Kurkistan

I always rather dislike how hard it is to ID people during this period...

I don't really think we ought to take Brandon saying "Drab without a Breath" as him necessarily "specifying" it in any hintingful way. This was a signing report, so perhaps a peek at the audio would clarify the tone/emphasis (so he could have said "a Drab... without a Breath it's going to be very hard..." or the like), but a very natural way to read Brandon's answer is in that whole "actual human speech is unnecessarily complicated/ambiguous/repetitive" way, rather than as him being particularly devious and implying that you could be a Drab who has a Breath. - Thanks for the link, Weiry.

Yes. Maybe. We have some oblique WoB's on it. -Yes. -I feel like we have a definitive "no" on this, but I can't find it at the moment, so may be wrong.

Source:

*The Grammar Nazi has struck again!!!* -Sorry, that's one of of my pet peeves. Continue about your day.

My apologies for misinterpreting, then: I read your post as you proposing a true alternative model that you thought possible rather than idle musings. -- If you're dissatisfied with the loss of color, there are numerous theories floating around, and even if all of them are wrong I'm sure some reasonable explanation exists. Myself I've suggested that the color pays for the initial Command itself, while the Breath covers the cost of the follow-through—which suggestion was part of a model of Awakening that Brandon found "very close" to how it actually works.

While the connection between Awakening's color-draining and Shardblade wounds has been noted, this concept of yours simply flies in the face of the very WoB that tells us Awakening is end-neutral. To quote it again: Source: End-neutral/positive/negative is all decided by how the energy is gained, and here's Brandon telling us Awakening is end-neutral because Breath aren't lost in the process. How exactly are you going about interpreting this any other way? EDIT: Mistborn/WoR spoilers

@Windy Well that Annotation neatly torpedoes any attempt to draw a distinction between Vasher & co. and low-Breath Returned: so there is in fact no gradual drop-off of strength.

I was trying to find it, but I'm fairly sure I've seen a WoB saying something about the Returned "endowing" (exact word) some of its Breath to the child; I may just be misremembering the second WoB I linked to, though. So the Returned gives over a fragment of its Splinter, which is then passed down through the Royal line: myself, I'd guess that the divine Breath is moreso anchored to some conceptual "Idrian Royal line"--manifesting in some of them but never truly belonging to them--rather than in the royals proper. So far as not needing a constant influx of Breath goes, I think we already have a fairly natural explanation in that Returned are not properly human: they don't even eat for Austre's sake! So the need for new Breath seems to be a matter of their bodies rather than their divine Breaths--or if it is their divine Breath it's only because they're in Returned that the Breaths act that way.

*Whistles casually* The Royal family is descended from a Returned, after all. EDIT: *Sees edit about superspeed* That same Annotation I just linked to seems like it might answer that as well, as Vivienne can manifest various of the abilities of a divine Breath without needing to get all glowy.

I think I'll disagree with you on the idea that Returned could even theoretically survive without their Divine Breath. Recall that a Divine Breath is not just a super-powered Breath: it's a Splinter of Endowment, and so just as much Cognitive as it is Spiritual—here I rest on my assumption/theory that normal Breath are primarily if not entirely Spiritual. And Returned aren't just people with a lot of Breath and self-image issues. I'm with Vasher that they are BioChromatic Entities in their own right: no longer properly human and not going to become anything like human anytime soon. Beyond that the Divine Breath is obviously doing many many things besides provide the Fifth Heightening—as seen with body-morphing and the like—and so can't be so casually replaced with an equivalent amount of energy. So I would argue that the cause of death when Returned run out of Breath to eat (and so eat their own) is exactly the same as when they give away their Divine Breath: They have lost the thing that makes them tick, what differentiates Vasher from a corpse. So a Vasher who gives away his Divine Breath won't die because he runs out of energy, but simply because he no longer has his Divine Breath.

Yeah, the theory of physics-as-Spiritual has been floating around for quite some time, but it really doesn't come up much in conversation. I'm honestly unsure if I was its originator. - You could just look at my big post instead. P.S. Wow that's a tad out of date. Also a bit assertoric. And it's sorely lacking in generalizations, leaving too much stuck to the individual objects rather than abstracting out to Forms and the like. I also kind of got the "beads in the hair" wrong, since Shallan does apparently transition into Shadesmar; the body here being much more bolted onto the mind than I'd assumed. P.P.S. Still not too bad, though, if I do say so myself. Especially since it was written at a time when I could honestly say that we knew more about the Spiritual than the Cognitive (remember: pre-TES).

Such a system would make it easier for me to perpetuate the impression of my omniscience... *Begins thinking of ways to subvert the system to alert him whenever time bubbles are mentioned...*

Well this is interesting. Here I've been walking around with the unspoken assumption that the "glowiness" of surgebinders was entirely a function of them losing stormlight: so "they" don't glow, just the Light that they're losing. It seems that (perhaps for good reason, I just never gave it another thought) others have different opinions.

I'll note that I severely doubt that "Taln" is a kandra, but for the sake of argument... The Blessing of Potency (or some as-yet unknown Blessing, to be even more speculative) might be able to account for that, if we're perhaps to credit "increased strength and endurance" with some secondary speed/reflex boosts.

I don't necessarily have a problem with this "eat the Breath, get one week's energy" model, but I would like to examine exactly what form that "one week's energy" takes. Where is all that energy sitting in the interim? Simply saying that the Returned "has" it isn't very explanatory. Are you suggesting that the energy's incorporated directly into the Returned and then they vampire off it throughout the week? In case you got lost in my double-talk and speculation, here's the core concern:

@Moogle More likely, I think, is that the sphere begins to infuse at that moment, but continues to do so for some period of time. The "suddenly coming to life" could quite easily be explained within this understadning, I think, by several mechanisms. To throw some out: The sphere is really quite tiny/the infusion rate is high, so it fills up very very quickly; there is indeed some abnormally-large burst at the first moment of infusion to insta-fill everything, but then the stream settles down; etc. -EDIT: The "other realm" option looks good too, actually... Continuous infusion seems necessary, though, if we're to explain why one small sphere could keep Kaladin alive through all of that, and also the implication (or is it even stated outright?) in WoR that Szeth and Kaladin are re-infusing rather freely as they fly about.

I think we may have a divide here in how we understand the process working. By my understanding, it goes like this. Returned eats a kid's soul. The Breath is functionally gone, and now the Returned is just walking around with 1 Divine Breath and that's it. Over the course of a week, he grows gradually weaker. If he does not get another Breath at the end of the week, he consume his own Breath and dies. If he does get another Breath at the end of the week, he immediately consumes it and we start at 1 again. So the Returned here is never really "holding" the Breath as such for more than a moment, and he can't use it to Awaken or anything. The cost is paid upfront, and this cost is what pays for their next week of life. I'd like to emphasize my "at least in some form", then. As you agree, something needs to be sustaining our Returned throughout the week. A possibility, then, is that the Breath is "converted" into some kind of Spiritual battery or the like, or perhaps "locked for editing" while they eat it, or some other mechanism. Something that allows it to continue existing while still not being discernible from the outside. -- Are you suggesting, though, that during the course of a normal week a Returned is in fact holding 2 Breaths—1 Divine and one Soul of a Forsaken child—and gradually consuming the non-Divine one? The distinction is subtle, but if you're right than the Returned could theoretically use that 1 Breath to Awaken or the like and so immediately die from "switching to backup battery", as it were, and eating their Splinters. EDIT: Hmm... Maybe Vasher & Co. can avoid the weakness by supplementing waning eaten-Breath power with the normal "dividend" produced by other Breaths? If so, we'll need to establish a reason why a Returned couldn't simply get away with having some arbitrarily large number of Breaths and never needing to actually "eat" any of them as he lives off the interest. Perhaps, if this is indeed how it works, the weekly eating of the Breath is simply hard-coded into Returned, whether or nor it's necessary/beneficial? Though it's speculative to say so, I doubt that Returned are about to just keel over dead from weakness in the moments before they consume their own Divine Breath: if so, then that provides evidence that the weekly Breath-eating is at least somewhat unconnected to their actual need for energy.

So far as Breath feeding mechanics goes, it really does seem that the Breath sticks around for a while, at least in some form. Otherwise we wouldn't get the observed decline in strength. So that does suggest that the Breath is partially eaten... Perhaps the act of eating any of the Breath irrevocably alters it—maybe "tying" it even more closely to you, or changing its form to that of raw energy rather than the more modular Breath we know and love—but doesn't destroy it outright? Because there has to be something there keeping Returned alive during that week, and that something declines over time until you get another Breath to eat. -But then that doesn't explain why Vasher doesn't, say, lose 2 Breath at a time if we're to posit that he doesn't suffer from periodic weakness... ergh. -- EDIT: Also, to be fair, I likely beat you (and everyone else) over the head with my interest/capital model at least half a dozen times before Jan. 2014, so you can't blame yourself if you started subliminally adopting it.

Ooh, I'll need to remember that horizontal-rule bbcode... Ahem. The way I myself have modeled it, historically, is something of a "captial vs. interest" model. To adopt some of your terminology for the example, X amount of innate/owned Investiture in my model would have Y% of "free" energy that Awakening utilizes: As an example (with arbitrary numbers), if a Breath has 10 "units" of power then you can "reusuably" use 10% of it, for 1 unit/second without diminishing it. But If you want more than 1 unit/second, then you're going to need to stop living off the interest and dip into the capital; in so doing fundamentally reducing the amount of energy that you'll get going forward. Use 2 units for a second and now your capital is only 9 and your interest is 0.9; then... So in this case, if we're to adopt Moogle's model, then people can only really access a certain amount of the power of each Breath without triggering the "disperse and go back to Endowment" process for at least some of its "base" Investiture. -- One thing to note with Returned is exactly how their feeding cycle works: They grow weaker as time passes after "eating", then consume a single Breath each week to go back up to full strength. If they don't have a spare one, then they immediately die upon trying to eat their Divine Breath. This seems to indicate both a suddenness and a gradualness to the Breath-eating process. Perhaps Divine Breath is just very finicky and reacts poorly when you try siphon off any of it? In contrast to this, we get no indication that any of the "high Breath Returned" (Vasher, Susebron, Denth) follow this strength->weakness->strength cycle. This isn't definitive, but suggests a continual process of gradually transitioning to feeding primarily on a new Breath as the week goes on, rather than suddenly as with the one-and-done Returned.

Found the oblique WoB (couldn't find it earlier because half the signing it's from isn't in Theoryland yet) Source: @Weiry Ah, thanks.

Well we know it's shaped like 2d cut of a Julia set, and I doubt the Cosmere looks like that. Memory fails me at the moment, but I feel like we might actually have an oblique WoB hinting at this... I believe you may be operating under the misconception that the cosmere books are locked into being published in in-universe chronological order, which I don't believe has been true for quite some time. So Brandon's talking about writing/publishing order there, not necessarily in-universe order of events. EDIT: Oops, may have misread you a bit (I didn't see Dragonsteel there at the beginning ). If Brandon did say that that's how it was going to work chronologically, then a simple answer is that the big time gap is between Mistborn 1 and Stormlight 1/2, with then only a few years between the two Stormlight halves—Mistborn 2 taking place over that short time span.

Source: --- Source: Source: EDIT: Source:

Welcome back, Zas. I think you'll be rather strongly surprised by the sheer number of WoBs and theories and whatnot we've accumulated in the interim.

Color me persuaded, I suppose. P.S. I also find Awakening to be quite the fascinating subject; so many Realmatic goodies if you dig deep enough.