killersquirrel59

Again, how do we know this? Clearly it isn't the case that there is no god metal without an act like that, otherwise there would be no Lerasium beads. I always assumed that the production of Atium (and Lerasium for that matter) was a natural byproduct of the Shardpool buried at the Well and under the Pits.

It occurs to me that we are spending a lot of time here debating who Trell might be. Yet what evidence do we really have that Trell is anything? We know that Miles worshipped Trell, but that's about it. I put forward that Trell might be just a huge red herring, and we are jumping on that name because it was the last word in the book. Now there is definitely something bigger going on involving another Shard of some variety, as we have confirmed that the new God metal is something new. However, we don't know that this is Trell. Marisi thinks it is, but we have been fooled by in-character assumptions before, such as Vin being the Hero of Ages in WoA.

Do you have a quote to back that up? I remember in HoA them talking about the purpose of direct spiking being that no power was lost.

Why do you think that Atium didn't exist prior to Ruin's prison? Do we have any evidence of that?

Like I said, I don't think its a question of whether or not Bronze can sense other Investitures. We have a confirmation that it can. I think it is simply a question of it being communicated through some other strange sensory input that seekers simply don't know to look for. I mean, think about the pulses. These are not something you would think much of if you didn't know they meant anything.

It has been hinted through WoB that Bronze Allomancy can sense other forms of Investiture including Feruchemy. However, no one on Scadrial knows how to do it. Think about it. Sensing Allomancy involves listening for strange pulses. Sensing Feruchemy or other magic systems likely involves its own strange sensory experience that Seekers simply don't know to look for.

Not so much directly starting a ridiculous religion intentionally. However, I could definitely see him making a few smart-chull comments to the right/wrong people, fully intended to mean nothing, then coming back in a thousand years and laughing his chull off these people had built a religion around what he had meant to be a bad joke.

Doesn't really follow the pattern. Ruin called himself Ruin, telling Vin she could call him by that name, yet Atium was not called Ruinum. It was named after his original name, as should Sazedium (or Sazium if you prefer).

As to the objections saying that the Koloss couldn't checkmate them, have you ever fought against swarm tactics? The Koloss don't need to be smart or strategic when they outnumber them so overwhelmingly. I have done combat LARPs for a while and I can say without a doubt that the increased difficulty for being surrounded cannot be overstated. If you are outnumbered 4:1 or greater, your enemies don't even need to be working together to completely overwhelm you. With Atium, the number you could reasonably handle might increase as high as maybe 10:1, but they were outnumbered easily 1,000:1. There is just no winning against those odds short of the kind of artillery weaponry that didn't exist in the Final Empire. Atium is an amazing personal scale advantage, but it can only do so much. As for the tactical positioning arguments about defending a narrow passage, yes that does provide a substantial advantage. However, look at a real-world example of something similar. Thermopoli and the last stand of the 300. They were outnumbered actually by a smaller ratio than Elend's forces were outnumbered and had ideal ground. They took thousands down with them, but in the end they were slaughtered just as Elend's forces were. I guess what I'm saying is that footing, training, tactics, positioning, technology, even something like Atium, all of these things make substantial differences in your ability to fight a superiour force. However, there is a limit, a point where superiour numbers will always prevail, no matter what other advantages you have.

I like that. I'll have to go back through HoA to see if there are enough names. I think though that we only get the name of the one leader Sazed is speaking with. Any other ideas?

Very good point Bremen. Take an upvote. I have noticed this as a flaw among us fans for a while now. Despite knowing he is deceptive as Harmony, we still have an instinct to see the best from him and assume he is being honest, likely because Sazed was painfully honest to a fault.

Pausing to go get more Atium would not cover the total amount of rest needed. Anyone who has done any sort of mass battle combat knows the fatigue sets in hard and doesn't go away with a few seconds breather. No way in hell were they all fighting at once. Elend could keep going because of Pewter, but the rest were Seers and would need adequate rest. Second, time was already going wonky during that battle. Vin was trying to fix things and at one point spun the world to stop it catching fire. With such interference we have no idea how long in truth they were fighting for. Third, Elend at least was not just burning the Atium, he was flaring it (and at one point even using a Duralumin flare). And given that the purpose of the exercise was to get rid of all the Atium, I can't imagine that he wouldn't have instructed the others to flare as well. This drastically cuts down the amount of time, somewhere around a 10% of the normal burn time. As for the tactics themselves, there are a few other factors to take into account: 1) These are not experienced Allomancers. They don't know very well how to judge metal reserves. It would be very easy for them to get caught in the middle of the battlefield when their Atium ran out and just be slaughtered. 2) Even with experienced Allomancers, it has been stated that a viable way to beat an Atium-burner is to put him in a lose-lose situation, a kill box where there simply is no exit. There is nothing better suited to accomplish that goal than swarm tactics from a vastly outnumbering force. Taking these two factors into account, you have to adjust your math for the men Elend is losing throughout the battle.

I could see Sazium. That sounds much better than Harmonium and keeps the pattern pure. And it's not just the Ars Arcanum writers who established this pattern. Atium was not named by that writer. The name Atium came from somewhere (true Lerasium was not well known). It was likely known by Feruchemists before the Ascension, though according to Sazed has always been mostly discounted as fairly pointless in Feruchemy.

No, even if the Inquisitors were so affected by Ruin that their sadism was taking over, making them want to just waste the power, letting spikes drain, The Lord Ruler would never let them. He is the one who taught them Hemalurgy, and from everything we know of his style of rule, he is a deeply pragmatic and practical man (well...God/King/Emperor). He was not evil for evil's sake. He was interested in Hemalurgy for its practical benefit, and lamented the difficulty of making more Inquisitors to Kelsier before he killed him. If he knew about the blood coating, he would have insisted they use it to keep their numbers, not only up, but constantly growing, since spikes could be re-used indefinitely with no decay. Furthermore, I can't imagine that Rashek wouldn't have figured this secret out through all his experimentation with Hemalurgy. A spike is going to be coated in blood as it exits the victim. I just can't see him not figuring out that simply not cleaning it makes it decay slower/not at all. Therefore, I can only conclude that this was not a thing in Hemalurgy before Harmony's Final Ascension, and that he changed the way Hemalurgy works.

I would guess some combination of Ruin's subtle manipulation to keep her alive, coupled with her very good danger sense instincts.

Rashek was deliberately trying to conceal and eliminate Feruchemy so I doubt he'd specifically use Feruchemical terms. I could see the names of his friends, some of which are probably the Great Houses. However, we know from the book that criteria for being a Great House is simply enough income to afford a Keep in Luthadel, so those names certainly changed over the centuries. But I could certainly take at least a few of those names as basis, saying those were the names that endured. Any other ideas? They don't all necessarily have to follow the same pattern.

And I can see that being more the case in Era 2, where gold is valued for Feruchemy. But during the Final Empire, no one knew about that, and the only practical use for Gold was seen as the most useless of Allomancy powers.

I have been toying with a project of creating a Final Empire calendar, and have hit a road block. We know that the planet is too close to the sun which would imply a shorter year (not necessarily guarantee it, but if we assume that Scadrial in its proper orbit is roughly Earth-like, then it is the likely possibility). In order to use the number 16 as much as possible, I went with a 256-day year (16 squared) and said the days could be 32 hours each to better account for mentioned ages being roughly equivalent to what we expect (so Vin saying she's 17 doesn't mean she is actually 11 by our reckoning). For structure, I said there were 16 months, each month composed of 2 8-day weeks. The days of the week are named for the 8 base metals (Ironday, Steelday, Tinday, Pewterday, Zincday, Brassday, Copperday, Bronzeday), and the weeks of each month are colloquially known as Ashweek and Mistweek. So to find, say the 13th day in a month, you would refer to it as Mist Zincday. All in all, this works for me. Where I have run into a block is trying to name the months. These would have been named by the Lord Ruler, and named early on in his reign, so he is still thinking like Rashek. I toyed with the idea of including the names of people he both hated and respected at the same time, naming one month after Kwan and another after Alendi, but that doesn't give me nearly enough ideas. Help me with ideas to name the months.

GRRRR. I join you in displeasure at this. I may just have to plug my ears and pretend I didn't read that.

Is there a reason we automatically assume gold is valuable on Scadrial? Think about it for a minute. Gold has no intrinsic worth (on Earth or Scadrial) before its practical application in electronic components. On Earth it acquired the sense of value out of a sense of wonder at the fact that it is shiny and doesn't heat up in the hand. That makes sense given the past cultures of Earth. However, the cultures on Scadrial, particularly post-Ascension, are far more practical than early Earth cultures. The world-spanning religion is an enormous bureaucracy. Furthermore, gold is already looked down on in Allomantic circles, generally being seen as useless. So why would it be considered valuable? We know from TFE that there are coins minted from Gold, but for all we know that could be their equivalent of saying "Well, we don't have anything else to do with this useless garbage metal, so let's make coins out of it".

Why do so many on this board insist on referring to the theoretical god metal of Harmony as Harmonium? This completely breaks the naming conventions already established for the other god metals. Atium comes from Ati, the name of the shardholder. Lerasium comes from Leras, the name of the shardholder. So why on Scadrial would the name of the new god metal suddenly change conventions to derive from the name of the shard (Harmonium) and not follow the existing convention and be called Sazedium?

That quote doesn't at all seem like Autonomy to me. Autonomy is supposed to be all about figuring things out for yourself, not relying on structured power, fighting the system, and hyper-individualism. The idea of "Ask Trell, and he will answer" seems very much in keeping with a top-down structure of obedience and dependence. But I've never liked the idea of Trell being Autonomy at all. I have a couple of possibilities: 1) Trell is Odium. This could have been the case in Classic Scadrial as well, since we knew Odium was traveling at that point. What I actually picture here is that Odium hijacked the seeds of an existing pre-Ascension religion on Scadrial at the time (likely sun-worshippers) and formed his cult around the opposite. That seems right in Rayse's style. 2) Trell is a prank by Hoid or some other powerful Worldhopper. I like Hoid for it, because the idea of setting up an intrinsically ridiculous sounding religion and then checking back in a thousand years and seeing what became of it seems right up Hoid's alley. 3) Trell in classic Scadrial was Preservation, who was the one who was good at seeing the future and knew that at some point in the long run, there would be a great need for star maps, so subtly influenced a group of people to study astronomy as part of his long-term plans to thwart Ruin. If this is the case, then 2nd Era Trell was likely hijacked to suit the purposes of some other, more nefarious group (looking at you 17th Shard...)

Well we know that Era 3 will have Mistborn again (or at least one since the plot is supposed to involve hunting down a Mistborn serial killer), so personally I think we are going to see the Set succeed in creating a new Mistborn and let the horror of what that means just start to spread before the end of the 4th book.

This can also be explained by Harmony subtly changing how Hemalurgy works. We know that he did to some degree, and this is what I assumed was meant by it.

I suppose that is possible. There could be worldhoppers involved in this story. Unfortunately we don't really have anything to go on until White Sands is published. Until we know literally anything about Bavadin/Autonomy, I personally choose to avoid trying to include him in speculative theories. It is nothing but an exercise in frustration and futility. Far better to theorize with the information we actually have.