Brandon told me it's part of a melted down Inquisitor spike at a signing. And I believe he said that it was TenSoon's "daughter" MeLann that gave it to him.
also, Soulcasters do not get any physical enhancements from their powers, which means that if you can get someone close enough to them to whack them, or shoot them from behind when they're busy with other people, they are dead meat.
well we don't know that Aona and Skai were working together they might have been fighting each other and Odium took them both out when they were too busy fighting each other to stop him.
well Endowment is alive (as far as we know) and the Returned are fueled by Splinters of Endowment, so it appears that Shards can create Splinters voluntarily.
although Hoid actually has lived more subjective years then a normal person could, so he has found some way to prolong his life, in addition to skipping forward in time. We don't know how that works.
And I suspect the Heralds had assistance from Honor to make them immortal.
Brandon's doing that on purpose because he wants people to be able to understand the individual storylines in each book/series without having to read all the others, the cosmere thing is mostly an easter egg for the obsessive fans.
yeah you can imprison somebody with a shardblade you just need to immobilize their hands, they can't use the Blade if they can't move their hands at all.
Alternatively you could dangle them from a rope attached to a very high ceiling, if they cut the rope they'll go splat, it's a little harder with Szeth because of his lashings but you could do it if you kept him from getting any Stormlight.
actually Roshar's years are about 10 percent longer then our years, they have more days but the days are shorter. This is Word of Brandon, somewhere I think.
because any problem can be solved with enough balefire - just balefire the person who caused the problem hard enough that they cease to exist before they caused the problem!
if you could hit him with enough projectiles full of hot oil, you might be able to drain away all his Stormlight from the healing, then you could just shoot him with a regular arrow that he wouldn't be able to avoid. Or with more hot oil.
so if there's a cognitive interaction going on, why does it require that the measurement be written down in order to have an effect? I suppose it might be similar to how Commands in Awakening require both mental focus and the spoken word. Only for some reason speaking isn't enough in this case, you have to write it down........
Brandon has hinted that that little experiment is important, but I suspect it may take quite a few books before we find out why.