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We seem to have some numerical trends seen across the cosmere, is there a reason for this, and how will this be incorporated in the future?


The Elemental Shard

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Sixteen is important to the wider Cosmere because it's the number of Shards of Adonalsium. There are other significant numbers but these are strongly implied to be associated with planets rather than the Shards directly.

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1 hour ago, Weltall said:

Sixteen is important to the wider Cosmere because it's the number of Shards of Adonalsium. There are other significant numbers but these are strongly implied to be associated with planets rather than the Shards directly.

Like ten on Roshar: Ten Surges, ten Heralds, ten planets, ten Essences, ten orders of Knights Radiant...

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Cosmere magic systems sometimes include various concepts/motifs as part of the rules. I'm not sure if there's really a reason, or it is just how the cosmere works. One example is the numbers, with different planets sometimes having a certain number motif. Scadrial has 16, while the Roshar system has 10, except for Braize which is 9 for some reason. Another is color. Some of the gems in Stormlight have near identical chemical compositions with the exception of very minor contaminants, but have wildly different effects. This is due to the color of the gem instead of its composition. 

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Questioner

With the gemstones, we know that the hue seems to matter more than the rarity. Is that somehow tying in to the colors for Warbreaker, and how that stuff works?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, that is tying in. Color will be a recurring theme, much as metal will be a recurring theme, as you see different magic systems work. In this case, the color has an affect on the spren and getting a spren trapped in it.

Questioner

So just the color itself?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah the color is the important part. When I was researching Stormlight, I determined that color had to be the point. Because a lot of the gemstones I'm using are molecularly identical.

Questioner

So that was the best way to differentiate?

Brandon Sanderson

So this was the best way to differentiate. But I had already had this as part of the cosmere, that color and the way people perceive color and things like, that were part of it. But getting ten different gemstones that were molecularly different proved to be very difficult and not worth it. If you look, so many of them are just basically the same gemstone with a few impurities. Their crystalline structure is the same.

Idaho Falls signing (July 21, 2018)

 

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