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Out of curiosity, do you think he's capable of the sort of change necessary to eventually learn/develop a conscious of his own? And would the fact that he's now kinda in a spiritual menage-a-trois with a Highspren have any affect?

Whatever you want to call it, it heals damage to the spiritweb such as what is caused by a Shardblade or even being the donor for a hemalurical spike, meaning it can regenerate large portions of the web that have been entirely removed. If it were purely using the Spiritweb as a blueprint to alter the physical aspect, that would not happen.

That might be happening already with the Color Distortion of the Tenth Heightening, though presumably you'd need the education to actually know what different color patterns correlated to various materials.

I wouldnt think so, any more than a person's identity changes with their cloths. It might be aware of its contents though, on some level.

damnation, that honestly makes even less sense to me, though I read the WOB the same way you do. I understand the whole "there's nothing wrong with you to heal" in the context of not healing things like Kaladin's natural chemical Depression, or various genetic abnormalities that can always be debated as evolution rather than damage, but the change that happens with savantism is the result of external forces on the spiritweb, more akin to Shardblade damage I would think. Though the same could be said for Snapping and/or the Nahel bond and Cosmere healing doesnt touch those. Curiouser and Curiouser.

It's a running gag on the boards, sourced in the Alleyverse RP sub-forum. The Cookies may contain hemalurgic spikes, like the rumored booby-trapped Halloween candies of old. I still think that was just an excuse for my parents to steal from my haul...

Yes, savantism is more about over-use or over-exposure to Investiture which causes a warping of the Spirit-web that has become infuled with invetiture so much that it causes changes to the physical form. A similar thing happens on Roshar to people that over-use Soulcaster fabrials. I dont think we know what would happen if you removed one from a savant. Assuming you could survive the removal of the spike (depends on where it was implanted) I could see you retaining some shadow of the original abilities, but since narrative savantism is supposed to be a down-side, I think it more likely that you'd have withdrawl symptoms just like a normal allomantic savant who stops flairing. No idea if you could use Gold or Regrowth to heal the savantism away.

I could buy it. We know that Dawnshards were involved in whatever made Ashyn uninhabitable. We know that Tanavast "raved" about them in his final days, becoming convinced that the Surgebinders would do the same thing to Roshar, though by the time he made the Visions he seemed to think that the people of Roshar wouldnt be able to defeat Odium without them. We know from that poem they could "bind any creature voidish or mortal". One popular theory is that the Dawnshards were the Perfect Gems that can permanently imprison unmade, spren etc. Those gems are also rumored (in world) to be pieces of the "Stone of Ten Dawns". I wouldnt be surprised if the Blade that was used to kill Jeziren (or at least the gem mounted on it) was a Dawnshard given that it was able to kill a Herald.

Ooh, fair points both. I was thinking purely in terms of physical/strain type damage, not the chemical side (got stuck on Hardness, rather than "harder to destroy). That being said, he spends all that time in an aluminum bottle exuding liquid, dripping black, ruinous Investiture that likely blocks H2O moisture at least as well as an oil bath. And if the black color was there prior to Awakening it could be that he simply has an applied black patina, which is a common method to prevent rust on iron & steel. Still, Nightblood also the most invested Non-shard thing in the entire cosmere he's likely going to break most of the rules. For lesser Investment levels like Metalminds/Spikes and any other non-sentient Invested objects, I dont think we've seen any increased durability. But your rust point is a perfect test-case, has there been any mention of metalminds or spikes getting oxidation and/or needing polish/maintenance? Id prefer to ignore the Bands, as they are similarly weird. But it should be an easy to spot issue for bronze&copper, steel&iron at least.

Lopen would drive Jasnah to murder in under five minutes...

Just a extra bit of detail I found on my holiday reread: "All mobile bridges were made of a kind of wood called makam. It had a deep brown color, the grain almost hidden, and was both strong and light." ---WotK,Ch. 30.

Active Worldhoppers sure, but not necessarily those that simply immigrated to a single other world en masse. Personally I think there is a lot more to Taln and his whole madness vs periods of lucidity than we yet realize, and he did get a deadeye shardblade somewhere...

She can/has become a shield, and even as a more limited Windspren she could do Adhesion on her own (sticking people's shoe to the floor was a common prank for her) so I dont see why not. Lets take this to another thread, I dont think we want to clutter this one up with too much back and forth conversation. You can come back and post questions here once the community fails to provide an answer.

Yes, it's called a Reverse Lashing, and is how Kaladin made an entire volley of arrows suck in and hit just his shield. You have to maintain contact with the object you want to do the pulling, though, so you cant make things home in on a moving target that you arent touching. Question For Brandon: Would somebody with the Ninth Heightening be able to activate other powers that require physical contact (like the Reverse Lashing) at a distance the same way they can Awaken with just the sound of their Voice?

On the Mraize bit, at the beginning of the conversation he said "he is also my current Prey" so I assumed when he said that his life belonged to another he was talking about himself, or maybe his own superior(s).

"You dont get to like my hair! You know why..."

I dont know, Nightblood's issue is that it would destroy anything that came in contact with it before it had a chance to do damage. But if you stuck it in a slot on a big block of aluminum and wrenched it sideways it might very well bend and/or shatter just like a normal steel blade of it's original size and shape. Unless it has become so Invested that it has become a Godmetal like a shardblade, with fundamentally different physical properties, which is only really possible in it's case where it's far more invested now than even at it's initial creation. By all indications Ive seen, metalminds, spikes, Aon structures, fabrials, Awakened or Forged items, and even Gems are all as physically vulnerable as their non-invested counterparts.

I think you could have Perfect Taste and Perfect Smell easy enough, in the sense that they would be heightened to give a level of detail that normal people dont have, much like Dogs. They say (and I dont really know who "they" are) that a person with dog Smell would not smell "Spaghetti" they would small Pasta and Tomatoes and Garlic and all the other individual things, rather than the mixed blur of scents that we get and name the combinations. There's an anime character Ive seen who had "the God Tongue" and was able to taste various piles of salt and tell you which salt mine it came from (Food Wars, a really odd cooking anime), and identify any ingredient in a dish, while the Super-smell guy could walk down a fishmarket with his eyes closed and pick the highest quality fish from the pile. Perfect Touch could be Perfect Tactile Detail (ie read microscopic braille), Perfect Thermal Sense, etc. That being said, the Watsonian explanation Id go with is that the Heighening enhancements are restricted to Waveform-based things the same way Lightweaving is. Lightweaving and the other surges are supposed to be reflections of fundamental forces in the Cosmere, so other systems having similar diving lines would makes sense to me.

I dont personally think so, but it's always possible. Feruchemy predates the merger of the two into Harmony, and while it formed because of the presence of two shard is still a Preservation thing (per This and This). Harmonium, by contrast is a much more direct embodiment of the warring nature of those two shards being held by a single vessel, which is why it is so volatile. So volatile, it cannot physically be used for either Allomancy or Hemalurgy, since the former requires that you ingest it and the latter requires that it contact your Blood, and in either case it would explode like an alkali metal

My theory on source of The Test is that when Shashara created him and gave him the Destroy Evil Intent, she did not herself have a clear/conscious definition of Evil, but being somewhat of a moral person she did have a gut-level impression of Evil, int he same way a lot of people can tell if something is evil when faced with it even if they arent conscious philosophers enough to put it into words. So the Test is more or less an Imprint of Shashara's subconscious definition of evil at the time of his creation. That being said, I do think Nightblood is maturing and will be able to make his own moral judgements eventually, as evidenced by how he thought Szeth's drowning of that crippled criminal was "Cruel".

Hard to say on a whole cast, as mot have at least one shamelessly Punny person. Top candidates are Wayne, Lightsong, Syl, & Shallan. And one day when he grows up (if we are all lucky): Nightblood

I dont think thats how they work. The gems are put inside the glass spheres so even the smallest are easy to count and carry, and are cut with facets to create the various sizes of Gems and occasionally make Perfect Gems(which are both chemically/atomically perfect and also cut to the perfect shape for containment, but it's an angular cut). Also, You cant actually soulcast gems for in-world reasons (I think because they're always a tad Invested, at least on Roshar). Also, Ball Bearings are still mechanically machined to relatively standard tolerances, Id go for Soulcasting Soap Bubbles to get perfect spheres.

I agree they are separate, though if a Ship can know it is a ship and even have some amount of attachment to it's crew, I think a metalmind would be at least as self-aware, at least in the context of a Soulcaster. It might not be able to tell you anything specific about what's stored in it (the memory, the sense, etc) but Id think it would know it is a Metalmind in Function on top of knowing it's form. And to a skilled Soulcaster they might be able to get more out of it like a general sense of whose Identity is in it (or at least if there is no Identity present).

That's more about the nature of Stormlight itself, which innately wants to leak out and return to the Investiture cycle/ecosystem of Roshar, as compared to say Breaths that naturally like to stick to things. EDIT: Spoilered the WOB because it's long .

Not typically much of a shipper, I generally prefer to just see how their relationships play out on their own, to avoid the inevitable disappointment when my hopes dont work out, if nothing else. That being said: Jasnah and Rlain. Jasnah seems really unimpressed by the cultural gender roles she was born into, and there's that line when she proposed the engagement to Shallan where she said "Doesnt it bother you at all? The idea of being beholden to another, particularly a man?" This made me think she might lean the other way in the great game of Love; Id enjoy seeing her buck the cultural norm and find what Im sure for her would be an unexpected connection with another woman. But that would likely end up with her and another heavy Scholar type (just given the pool of folks she spends her time around), and I think it could be even more interesting to see her go further and find a romantic connection with a Singer, somebody from the race with several genders and little-to-no apparent gender bias. I think she'd enjoy being around a person that has to very consciously change Forms to Mateform before they have to deal with much sexual drive; it could lead to some fun scenes where for the first time she was the one dealing with the sort of heightened sexual distraction that Singers attribute to Mateform. We know from the Horneaters that inter-species relations work on a genetic level. Plus, I want Rlain to have as much development and screen time as possible, though Venli (as our other Named Singer character) could serve much the same narrative purpose in most respects. EDIT: Not to mention, that would mean that