Source of talents [all the spoilers]

[bluefoxicy]

Nobody seems to be speculating (anywhere, even on the wiki) about the talents being, you know, alive?  Alkatraz even comments on it.

…after seeing the Incarnate Wheel with a creature in the center reaching out to poke a spot in one corner during Kaz's teleportation trick.  It looks like only one thing is alive in there, so why the plural anyway?

Wonder if we'll find out exactly how they got the talents in the first place, the nature of that creature, why only certain people have them, and if there were any obvious (and understood) ethical problems at the time.  Really it'd be nice to see the whole understanding of prior history, but that would require someone getting another translator's lens, another copy of the book Shasta burned (can't say she didn't have a good head on her shoulders for that, but that probably also makes her the one person who should have read the damned thing to make sure anything extremely important was grabbed first while also not revealing anything incredibly dangerous), and some way to keep idiots from deciding they can learn from past mistakes by repeating them but not messing up this time instead of by realizing some things are a really bad idea to begin with—which would violate suspension of disbelief far more than even Sanderson can fix.  Remember:  knowledge doesn't stay secret (notice one guy tried to make an entire language permanently-inaccessible and still failed).

That and the amount of stuff that's still up in the air would require Sanderson to drop a Stormlight novel as #6, or do the annoying Mistborn thing and jump to an entire new setting and cast of characters (I would really prefer to not see a distant prequal going through Incarnate history, at least not before seeing a sequel where people other than the reader discover and draw conclusions about that history from records and reflections—it's more interesting to have to see the past first from the present trying to discover the past).