormlight is the Surge. Now, the fact that the Unified Surge dissipates is definitely a problem for Rosharian Investiture. Szeth complains about losing Stormlight so quickly. Even Kaladin has to deal with this, although to a lesser extent. We know that the Stormfather regularly collects the dissipated Stormlight and and transports them into gemstones every highstorm, but won't it be nice if people could somehow make Stormlight stay put on a more permanent basis, like the Breaths on Nalthis? How do we fight the decay of Stormlight? I've mentioned in another thread that this impermanence of Investiture might be solved by transforming it into Innate Investiture. This, I think, is the purpose of the Nahel bond system that Honor's spren invented. I believe the Nahel bond is a manifestation of the Adhesion Surge applied to both Stormlight itself and a human soul. The stronger a Nahel bond is, the more Innate the act of Stormlight-holding becomes, the better the bond between Stormlight and the Radiant. To make another physics analogy, this is akin to how neutrons are a lot more stable when bound inside a nucleus than when it is free. By boosting Adhesion between Stormlight and the Surgebinder, the Nahel bond actually boosts the aspect of Cohesion within Stormlight, which is normally unstable, allowing it to fully counteract the natural dominance of Division and become stable.
  9. Prologue: WoB: Did Jasnah use cohesion? We've seen her use the abilities of an Elsecaller in the epilogue and the first book, but the description in the prologue seems very out-of-place if it's supposed to exemplify accidental use of transformation or transportation. One could argue it was accidental transformation, but mud is not even an Essence, which implies it should be a difficult transformation. If the mud description is intended to mean anything at all, it would be a hint at cohesion, only available to willshapers and stonewards. This is all just one data point, of course, does anything else support the theory? I don't see this as exemplified transformation, as nothing looks to actually change material, but it does sound like willshaping, even ending on a note about being willful. Edit: Consider also the following quote from WoK which also shows off Jasnah's power over Shadesmar: The theory is by no means confirmed, but I find it compelling. It implies, however, that it must be possible for a person to acquire more than their share of surges. Luckily, we know of a way that could be possible. The epilogue seems to imply that she's been hanging out with Wit for some time: So maybe, just maybe, she's been involved in the greater cosmere for a while. Certainly, she refers to "the cosmere's great mysteries" and has been killing Ghostbloods, who displayed artifacts from other cosmere worlds in their cellar. So in this Jasnah-versus-Ghostbloods conflict, could we really expect hemalurgy to be disregarded as a tool, provided both sides know of it? Jasnah's hands-on lesson in philosophy seems to imply she's not beyond using magic to kill, so I'm inclined to believe she would use hemalurgy if she could. Open flame: Long and thin knife? Sounds somewhat like a spike, wouldn't you say? I figure they know of it. The prime weakness of the theory is that Jasnah's bathing scene in WoK did not mention any spikes, though the philosophy lesson chapter mentions earrings. Then again, the healing properties of stormlight and the presumed reshaping abilities of the willshaper could provide a convenient explanation?
  10. So I was writing up my absurdly large time bubble thread (what else is new?) and I got the section about bubble occupancy. For the first time, I actually sat down and thought about the implications of a particular new WoB in light of some fairly old knowledge: Namely, how do we reconcile the facts that time bubble borders are static (i.e., don't distend ever) and any living thing touching a time bubble is affected by it with the fact that passengers in a bubbled train that doesn't notice the bubble won't notice it either? The WoBs: Living touch enough Bubble borders static VS. Bubble occupancy ----- How to reconcile these, then? It seems that the key to this question is to ask how time bubbles "find out" whether or not objects should be included in their effect. We see that objects are included or excluded as wholes: You won't be speeding up one leg of a chair and leaving the rest untouched, for instance. Yet objects do not lose their individual identities when they become a part of a greater whole. We saw in WoR that parts of the whole can both have their own beads in Shadesmar (their own individual Cognitive aspects) and be represented within the beads of their parent (and presumably their parent's parent and so on). The doors and lamps in Kholinar's palace have their own distinct beads at the same time as those same objects are a part of the "PALACE" mega-bead. We see, then, that time bubbles know not to include the child without consulting the parent. You won't see the chair leg being included on its own because the bubble somehow knows that that leg has a parent aspect and that that aspect is not included. The bubble then doesn't include the leg. Where is this answer derived, though? 1. Does the bubble look first at the leg, then see it has a parent, then look to the parent, then check if it has a parent, then see it doesn't and determine if it would like to go fast today? -This requires some mechanism of "trickle down" for all the child objects to be suitably affected/not-affected. 2. Does the bubble simultaneously survey all potentially-included objects, figure out the tree, and then only bother to actually look to the root nodes for occupancy? 3. Does the bubble simply ask the leg "would you like to go fast?" and then the leg, as black-box, replies Y/N after querying its parent? I am somewhat disposed towards the third option, myself. It's a bit of extra work on the part of individual aspects, but requires fewer/slower fundamental changes than the first and far less unbelievable work than the second. The first option requires that pesky trickle-down mechanism. It requires that either the bubble remember everything it's looked at and associate them with their parents as it finds them or that the parents be able to tell all their children its "decision". The second requires a large degree of "thought" on the part of the bubble: it takes place in two distinct steps, with some concept of consideration/evaluation in play between the steps. The bubble somehow "looks" at everything before "actually" looking at only a subset of those things for its actual answer. It seems overdone. The third option does demand some degree of work from individual objects. It requires that random peice of wood #7 go through the trouble of actively figuring out whether it and/or its parents want to be included in the bubble. This could go on for dozens or hundreds of layers, depending on how fine-grained we get. -- Another thing we must consider is how what objects are included in the bubble is decided. Yes, there's Cognitive "is this thing 'in' this space?" questions, but who's asking and who's answering? Are individual objects returning their assessment of whether they're within the bubble's space, or are third parties, or is the bubble itself determining this? The answer to this question has special weight for Option 3 above because that option doesn't allow the bubble any input into whether the root object is included. -- Getting back to my own judgments, I would also say that the objects' Cognitive aspects in the broad sense (so including both personal and external opinion) determine "where" they are in space, and then that object reports whether it thinks it's "in" the bubble if some part of it is straddling the line. I don't think it appropriate to saddle a distortion in space-time with too much thinking. This presumed lack of cognitive ability is yet another reason to discard Option 2, also. I think it fair to proceed as if we've narrowed the reasonable options down to 1 and 3, then. Not being sure between these two still leaves ambiguity as to exactly what these Cognitive aspects look like, though. In the case of Option 3, then the only thing we need in order to reconcile the WoB's is for child objects to know who their parents are. You can have a bunch of illegitimate passengers running around saying "this train is my parent" without the train ever being aware they even exist, let alone that it allegedly has a few hundred children. -- But in the case of Option 1, things are nastier. We've already essentially excised the time bubble from any computational heavy-lifting, so requiring that it remember/associate children with parents seems untoward. That leaves the parents being able to inform their children of what's what. How, then? I see two fundamental ways. Either the parent knows all of its children and tells them all personally or it "broadcasts" some message to all saying essentially "My kids: listen as I say...". The broadcast idea is rather uncivilized, and ghastly-expensive/loud. If the parent has no idea whatsoever who its children are, then it has to tell everything it can reach the message. And the kids have to all be listening for it and be able to actively distinguish when their parent has a message. Ugly and I don't see Brandon designing it that way, frankly. On more Realmatic grounds, the Cognitive isn't really that kind of place. Nor is the Spiritual, when you get right down to it. We've yet to see any simple broadband "tell everyone the news" communication Realmatically. The Spiritual has sets of 1:1 connections while the Cognitive seems composed of a bunch of quite singular entities that, to their core, know what they are. While this "knowing what you are" could quite easily extend to "just knowing" your parents or children (and thus perhaps going on to forge and maintain Spiritual bonds with them for communication), it doesn't seem to extend to knowing and being able to communicate with your local area. So the other way is that the parent knows all of its kids and tells them personally. How kind. But the problem with this is the ephemerality of some of the relations we're talking about, and how quickly they'd have to be established and torn down. When a passenger sets foot on a train, this model requires that that train immediately become aware of that passenger as its child and see itself as containing him. That's the impact of this set of WoB's. And that's rather absurd on the face of it. Besides the "absurd on the face of it" thing, which isn't exactly a scientific assessment, we also have good reason to disbelieve such ephemerality: Soulcasting. When Shallan soulcast the ship in WoR, she did not, as it turns out, turn all of its human occupants to water. Despite this, I think it fair to claim that those same occupants would have been unaffected by a passing time bubble that the ship ignored. So there are in fact at least these two levels of Cognitive identity to deal with: one where ephemeral occupancy does protect you from time bubbles but does not entail being "part of" something (the ship's occupants) on a deeper level, and another where long-term occupancy both protects from time bubbles and entails "partness" (the ship's various planks and whatnot). Following from this, the natural conclusion to make, I think, is that what separates these two types of belonging is exactly where children objects are accounted for in their parents' cognitive aspects. Perhaps some other division could be made, or we could make allowances for the difference being due to different degrees in which the parent regards the child, but such seems unwieldy and quite unnecessary in the face of a simpler option. -As an aside, I'd say that Soulcasting directly affects exactly those parts of an object which its Cognitive aspect (its bead) says are a part of it. So Soulcasting directly locates and transforms all those basic-level, non-parent objects which are a part of the whole according to the whole. The whole knows what all of these objects are, and is likely Spiritually connected to them, so I'd wager it easy enough for a Soulcaster to follow the threads down. ---- It seems, then, that we've discarded Option 1 in its entirety. That leaves Option 3, which, to recall, is the one where individual objects are queried by the bubble and make black-box replies which they base on querying their parents. This model requires only singly-linked lists rather than the more expensive doubly-linked tree option 1 needed. Any given object needs only to know either what object its parent is or that it does not, in fact, have a parent. In the first case it asks the parent whether they're in the bubble, in the second it makes the judgment itself. The parent doesn't need to remember any of this, only bothering to connect to its children for a moment as it replies to their individual queries. To the parent in this model, the child asking after occupancy is asked and answered in the same exact way as the bubble asking after occupancy. ---- So, to summarize, this leaves passengers in the train not "touching" the bubble proper because they don't really "interact" with it directly. At no point are they actually doing any work in assessing whether or not they're in the bubble: all they do is ask the train to make the call. When the passenger is in the train, he doesn't actually know whether or not he's touching the bubble because the only way he has to assess the question is asking his parent the train what the answer is. When the passenger is outside the train, though, the buck stops with the human and he is, in fact, "touching" the bubble with no Cognitive intermediary. Honestly I preferred distension to all of this, but given the WoB we have and assuming that I'm not drastically misinterpreting it (which I'm fairly sure I'm not), this seems the answer. ------------- Implications: This is likely the exact same way that clothing and/or held items behave for time bubbles. While I have my whole thread on the matter, I have yet to address what happens to clothing when people touch time bubbles. I think it intuitive and natural that their clothing is included in the speedup/slowdown as well. It wouldn't do to have a "pulled out of his socks" situation it a man poked a time bubble with his finger while running by. So perhaps the mans clothing is included in the direct, "this is part of the human's Cognitive aspect" sense. It's a bit more of an open question whether held-items (like weapons) would have the same privilege. To expand why such short-term "partness" is plausible, I would argue that such possessions (including held items?) are included (and eventually discarded) so easily because living beings are living beings. We cannot expect a train or a ship to actively track and/or have opinions on what's properly part of it: That kind of thing is decided entirely by the input/views of living beings who can make such judgments. By that measure, though, it could well be that the living things have much more malleable "part of me" parts of their Cognitive selves, and can in fact very quickly come to regard clothing/held-items as a part of themselves. In this human case, then, clothing and possibly held objects are included in the effect of the bubble directly because of the uniquely malleable nature of the living Cognitive aspect. -- Another point to make is that I would think a man wearing gloves who touched the edge of a bubble with only the gloves might get included, as the gloves are a part of him. That one's a tad in the air, though, as to whether the "part of me" extends so deeply. We wouldn't expect someone whose shirt got cut by a Shardblade to feel pained by it, after all. ---- Another expansionary point is that this might actually address the "man runs into pole at 500 mph" point I touch on in a few of my time bubble threads. The basic problem is that of a moving person who is trailing along a train (matching its speed) and then gets time-bubbled at 20x speed into the back of a train that is ignoring the time bubble. Does this man suffer damage from this collision? This "parenting" theory may solve this problem: potentially, the moment the man contacts the train his overriding "wait a minute, I'm now in contact with an object big enough that I consider myself to be 'on' it" is such that he begins to take his time-bubble-related ques from the train rather than his own body. So the man ends up painlessly coming to rest against the back of the train with no tangible impact, rather than going kersplat. ------ So... yeah. This is what happens when I get in time bubble mode.
  11. The Caustic Nature of Investiture First and foremost, I need to recognize Tempus for a ton of help on this theory. There were multiple conversations that we had and I couldn’t have put this together without those conversations. Credit where credit is due. Introduction There were certain properties and side-effects from the magic systems and magical artifacts that seemed to align and suggest an overall property of the unified magic system. I had seen another thread in the Warbreaker forum that hinted at the link[1], but only explored the relationship between two of the worlds/magic systems. Specifically, it was the similarity between an object that had been drained of color and a wound on a limb that had been inflicted by a Shardblade and how both turned grey. The relationship was explored, but didn’t seem to be expanded to the Cosmere as a whole. I wanted to take the similarities of the two and find a common thread for all the magic systems because it seemed too coincidental for Awakening and Shardblades to grey things out but nothing else. After a false start where I tried to have everything result in something being greyed out, I read the Realmatic Attributes theory. That coupled with suggestions from Tempus led me to the actual nature of Investiture. Theory Investiture is, by nature, a caustic force. More specifically, it corrodes different features of the different realms, with the strength of the corrosion proportional on the volume of Investiture that is concentrated in the realm for the magic system. Reasoning The easiest place to start with this is with Allomancy. As Chaos posited in the Realmatic attributes thread, Allomancy is focused very heavily in the Physical Realm[2]. The metal acts as a conduit for the Allomancy and, when being used, the metal is vaporized[3]. The only two components here are the metal and the Investiture, so it stands to reason that the Investiture is responsible for the vaporization. It is packed in to a very small area, causing the Investiture to become very dense in a very small area and the metal is eliminated in the Physical Realm. Consider another example of dense Investiture in Nightblood. While we’ve seen denser collections of Breaths in others (Nightblood has 1,000 Breaths and the God King has over 10,000), the Breaths in Nightblood are constantly activated due to the command given while Awakening. The Breaths in Susebron remain “dormant”. When drawn, Nightblood vaporizes people when coming in contact[4], just the same as metal in Allomancy. Nightblood even discolors with his smoke in the same way a Shardblade discolors when cutting[5]. Awakening drains the color when used. So how does this fit? Well, the caustic nature of the Investiture is still burning something up, but it happens to be in a different realm. This time, it occurs in the Spiritual Realm. The color is used up much like the metal in Allomancy, but the users see it in a very different way. The object still exists in the Physical Realm, but a component of its spiritual identity is missing. This shows as the object now being grey in the Physical Realm. The burning of the attribute in the Spiritual Realm is a function of the magic system (Physical for Allomancy, Spiritual for Awakening). This is because Awakening has a heavier presence in the Spiritual Realm. Again, density per realm is important. Take, then Feruchemy. This one gave me a bit of trouble when I was initially trying to justify everything as turning grey. However, in the model of Investiture being caustic, it fits fairly well in my mind. The attributes stored are moved from an individual to a metalmind. I picture this happening along a “stream” of investiture. It would appear that it’s a one-to-one transfer. But I believe there’s an actual cost to this and the attribute actually has a little bit burned away during the transfer. It’s not a tremendous amount as the flow is not really dense. But consider what happens when a Feruchemist draws quickly upon a metalmind (or uses more of what is stored). Decreasing returns[6]. This is because more of the material is carried faster along the Investiture. A bigger stream of Investiture, if you will, which is a higher density. You lose to the corrosive nature of the Investiture. For brevity’s sake here, I’ve listed the systems and the feature corroded below. Allomancy -> Metal Feruchemy -> Attribute Stored Hemalurgy -> Unknown for now AonDor -> Shape Drawn ChayShan -> Unknown for now Dahkor -> Unknown for now Stormlight -> Heat (resulting in frost) Awakening -> Color The purpose here is not to make a definitive listing, but to provide the framework. If people come up with what the item corroded is, I’m willing to update this list. While not an official part of this theory, I believe this may explain why Adonalsium shattered. Much like a star using up all its fuel and going supernova, the innate Investiture there may have caused Adonalsium to shatter. And, like a supernova star reforming into planets and another star, we could get the 16 shards. This also implies that Adonalsium may not be able to be put back together, as has been posited in another theory. References Edit: Formatting
  12. Has anyone else noticed that every fabrial we've seen so far that has been sufficiently described was fixed in a metal setting of some sort? What I mean is that we've never seen a fabrial explicitly described as being without metal. It almost seems like metal was a requirement in fabrial creation, and not just for aesthetic purposes. In fact, in WoR, Shallan only realized that the lamps in the Stormseat Oathgate room were fabrials when she noticed the metallic latticework around each gemstone: But if metals are important in fabrial creation, what exactly is their purpose? Shouldn't a fabrial's power come directly from the spren and the Stormlight inside the gemstone? In a pre-WoR thread of mine, I theorized that metals were conduits/transmitters of Investiture, and were the reason why fabrials can actually change their environment. That might still be the case, but right now I'm not 100% convinced about it because that theory was based on metals having intrinsic Transportation Surge properties, which I now doubt. I have a new theory that doesn't require metals to transmit Investiture, but is still compatible with that idea. It first came to me when I noticed a problem with the Soulcaster fabrials. We know that these fabrials are special because all of them were made long ago, before the Recreance, when the Knights Radiant were still around. These Soulcasters, considered sacred by the ardents, have not yet been replicated in modern times. In other words, every single Soulcaster fabrial on Roshar are practically irreplaceable artifacts. The big problem with that is that gemstones crack when too much Stormlight is forced out of them. Or as Navani would say, they "succumb easily to the multiplied strain of simultaneous infusion drain and physical stress". And when that happens, you'll have to replace the broken gemstone. So if people saw me using a Soulcaster and one of its gemstones suddenly cracks, I'd probably look rather foolish to them, won't I? They'd think I had just destroyed something immensely precious, won't they? Well, apparently not. Jasnah didn't even pretend to be upset when the the smokestone in her (fake) fabrial cracked. It's as if she fully expected Shallan to believe the smokestone could simply be replaced. As for Shallan, she had serious problems with what Jasnah did, including using a holy artifact to commit murder, but not including irreplaceably breaking said artifact. I therefore conclude that while the gemstone component of a fabrial is obviously important (it holds the Stormlight that powers the fabrial), it can definitely be replaced, even that of a Soulcaster fabrial. But how could that be? Won't you need to trap the same kind of spren in another identically-cut gemstone to replicate the cracked gemstone's power (which in the case of Soulcasters, nobody has ever done successfully)? I don't think so. We know from one of Navani's illustrations that when a gemstone that has a spren trapped inside is infused with Stormlight, it creates a specific Stormlight pattern. Now, here is my theory: I think a fabrial's Stormlight pattern is somehow imprinted on the fabrial's metal setting. This allows for the gemstone to be replaced when needed without having to attract another spren in the replacement gemstone. That probably means replacement gemstones need not even contain any spren as long as the Stormlight pattern has already been imprinted in the metal. That also means the most important thing you could do to keep a fabrial working is to not mess with the metal framework because it might disturb the pattern imprinted on it. So you should, like, try not to accidentally damage it with a sword while attempting to stab your abusive father. Or something. What do you guys think? Edit: I believe this "imprinting" of a Stormlight pattern onto metal is made possible by the Cohesion Surge, but that probably deserves its own separate thread.
  13. First of all, forgive me if someone else has already posited this. I will freely admit that I lost track of all the new posts during the post-WoR explosion, and I'm actually quite bad at finding stuff that I haven't read at least once before. That said, I have had an assumption about how the Diagram is so accurate floating around in the back of my head ever since I first saw someone question how a smart Taravangian (hereafter referred to by his proper title of "Mr. T") could make accurate predictions about human behavior given his previously demonstrated idiocy in that regard whenever he's really smart. Like how one day a smart Mr. T tried to get all the dumb people to commit suicide, and actually thoughts that everyone would agree with him so long as he explained it all well enough. So the question naturally arises in many minds: How could the super-ultra-duper-mega-smart Mr. T who wrote the Diagram predict the course of a conversation, let alone the course of human events on an entire planet? My immediate thought when I saw this question was as follows: Super-Mr. T crossed a very important threshold that day: he became intelligent enough to model human thought and behavior (on the macro scale, at the very least) as a pure abstraction, a pure exercise of thought without any reference at all to his own feelings, intuitions, or proclivities. It's as if you dropped a Mr. T-shaped AI on Roshar with all of Mr. T's memories and the directive "save humanity" and then let it figure it all out on its own. Where I would think that normally we model how other people will think and behave based in large part on our own capacities—our empathy and how we'd react in their situation and the like—it seems that intelligent Mr. T, besides not having compassion to care for the suffering of others, doesn't have that ability to empathize, and quite likely doesn't really even think in the same ways as normal people. So any attempt by an intelligent Mr. T to predict the behavior of others will necessarily be poisoned by his own atypical intuitions and proclivities. There may even be another threshold that Super-Mr. T had to cross before he was intelligent enough to recognize and consciously ignore his own intuitions about how other people will behave, such as his incorrect intuitions in the dumb-person-suicide case. --- So, in concluding, I think that the Diagram faction is entitled to trust in Super-Mr. T's predictions and directions because Super-Mr. T was so smart that he could model how us puny humans would react and take those reactions into account. Given the assumption that the Diagram's end goal is the salvation of some part of humanity, and given that Diagramists are heavily skewed towards the "ends justify the means" camp, Super-Mr. T is worth trusting. EDIT: I'm "espousing" the main idea in the OP (and other threads, as it turns out), not necessarily all the morality discussion that follows.
  14. The Advent of Squires. My Theory is simple: squires gain their power through loyalty to and admiration of existing Knights Radiant, Thus acquiring a bond to the Knight, rather than to an actual spren. This ability is what separates the Nahel Bond, and Knights Radiant from Ancient Surgebinders. Rules: 1. it requires a Knight Radiant in full status (all three oaths) to attract Squires. This is why Squires only started appearing after Kaladin said his 3rd oath. 2. Squires have only one oath: the first oath, shared among all orders of Knights Radiant. 3. Squires are not bonded to a spren; they derive their ability to breath Stormlight from their bond to a Radiant. (Lopen would be bonded to Kaladin, etc) 4. Squires cannot utilize surges, but do gain enhanced healing, strength, etc. from holding stormlight. Anchiently, Squires likely used fabrials to mimic the surges they lacked. Consequences: 1. The number of people able to utilize Stormlight grows exponentially, rather than logarithmically. The number of people able to utilize stormlight increases drastically. 2. The existence of Squire allows an 'introductory phase' in which a person can get used to following the Radiant Oaths, or even transfer from one order to another, prior to any spren actually agreeing to bond them. This reduces the risk of a spren being killed by lack of faithfulness to oaths. 3. 'side effects' from the use of powerful Fabrials (such as soulcasters, and other fabrials which mimic the surges) are mitigated. {Note that soulcasters, over time, gain a very odd appearance, stone-like flesh, etc. one who could breath stormlight would have these effects healed long before they manifested fully.} 4. The 17th shard may make use of Squires, allowing their world-hoppers to power their off-world abilities with stormlight. (a separate theory in its own right, but worthy of consideration) EDITED: to correct and clarify
  15. My Theory: Prophecies in the Mistborn world could be made by a feruchemist storing up physical speed, mental clarity, and luck for a prolonged period of time (maybe their whole life), and then, they would burn them in conjunction, to "guess" at what is coming, or to "guess" at what information their people will need about the days to come? (Mental clarity would be so they could fully understand what their luck was telling them, and physical speed would allow them to write it all down, quickly, allowing them to compound their luck and mental clarity, further.) This would also explain the vagueness of prophecy: the prophet doesn't actually see anything they are just making an incredibly "lucky" guess about what is to come. This is my theory on prophecy in that world. What do you gals and guys think?
  16. Introduction In a previous thread, I noted several strange things about how the Surges are currently connected to the Orders/Essences. Most of them just didn't seem to fit, in my view. How does blood relate to illumination? What has tallow got to do with transformation? Anyway, since I promised not to formulate a theory in that thread, I'll just post the theoretical solution I came up with here. But first, let me describe two other issues that, in addition to the Surge issues I've already mentioned, eventually led me to this theory (spoilered for length). The Problem of Elemental Arrangement The Problem of Edgedancers Due to these problems, I'm going to theorize that, for some reason, Tanavast "did a Leras" and fiddled with Rosharian Investiture at some point in the past. Let me detail this theory into four parts (plus a few appendices): Part I: What Was Part II: What Could Have Been Part III: What Came to Be Part IV: What Might Be Appendix A: Order-specific Powers and the Limitation of Lightborn Appendix B: Cultivation, the Listeners, and Odium Appendix C: Circumstantial Evidence from the Books Part I: What Was I believe that what we now see in the Knights Radiant chart does not reflect the natural order of the Surges on Roshar. This natural order involves eight "basic" Essences (Lucentia, Spark, Vapor, Zephyr, Blood, Tallow, Foil, and Talus) that normally interact with Roshar, and the two "Aether" Essences (Sinew and Pulp) that deal with Shardic Investiture and transcend the other eight. The interaction of the eight Essences manifest as the eight "basic" Surges: Illumination, Transformation, Gravitation, Transportation, Tension, Friction, Cohesion, and Division. Each Surge reflected the qualities of two Essences, as I shall detail below (spoilered for length): Here's a diagram: And here's another diagram with the exact same Essence connections, but twisted vertically at the center, and with Sinew and Pulp added but disconnected from the others: Notice how it's almost the Double Eye of the Almighty, only minus the connections to Sinew and Pulp. Also, notice how it looks like two diamonds merged at the tip. In fact, even the first diagram sort of looks like a gemstone, and can probably be stylized into looking like the crown view of an "old eight cut" diamond. Edit: Re-worded Part I due to theory developments in Part III. I sometimes change my mind about details in my theory halfway through writing it. Sorry if this confused anyone. Also, fixed some weird formatting errors that appeared in my last edit.
  17. SPOILER WARNING: While this theory does contain spoiler information for many of the cosmere books, the main theory itself is only concerned with Stormlight Archive and all cosmere spoilers (including Words of Radiance) are in spoiler tags. Feel free to read the theory and peruse and open spoilers as you feel fit! Disclaimer: This is not the kind of theory in which I gleefully proclaim that I have “figured it all out” and have indisputable evidence to back up my claims. This is a shot-in-the-dark, guesswork kind of theory. A “wouldn’t it be cool if” kind of theory. Got it? Basically, I was in cosmere chat and was suddenly struck by an idea. See, we still don’t know much about the Stormlight Archive and its overall plot. We know that Odium is a bad guy and he is trying to accomplish something. We know that the Knights Radiant are returning because of some reason. We know that there’s three shards but we don’t really know what each of them are doing or have done or what their goals are. As far as what the big arcs of this series are going to be, what the main goal of our antagonist is, we’re actually sitting quite a bit in the dark. At the moment, the series is concerned with fairly small scale things, arcs relating to individual characters or single countries or such. But there’s hints and stirrings that this is going to get big. So, here’s my humble guess: There is something wrong with Roshar’s afterlife which needs to be fixed or solved. This will be a major part of the plot for The Stormlight Archive. There’s a few different reasons why I’m coming up with this. I’m going to put these things in spoiler tags just to keep things neat and organized, because I dislike huge blocks of text. Some of them have spoilers within them, others just have info. Textual Reasons 1.The Tranquiline Halls (no WoR spoilers) 2.Braize and Damnation (one WoR quote, not really spoilery) 3.Other Cosmere Afterlife Hints Metatextual Reasons 1.It Hasn’t Been Done Before 2.Brandon Is A Troll There’s more I could get into her with all of this, and perhaps this thread will bring up some of those discussions, but I think that’s enough for an opening post. Fanfic writer that I am, I’ve been tossing around possibilities of situations if this does turn out to be the case, some heartwarming, some tragic – because this is me after all, and I’ve got to live up to my reputation as the fandom monster right? So, thoughts, opinions, more evidence, disputes, theological debates? What are you guys thinking about all of this? Do you think it’s possible? Do you think it’s likely? Do we all just really want to see Tien and Kaladin reunite? Give me some of your responses! Update: July 2016 Hello to all who have come to check out this theory post after it was on the Featured Theories news (thank you, @Windrunner, I am extremely flattered). However, there have been a few books released since I first typed up this theory way back in... 2014 was it? And boy were some of those books doozies when it came to this theory and its implications. So, here's a quick update on how this theory is faring thus far: 1. New Information (Bands of Mourning and Secret History spoilers!)
  18. Shardic Number Theory Revisited Part Three - Shardic Numbers Are Bollox Premise We've talked about 'Every Shard has a number', and also 'Shard Numbers Mesh Together'. And Word of Brandon supports this[1]. However, Shardic number theory is full of holes and things that don't match up and is generally the kind of thing you look at with one eyebrow raised. However, surely there are other options? That Word of Brandon is actually very open to interpretation! We'll be looking at a few of these today, for the last part of Shardic Number Theory Revisited. I will be referring back to evidence from the previous theories to save time and space. Each Shardworld has a Number Hypothesis: Just because the number is important to the Shard doesn't mean that the number belongs to the Shard. A good alternative theory is that the Shardworld is what encodes the number that is important (kind of like how the Shardworld determines the Focus for the planet). Scadrial - Sixteen Scadrial's number must be sixteen. They even have a 'law of sixteen' on Scadrial. Brandon comes out and tells us Preservation picked sixteen since it was important, and Alloy of Law is stuffed with more sixteen's than a high school dance. Sel - Three or Four Sel is still not clear. Going by the significant numbers noted previously, three and four seem very likely. Roshar - Ten If you have read Stormlight Archive, you may have noticed the number ten used once or twice. This subtle hint is Brandon's way of telling you the number for this Shardworld. Nalthis - Five As seen previously, Nalthis remains five, for the very same reasons. The Numbers are Important to the Cosmere as a Whole Hypothesis: Shards may choose to focus on numbers that are important to the Cosmere as a whole. Thus, there may be some numbers here that come up again and again. Sixteen Sixteen is certainly of Cosmere importance. There are sixteen Shards from the Shattered Adonalsium. Here are some other instances where sixteen is important. On Scadrial, Vin's Age, Allomantic, Feruchemic, and Hemalurgic Metals, The number of people in percent that Preservation Snapped, the Law of Sixteen mentioned in Alloy of Law, Wax's address, Wax's generation, when Wax Snapped, and other less important instances. On Roshar, sixteen is considered the time of coming of age. On Sel, the Rose Empire has eighty factions and worship the eighty suns, which is sixteen times five. There is no known significance of sixteen on Nalthis. Ten Ten is also of Cosmere importance. Word of Brandon tells us there are ten Major Shardworlds[2]. Other instances where ten is important are: On Scadrial, there were ten original known metals, ten great houses, ten dominances, ten thousand skaa in the rebellion and numerous other small facts (Mistwraith are ten feet long). The Well of Ascension, in an important fact, refills every 2^10 years. On Sel, the Reod was precisely ten years ago. On Nalthis, there are Ten Heightenings, and the count of Breaths to reach them are always approximating multiples of ten. There are also ten thousand Lifeless. Roshar also has a small amount of influence from the number ten, but I will leave this as an exercise to the reader. Five Five has no known meaning in the meta-narrative, but is nonetheless found all over the Cosmere. Some instances of five include... On Scadrial, the Dominances are split into two groups of five (as are the metals). Skaa do not become Mistings unless they have Aristocratic blood within five generations. Spook snapped when he was five and Inquisitors trained for five years before being spiked. The Lord Ruler's Chamber was lit with five massive braziers. The Well of Ascension can also be counted as refilling every 4^5 years. It was five months since Lessie's death for Wax, and Elendel accomodates about five million people. Lawmen should be one to five hundred people, and bubbles are about five feet across, as far as we know. Wax has been a constable for 25 years. On Sel, the City of Elantris is designed with many five's in it's architecture and planning. It was five years since Sarene began to paint, and five years since Raoden began opposing his father. Sarene was 25, and Hrathen and Sarene were poisoned for five days. Shai has five Essence Marks, there are five Arbiters per faction, and five times sixteen yields the number 80, important both politically and religiously in the Rose Empire. Roshar has the five ideals, and five known groupings of fabrials. The binding charts seem to be able to split into fives along both axis. Nalthis is of course replete with fives as mentioned before, and shshshsh also has significant influence of the number five, such as the spheres at the beginning. Eleven Eleven seems to be a Cosmere number identified with a number of evil things and occurrences. The only know duration of a Desolation lasted eleven years. There were 99 Desolations in total, according to the Vorins. Eleven is also associated with Ruin many times, see Part One for details. In Elantris, the Jeskeri Mysteries met at eleven 'o clock to sacrifice. Conclusion The two theories above are attractive. They are generally simpler than attaching numbers specifically to a Shard, and thus perhaps more likely to be correct. That said, they are all very common numbers, and Brandon has to count things somehow. There is also a very notable concentration of some numbers on some planets, where those numbers aren't seen at all on others. Mysterious. That was pretty much every Shardic Number Theory that held water I could find or dream up, and all the references I could find. I hope you all enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed endlessly typing em' out. References:
  19. Shardic Number Theory Revisited Part Two - Shardic Numbers Mesh Together Premise Previously we talked about the traditional Shardic Number Theory - 'Every Shard has a number'. Today we've got a slightly different theory. In the Cosmere, there are instances on planets where Shardic Intents seem to interact with each other. On Scadrial, Preservation and Ruin made the Balance Magic of Feruchemy[1]. On Sel, the Dor is apparently both Dominion and Devotion together[2]. On Roshar, it seems like Honor, Cultivation, and Odium all interact in a variety of ways which aren't necessarily clear yet. Could this not apply to numbers as well? Hypothesis Each Shard has a number which is important to them, often Realmatically. These numbers interact with other numbers of Shards on the Shardworld to more fully describe the world. Known Shards from Published Works Scadrial - Preservation is eight, and Ruin is two. Harmony is sixteen. Preservation has always been a shoe in for sixteen. And why not? In Hero of Ages, people suddenly start getting sick, Vin deduces that it is in fact a sign, and Sazed tells us that Preservation chose sixteen because it was an important number to the people on Scadrial. Wait, what? Here's the kicker. The Mistborn series as it stands is four books. The first book, Final Empire, deals with Allomancy, and Vin and Kelsier fighting the Lord Ruler. The second book, Well of Ascension, deals with Feruchemy, and is all about the Well and stablizing the world after the collapse. The third book delves more into Hemalurgy, and about the confrontation between Ruin and Preservation. Alloy of Law is all about Wax, Wayne, and Harmony. So sixteen is super important right? It's a sign everyone will recognize. Everyone in Alloy of Law does, Wax mentions it a bunch, it's all over the book. What about the first trilogy? Sixteen must be big there too, right? Nope. The only instance of sixteen in the first book is Vin's age. The second book has no instances of note at all. The third book, is it anywhere? Yes! It exists ONLY in the scene where Vin magically deduces sixteen is important. Fact is, if Vin didn't tell us, if that scene didn't happen, if Sazed didn't clear it up, we would never know anyone on Scadrial cared about sixteen at all until Alloy of Law. What's your game Brandon? Are you daft. No, he's not daft. The simple fact is, sixteen is not Preservation's number. Eight is. Eight is all over the place in the Mistborn books, especially the first book. Eight metals, eight people on Kelsier's team, eight Mistings, eight months of planning for the attack on the Lord Ruler, eight Inquistors guarding the Lord Ruler, we're drowning in plot-centric eights. Ruin, by contrast, we said might be eleven. Okay, eight and eleven don't really mean much. But eight and two do. Ruin's number is actually two. There's evidence as well - hemalurgic spikes work best in balanced pairs. Inquisitors have spikes in groups of twos, attached by the single neck spike. Four groups below and one above. Kandra blessings require two spikes. Koloss use paired hemalurgic spikes. When we get to the plot, plots where Ruin influences events are all in pairs - Vin and Kelsier, Vin and Zane. When we look at Preservation... eight guards, eight people per profession on Elend's council, eight people in the thief group, eight core people involved in running Elend's new empire. This is why sixteen is a sign. Just like how Allomancy and Hemalurgy combine to form Feruchemy, Ruin and Preservation's numbers combine to make sixteen. This is why Harmony is sixteen, and why Alloy of Law is full of sixteens. The numbers meshed. Sel - Devotion and Dominion, One, Three and Four Sel is not clear at all, as we have very little information. Based on the information from the previous post, things are pretty inconclusive. There is some evidence for five (in the structure and layout of Elantris) but five is taken. But when meshing is taken into the picture, one becomes an option. It's difficult to examine the viability of one, because one is used so often in books. However, rather than multiply systems like we see on Scadrial, it could be said Devotion and Dominion added together to make one larger system, powered by the Dor (which is a combo of both[2]). Thus, our most likely significant options, Three, Four and Five, can be balanced by one. One and Three would add up into Four, and One and Four would add into Five, nicely covering the significant numbers we can't reach. This is very tentative support, however. Roshar - Honour is Five, Cultivation is Six (possibly Four, Fourteen), and Odium is Nine Honour is Five? You must be daft! Ten is ALL OVER the Stormlight Archives. Pretty much everywhere. How could Honour be five? Well, there are a few things that are shifty about 'ten'. First off, ten is important in every Cosmere book. Yup. In Mistborn, there are ten great houses, ten original metals if you include the God Metals, ten Dominances on the planet, Vin was ten when she snapped, one is every ten thousand skaa became a Misting (whether or not they had noble blood), ten thousand people in the skaa rebellion, Mistwraiths are ten feet long... the list goes on. Nalthis has Ten Heightenings, ten thousand Lifeless, Lifeless skin is exactly ten shades lighter... even on Sel, the Reod was ten years ago. Even on Threnody, Silence had been hunting for ten years, and had first killed a Shade when she was ten. Weird. But there is one thing, one thing we know that Honour does that is Five. The Five Ideals, the basis of the Knights Radiant, the foundation of the order that lives to be of Honour. Incidentally, there are also five types of discovered Fabrial at the moment. Another point, 500 years times 9 is the length since the last Desolation, see my Desolations theory for why that could be an important balance between Odium and Honour. Cultivation, we don't have enough info for, as stated in the previous thread. Numeric meshing makes six seem likely. There are '30' magic systems on Roshar according to Brandon[3], and five goes into thirty six times. Four is also possible - we've seen four images of a woman on the purple binding chart in Way of Kings, and four and five make twenty, accounting for all powers on the two charts we've seen. Two is also a possibility: two times five makes ten, which might help Roshar's ten fetish. Of other meshing numbers of interest, 5+6 * 9 == 99 Desolations. 5+11+14 (if Odium is eleven, which is unlikely but possible) would equal 30, and Greatshells have fourteen legs for Cultivation there (that one is a huge stretch). That's all I got. Of course, Honour could still be ten, Cultivation one of her many options, and Odium nine. Then we've got the same problem of 'Too many offworld tens', and the meshing is a little less supported. Nalthis - Endowment is Five Endowment still looks like five. As there are no other Shards, no meshing can occur. Non-canon Shards, and Shards from Unpublished Works Mythwalker - Eight, Sixteen Mythwalker Shard(s?) seem to have parallels to Mistborn, and the Well of Ascension. It's possible their numbers were similar, and repurposed when the book was cannibalized for Mistborn. Bavadin - Same as before One Shard on Taldain, no meshing. shshshshsh and shshshshsh - Three, ??? Due to the split that occurred here, three looks very nice in this theory, and fits EXCELLENTLY. The other number is a mystery. Conclusion Shardic Number Meshing is good in some parts, and bad in others. It makes Scadrial make a LOT of sense, and deals with a large majority of the inconsistencies found in the other theory (which I politely didn't mention last time so I could use them as evidence here). Sel stays about the same, but fits just slightly better with Meshing than without. Roshar is a mess. But Roshar was a mess before too. Single Shardworlds have no effect. Coming up soon, the third and final segment going over some other options presenting solutions to the above. References:
  20. So as I'm looking at a quote from Brandon: Now, as we've understood it, this means that whatever power Allomancy taps into, Feruchemy can siphon it off. Taking it into a larger context however, you can realise that this means that an End-Neutral System can effectively be powered by a End-Positive System. Imagine a Feruchemist Worldhopping the Cosmere, only to return to Elantris after an exciting day - as they arrive, they activate the Aons they have inscribed on their MetalMinds, and instantly they are fully recharged. That's only where the possibilities begin! (I've just realised that using Stormlight to fuel Awakening is essentially Compounding - good on you, Vasher). Sorry if this has been realised before, but I just had my mind blown and needed an outlet. I've also very curious to see how this relates to End-Negative Systems, or even Reverse-Compounding (as I believe we have WoB that the Lord Ruler enhanced his Allomancy with Feruchemy). On another note, I'm going to begin compiling notes on how to make the most overpowered being in the Cosmere. Examples of this would be abusing this version of Feruchemical Compounding, an Awakened Mistcloak, Nahel Bond Spren, Awakened sword, Honourblade, etc,. I would be most delighted to see if anyone else can come up with some overpowered combinations.
  21. Shardic Number Theory Revisited Part One - Shards each have a number Premise Kicking around for a long time has been a theory that each shard has a number associated with them, a specifically meaningful number. I've had a copious amount of notes on the topic for a while, so I thought that now would be a good time to start and post a few theories on em'. For convenience sake, I've divided it into three parts - I might follow it up with a post on Shardic Colour theory as well. The first part, displayed here today, will be the traditional approach, that each Shard has a number that is special to them.[1] Hypothesis Each Shard has a number which is important to them, often Realmatically. It is possible these are related to the order of Shattering, or the Shattering in another fashion. Known Shards from Published Works Preservation - Sixteen Preservation, in this theory, is the most simple and straight forward. We have Word of Brandon that Preservation used sixteen as his number, because it would be significant to his followers - it was apparently an important number to them.[2][3] It is also the known number of ordinary Allomantic metals. There are various appearances of sixteen[4]. No other Shard has such a nicely tied number. Ruin - Eleven We don't have as much concrete info for Ruin, but there are some potentially significant numbers. We know that Inquisitors needed Eleven spikes. We also know that the metal intended to topple the Lord Ruler (the one Preserving the Empire) was the Eleventh Metal, and was influenced by Ruin through Kelsier's teacher. Koloss are also described in Hero of Ages as being eleven feet tall. Ruin's number could very well be eleven, in the absence of better candidates. Harmony - Sixteen again? Harmony is two Shards, technically. In Alloy of Law, we see lots of sixteens: Wax is the sixteenth of his line, his address is Sixteen Ladrian Place, Wax snapped when he was sixteen, etc. Eleven is not found at all in Alloy of Law. Endowment - Five Endowment is a little easier. We have quite a few important instances of the number five. The Returned are at the fifth Heightening with a single Breath. There were Five Scholars, of which Vasher was one. Austrism promotes living your life according to the Five Visions, an important religious concept. Lightsong Returned five years prior to the events of Warbreaker. Vivenna receives about 500 Breaths from Lemex. There were 25 Returned Gods in the Court during the events of Warbreaker. The rebellion began five years ago. Lightsong deals in fives all the time - randomly grabbing five lemons, looking at five painting before giving up, getting points in that game he played that were in the five hundreds, or ended in five. In addition, there were five God Kings in the history of Hallandren, and approximately five hundred years since people began to Awaken. Nightblood is also five feet long. Fifths of color are considered harmonic perfection in Hallandren. Yep, five is pretty good for Endowment. Dominion - Three or Four Dominion is not terribly clear cut. The best options are three and four. For three, Hrathen was given three months to covert Arelon. Three hundred years since Fjorden was founded after the collapsed previous empire. The fallen Elantris was original dominated by three gangs. There are three original gods: Shu-Korath, Shu-Keseg, and Shu-Dereth. Wyrn the King, the founding text of Fjorden, is three thousand lines long. Sarene had three engagements, and three husbands in the course of Elantris. Shai had a three month deadline to fix the Emperor. For four, there have been four long-live emperors of Fjorden. Four vials of poison were delivered to Hrathen. The poison took four days to clear up, and one day to take effect (five days total). Kaise knows four languages, and is described as 'Domineering' (Dominion is only used in regards to Dilaf and Fjorden, other than that instance). Shai's unforgeable prison has fourty four types of stone. Devotion - Three or Five Like Dominion, Devotion is tough. Best options are three and five. For three, Aons have three core lines. The Three Virgins are a religious figure in Teod. Aons should be drawn with three fingers pressed together. Again, three Shu-gods. For five, there are five domes, and five wings in the Palace of Elantris. Elantris itself is made up of five cities. The Elantris University has five buildings. Sarene began to paint five years ago, at the same time Raoden began to oppose his father. Sarene is 25. Shai has five Essence Marks, there are five arbiters per faction in the Rose kingdom, and Shai finished five days prior to the deadline. Honor - Ten If Honor has a number, it is ten. Ten Heralds, ten surges, ten Radiants, ten Highprinces, plus many, many other sets of ten. There are so many tens. Or is it? More on this tomorrow. Cultivation - Fourteen, Six, Five, Others? Cultivation is particularly tough. We have very little information. Fourteen is an option - there are fourteen legs on a Greatshell, and Lift is fourteen. Six is possible - six legs on an axehound, six years spent on the Shattered Plains. There are also five discovered groupings of Fabrials, and that may be related to Cultivation. Odium - Nine The best bet for Odium is probably nine. There were 99 Desolations (or possibly nine, as I've theorized). Nine Heralds abandoned the Oathpact. Nine of ten people were killedthe Desolation Nohadon's fought. The last Desolation was 4500 years ago, which is conveniently nine times five hundred. See above linked theory for more on that. In unrelated nines Kaladin's flashbacks go back nine years, and there are nine colours of spheres in their currency. The only known length of a Desolation is eleven years, and eleven times nine is ninety nine, which is entirely beside the point, but there might be a link to eleven as well. Non-canon Shards, and Shards from Unpublished Works Mythwalker - Seven, Eight, Nine, Eleven, Sixteen The Shard in Mythwalker is unknown. The book was never finished, and parts of the book were taken for Warbreaker, Mistborn, and a small bit for Way of Kings. Despite this book not being canon, and never finished, it was written long after many Realmatic concepts were throughly established, so if there are Shardic numbers, Mythwalker should have evidence of one. The number in Mythwalker is probably eight. There are eight great houses. There are eight major magic abilities. That said, there are eleven different powers evident in the book (reminiscent of Mistborn, and one is even a God power potentially). The number of houses is actually unclear. There were eight, but also possibly eight minor houses. That would be sixteen. Also, each house may have a female and a male power, that could be sixteen major powers as well. Lastly, one house dies early on, meaning there are seven houses - there are also seven septs of rank that they inform us of. Those numbers are all possibilities. Bavadin - Five, Eight, Nine We don't know much about Bavadin, but there are a few options. There are five shshshshsh, and a shshshshsh can have five shshshshsh. The religious texts on shshshshsh are five hundred years old. There are eight shshshshsh, who elect eight shshshshsh, and shshshshsh spent eight years training. The shshshshsh religion sends eight shshshshsh at shshshshsh per day. There are also nine ranks of shshshshsh, nine people in shshshshsh's expedition, a maximum of nine shshsh without over-shshshshsh, and nine shshshshsh if you count the beggars. This paragraph brought to you by the Librarians. shshshshsh and shshshshsh - Three, four six It's hard to talk about an unpublished work without talking about it! Suffice it to say, Aether was a book that was heavily cannibalized, and the shards in that book are definitely non-canon, and were partially reused for Mistborn in a very different form. All of that is in WoB. The three numbers in the book that have some sort of religious or realmatic significance seem to be three, four, or six. No telling what belongs with which. The above four Shards, while not canon, do show that the books at least have a tendency towards some significant numbers. Which is general support for Shardic number theory. Conclusion There are lots of unknowns with Shardic number theory, and lots of problems. That said, the above conclusions look pretty good... or do they? Part two can be found here, with a whole different take on things. References:
  22. This Theory focuses around the voidbringers and their apparent nature, it seems that the voidbringers we have seen so far are Parshendi/Listeners, that have bonded Voidspren. now this changes their likeness and even changes the way they see the world. mistborn spoiler: Now the Parshendi are able to bond the Voidspren because of there obvious closeness to the cognitive realm. In fact they depend on bonding an ordinary kind of spren to gain any form of sentience. The conclusion that this closeness to the cognitive realm is what makes them voidbringers has lead me to a separate theory. And that is that the Parshendi were not the only race to get sucked into Odium's army during the desolations, I believe that the Aimian's are also capable of becoming voidbringers. I think this because in our only chapter that we see from an Aimian's perspective, Axies the collector, we see an obvious closeness to the cognitive realm in his ability to change his appearance with thought. I believe that some of the more dangerous voidbringers were actually Aimian's I say this because a Parshendi needs a spren to change it's form, an Aimian can do it at will (to a degree). I also think that this is also the cause of the general dislike of Aimian's, I know that Axies says that it is just because they are different, but i think it is actually a dislike that has been built into Rosharan culture due to the Aimian's connection with the desolations. well that's all I have, I would link quotes to Axies' chapter but i feel that the whole chapter is pretty relevant to my theory so if you want to investigate, just read it.
  23. I was thinking that Taravangians goals seem in a way to fit with the bondsmiths ordeal. He is trying to unite all humanity.If bondsmiths do indeed each bond a "Godspren" then Taravangians might be the one bonded to the Odium spren, which would help account for his more twisted means of achieving unity. He is trying to save Roshar using sometimes evil means. This seems to be something a knight radiant bonded to an evil or destructive spren might do. Not to sure about this just thought that I would get some opinions about it.
  24. I've been lax in making theories lately, and missing posting them, so I figured I'd knock out a random theory that has been rattled in my head before I head to sleep. Without further ado... Cultivation is the Shard in the Silence Divine Or at least she used to be Premise There is an upcoming Sanderson novel named the Silence Divine. This planet has no Shard[1], and yet has an active magic system that requires you to perform it. This is the sort of magic system corresponding to a Shardic Investiture[2]. Shards are required to invest themselves consciously[citation needed - I know it's out there], and are reluctant to do so. Thus, some Shard must have invested in Ashyn (the planet the Silence Divine takes place on)[4], in order to produce an actively invested magic system. Hypothesis The Shard that invested themselves on Ashyn is Cultivation. Evidence, Data, and Deductions Ashyn requires a Shardic Investiture Based on the reading from the Silence Divine, magic on Ashyn works as follows. You gain a disease, and for as long as you have the disease you gain a magic power. Magic users are termed incubators. The powers we've seen in the reading include prophecy, flight or hovering, healing, among others. According to Brandon, worlds without shards have magic that you interact with, but not that you perform[2]. These examples on Ashyn are clear examples of magic you perform, and share similarities to other magic systems in the Cosmere. Such magic systems require a Shardic Investiture to be powered. Thus induction suggests that Ashyn has indeed been invested. Cultivation fits Ashyn's Investiture There are a few points that support Cultivation as being related to Ashyn. In the reading, Ashyn is noted to be a planet with ash and magma - a fitting name. Ashyn is described more clearly as a barren world with fertile patches[4]. On Roshar, we note that there is an area that is heavily fertile and safe to an extent from the ravages of the Highstorms - Shinovar. It is very possible that a magmatic planet could support life only through intervention of a Shard such as Cultivation, in a process that parallels the unusual and suggestive area on Roshar. In addition to the parallel of terrain oddities that is suggestive, Cultivation fits the magic on Ashyn very perfectly in terms of Shardic Intent. In fact, bacteria are a tiny form of life. When studied, bacteria are cultivated, causing them to multiply. A bacterial solution is thus called a culture. The specific tie from bacterial infections to Cultivation is suggestive, though certainly not definitive. A third similarity between the magic of Ashyn and Cultivation lies with the Nightwatcher. The Nightwatcher is a spren on Roshar suspected of being related to Cultivation (mostly for lack of better options). The Nightwatcher grants a boon, and also gives a curse[5]. This again parallels the magic on Ashyn, where disabling yourself with a disease grants a benefit of using Investiture. We have Precedent of Cross-System Interactions An obvious issue is that if Cultivation is currently on Roshar, then how can she be powering the magic on Ashyn? Luckily, we have precedent. Odium is noted as being located on Braize, another neighbouring planet in the Roshar System[6]. In addition, we know that Odium is able to direct his power not only to other planets in the system, but indeed across the Cosmere[7]. Words of Radiance show us that not only is Odium capable of doing all that, but he is also capable of splintering himself to produce spren on Roshar. All these facts demonstrate the capability of Cultivation investing herself on Ashyn at the same time as providing spren and possibly other magical influence on Roshar. Indeed, it has a certain symmetry that the three planets in the Roshar system could each be home to a different Shard, despite their interest in Roshar proper. Conclusion Given the above facts and suggestions, it is entirely possible and indeed plausible that either prior to her arrival on Roshar, or at some point during the history of Roshar that Cultivation Invested herself upon Ashyn. The implications can be very interesting - Cultivation may be weakened by this, or it may affect the amount of Investment she has placed on Roshar. It may have implications for theories of Intent Meshing or Balance magics if Cultivation is not fully invested in Roshar as well. References Notes: In the past, a variety of theories have been presented regarding the Silence Divine. This one is notable for several reasons; previous theories believed there to be a Shard on Ashyn as there was evidence for such, previous theories were not aware that Roshar was limited to three Shards and believed mistakenly there were four, and lastly previous theories all posited the existence of a further Shardic intent rather than using an existing one.
  25. In the Way of Kings, we first see a glimpse of Shadesmar when Shallan accidentally discovers it after giving a Cryptic (Pattern, I'm sure) a truth about herself. We see that there are bizarre floating flames in the part of Shadesmar where Shallan landed. Then, in Words of Radiance, we finally learn what those flames are supposed to be: So those flames supposedly represent the minds of living things. I shall henceforth call them "Mind flames". Anyway, when I first read that, I remembered a particularly exciting scene from the Way of Kings involving Jasnah and Soulcasting: (A sidenote: Why did the second footpad's clothing get transformed along with him, while the clothing of the last two remained untouched? I have no idea.) Anyway, I thought to myself: If living things were represented as flames in Shadesmar, does that mean Jasnah had to touch those Shadesmar flames in order to transform the first two footpads? That's some pretty cool imagery right there: Jasnah getting hold of the floating flame of her enemy's mind, casually ignoring the heat, and then sending Stormlight to it to turn her enemy into quartz. But there's a problem with that scenario: People who die have their "Mind flames" snuffed out. Here's a scene from Word of Radiance: The problem here is that a corpse is a non-living thing, and therefore should exist as a glass Identity bead in Shadesmar. If the Mind flame is the thing targeted when Soulcasting a living person, then that mind-flame should transform into a sphere upon that person's death, not vanish as described in that excerpt. So, it seems that the Mind flame is not simply a living thing's version of a dead thing's Identity bead. I now think that each person should have both a Mind flame and an Identity bead on Shadesmar, two distinct Cognitive objects. This duality reminds me of Hesina's little lecture in the Way of Kings: I guess Hesina's "soul" terminology might refer to the Mind flame, while the "very small" spren refers to the Identity beads of each body part (or even each cell). There has to be one Identity bead that represents the whole body, though. I think that Identity bead was the thing Jasnah targeted during that fight with the footpads, not the Mind flame. Even if my theory (that a person has both a Mind flame and an Identity bead on Shadesmar) is correct, I still wonder if there are Surgebinders who can affect Mind flames. Dustbringers have the Essence of Spark, but they're not known to visit Shadesmar, so I don't think they'll be able to do this. Since fire is a form of light energy, I feel that Lightweavers should be able to affect Mind flames somehow. Lightweavers are also adept at changing people's minds, so that fits with the idea of manipulating a representation of a mind. Perhaps Shallan should experiment with using the Illumination Surge on one of those when she next visits Shadesmar? As for Elsecallers, perhaps they can somehow access their own Mind flame in Shadesmar and do funky Elsecaller-y things with it. I'm a bit too sleepy to ponder on specific theoretical scenarios, though. How about you guys? What do you think?
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