[OB] Four Lifetimes: How Gold Allomancy Relates to Stormlight and Warbreaker

[Blightsong]

Intro

A new WoB was just recenly posted on the forums and I wanted to write up my thoughts on it, including a theory that has been in my head for a while. Let me know what you guys think!

New WoB

A sharder ( @Bugsy6912) recently posted on the 17th Shard Discord a WoB that he had gotten. Read it below:

Spoiler

Analysis+Theory

This is a super interesting Realmatics question. We dont really have much information on how time works in the Spiritual Realm or the Cognitive realm, so this answer was unexpected. One magic system that I believe does touch on how time works in other Realms is Allomancy. Obviously metals like Electrum and Atium interact with time on different realms, but so does Gold and Malatium. The passages we've seen with allomancers burning gold have been very interesting. I've started seeing interesting patterns between these scenes with some characters in Stormlight. Read the below Miles quote:

Quote

"But gold was not completely useless. Just mostly so. Upon burning it, Miles split. The change was visible only to his own senses, but for a moment, he was two people, two versions of himself. One was the man he had been. The angry lawkeeper, growing more bitter by the day. He wore a white duster over rugged clothing, with tinted spectacles to shade his eyes against the harsh sun. Dark hair kept short and greased back. No hat. He’d always hated those. The other man was the man he’d become. Dressed in the clothing of a city worker—buttoned shirt and suspenders over dirty trousers with fraying cuffs. He walked with a slouch. When had that begun? He could see through both pairs of eyes, think both sets of thoughts. He was two people at once, and each one loathed the other. The lawkeeper was intolerant, angry, and frustrated. He hated anything that broke with the strict order of the law, and meted out harsh punishments with no mercy. He had a special loathing for someone who had once followed the law, but had turned his back upon it. The robber, the Vanisher, hated that the lawkeeper let others choose his rules. There was really nothing sacred about the law. It was arbitrary, created by powerful men to help them hold power."

Now compare that to the below Shallan and Kaladin passages:

Quote

"Kaladin glanced at the soldier. Captain of Roshone’s guard; Kaladin thought he remembered the man. He almost seemed too pretty to be a soldier, but then, he was lighteyed.

“Don’t worry about that,” Hesina said. “We’ll deal with it, whatever the… trouble is. With all these wounded pouring in from the villages around, Roshone will need your father’s skill. Roshone won’t go making a storm and risk Lirin’s discontent—and you won’t be taken from us again.”

She talked to him as if he were a child.

What a surreal sensation, being back here, being treated like he was still the boy who had left for war five years ago. Three men bearing their son’s name had lived and died in that time. The soldier who had been forged in Amaram’s army. The slave, so bitter and angry. His parents had never met Captain Kaladin, bodyguard to the most powerful man in Roshar.

And then… there was the next man, the man he was becoming. A man who owned the skies and spoke ancient oaths. Five years had passed. And four lifetimes."

Quote

"Shallan nodded, holding his eyes. “Yes. It would be nice if nobody in the world knew of those things, Kaladin Stormblessed. I agree. With everything I have.” He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken. Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway. It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life. “How?” he asked. She shrugged lightly. “Helps if you’re crazy. Come on. I do believe we’re under a slight time constraint . . .”

In the first two you can notice a distinct similarity in the prose and syntax used in both quotes. There is a kind of "self labeling" going on between both people, but one is burning gold and the other isnt. I think that this is because the fundamentals of gold may function based on the fundamentals that the above WoB hints at, time interacting with investiture, and that this is why we see Kaladin, an invested being, having his Cognitive filter possibly being distorted by investiture. Gold also definitely seems to work this way. My theoy is that the Connections that are snapped into one's Spiritual aspect allow for a kind of meshing, caused by the extra investiture, between one's Spiritual aspect, Cogntive aspect, and how the two are affected by this dilation from the investiture.

End

This is super heavy crackpot, and not very edited as this WoB was posted just ealier today, but I think it Connects some of my ideas on how the Cosmere works. Let me know what holes you guy see in it and what your opinions are!

[ZenBossanova]

If space and time are connected (ie space-time) then if you are able to effect space, then affecting time should be a side effect, if not a direct effect. Investiture is as fundamental a physical quantity as mass is in ours. 

It would also suggest some kind of link between Investiture and Information. Even in our world, Information has been suggested as a fundamental basis for Quantum Mechanics (Wheeler called it, 'It from Bit')  and even more recently, Gravity ( Erik Verlinde and his theory about gravity from entropy, which is closely related to information). 

[Gigalemesh]

Personally I don't think something magical is happening there, just regular introspection as Brandon is so fond of