Harrycrapper

Been a bit since I read SoS, but had a feeling that was the case, thank you for confirming.

They have physical bodies, they definitely leave something behind. Whether or not they remain in the form they were in when they die isn't something I know off the top of my head. And if they do revert to their mistwraith form, I'm not sure how long that would take to decompose or whether there's enough to work with to make a Lifeless. Mistwraiths are techinically humans, so it should technically be possible, but I'm unsure of the logistics on making it happen.

Wow, I did not know he was planning Mistborn Era 4 to have Stormlight length books. Given that, I have doubts he'll write the whole series before releasing the first one like he did with Era 1 and plans to do with Era 3.

I think the star in the Detritus system has a different description than our sun. While it's possible the moon could have been terraformed to the point that it has an atmosphere and can support life, I don't think humans in the Cytoverse were advanced enough to alter the sun in a significant enough way.

This actually won't work. Hemalurgy doesn't steal the exact amount of Investiture that the person being spiked carries. So, a Hemalurgically stolen Divine Breath won't give someone the 5th Heightening and would also likely appear off to other people with aura recognition. However, if you get real good at killing Returned, you could just keep spiking the Divine Breaths out of them and sell the spikes for large quantities of ordinary Breaths. This is all assuming Endowment doesn't take issue with someone killing the people she specifically chooses to Return.

Yea that's basically my perspective as well, this would need to be Endowment sanctioned.

I always figured it was because she's completely unopposed. Odium couldn't do that to just anyone because Cultivation could counter it much like Ruin was countering Vin's moves as Preservation. Harmony can't do it because of the nature of holding the two Shards he has makes it difficult to do much. But, Endowment is the sole Shard on Nalthis which I figure gives her more leeway in terms of what she can do, but obviously just on her planet, I don't think she can strike from afar.

Expanding on that, it's similar to how AonDor works. The Elantrian makes an Aon shaped in a particular way and the Investiture is pushed out of the Cognitive realm through that shape and produces an effect based on various specific aspects of the shape(size, modifiers, ect.). In Allomancy, the metal is the Aon, the act of burning it is equivalent to the Elantrian drawing the Aon, and the Investiture comes from the Spiritual realm instead because it didn't get stuffed into the Cognitive realm like it did on Sel.

I'd say the best way to do this would be to post a Kandra in somewhere like Idris where they don't revere the Returned and just let them die when their week is up. The Kandra just needs to find the person and spike them. They won't be well guarded and the killer wouldn't be pursued like they would if they killed a Returned in Hallandren. Unfortunately, you'd still probably be going up against Endowment. Between Shardic futuresight(which she seems to be talented at compared to others like Honor), the straight up ability to smite you, and the fact that there's some sort of customs officials you have to get through on your way out of Nalthis, I'm not sure anyone is pulling this off that Endowment doesn't want to.

Hmmm, offhand I'm not sure you could get enough Stormlight out of one person to grant Heightenings. Maybe if you created multiple spikes from separate Radiants who are filled to the brim. You'd need to have that special table used in Hemalurgy to make sure the spike goes into the host as quickly as possible, I imagine Stormlight would leak out of a Hemalurgic spike faster than most things. Also, a spren or Herald might have enough Investiture for that to be possible with one spike.

It worked on Sel...

Brandon was writing a screenplay for Mistborn and in the screenplay he made adjustments to the story. One notable thing I remember was Shan Elariel being Ellend's sister instead of an Elariel. The other one was that he wanted to make it so anyone could use Atium because it made more sense, I think someone linked the WoB up there that explains some of it. I theorized along these same lines a while back. I've always thought that the Atium from Era 1 was an alloy and not the pure form based on how Malatium works. Gold lets you see your past self, Malatium lets you see someone else's. Electrum lets you see your immediate future, Atium lets you see other people's or objects' future. It just seems odd to me that Atium works in a reverse manner to electrum much like other metal and alloy pairs work, much like gold and Malatium work. If Peter isn't mistaken here, my thought is that the ancient Terris prophecies were made using Atium. The Terris prophecies are the only instance on Scadrial that we know of where someone who is not a Shard saw further than a few seconds in the future besides Elend at the end of HoA. I don't believe Feruchemy has any properties that would allow someone to do that. They didn't have strong enough Allomancy back then to do what Elend did with duralumin + Atium. But, maybe they were able to use some sort of pure form of Atium to connect to the Spiritual Realm like Elend did and see the future where Sazed saves humanity or were able to just straight up see the future through some other utilization of Atium. Another possibility is that Ruin's Perpendicularity is the pure Atium and they were able to use that much like Rashek and Vin used Preservation's. Except, Ruin's power could be used to see into the future.

I'm going to back this up with Elhokar's comment from early in TWoK where he said that he only seems to see Gloryspren around Dalinar.

It's possible they don't look like anything when summoned. If a human transitions to the Cognitive Realm, they don't seem to exist in the Physical Realm or at least they don't leave any visible remnant. Similarly, I would think if a spren is summoned into the Physical Realm as a Shardblade, they shouldn't be visible in the Cognitive Realm at all. It's been a bit since I read OB, but I think someone in Shadesmar said that when the deadeye blades are summoned, they disappear from the Cognitive Realm.

It wasn't only SoS and BoM too, he also showed up with a secret pregnancy aka Secret History.

Yea that mostly tracks with how I feel. Starsight is...odd. I do decently like it, but it was a bold choice of Brandon to separate Spensa from all the characters from Skyward. It almost didn't work for me because of that. But, for some reason I mostly base my feelings on Sanderson books on the endings and Starsight did end quite well. That's also the reason I like Defending Elysium, I thought the ending was really interesting. And that's also why I would rate Sunreach as the lowest, I think it had the weakest ending. Though I think that is because it was the first one Janci worked on and she was still trying to get a feel for it all. However, I do think the Rig/FM romance worked a lot better than what seems to have been set up for Allanik and Arturo. It just seems a bit gratuitous to develop another romance between two characters, though I guess these are supposed to be YA stories.

Out of curiosity, where would you put Defending Elysium in there?

Medallions require that someone with the respective power contribute towards making the medallion. We're still missing some key information on how those are created, but Allik specifically said that Kelsier only gave them F-Warmth and they reverse engineered the rest on their own over the years. After Wax asks why they don't just wear multiple medallions, Allik says that won't work, they interfere with each other. Allik then says to make a medallion with multiple powers, you'd need to have them instead of just adding yours and passing it to the next person to add theirs. We may not know what the excisors are or what they do, but we know it takes a live Feruchemist to make a medallion. They have Feruchemy. I don't have a digital copy of BoM, if you need confirmation of this, read chapter 21, specifically the portion where Wax questions Allik. The Terris were given Feruchemy as a gift from Preservation and/or Ruin: So unless Kelsier somehow figured out how to give people Feruchemy that can be passed down to their descendants like it does for Terris people, they're descended from Terris people. The only other established ways of obtaining Feruchemy outside of genetically inheriting it are Hemalurgy and Medallions. Medallions can't be made using other Medallions and Hemalurgy still requires that you take the power from a Feruchemist. Now, you can propose that Kelsier took a bunch of Terris people with the right SDNA to pass it on to children and they sowed their wild oats across Southern Scadrial, but I'm more inclined to believe that Rashek included some Terris people when he sectioned off the Southern Scadrians as a control group for his genetic experiment. Rashek was afraid of another Fullborn. Southern Scadrial does not have the ability to produce Mistborn, and can barely produce any Mistings due to the lack of Lerasium in their genetic heritage. Also, there's a boiling ocean separating the two continents that I don't think even a Fullborn could make it through. I don't think this would have been a factor. I will concede that it is possible for them to not have Terris ancestry. Maybe Kelsier figured out where a bit of Lerasium was and somehow used it in conjunction with some of Marsh's Atium to make some Ferrings(they don't have Full Feruchemists, otherwise they would have been able to make Medallions with more powers). However, without a doubt they do have Feruchemy, nothing about the Medallions makes sense if they don't have live Feruchemists.

The Skybreakers definitely have some, they gave Helaran a set that no one had ever seen or heard of.

The Terris architecture bit was just my first thought when I read it, Kingsdaughter provided a WoB where Brandon clarifies that it was the Ska huts from the prologue of the first Mistborn book. But, I stand by the fact that at least some Southern Scadrians are descended from Terris people as that's the only way they should have access to Feruchemy.

They have Feruchemy, so that's not an if. They do share common ancestry. This is all mostly moot as Kingsdaughter cleared things up, however I typed it all up before that. Architectural influences last thousands of years. Yes, a lot of things change over the years, but a lot of stuff sticks around too. Sometimes it's blatantly trying to emulate a culture's architecture from the past like a lot of the capitol buildings in Washington DC, other times subtle influences survive the millennia. It's as possible for Terris influences on something like this to survive that length of time as it for every shred of it to be forgotten because of calamity. You can doubt all you want, but it's possible and we have no facts pointing in either direction. Also worth noting is that southern Scadrial is probably the only place you could find hints of ancient Terris architecture(aside from Rashek's hut obviously) as Rashek basically destroyed nearly every bit of culture of the Terris people in northern Scadrial. So Rashek who was, for lack of a better term, a Terris supremacist, altered the DNA of humanity to help them survive the deathworld he created and left a bunch of humans at the south pole with unmodified DNA in case he screwed up, didn't include a single member of his people? And those same people somehow have access to the magic system that only people descended from Terris have? Also, I'd like to address "which they are not, unless you have a source stating otherwise." I just kind of find it ironic you said that absent a source corroborating your position or even any reasoning. I get that you don't think southern Scadrians don't have any Terris blood or any Terris influences, but you stated that as if it were a fact and then required I provided sources to the contrary. Which, I also get why you didn't provide any sources as there aren't any. There are no WoBs on this specifically that I can find. So given the facts we know(i.e. Southern Scadrians have Feruchemy and Feruchemy is hereditary) they have Terris ancestry. It's likely not a whole lot of Terris ancestry, but it's enough to make an entire medallion economy.

When I read it, I thought that it was referring to ancient Terris architecture, specifically Rashek's hut in Credig Shaw which had personal significance to Kelsier. The Southerners have ties to the ancient Terris people as they have Ferrings among them which is how they create the warmth medallions. So, it stands to reason they might have some architecture that resembles ancient Terris buildings as well. I don't think we'll know for certain why the architecture was familar to the person who put the memory in the coin without asking Brandon, assuming it doesn't somehow get answered in TLM. Though, there's another possibility that just occurred to me. Ostensibly, Hoid would have had to retrieve and replace the memory in the coin before giving it to Wax to make sure it had what he wanted Wax to see. What if the buildings were familiar to Hoid and somehow that got tied to the memory before putting it back in the coin? Given that copperminds that can be shared can now be common, it begs the question of whether someone can change/tamper with other peoples' memories before storing them again.

Yes, Investiture can become sapient on it's own. It can also provide sapience to something that otherwise wouldn't be. But, that doesn't mean the consciousness literally is the Investiture or vice versa. There's a definite relationship between the two, but consciousness isn't Investiture and Investiture isn't consciousness. Investiture is the means by which something can become sapient. A Kandra/Mistwraith's spikes are not their mind, it's the means by which they can use their mind.

The Kandra is the mistwraith, they are not separate beings. Mistwraiths are physically altered humans that TLR designed with something specific missing that prevents them from being sapient without spikes. The spikes contains whatever allows them to become people, it doesn't create a new one. So when they die and show up in the Cognitive realm, they'll show up however they see themselves just like any other person. The Koloss didn't see themselves as Koloss, they saw themselves as people. Similarly, Kandra spend so much time imitating people that most in Era 2 would show up as whatever form they identify with the most. I'd say if Tensoon died, he'd show up looking like a dog. The Era 1 Kandra that never left the homeland would likely appear as the translucent forms with whatever material they preferred for a skeleton.

Yea, Mistwraiths are technically humans with some weird Cognitive blockage and altered physical forms. Era 1 Koloss are humans that are altered by the placement of spikes in specific bind points. I believe it takes 5 humans to make one Koloss, but that's mostly just to make 4 spikes and to combine the skin for the resulting Koloss when you place the spikes in the 5th human. When a Koloss dies, you will see one human Cognitive Shadow in the Cogntive realm, not 5, because the other four died whenever that Koloss was made.