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I stumbled across this WOB that mentioned how Harmonium does not have the normal melting point of an Alkali metal (which normally melt relatively low and are mostly liquid at ambient room temps). That got me thinking about Investiture and how those might deal with phase changes. Investiture manifests in various unique ways when it's solidified into physical form. We know that it has to be possible to melt godmetals because it is possible to make alloys of at least two of them. In any other situation that would be the end of it, but now we are talking about something that only acts like metal because it is solid, it's part of the definition. Investiture as a liquid or as a gas works in wildly different ways. But if you melt or boil one do you get another? Does boiling godmetal make Mist/Stormlight/etc gaseous Investiture? If you froze the waters from a shard-pool would it take on metallic traits? Can either of those things be done with normal thermal energy or is there some other secret method needed to actually melt and smith a Godmetal? For example, does the phase change of melting a godmetal require more dramatic Realmic process, like maybe using a perpendicularity to provide a "pressure" equivalent, rather than temperature-based phase changes the way astronomic pressures can crush hydrogen into a metallic form? It's a side of Realmic Mechanics that Id never considered so it's a rabbit-hole Ive never really chased. Thoughts?

Ive been hesitating to read the Dragonsteel excerpts or any of the Prime stuff, mostly because I heard it's been cannibalized for other stories and I was afraid of it spoiling the later stories with the narrative Uncanny Valley. I dont mind seeing the spoilers piecemeal here, I just dont know if I want to sit down and read the entire proto-story.

I have a few barely supported and/or entirely unsupported ideas regarding cosmere Dragons, and I was curious if anyone else had any similar wild speculations on the topic. In no particular order: -I think that Dragons will be able to absorb Investiture directly the way Larkin aka "Dragon Bugs" do. I suspect this is their natural food, and being innate and sapient Investiture manipulators is a lot of why they are racially immortal and able to shape-shift. -I think Dragons have Gemhearts, mostly because it would make sense realmically and be thematically consistent with the popular trope of dragons having magically significant Hearts. If true, I would not be surprised if the Singers proved to have originally been a hybrid race of dragons and Humans (or Dragons and Sho Del, I suppose). -I would not be surprised to learn that Dragonsteel is an in-world material, something naturally Invested and smelted from their shed scales or some such. It would please me to find out that this was the closest thing to a pre-Shattering Godmetal, something the vessels later mimicked.

I couldnt find that reference anywhere in the Hoid scene, can you post it? All I found was where Hoid said Vo's wife founded the original royal line.

On the other hand, there is a certain amount of symmetry to having all three Bondsmiths emerge but swear loyalty to a specific Shard, with the Nightmother's going to Cultivation but the Sibling's bondsmith going to Odium (even temporarily).

for what it's worth: it does have some mechanical benefits too, it's more maleable/ductile and less prone to cracks from mechanical and/or vibration stresses. From Ye' Internets on the topic because it was interesting: Silver is the most conductive per volume and it's only 5% better than copper. Copper is a way better conductor per dollar: you just make the copper wire 5% larger than the silver wire. Side note, power lines wires are aluminum. In terms of conductivity per mass, aluminum is twice as good as copper or silver and when you have to build huge structures to hang the wires in the air, mass is what you care about, not volume.

Adding to what @Calderis said, he has currently RAFO'd what would happen if somebody shot a time bubble with an aluminum bullet, but for what it's worth we do know that if you tried to raise a time bubble with aluminum crossing the boundary, the Time bubble would fail to form and you'd get hit with some kind of backlash:

Definitely not #5, on the basis that we've seen two wildly different generations of the Royal locks both retain the ability. I dont think they "dilute" the way normal DNA traits can and do, mostly because I dont think they have the complexity or the Dominant/Recessive trait dynamics it would take for that sort of fading. It's not that the lineage has a finite chunk of Divine Breath that is getting literally passed down or divided up, so much as the fact that a Returned had a child which caused a permanent mutation in them more like Lerasium creating Mistborn/Misting bloodlines. We've been told any Return could potentially learn what it takes to have children just like they can learn to control their physical form.

Cultivation having, or at least needing, her own Champion would imply that she has goals that are separate from (and potentially antagonistic to) those of the Radiants and/or the Stormfather as Honor's Heir. Otherwise I think she'd simply invest her efforts into Cultivating Honor's Champion into the best possible version she could make. Why start from scratch when you can build on the seeds of what's already there.

That's what I was thinking. I knew Shallan spoke of Pattern as male, but I didnt think he really bought into that definition himself, but I didnt recall if the Cryptics in shademar that had full bodies had any sort of neck-down secondary sex characteristics.

Interesting! Do the Cryptics we've met seem to identify with Genders? Id think that Mathematics would be one such thing that the Rosharan residents would not innately consider gendered (Alethi illiteracy and gender roles notwithstanding).

Stormlight yes, but I was under the impression that Honor was not directly involved with the emergence of the Radiants and the Nahel Bond? I thought they'd said that the Spren had observed the Heralds and themselves learned to mimic what the Honrblades where doing. I thought that was the main reason some of hte heralds did not immediately support and/or Join their corresponding Order, until Ishar imposed some organization on them in an effort to mitigate the danger they posed. For what it's worth, I think Lift, Renarin, and Venli are all pretty unusual in their own ways, ways that many in-world might find troubling. Malata and Spark too, I think, given how open they are to siding against the rest of the Radiants.

I think this part, the second possibility is what Notum Thinks is the case and was generally trying to say. I dont think he's really worried about the radiant being as unrestrained with their powers as the Heralds, but I do think he is worried that without the direct guidance and direction of Honor himself the Radiants will harm/kill another generation of Spren, either with a repeat betrayal like the Recreance, or else simply the spren being forced to Choose Sides in a radiant/spren Civil War without Honor there to be a unifying force for them. But at the end of the day I dont think anyone, not Notum and not even the Stormfather, actually know how things are going to work this time around: There has never before been a Bondsmith bound directly to the Ghost of a Shardic Vessel. From the Unity Event on down, things are going to get weird for everyone and shatter expectations on all side.

On the basis that Brandon has described him as a "Robot Spren" I think Nightblood would operate similarly in that he would, or at least could, have a different form in the Cognitive Realm compared to the Physical realm where he manifests as a Sword. That being said I think he (and potentially Azure's blade if it's also a TypeIV) simply view themselves as the sentient Sword it was born as, and so they still retain that shape in Shadesmar rather than changing to a more anthropomorphic form like Syl or Maya are part of a natural spren race with more direct (or less controlled and filtered) influence from the human/biped population.

"Go Our Separate Ways" is different from "Dont Interfere with Each Other". which is different from "Dont Violate Each Other's Domains" and any number of other variations. There is a lot of interpretation there even before you throw a group of Hyper-polarized folk into the mix. Where one might think the Agreement was to all settle separately, one shard Only per World, another might think it was just that they all go off and settle somewhere and after that you dont interfere with the Investments of another shard. The latter would not preclude two shards from willingly settling together (especially if they were married/involved). Leras and Ati went off and Created a whole new world, hard to argue they dont both have equal claim to that world. All of it, the both the Spirit and the Letter of that Agreement will depend entirely on Why they shattered Adonalsium in the first place. If, for example, the whole reason they did it was to prevent the accumulation of 16x Shardic Power, then the spirit of it would be more clearly violated by grouping or heaven forbid actually Combining shards like Harmony. If they as a group had more active goals for how they were intending to use the Power, it would be hard to say a pair couldnt go off and make their own sandbox together. Regardless, I think it's telling that Odium's first target was NOT one of the violator pairs of that agreement, it was just the one he thought was the biggest threat to his supremacy. So far both pairs he's gone after seem to have been targets of opportunity.

The sibling is supposed to be a contemporary of the Stormfather, who is the manifestation of a plantary-sized effect. This has had me thinking recently that maybethe Sibling is a continental-sized Cryptic, and the ridges of landmass that make up the Rosharan Continent (which we know are a giant fractal much like Crytpics and several cities) are the result of the same ripple warping we see when Pattern in moving across a surface. That would make the entire continent one giant (if motionless) fractal cryptic with Urithiru right at it's center. I wont derail this conversation with is too much, but it has some circumstantial support in the way the Shin dont like to carve or even walk on bare stone: for them it would be like walking across God's toe, or cutting off bits of it. As far as Navani for the Siblings Bondsmith, I could definitely get behind it since I do like her for a Bondsmith. But I think she might do really well bonding the Nightmother instead: she's a similarly motherly figure with a scholars mind for R&D (a type of Cultivation, I would argue). Plus there are several interesting candidates people have put forward for the Sibling's Bondsmith, and Im personally really pulling for Rlain.

Agreed, though apparently at risk, since she implied she was potentially helping make Dalinar more suitable for Odium with her "pruning"

That's really interesting, I didnt catch that she'd manipulated her appearance outside of the normal scope of the royal locks. If they can be learned to change things beyond the normal hair manifestation, it makes me wonder if Denth had any unusually advanced capacity for that sort of change, being a member of the Royal line independent of his own returned Status. Crap, I completely missed that too, being an Other Worlds topic.

I dont think so, I think the Regrowth Surge uses the Spiritwebs own definitions and floods it with Stormlight to repair/realign with that image (a stronger version of the natural healing Radiants get for being Invested and holding Stormlight). Soulcasting fundamentally works differently by directly changing that definition, so if you dont know what you are doing in precise detail your "Healing" would look more like Mutation/cancer; it would be a lot like a telekinetic trying to "heal" you by physically reshuffling your DNA strands. Because you arent going to the spririt web and telling it to repair per the established schematics, so much as you would be re describing a whole new set of schematics that may or may not function any better (depending on your design skills). Put another, simpler way, it would be spiritual brain-surgury, and the Soulcasting would just be the scalpels. All that to a Soulcaster might be able to heal with some combination of Blood, Bone, and Tissue, but I think they would have to either be very skilled or very, VERY Lucky to do more good than harm.

They'llbe the main cahracters of Dragonsteel, so that's were we'll get their characterizations and motivations (back when they were all still alive and less crazy). My understanding is that the Cosmere finale will be coming together during the planned Mistborn Era 4 (previously called Era 3) where Scadrial has gone full space-fairing society. Sixth of the Dusk is set in that era, fwiw. But before that we should have already gotten a lot of new Cosmere meat to chew on with Nightblood and the rest of Stormlight (the back half of which sounds like it will pull back the curtain a good bit).

Not necessarily, that seems to be more Rayse interpretation. He wants to be "top dog" but doesnt want to pollute his nature with more Shardic Intents. I dont think that is a fundamental drive of the shard, just Rayse not wanting to be changed from what he currently is. But a more open-minded Vessel of Odium could probably try to climb the pile using Sazed's method instead. Im guessing it's why Odium is afraid of Harmony, he's the biggest challenger to that goal.

He eventually plans to write a series called Dragonsteel, which will include the prequel events of the Cosmere including Hoid's backstory and the events of the Shattering. Also Dragons.

I suspect she'd have Awakened some of her gear for the fight the way she learned in Warbreaker, and without vashers issue of a divine breath to deal with that would be enough.

That's the best case scenario, assuming you could fuse them all back together in a balanced way. But otherwise, based on Harmony, they dont immediately balance each other, they still pull at the vessel in their distinct ways. They do appear to be slowing merging the longer they are held together (Per WOB it would take effort to separate them now), but I dont think it's going to be that easy to hold Humpty Dumpty together in the meantime, if you tried to especially if you cram all 16 together at once. Though once you get a few melded I could see it becoming easier to add more to the mix as they'd represent a smaller and small percentage (and thus upset) of the accumulating whole.

If it's this one you are thinking of, it describes it as basically splitting the spren's soul in half