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Tor's got the second chapter up! That last line! Man. I can't wait for this book! EDIT: Oh. Apparently, there's a while other thread for that. I wondered why no one had said anything about it yet.

No, see, I'm thinking that it would work like regular compounding. So the Leecher gets a huge burst of luck, and the Augur gets a big healing burst. The feruchemical abilities are both very useful, so the twins would have to spend almost all their downtime storing, since they would each want full metalminds of their own to use, as well as bits for the other to burn. Basically, you'd get one guy who's always unlucky and another who's always sick, and they'd be grumpy with each other all the time, since the train who'd benefit most from the given attribute would be the one who didn't have to store it.

He's trying to find the other Shard(s), I'd wager, since he just found clear evidence of a Shard from outside Scadrial messing with his world.

I was thinking gold and chromium, maybe. Both are extremely useful feruchemical powers that are very inconvenient to store and are not all that useful, allomantically (well, chromium is, if you're fighting other allomancers).

It depends. I got a response almost immediately (a couple of days, tops), but sometimes it takes a long time.

I still think that my idea about twins with opposite allomantic and feruchemical powers could work. The reciprocal relationship of their powers could be a part of their spiritual identity.

Ever listen to Russian Circles? They're good listening for reading a lot of epic fantasy.

I think that there should be a little wiggle room on the differing sDNA. It's not quite the same as one twin is Mistborn and the other isn't. In a sense, it is: one twin can store attribute X, and the other cannot. However, once you've got Investiture stored somewhere, and someone tries to pull it out, if their sDNA is really close, they might be able to access it, if imperfectly. Or, more likely (in my mind), if your twin is, say, a Bloodmaker, and you're an Augur, you might be able to burn his his metalmind for a big health burst. You're already hacking the system by Compounding, so a little more fudging of things might not be a big deal.

There is most definitely a plot, but there is a lot going on. Counting LoC, you still have 9 books to read. Guess how much time elapses during those 9 books? Now, I don't really consider this a spoiler, but just in case:

I could be wrong, but I don't know if anyone is really sure whether or not this will be in SA3. I assume Jasnah will rejoin the main plot before the book is out (though not necessarily; Talenel sure didn't end up doing much in WoR, despite his dramatic appearance at the end of TWoK), so it's not like it's irrelevant. I wouldn't complain if there ended up being enough material like this to fill a novella, and that got released in 2016 to tide us over for Oathbringer (which now looks like it will be coming out a full three years after WoR).

Did you guys read the beginning of that story, that got released on Tor.com a little over a year ago? I somehow missed it when it came out and just found it a few weeks ago. I have therefore been eagerly linking it anytime I have the slightest excuse to do so. So, here it is again: http://www.tor.com/2014/08/06/stormlight-archive-scene-after-words-of-radiance/

I bet it's going to world-shaking for Dalinar when he realizes how wrong he was about his brother. I can see him in a position where he finds that the people he is up against are on the same side that Gavilar was. In fact, if Dalinar, the Radiant, could be sent back in time to his brother's assassination, he might even discover that he now only opposes the Parshendi's methods of solving the Gavilar problem. I bet he would want to stop him, too.

I don't know. I mean, I assume that the chasmfiends and other huge Rosharan creatures have their gemhearts so they can store up Stomrlight to fuel their anti-grav. It would stand to reason that the skyeels must have small gemhearts as well. On the other hand, there probably is some ambient Investiture somewhere. The tricks windspren play on people seem to rely on the Adhesion Surge. Yes, they could be getting that from spheres the person had, but I would think that people would eventually connect their spheres going dun with windspren pranks.

Check the picture I linked above. They definitely land sometimes; although, it is apparently rather ungainly. As for a mucus layer, probably only if they're amphibious, I would think.

Yeah, I'd say that they're more or less gliders. However, with access to something akin to gravitation Lashings and lift from the air sacs (which must be some kind of lighter-than-air gas they produce or something), what they're doing probably would be a whole lot like flying. I think it's a gas for lift because Shallan says that she "noticed some sort of pouch under each wing that deflates as it dives."

I think that this is exactly what happened. While the scene isn't long enough for us to realize it, the Jasnah that talks to Hoid at the end of WoR is much changed from the Jasnah that we knew in TWoK and from the beginning of the book.

The skyeels can fly because of those so-called luckspren, I'd say. The same spren congregate around chasmfiends, who really are way too big to be the way they are. I think that they're really anti-gravityspren or something (maybe straight-up gravitationspren, lashing part of the creatures' weight against the force of the planet). Yes, I know that the gravity is less than Earth's on Roshar, but it's still not enough for a creature like a skyeel to fly or a chasmfiend to run around without getting crushed under its own weight.

Fly above it, maybe?

That's a really good question. I actually never thought of what they did with it. I just figured it was getting sucked out and returned to the source Here, by the way, is the page from Shallan's notebook on skyeels (they aren't crustacean-y): http://coppermind.net/w/images/Skyeel.jpg

The dragon-looking things are larkins. That's what Nalan used to suck out Lift's Stormlight and also what Rysn was given as a gift after she jumped off the Reshi island.

You know what's weird? I got into Sanderson because of A Song of Ice and Fire, but I tried to reread Game of Thrones a few months ago and could barely get past the first few chapters before I got bored with it. Like a lot of people, I hadn't heard of ASoIaF until I got wind of the HBO adaptation. The synopses I saw on the Internet and the teaser footage floating about intrigued me, so I read the books. I finished them fairly quickly and wanted something else to read. I thought about WoT, but I had lingering memories, from when I was 12 or so, of seeing these huge paperbacks kicking around, each longer than any book that I could imagine reading, and seeing "Volume 4 of The Wheel of Time," "Volume Six..." I think memories of being intimidated by the length scared me away. I eventually happened upon Mistborn (without, as I recall, realizing that it was written by the same author who was finishing WoT). The thing is, Mistborn didn't turn me into an immediate die-hard Sanderfan. After all the grimdark grit of ASoIaF, it seemed rather light--almost breezy. It felt like too much fun to take too seriously, and I almost felt guilty for liking it as much as I did. I read The Way of Kings not too long after that and realized that Sanderson wasn't just fun. His books are really good. Then I found out about the Cosmere. And then I was ruined.

An idea I have entertained is that who/whatever held Adonalsium (and, no, we don't know that Adonalsium even was held by anyone or anything; I'm just going with the idea for the sake of my theory) was dead when the Shattering happened. In fact, that is why those involved were motivated to go through with the Shattering to begin with. Basically, I'm thinking that things were getting very weird in the Cosmere, with no consciousness guiding its governing force. In order to forestall a catastrophe (or maybe halt an ongoing one), some knowledgeable people got together to try to solve the problem. I'm assuming that this group of people included some or all of the original 16 Shardholders. So the Shattering was their solution, and I have a couple of ideas for why this might be. One is that the power was too great for any one person to handle, so they needed to break it up. Another is that they weren't actually trying to shatter it; they just needed to get cracks into it to so that someone would be able to access the power. If it's the latter, maybe it was just a total accident, or maybe schemers like Rayse and Bavadin intentionally hijacked the process so they could get their hands on some of the power.

You know what would be awesome? If there were identical twin ferrings who had different metals and discovered that they could actually use each other's metalminds and access what the other had stored. Or if they were twinborn and had opposite allomantic/feruchemical powers. So, the one could burn the other's metalminds and get a huge burst of the attribute the other had stored. Besides it being interesting, there could be a neat character dynamic, where they're always grousing at each other for having to store attributes for the other to use (especially if one is a Bloodmaker and has to go around feeling sick a bunch, just so their Augur sibling can burn it as needed and get huge healing bursts).

I really think that something is, or at least was, blocking Jasnah's progression. Sure, the "prodigiously benevolent" quote specifically refers to the Elsecallers serving as go-betweens for Radiants unable to access Shadesmar, but it still implies something about their character that I find almost wholly lacking in Jasnah. The narrative implies that it's there, beneath the surface, but she seems to be protecting herself by maintaining a cold distance from almost everyone. She hardly tells Shallan anything about Radiancy, and I don't think she's really keeping much information back, except perhaps some tidbits that she feels should be kept private between her and Ivory. I think that she really didn't know much.

Well, he apparently gains the memories of the host bodies he takes over. I assume that he wasn't actually hanging out in Will's lair. Rather, because he had all of his memories, he suspected that someone might come looking for him and therefore was on the lookout for a party to come through. When he saw Fitz, who he would have recognized, he just scuttled off to the hideout and waited for him to show up.