Kurkistan

I think it's rather bluntly implied that she's talking to her spren, as I mentioned when this reading first came to light.

She breaks two wooden objects (rottenified by Forging) into smaller pieces of wood while in the process of a high-tension escape. Not exactly the opportune time to stop and mention a (somewhat intuitive, I think) aspect of the magic system.

I think AoL is next up in the pipeline, but don't quote me on that (just wait for Phantom to quote Brandon on it in T-minus 5... 4....). I doubt we'll get the WoK annotations any time soon, as any decent discussion of Brandon's thoughts/motivations/writing process would almost certainly be laden with spoilers for the series.

Yeah hoser, I must say I agree with Shardlet that you're reading too much into that scene. "Share a look, then start fighting in unison" and harking back to a memory/considering the desolation ahead do not telepathy make.

I wouldn't be surprised if he had a money-lender-quality cage for the broams. He was given them in semi-permanent trust to facilitate his work--which work always happened at his home--so it would make sense for Wistiow to pay to install such a cage for Lirin to be able to re-infuse the broams securely and with ease.

That's the plan.

I'm unsure as to whether you're kidding when you say "sMuscles". Are those a thing now?

@Writer Thanks, I do like my upvotes. @Phantom Except mine is grounded in PHYSICS, rather than magical hapenstance

If you say so. The nature of magic on Roshar begs to differ. Not necessarily, if you only consider the 10 Polestones to be "gemstones". Enter: "Rememberers". Joyless lines of mass-producing quarter-trained Forgers who keep the heritage faction happy. Turn them to making gold out of thin air and you win.

@Phantom On quartz: Ah. I had thought you were trying to claim that quartz was a soulcasting gemstone, for some reason. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Still not sure why you went all "quartz is an Essence, dude" in reply to my point about not being able to soulcast the core 10 gem types. On fake gems: I may be wrong here, I just feel that it would be too easy. After all, there has to be a reason why the 10 gems can't be soulcast, and that could bleed over into trying to synthesize them. On Forgeries: My concern is even more fundamental, actually: I would not be surprised if you simply cannot Forge an object in such a way as to change other objects that it contains. So you'd never be able to "remove" things from a Forged object and see where the breaking point is because you can only change the box, not the cargo. If this is the case, then doing anything to damage/destroy the identity of a Forged singular object as a singular object probably compromises the Forging quite severely. The degree to which this is true is still in the air for me, though. You can reuse soulstamps. Quite easily, actually. The maker of the stamp doesn't have to apply it and we see Shai using one stamp for multiple purposes. No doubt the problem comes down to different objects having different histories, but a system such as king of nowhere proposes would be so genericized that it wouldn't matter all that much.

Ooh, I like that way of describing it (a bit). Still, I'm somewhat leery of allowing this, if only because it allows king of nowhere to be happy. In particular, it allows him to get infinite matter, so long as you're sure to use it up in a relatively confined space. Unless destroying/altering these magically acquired contents should also hurt the stamp? No, it's not an essence. It isn't a associated with an essence either. It's a "soulcasting property" of diamond. http://stormlightarchive.wikia.com/wiki/Ten_Essences I wouldn't be surprised if synthetic amethyst--of any variety, if you insist that it could be done through soulcasting--is still unusable for soulcasting. I'd bet that either its Spiritual or its Cognitive makeup will be different and so interfere with the soulcasting. Things just break when you can manufacture gemstones.

Though I tend to agree with you that Forging likely just changes objects, but not their contents, we know from Shai that it's actually relatively easy to turn gold to lead.

EDIT: Oops, got so caught up out-quoting you that I forgot to write this part. Shallan mentions how her family could only use the soulcaster to make things like marble and opal, not "actual gemstones": I'll assume (quite rightly, I think, given that they hunt down death-monsters for emeralds) that they only think that soulcasting/stormlight-compatible gems are "actual gemstones". (WoK, Ch 33) ---- I would be surprised if there is such a breakthrough, given that gems that aren't exactly right are like bad alloys. (Boom! I out-quoted Phantom! *dances with glee*) Eh, not really. Their armies in the field rely upon it, but they still have farmers. And there's the matter of the relative simplicity of what they produce. For matter!Forging, I'm talking no professions beyond token "this guy is a craftsmen who could have made this really nice chair" and the service industries. Complete disruption of society. Big stuff. Why would you need to be tricky about it? Go into the treasury, where there are hundreds of caskets of gold. Pick one that happens to be empty at this time. Forge it so it's not, and is instead full of real gold. That's 100% plausible and will stick for the foreseeable future. Even if you throw in "oh but the stamp could wear off" as a token, you can still get a lot of mileage out of this. On a less destroying-currency side, you could do the same thing with basically any physical good that you could put in a box. "Empty shipping container on the side of the street by a warehouse? Oh no, that's full to the brim with silk about to be shipped out." And so on. If the stamp's destructibility is really the only limit, then just keep them safe. For instance, all of those doors and vases and whatnot in the palace, instead of being individually stamped, could have just come out of some big crates that got stamped instead, thus cutting down on both labor (all those joyless "Rememberers") and making it so that your replicas aren't marred in any way by shameful stamps. If it could have happened, it would have. And this is all before I even get Realmatic on you.

Soulcasters, though, have an explicit cost of semi-finite energy (stormlight that can only be gathered at particular times) and, more importantly, gems that are known to be impossible to soulcast. So there's an upper limit to what you can do. Also, it's far harder/rarer/less precise than Forging, and so could not be used on anything like an industrial scale.

My current head-cannon has Feruchemicy be usable to change where time bubbles "anchor", and so enabling my version of FTL.

Okay, I can buy that interpretation. Thank you.

I mean more along the lines of someone scraping the gilt off of Shai's desk and selling it, or if the pieces of the door Shai whammied and then broke, or her bed that she whammied and then broke, reverting to their original forms when they're no longer whole objects. So not functional destruction, as I've been discussing with Thought, but making so that an object is no longer a single object. Really, that question was more rhetorical than anything. What King proposes is essentially a matter replicator (oh yeah, I went there. I hope you weren't planning anything important for the next life or so). Once you work out the kinks, anything and everything could be infinitely recreated, at least unless the Dor runs out. That isn't going to happen if Brandon has anything to say about it, and he does, so it won't. EDIT: And what Observer said.

Just a quick theory that occurred to me as I was considering the economics (or lack thereof) of re-infusing gems. So we know (WoK, Ch 17) that the light from spheres last for about a week: "all you had to do was leave [a dun sphere] out in a highstorm, and it would recharge and give off light for a week or so." We also know that nobles light their homes with spheres and Kharbranth lights literally one of the largest structures on Roshar with the emerald broams from its treasury. This has always struck me the wrong way. A week (a five day week at that!) is not a long time. In fact, it is a short time. The broams in the Palanaeum, then, have to be taken out into a high storm every five days or so. We have gotten a few hints, I think, that there exist fabrials to transfer stormlight between gems, but even then! Because of this, and also because it tickles my fancy, I hereby suggest that gems actually radiate stormlight the same way that black bodies radiate heat: namely, the larger the gem, the longer it radiates stormlight for. This is due to the square-cube law: as the size of an object goes up, its volume increases much faster than its surface area. Because of this, the amount of <thing> it contains will be grow much faster than the rate at which <thing> is lost from the surface. So in the case of gems, larger gemstones, such as broams, contain much more stormlight and radiate it very slowly--at least in proportion to the amount they contain. So you might keep your broams down in the pit for a month or two before needing to recharge them. If this is the case, then the exposition I quoted above is just how long chips can retain stormlight (though it might differ for different types of gems). Assuming uniform radiation for all types of gems, it might actually be fairly easy to do some mathematical hi-jinks using rough estimates of size from the books, and figure out exactly how long each denomination's stormlight will last/how much each denomination holds just after a highstorm. Thoughts/math from people with stronger math-fu than me? Tl;dr: Bigger gems both hold more stormlight than smaller gems and lose it--in proportion to their total capacity--much more slowly than smaller gems do.

Over all, we get 4 references of the Cosmere from 3 people. One from Hoid in the letter, one when Jasnah is scoffing at Shallan for something or other, one when Kabsal is talking to Shallan, and one from Hoid-as-Wit to Dalinar in his farewell. Since Jasnah mentioned it so very casually to Shallan (when they first met, in fact), I would assume that it's a fairly well known term in certain circles. And don't worry, that wasn't from memory. eBooks are wonderful things.

Sats, I'm sorry, but it just doesn't shift. If it did, people would get microwaved. Also, as Phantom indicated, you're perception would be of red/blue-shifted events happening very slowly/quickly--what with rods and cones and whatnot being relatively objective--if it did shift.

Recall also that time bubbles were originally going to mess with light, but then Handwavium was applied when that was found to be impractical. So they almost certainly operate the same way now as they would have then, just with light given a free pass for no good reason.

As I said, I highly doubt it.

@Leuthi No one sees Ruin post-spike-removal, that I recall. He disappears when Spook takes his spike out, and when Vin takes hers out to "kill" Marsh for time number 73. His voice also goes away suddenly a few times when Vin loses her earring, if IRC. @Phantom I know you like your quotes, Phantom, but some analysis as to what you think this quote means would also be nice here.

Fair enough, I suppose. I'll just leave it to Sats (good old Auotpwail), then.

In that case you are essentially acknowledging that "relativity has a say in the matter". Therefore, unless you can get down to negative mass (not just 0, negative), you still can't exceed c, by my understanding. That leaves us with issues.