Post your unfounded theories about unexplored Shards

[ElectrumSavant he/him]

So, there were several shards revealed in RoW that we know nothing about besides their names. To my knowledge, that includes:

• Whimsy
• Mercy
• Valor
• Invention

Make your completely unfounded predictions now, before anything conclusive is revealed about them! Here are mine.

WHIMSY- This shard has never actually settled down on a world, and instead just hops from world to world making havok of the local conditions and creating ridiculous magic systems (this is based on a WoB). In addition, the vessel is constantly giving up the shard to random passerby, so the Shard Whimsy has changed hands some fifty different times since the Shattering. Its current holder? Doug, the pancake-like being that communicates with flatulence that Hoid mentioned in a tangent in Tress of the Emerald Sea.

MERCY- We've seen a lot of different healing-based magic systems across the Cosmere. Bloodmaking, Regrowth, Aons, and so on. But Mercy takes things to another level. On Mercy's homeworld, nothing ever dies. No one gets sick, no one gets injured, no one even feels pain. And no one has for centuries. But the complete lack of consequences has had horrible results on the mental state of the people on Mercy's planet. Worldhoppers visit Mercy's world often to get access to her Investiture and stave off the effects of aging, but have to get out quickly to avoid getting attacked by madmen. Mercy's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

VALOR- On Valor's homeworld, Investiture is given for a brief time to living people while they are struggling against great odds like a super-adrenaline. Entering the Valor-state allows access to enormous strength and endurance, but the longer someone stays in the Valor-state the greater the risk that they will be burnt out and left crippled when they eventually leave it. Valor's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

INVENTION- Invention moves from world to world and adopts avatars, often without the avatar even knowing that they are connected to the Shard. Avatars get an enhanced ability to access Fortune, giving them a limited future sight and the ability to make connections between ideas no one has made before. Her most important avatar is in charge of Silverlight. Valor's vessel is a dragon, and is the same as it was at the Shattering.

[Firesong she/her]

54 minutes ago, ElectrumSavant said:

So, there were several shards revealed in RoW that we know nothing about besides their names. To my knowledge, that includes:

• Whimsy
• Mercy
• Valor
• Invention

Make your completely unfounded predictions now, before anything conclusive is revealed about them! Here are mine.

WHIMSY- This shard has never actually settled down on a world, and instead just hops from world to world making havok of the local conditions and creating ridiculous magic systems (this is based on a WoB). In addition, the vessel is constantly giving up the shard to random passerby, so the Shard Whimsy has changed hands some fifty different times since the Shattering. Its current holder? Doug, the pancake-like being that communicates with flatulence that Hoid mentioned in a tangent in Tress of the Emerald Sea.

MERCY- We've seen a lot of different healing-based magic systems across the Cosmere. Bloodmaking, Regrowth, Aons, and so on. But Mercy takes things to another level. On Mercy's homeworld, nothing ever dies. No one gets sick, no one gets injured, no one even feels pain. And no one has for centuries. But the complete lack of consequences has had horrible results on the mental state of the people on Mercy's planet. Worldhoppers visit Mercy's world often to get access to her Investiture and stave off the effects of aging, but have to get out quickly to avoid getting attacked by madmen. Mercy's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

VALOR- On Valor's homeworld, Investiture is given for a brief time to living people while they are struggling against great odds like a super-adrenaline. Entering the Valor-state allows access to enormous strength and endurance, but the longer someone stays in the Valor-state the greater the risk that they will be burnt out and left crippled when they eventually leave it. Valor's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

INVENTION- Invention moves from world to world and adopts avatars, often without the avatar even knowing that they are connected to the Shard. Avatars get an enhanced ability to access Fortune, giving them a limited future sight and the ability to make connections between ideas no one has made before. Her most important avatar is in charge of Silverlight. Valor's vessel is a dragon, and is the same as it was at the Shattering.

We actually have a bit on Invention, they were a scholar that thought that the greatest and most worthy of talents is the talent to create machines and devices. Hoid mentioned them in the Way of Kings epilogue alongside Virtuosity and what is supposedly the Survival Shard (Wisdom). We also know that they did something that made them hard for Harmony to find, as they basically vanished. 

We also know Whimsy wouldn't have changed that much. Brandon has made sure in and out of work to push the idea of how absurdly rare it is for Shards to change hands, with each one being an incredibly notable event. 

We know something about Mercy worries Harmony greatly, and they were involved in the Splintering of Ambition, supposedly helping Odium. 

[One who Breaths and Reads she/her]

Actually I would personally say that Mercy would have it that instead that when people die on Mercies world its instead that they are revived as Cognitive shadows like the Returned in a sense or the near dying gain immense investure to survive and then the rest is correct. Although thats my thoughts on what fits a bit more

[alder24]

9 hours ago, ElectrumSavant said:

So, there were several shards revealed in RoW that we know nothing about besides their names. To my knowledge, that includes:

• Whimsy
• Mercy
• Valor
• Invention

Make your completely unfounded predictions now, before anything conclusive is revealed about them! Here are mine.

WHIMSY- This shard has never actually settled down on a world, and instead just hops from world to world making havok of the local conditions and creating ridiculous magic systems (this is based on a WoB). In addition, the vessel is constantly giving up the shard to random passerby, so the Shard Whimsy has changed hands some fifty different times since the Shattering. Its current holder? Doug, the pancake-like being that communicates with flatulence that Hoid mentioned in a tangent in Tress of the Emerald Sea.

MERCY- We've seen a lot of different healing-based magic systems across the Cosmere. Bloodmaking, Regrowth, Aons, and so on. But Mercy takes things to another level. On Mercy's homeworld, nothing ever dies. No one gets sick, no one gets injured, no one even feels pain. And no one has for centuries. But the complete lack of consequences has had horrible results on the mental state of the people on Mercy's planet. Worldhoppers visit Mercy's world often to get access to her Investiture and stave off the effects of aging, but have to get out quickly to avoid getting attacked by madmen. Mercy's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

VALOR- On Valor's homeworld, Investiture is given for a brief time to living people while they are struggling against great odds like a super-adrenaline. Entering the Valor-state allows access to enormous strength and endurance, but the longer someone stays in the Valor-state the greater the risk that they will be burnt out and left crippled when they eventually leave it. Valor's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

INVENTION- Invention moves from world to world and adopts avatars, often without the avatar even knowing that they are connected to the Shard. Avatars get an enhanced ability to access Fortune, giving them a limited future sight and the ability to make connections between ideas no one has made before. Her most important avatar is in charge of Silverlight. Valor's vessel is a dragon, and is the same as it was at the Shattering.

Those are great and fun ideas. Nice work, I like it. And the WoB you've found is very interesting.

To nitpick just a little:

As said before, Shards changing happens very, very rarely. Whimsy simply couldn't do that. But there is a Shard besides Harmony that isn't held by its original Vessel (pre RoW) - not sure if that counts Splintered Vesselless Shards like Honor or Devotion etc. Nonetheless, Shards changing Vessels are rare:

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Brandon said offhandedly, "It is not random who got which Shard." Also, Shards very rarely change hands. Brandon emphasized the "very" there.

Alloy of Law 17th Shard Q&A (Nov. 5, 2011)

 

Spoiler

Questioner

Are there currently any Shards, besides Harmony, that are not held by their original Vessel?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Skyward Seattle signing (Nov. 10, 2018)

 

Invention's Vessel can't be a dragon. We know there is only 1 dragon who is a Vessel and that's Cultivation, Koravellium Avast:

Spoiler

Vetterlinj

Is there more than 1 dragon amongst the Shards? If so, how many are there?

Brandon Sanderson

Only 1 dragon right now as a Shard.

Dragonsteel Mini-Con 2021 (Nov. 22, 2021)

 

Spoiler

Benjamin Susla

Did Hoid confirm that Cultivation is a dragon?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't know if Hoid did. I can confirm it for you. Cultivation is. 

If I RAFO'd that one, everyone would be "Oh it's a secret still." It's not. I could RAFO it so people continue to theorize, which I sometimes like. But it's not suppose to be a secret.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 1 (Dec. 17, 2020)

 

 

I personally believe Mercy is more about "easing the pain by killing you" rather than a good and caring Shard. After all there is something worrying in them and they took part in the battle between Odium and Ambition.

[Quantus he/him]

Im convinced that Invention cant be found because they went "Periscope Down" into their workshop, whatever form that may take, and is off Building something that they think will help in the coming  Conflict Harmony contacted them about.  I further think this will be a Planetary device, just like when Adonalsium created Roshar for whatever reason (a Realmic Pressure Regulator, at the very least).

 

I think Mercy is the Anti-Honor.  WOB says "Honor is the sense of being bound by rules, even when those rules, you wouldn't have to be bound by." Mercy is choosing to disregard those same societal Bonds.  Thematically that is something we default to calling a Good thing, but like Passion/Hate/Odium, it's really only "Good" when applied in moderation and balanced by other considerations.  

Spoiler

Quote

 

Questioner

Shards. We started with fairly obvious ones, magic wise. Trying to keep this spoiler free, so: Ruin, Preservation, this kind of thing. Then we get the weird ones. Why do we have Shards that can only exist in the mind of a sentient creature? ...Like the concept of Honor can only be done when it's carried out, essentially, by a sentient creature.

Brandon Sanderson

So when I split Adonalsium I said, "I'm going to take aspects of Adonalsium's nature." And this involves personality to me. So the Shattering of Adonalsium was primal forces attached to certain aspects of personality. And so I view every one of them this way. And when I wrote Mistborn we had Ruin and Preservation. They are the primal forces of entropy and whatever you call the opposite, staying-the-same-ism-y. Like, you've got these two contrasts, between things changing and things not changing. And then humans do have a part, there's a personality. Ruin is a charged term for something that actually is the way that life exists. And Preservation is a charged term for stasis, for staying the same. And those are the personality aspects, and the way they are viewed by people and by the entity that was Adonalsium.

So I view this for all of them. Like, Honor is the sense of being bound by rules, even when those rules, you wouldn't have to be bound by. And there's this sense that that is noble, that's the honor aspect to it, but there's also something not honorable about Honor if taken from the other direction. So a lot of them do kind of have this both-- cultural component, I would say, that is trying to represent something that is also natural. And not all of them are gonna have a 100% balance between those two things, I would say, because there's only so many fundamental laws of the universe that I can ascribe personalities to in that way. 

So I find Honor very interesting, but I find Autonomy a very interesting one for the exact same reason. What does autonomy mean? We attach a lot to it, but what is the actual, if you get rid of the charged terms, what does it mean? And this is where you end up with things like Odium claiming "I am all emotion." Rather than-- But then there's a charged term for it that is associated with this Shard. I'm not going to tell you whether he's right or not, but he has an argument. 

Emerald City Comic Con 2018 (March 1, 2018)

 

 

 

  Edited July 26, 2023 by Quantus

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

18 hours ago, ElectrumSavant said:

WHIMSY- This shard has never actually settled down on a world, and instead just hops from world to world making havok of the local conditions and creating ridiculous magic systems (this is based on a WoB). In addition, the vessel is constantly giving up the shard to random passerby, so the Shard Whimsy has changed hands some fifty different times since the Shattering. Its current holder? Doug, the pancake-like being that communicates with flatulence that Hoid mentioned in a tangent in Tress of the Emerald Sea.

Upvoted just for that. Hilarious. Maybe the kites are steered with farts?

18 hours ago, ElectrumSavant said:

MERCY- We've seen a lot of different healing-based magic systems across the Cosmere. Bloodmaking, Regrowth, Aons, and so on. But Mercy takes things to another level. On Mercy's homeworld, nothing ever dies. No one gets sick, no one gets injured, no one even feels pain. And no one has for centuries. But the complete lack of consequences has had horrible results on the mental state of the people on Mercy's planet. Worldhoppers visit Mercy's world often to get access to her Investiture and stave off the effects of aging, but have to get out quickly to avoid getting attacked by madmen. Mercy's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

On the one hand, leading to mental illness on that scale is hardly merciful. On the other hand, that fits perfectly with how vessels interpret the shards' intents weirdly sometimes, ie. TLM spoilers:

Spoiler

Autonomy enforcing independence of Bilming citizens by making them all identical under the surface. Manufactured individuality.

 

19 hours ago, ElectrumSavant said:

VALOR- On Valor's homeworld, Investiture is given for a brief time to living people while they are struggling against great odds like a super-adrenaline. Entering the Valor-state allows access to enormous strength and endurance, but the longer someone stays in the Valor-state the greater the risk that they will be burnt out and left crippled when they eventually leave it. Valor's vessel, a human, is the same as it was at the Shattering.

I think it's more likely that the Valor-state is addictive. It also could be based on a different kind of valor.

 

19 hours ago, ElectrumSavant said:

INVENTION- Invention moves from world to world and adopts avatars, often without the avatar even knowing that they are connected to the Shard. Avatars get an enhanced ability to access Fortune, giving them a limited future sight and the ability to make connections between ideas no one has made before. Her most important avatar is in charge of Silverlight. Valor's vessel is a dragon, and is the same as it was at the Shattering.

I definitely think Invention could be at Silverlight.