Quantus

An idea occurred to me recently, coalescing from a bunch of scattered bits of information that we know about Amia. It's by no means definitive, but I think you could arrange the facts we have into this overall picture, if you fill in enough gaps with (reasonable?) assumptions. Consider: We know Amia was a rich land and the home of an Oathgate, It had many unique flora and fauna that were unusually Investiture-active, including Larkyin (investiture-drinkers), lanceryn (some of the largest known greatshells of the time), and two species of Sentient pseudo-human. It's capital (Akinah) was built on the same resonant Cymatics principle that several other cities were, and (if Im not mistaken) all Oathgate cities are so far. It was believed that Amia was the historic source of Soulcasters It has a vast network of underground/Underwater tunnels Some time ago (maybe a few Centuries) Amia was "Scoured", causing it's ecosystem to collapse It is an in-world theory (by Hessi) that the Unmade Dai-Gonarthis, the Black Fisher, is responsible for the Scouring of Amia. Almost nothing else is known about this Unmade It's capital city (Akinah) is now surrounded by a Soulcast barrier, and is actively guarded by at least one Dysian Aimian. Shadesmar swaps the landscape above and below the waterline, so Akinah should have huge, twisting stone arcs and spires rising from an inland Bead-Sea corresponding to the Island's Underwater cave system, and my bet is that they will also follow some Cymatic pattern. Then we have Mandras (Mandrae?): Spren use Mandrae to pull Shademar boats through a giant bead Sea to navigate between spren Cities. Mandrae are the Spren responsible for reducing Greatshell's weight sufficiently to survive to the immense size they can reach. Mandrae do not survive for long away from human population centers When I add those two pools of Information together, I get a Theory: The Scouring of Amia was actually the King Fisher (or some other agent of Odium) laying Siege on the Spren City on the other side of Akinah. I dont know which came first: either the Physical Realm Population was destroyed to prevent a Mandra population from surviving, or the Mandra population was destroyed directly which caused the collapse of the Greatshell ecosystem on Amia, but either way the end result would have been a Spren city without access to Mandra-based transportation, and left limited to overland travel in the ocean-adjacent regions. If we add a few other bits of data to the mix, a possibility emerges. Fabrials work by attracting an imprisoning a Spren that is sympathetic to the nature/use of the Fabrial in question Cryptics are Spren representing the underlying "Truths" of the cosmere. Cryptics only have a single City, unlike other sapient Spren races, and have no desire to expand. What If: The Other Side of Akinah is the Cryptic Home City. What If Cryptics (or maybe some lesser-spren relative) are the Spren inside Soulcasters (which are some of the most potent weapons in the cosmere), and operate by Understanding a Bead-soul's Truth and then changing it with a potent Lie. And What If the Black Fisher is an UnMade that is largely unknown to humans because he/she/they do not operate in the Physcial Realm but rather in the Shadesmar Bead-oceans, antagonistic to the Spren population centers directly. That was the result a lot of different idea's coming together, and probably came out less coherent than it seemed in my head. What do you all think?

I suspect that by stepping up to the position of Champion of all Roshar the prospective champion would be forfeiting his Kabranthian "immunity", not unlike how Dalinar had to give up his claim to being an Alethi Highprince when he ascended to the role of High-King.

Honestly it has more to do with what I have in the house at the moment, but I have a couple idea's that might make it work: I think I can use Anchovy juice (aka Worcestershire sauce) to tie it together. It will be a spectacular Success or an equally spectacular Failure.

Welp...I think Im going to have to try grilling some Beef&Tuna patties tonight. I'll report back if I survive

I desperately want to give Lift an Unsealed Bendalloy medallion (Not a spike, that would open her up to some unsavory things). I want to give Pattern a computer. I want to give Renarin a Scholar's education, without all the life-long slavery of the Ardentia.

Any time, Im curious to see where you go with it.

Im with what others have said, I think that the Unite Them mandate is going to have to include the Singers. And I think that theme of getting past old racial divides is already a very big theme, from Rlain and Bridge Four, to Venli as a Radiant, and even to Renarin binding a Voidspren.

Im not sure I your objection to Rlain? A Parshendi Bondsmith would hardly be making more of a Kholin dynasty, and is about as far as you can possibly get from Vorinism.

I pretty sure Navani's next Ideal is going to be "I will Bring Order from the Chaos." In her POV scene during the council meeting in OB Ch 96, she kept repeating "Order from Chaos" to herself like a Mantra. Another often mentioned favorite candidate for a Bondsmith is Rlain.

I like the Ancestry bit. I think it would depend on the Source of the magic in these different tribes, and also if you want it to be a hard barrier or something that has a more environmental and/or cultural connection (which may determine whether you can have a character that crosses the boundaries later). Ask yourself if it's innate to the Magic, a restriction resulting of Mindset or Culture, or a lack of the original environmental Exposure (which with interbreeding might go away). If it's just divergent tribes, those lines would be easiest to blur. If it's because they are sourced in entirely different magic sources (Earth Magic vs Life Magic or some such) then the Elementalist's telepathy likely isn't even operating on the same fundamental principles as "real" Telepathy, such that it can mimic some of the more rudimentary applications but is simply physically unable to accomplish the more advanced applications. So an elementalist that can bend light and a shapeshifter that can change their skin can both appear to become invisible, but they are getting there by different paths so the Ligthbender will never be able to grow claws and the shapeshifter will never be able to fire a laser beam. Another way to go is to make the distinction more about cultural Mindset than literal genetics. In your example, maybe a successful Elementalists has to be so focused on bludgeoning Primal Energies to do their will that they become unable to take the softer, more cooperative approach necessary for subtle telepathy, or are too externally focused to be able to reach the Sympathic and/or Introspective mental-space needed to connect to another form and Shapeshift. Then maybe somewhere along the road a person is born of both, or reaches a mental balance between the two, and learns to Shapeshift into a Rock Golem.

Could easily have been Renarin, that time... Even if Jasnah couldnt soulcast Kaladin directly, she could still fairly easily soulcast the air around him into any number of lethal things, up to and including a giant block of Aluminum. I think she'd still win in all but the most uneven contests; at the end of the day Soulcasting is just plain one of the single most potent powers in the entire Cosmere, as far as I can tell.

There's a lot of lingual development going on currently in Roshar, and with Dalinar learning to read and many of the more oppressive Gender roles breaking down I expect to see more. Given that, and how we saw the Amaram and the Sons of Honor using Glyphs as a phonetic language instead of the standard pictographs, there's a very real possibility that those three are not a symbolic representation of the Kholin family at all, and are instead a Three-glyph word or phrase in their own right. The catch is that we have a ton of unknown Glyphs and none that are specifically The Spear.

Hmmm, well, holding stormlight makes it so you dont need to breathe, if it can sustain you in other ways (food, sleep, etc) that might just work... My problem is that Im just not that Lawful a character, and the Skybreakers are about a lot more than just a personal Code, it seems very specific that it needs to be external.

I tend to agree, it always seemed similar to me to how Heightenings eventually let you get around a lot of the limitations of the system including (to an extent) the need for color. That being said, Brandon has indicated that he really doesnt like that aspect of the system and doesnt think it fits with the rest of the Cosmere magics, and since it's never actually been done on screen is seriously considering making it impossible, casting Slatrification as an In-World legend that is just incorrect.

Given the context I suspect that "Drought" has become a Rosharan word for Scarcity, rather than the literal Lack of Water. As your WOB points out, there are a lot of hold-over words from pre-roshar, like Wine for any alcoholic drink even though they have no grapes, Soil as in the WOB example, or Chicken being any bird.

My ebook search function is failing me. Cant find the actual quote that explains the role, but in Way of Kings Ch 15 we do get this: "Killing the King's Wit was Legal. But by so doing Sadeas would forfeit his title and lands. Most men found it a pour enough trade not to do it in the open. Of course, if you could assassinate a Wit without anyone knowing it was you, that was something different."

We have this WOB that says it's some combination of Skill, Ability, Numbers, and Undispersed Power (which I take to reference that most of the Others have their power tied up in Investing a planet, while prior to Braize he was unattached). However the "Numbers" option is what really catches my attention, because I've long thought it possible that Shattering a Shard specifically require Two shards to pull it apart rather than being something any one of them can do alone. A popular theory is that Autonomy is helping Rayse, though there are also all these shards we know nothing about which could be suspects too.

He's a Thrill-addict

Another possibility is that Hemalurgy, or at least it's fundamentals, predate Scadrial itself in the same way Lightweaving existed on Yolen before the Shattering, and Stormlight-in-gems existed on Roshar before Honor and Cultivation arrived and co-opted it. The implication would be that Scadrial was created more to give them an opportunity to Modify and/or Refine Hemalurgy, rather than creating it whole. Much like Yolen's version of Lightweaving, I wouldnt be surprised if some or even all of the Metallic Arts are modeled after older Dragonsteel era magics. For example, I could see it playing out that Dragons were innately Feruchemists, or that prior to Scadrial Hemalurgy worked but only with spikes made of Dragonsteel.

It doesnt say it's made of Atium specifically (sort of the the opposite actually), but it does say that Ruin's Investiture is in the mix, and more directly that we often get:

As an addendum to what I said earlier: I still think that Autonomy (or an avatar of Autonomy) is by a wide margin the most likely suspect, but it turns out there is a WOB that Alloy of Law takes place after Book 5 of Stormlight. So if things go really (REALLY) wrong for our Radiant friends, Book Five could see Odium released to go cause trouble elsewhere. But were that to happen I can't see what story would be left to tell in Books 6-10. Also, I kinda like the possibility that Sazed has gone entirely bonkers and "Trell" is a splinter personality representing a Discord persona; not sure how plausible that is, but a Jekyll & Hyde deity would be one hell of a narrative premise.

Alright, Im with you now, sorry I was thinking along slightly different lines. That is definitely something I can agree with, but I think it boils down to a different issue than the ethics of Hemalurgy itself. To use your example, the Question of whether Capital Punishment is ethical is a different conversation entirely than the question of whether specific methods of Execution are ethical. And to go back my example, Organ Transplants would indeed be completely horrific if modern medicine didnt have things like anesthesia to prevent it from being an exercise in torture. We're agreed that any kind of experienced Torture is unethical basically by definition, but his strikes me as less of a fundamental ethics issue and more of a technological barrier. As you say, it's possible to travel to the Cognitive realm and witness the effects and fallout of Spiking a person on that side, to determine if there is indeed any experienced Pain before they move on, and that could be done, though again a willing volunteer would make a lot of difference in the Ethics of such experimentation. From there it's just a matter of developing the Feruchemical fabrial* technology to achieve cognitive anesthesia. Pain Fabrials exist, sometime similar to that might work if aimed more at the Cognitive. Some combination of Feruchemy might help, perhaps filling a combination of Senses, Mental Speed, and Wakefulness would result in a functional cognitive dullness similar to chemical anesthesia. Perhaps tapping a very little Gold would prevent the cognitive pain without actually regrowing the lost spiritweb (which apparently has it's own issues). *WOB has it that Fabrial will eventually be a more cosmere-wide term for Investiture-based technology, and not purely applied to Rosharan Gem-based devices.

It's a whole lot of diligent stacking up of various WoB's into a timeline (by people better than me), and some dates are more definitive than others. We know that SA started off "just before the Alloy of Law era" and there were 300 years between Era1 and Era2. We also know that "Elantris, Mistborn, Warbreaker and Way of Kings all happen chronologically", and that "Way of Kings and Alloy of Law are pretty close to one another but Elantris is fairly far before them" And we know that Alloy of Law happens after SA book 5, though Brandon says hasnt definitely worked out the chronology for that one. [references from the thread @RShara posted #1 #2 #3]

The problem with that argument is think I would categorize that as going back to the religious domain that you wanted to discount, as that was precisely the argument historically used against organ donation and/or any postmortem mutilation, and is contingent on what you (or whomever is making the choice) believes happens to them after they die. There also seems to be a lot of in-world beliefs that consider the thing that goes Beyond and the Cognitive Aspect to be entirely separate things, but Brandon's said he intends to leave it unexplained. I suspect we'll see different Scadrian groups that fall on both sides.

The closest real world equivalent I can think of is Organ Donation (which on it's face is just as Horrible and Painful a procedure as this, save that we take pains to do it far more cleanly), and the ethics there generally fall on two fundamental principles: 1) that the person is irrevocably terminal AND has previously agreed to be used that way (or in the case of DNR's has also specifically asked not to be revived by other means) and 2) that the recipient has a very real Need for the addition/replacement. So it would to be a Choice by the donor and it's a Need rather than an unnecessary/elective procedure by the Recipient. Now, all the procedure in the world doesnt stop us from having horror-stories of tourists waking up in a bathtub full of ice missing a kidney, but similarly that back-alley butchery doesnt entirely negate the possibility of doing it ethically.