Atium and the Ars Arcanum

[Necessary Eagle]

So I've seen a lot of people here saying that the reason the tables of metals are so different in Era 1 and Era 2 is because Atium is a godmetal and doesn't count as one of the regular sixteen. But in HoA, 1/16 of the people with mist-sickness become Atium mistings. If Atium really counted differently, then either none of them should have been Atium mistings, or 1/18 of them should have been, for regular metlas + both godmetals. Because if Atium was one of the original sixteen, then so should have Lerasium.

(I can't believe I signed up here mostly because this was nagging at me, then remembered to post all my Cosmere questions except this one).

[The One Who Connects]

The short answer is Preservation meddled with things so that his prophecy could come true.

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His future-sight gave him a great deal of knowledge(when he created the original Terris Prophecies) This should have been before he betrayed Ruin.
He swapped out the time bubble metals with Atium/Malatium so that he could create Mistings of them, as the Mists were the gaseous form of his Investiture.
He did something else that I'm forgetting, and the table was reverted back to how it should have been after the ascension of Harmony

[Calderis]

The mist sickness was a sign designed by Preservation specifically to get people to burn the Atium to keep it out of Ruin's grasp. 

It's exactly as The One Who Connects just said. From the annotations of HoA ch. 21 part 2, spoilered section,  "on the number 16"

Quote

Note that here, Vin misunderstands what these numbers mean. She’s looking for rules that bind Ruin. What she finds is not that, but instead a clue left by Preservation. Numbers are understandable to people regardless of language, and so Preservation decided to leave some clues for people to discover that would hopefully lead them to follow the plans he’d set in motion. In my prewriting, I’d intended there to be more hard facts to be discovered in the workings of the universe—numbers hidden in mathematical statistics that said rational things, like the boiling point of water or the like. All as a means of Preservation hinting to humankind that there was a plan for them.
In the end, this didn’t work out. I decided it would be overly complicated and that it would just be too technical to work in this particular novel. The only remnant of that plot arc became the number sixteen that Preservation embedded into the way the mistsickness works, intending it to give a clue about what the mists are doing to people. “You now are Allomancers!” is what this was supposed to scream. Unfortunately, the Lord Ruler’s obfuscation of Allomancy—and the number of metals in it—left this clue to fall flat.

 

Edited June 11, 2017 by Calderis

[Necessary Eagle]

7 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

The short answer is Preservation meddled with things so that his prophecy could come true.

---

His future-sight gave him a great deal of knowledge(when he created the original Terris Prophecies) This should have been before he betrayed Ruin.
He swapped out the time bubble metals with Atium/Malatium so that he could create Mistings of them, as the Mists were the gaseous form of his Investiture.
He did something else that I'm forgetting, and the table was reverted back to how it should have been after the ascension of Harmony

Is this theory or WoB?

7 hours ago, Calderis said:

The mist sickness was a sign designed by Preservation specifically to get people to burn the Atium to keep it out of Ruin's grasp. 

 

 

Where does it say that in the annotation?

 

[Calderis]

4 hours ago, Necessary Eagle said:

Where does it say that in the annotation?

I'll go edit the post to fix it, because I wrote WoA instead of HoA, and wrote the wrong chapter. Here's the link. 

https://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-mistborn-3-chapter-twenty-one-part-2/

Bottom of the page, spoilered section. 

[The One Who Connects]

12 hours ago, Necessary Eagle said:

Is this theory or WoB?

It's still got a "citation needed" on the Wiki page, but I am fairly certain that it is fact, having been added to the wiki page by Chaos in 2013. Here's the edit revision history for when it was added.

Quote

However, Preservation could still alter Allomancy in certain ways. He changed the rules of Allomancy twice: the first time, he changed the Table of Allomantic Metals to have Atium and Malatium as external temporal metals, exchanging them with Cadmium Bendalloy.{{cite}} This may have had the effect of allowing for the existence of Atium Mistings. Ultimately, this was part of Preservation’s plan to defeat Ruin: to have Atium Mistings that could burn away Ruin’s body of Atium, allowing someone else, who was not influenced as much by the intent of Preservation, to take up its power and destroy Ruin.

We know that Harmony altered how Snapping worked after his ascension, so I see no reason to doubt that Preservation was capable of what has been said here.