Future Elantris plot thread theory

[Ripheus23]

So, random:  future Elantris short story, novella, or full sequel, will include archaeologicalish discoveries of the day and the hour of Odium's slaughter of Aona and Skai. Like, that event will have shattered some ancient civilization, say. There's a chance, maybe, that the Chasm, while not directly formed by their deaths, is a long-term consequence of those. This might be true just because sludging Dominion and Devotion into the Cognitive Realm is what is causing the landscape to evolve into self-aware/w/e life of its own, and so this mutation might have caused the Chasm, like skin ripping apart or something. Anyway, I hope to get a cool description of that battle. It's the only time we know of that Rayse took on two Shards at once and defeated both, although to be sure this kind of process might take place in a peculiar-looking way in the Physical Realm. Like, it might be that the Spiritual battle takes the form of a sort of Shard-parable that corresponds to a special sequence of events in which the involved Shards have Invested, so to say. And there are figures, people, in the Physical Realm, who have a sort of narrative correspondence to the Shards, "champions" of the Shard (so to say; it's possible the Shardic championship principle might apply to the Rosharan situation alone, but as Calderis pointed out, the Shard-tethers from the climax of The Hero of Ages give Elend and Marsh off a vibe of "representatives of their respective Shardfriends" (do forgive me ); OTOH Marsh didn't die when Ati did, so IDK). Anyway, I expect a cool battle scene of some kind, there.

Then again I could see a history-lesson scene coming up in a Silverlight novella (or whatever) and describing Ire records of the Aona-Skai killing, or something, maybe.

If one of those stories went that way, maybe we'd also get an explanation for why Rayse is pretending to enforce some mysterious pact between the Shards in the beginning. I was thinking of outer-space redness mystery and the redshift issue with bendalloy bubbles or whatever, so I started wondering about Shards and gravity. First off, when a magic system gives a character a clever way to defy gravity, that seems to give that character a special, massive burst of Spiritual Connection to pure space (I say "Spiritual" to capture the euphoria depicted in characters like Vin, Kelsier, Elend, Wax, and Kaladin; this passion is very intense so I think it has a major Spiritual-energy component/effect). Also, Shardic gravity in itself causes space to warp, not within the 3-plane but perpendicular, if you will, to it (in a way akin to how regular and imaginary/complex numbers are positioned around the number line).

So, is the Cosmere part of another galaxy or not? I guess we don't quite know. Let's say we did, and it was that there were a galaxy's worth more stars to the Cosmere context, than just those in the Cosmere. Some options:

• The Cosmere is part of a galaxy, and this is going to (eventually, let's say in 16,000 years from some point) collide with another galaxy. Stars will be destroyed when this happens, and something to do with Invested gravity will be implicated in the problem. The space-weirdness is the image of the approach of this other galaxy.
• The Cosmere is somehow a galaxy of its own, just with an incredible small number of stars gravitationally bound together to form a miniature galaxy. The Cosmere, then, is in itself in danger of colliding with another galaxy.

Now, if the Cosmere were gravitationally bound in itself, what is the cause of this? Maybe Adonalsium was the cause. [Maybe the Cognitive Realm itself is the cause?] Maybe Adonalsium's existence made the intergalactic collision scenario possible, which is why Hoid thought it was "sort of" necessary or whatever to Shatter Him. Who knows but let's say the reason for the pact, then, was to prevent Physical-Realm Investiture singularities from emerging, and even two Shards in proximity can bring these about.

Rayse is a hypocrite or other deviant, then, for starters because just by being near two other Shards, Physicallyish, he's magnifying the very threat he's supposedly trying to contain. Although three Shards have been present on Sel, only Roshar has been under their enduringly direct influence for so long. Now, maybe when the two Shards start gravitationally fusing (in the dishardic systems), this manifests as a battle between those Shards. Maybe Honor thinks being married to Cultivation prevents his proximity to her from manifesting as such, and that's why he's not technically violating the agreement by settling with her on one world. But I think that weird residue of obscure hostility that has shown up in the dialogue for all (or almost all) the original Shards to date, might be a weird effect of the Shards having this fundamental tension between each other.

Now, it's true, for all we know, Autonomy participated somehow in the Sel and Roshar Shard-slayings. So maybe in both cases we've seen four Shards in the same system at once. There is a way for Autonomy to twist-turn out to be the main antagonist in the SA. I mean we've only gotten 3 books out of a planned 10 so if surprise surprise we get major Bavadin cameos and plotlines appearing in 4 or 5, that will be quite early enough, maybe? So maybe Autonomy could also be the overarching Cosmere antagonist. For example, what if the Dawnshards turn out to be a Rosharan Patji? (Maybe Bavadin will turn out to be behind the svrakiss legend !) However...

However, if n+1-Shardic concentrations are dangerous and Autonomy is keeping herself gravitationally distributed in equilibrium, then overall, maybe the let's-collide-with-Andromeda hypothetical plot could still come into play. Like, maybe Odium is the first foil and Autonomy is the second, so it's Edgli-wielding-Nightblood or what, that turns out to be the ultra-twist endgame apocalypse-monster. Or Edgli never pulls off her mask and says, "Haha, the answer was within me all along!" but after Autonomy is KO'ed everyone else is still stuck with let's-NOT-collide-with-Andromeda to figure out.

I was also wondering, what if there ARE no galaxy-spanning stars outside the Cosmere? Like, there seem to be some displayed on a chart or something and maybe there are only 16,000 stars in the whole universe or whatever. So let's say Adonalsium's Shattering WAS the Big Bang, and the history of the Cosmere all occurs within the mystical equivalent of the Planck Epoch and its immediate aftermath. If the Shards reconverge, the Big Bang will stop and no more stars will be created when the Investiture singularity occurs, and as long as Adonalsium had been around in the first place, only the stars in the Cosmere existed.*,**

So another danger/superplot might be: with Adonalsium dead, the Cosmere star systems are started to slowly drift away from each other. This is causing the redness-weirdness or what. Eventually, all stars will fade from each others' sight and the Cosmere-universe will encompass the fate of cosmological expansion in which each galaxy is too far apart to be cognizant of the others within the framework of the speed of light. This will rupture the essence of the Cognitive Realm itself, sundering it, Fracturing it? anyway, destroying it, the world ends, etc. and so on.

Or maybe the hypothetical Shard-hate(!) leads to a Cosmere War, in which every Shard fights every other, or most fight each other, or there are alliances, or who knows, but think Invested Risk I guess.

*In which event, we might get a scene in which Sanderson describes the creation of trillions of stars in the aftermath universe.

**Let's say there could be time-dilation in the Cosmere, relative to the "bubble" of the Big Bang, so that millennia upon millennia of story-history are able to play outside inside of it. And if Yolen had its own time-dilation factor...