Stark

Could the Dysian Aimians be the ancient enemies of the Horneaters? Didn't Rock refuse to fight because being a Soldier was less esteemed than his position in the family? Hes birth-order placed him as a Chef, far more important than a soldier. Because Chef's keep people fed, and are the bane of the Dysian Aimians.

@AerionBFII @Jondesu Maybe the Horneater's did the scouring? They scoured Aimia looking for the rare and delicious cremlings to cook.

My only hesitation before full heartedly agreeing with you is I am fairly certain that the man referred to as Taln is slated to be one of the second arc main characters. And if he actually is a herald, his flashback sequences to damnation would be terrible to behold. And yes, I know Brandon has not ruled out the possibility of a main character being dead in their own book... But... I'm hesitant to commit to that line of thought.

I agree with a bunch of the points about the blades from @Thunder_93 and @kenod above. What has me looking at this sideways is the assertion that a Knight with Light doesn't need her plate. You are likely right, if the opponents are human. And a Radiant can heal any of her wounds via light short of the one-shot insta-death attacks (I believe Brandon has indicated total obliteration of the skull would work). But, the Radiants were originally convened for fighting the forces of Odium in the Desolations, correct? Where the enemies are significantly greater than humanoid, some made entirely out of stone that requires a Blade to even scratch, and instant death attacks are flying around left, right and center. At that point, the ability to take a hit, and keep moving without losing a lot of your precious Stormlight to healing seems pretty important. Contemporary Radiants and proto-Radiants may not necessarily require blades and plates to be effective, but the assertion that that was always the case, or will always be the case is fundamentally flawed. The Everstorm is here, and red eyes have re-appeared among the Listeners. What used to be overkill in battle may very quickly become the only way to fight effectively in the field in the very near future.

So, if we dipped Nightblood in Lister's Oil, would that help with his bad breath problems?

@Fulminato I agree, the Nahel-bond spren we have seen so far are not trapped in a gem. This is an excellent point. My only counter is that the Radiants have the Nahel bond, which applies a different rule set. It could be possible that the Nahel bond promotes the growth of a gemheart for the spren to inhabit, but not be captured. It's all speculation at this point, we don't yet have enough information to confirm anything. My other counter is that we see gems capture spren, but we do not know what they do in a living being. We do see spren leaving the Chasmfiends as they die. Maybe a living gemheart works differently than a dead one. A home, like a hermit-crab's shell for the spren that allow the organisms to defy physics, where as the dead ones become traps?

Late to a discussion that may be re-igniting soon, if Oathbringer brings new information. I think the above argument is flawed. Humans, mice, whales and elephants all have hearts, and they are all different sizes, based on what the organism evolved to suit its needs. If the Parshendi have gemhearts, they likely would be about the size of a normal heart, as that is all they would need. We cannot dismiss the possibility based on size, though the function may vary (tri-chamber frog heart as compared to a qaud-chamber mammalian heart, compared to a dual-chamber fish heart) What is also interesting is the idea that the Radiants are developing their own gemhearts. I don't think that will cause obvious physiological issues, partially because magic. But more Cosmere relevantly, because it sounds really like Savantism. We have seen Savantism have physiological changes and drawbacks before (Spook in HoA, the soulcasters in WoR) It would make sense that the Radiants would develop some form of Savantism with extended surge use, or higher level Oaths. This could tie into answers as to what happened to the Radiants after the Recreance. If the Radiant form of Savantism causes gemheart development, when the oath is broken, and the Spren are gone, there is nothing left to sustain them. They could then all die very quickly without it. We saw Kaladin be negatively impacted by the loss of Syl after two Oath's. Imagine, a full Radiant, with all five Oaths, and a fully developed gemheart, losing their bond. If Radiants and Listeners develop/have gemhearts to help contain their spren for the bond. It feels like an organic tie-in to Savantism to me.

I'd almost suggest taking a few extra steps, and eat a ton of antacids first, then swallow and burn ettmetal coated in oil. If you can temporarily neutralize your stomach acids to further reduce the potential for reaction, that seems ideal. And maybe already be a pewter misting with an unkeyed goldmind to provide you the fortitude and healing needed to survive being just a hair too slow.

This question has come up before. At what point is something considered inside. From a Biological perspective, the entire gastrointestinal tract can be considered as being outside your body, and nutrients are absorbed into your body across the intestinal barrier. From that perspective, metal in your stomach is never truly inside you, yet you can still burn it. I believe Brandon has stated that when something is considered inside you depends on your view of yourself. If you consider something inside your body cavities, up your nose, piecing you, etc to be inside you, it counts, and you can burn. So whether or not an Allomancer could burn a coin in their mouth depends on how they perceive themselves, and what is inside them. If you can do the mental gymnastics to convince yourself that something in your mouth is *in* and *part* of you enough to be immune to external Allomancer influences, you should be capable of taking it the one step further and consider them to be burnable. ***Edit***: @BlackYeti got there first, with a far more grounded and practical reason for why new Allomancers are trained to not burn things in their mouths.

@jofwu Thanks for the transcript!

Time for a little thread necromancy. I apologize in advance, especially seeing as I'm just going to echo what has already been said. Ais being female is not a big deal. I can only see that affecting things once they start talking threats to her family, but not much. More fantastical names are cool. But my disappointments are the pacing, that most of the characters look too similar, making it really hard to visually distinguish the various Sandmasters from each other, and the massively stripped dialogue. Will I continue to purchase the remaining volumes. Probably, especially after hearing that Brandon is not entirely happy with how the graphic novel turned out. But I won't be as enthusiastic, and my expectations will be lower. I'm not going to hold out for a prose release, but that would have me excited. The only thing I got out of the graphic novel that I did not get from the prose was the faces everywhere. But that had to be pointed out to me, and they weren't even supposed to be that obvious.

I thought that it didn't replace the allomantic effect. AoL specifically mentioned miles seeing his past self when burning his gold. My understanding was that when you compounded, you accessed both the Feruchemical and Allomantic powers simultaneously, but at unregulated amounts of power. Am I wrong?

He may not have healed himself. Stormlight healing is based on your self image, which is why Kaladin still has his scars, but Lopen is regrowing his arm. If Renarin's self image includes his need for glasses, that will not heal, and he will continue to need them. But @maxal helpfully pointed out that it has been heavily hinted at being a stimming tool. I do not know enough about Autism to be able to comment from anywhere other than a position of ignorance, so I'm going to take that bit of information as an opportunity to further educate myself.

Doesn't Renarin wear glasses? Could this just be his glasses case? It may be excessive for them, but as I would assume replacements might be hard to come by, it would make sense to me that he would want to protect them, and always have the case handy in case he needs to wear/remove them quickly. Yes, I'm aware that it is likely something more interesting, or important than a glasses case, but it would be amusing.

This of course leads to a hilarious mental image of a full shardbearer being thwarted by a paper thin sheet of Aluminum, further reinforcing the reliance on tin foil hats that protect from emotional Allomancy. It's a funny image. But it makes sense that the Aluminum would be immune to the magical aspect, but not the physical. Hmmm. Those half-shard from WoK - the shields that were designed to stop a shardblade, do you figure they were made with an aluminum alloy? They did work temporarily against Szeth before they broke. Or do you think it was more using gems to transfer a small amount of investiture to the shield material, giving it the resistance until the gems were cracked and drained?

True, though I thought that was more a technological limitation than a scarcity issue. Aluminum was pretty rare in Scadrial Era 1 as they did not have the technology to refine it. It is more common in Era 2 now that they know its value, and have developed the tech to process it. Roshar does not have the same drive to develop the requisite technology to mine aluminum, they can just soulcast whatever they need. Even for us, Aluminum is a relatively recent discovery, within the last 100-150 years. But still an excellent point! This is also very true. However, initially, we had a Gold/Electrum pairing with Atium/Malatium as the external effects to Atium's internal effects. They are similar to the point of mimicing, and electrum has been referred to as the "poor man's Atium." So this does not quite refute. As for the 16 coming from Preservation, 100% in agreement with you. Preservation set 16 metals to be part of his system to be a hint to try to lead people to confront Ati. But, I will go back to the core of my theory: In Cosmere scholars have had inaccurate, or outright wrong realmatic theories before that seemed to be true. We saw this with the "10 basic metals" and we have seen this in some of the recent WOBs on Cognitive shadows - what the scholars believe, and what is presented to us in the books, is not necessarily true. The characters believe it to be so based on the information they have available. Brandon has not given all the true information yet, so that our knowledge evolves with the Cosmere characters. So that said, is it not conceivable that Aluminum is a God metal, that has an effect similar to other metals in the table, not unlike Gold/Electrum/Atium/Malatium, and that they got it wrong? That they slotted it into the Allomantic table where it seemed to fit, and stopped looking? Duralumin was the first alloy in Vin's research that worked, so she stopped looking. It is possible for their to be another 14 alloys, as with Atium, that are not discovered, because no one is looking, because they think their information is accurate. In fact, if you look at the quartet of Atium/Malatium/Gold/Electrum, those mimic each other far more closely than the actual temporal quartet of Gold/Electrum/Cadmium/Bendalloy. The external/internal axis in the actual quartet is vastly different (viewing the past/future vs affecting the time-stream). Same with the physical (metal telekinesis vs physical attribute buffing) and mental (emotional manipulation vs detection abilities) quartets, internal and external powers do not mimic. But Aluminum/Duralumin/Nicrosil/Chromium as a quartet are extremely close in effect. This quartet is the odd one out. Knowing how sneaky Brandon can be, I could be completely wrong, but he could also be hiding this right in front of our faces and having us not notice, even though he pulled the same fake-out before with Atium and Gold. Watch it fool us twice by presenting an Allomantic table that seems to make sense as compared to the original 10 that didn't quite fit nicely together, especially seeing as this quartet of metals are the ones we have seen the least of in any of the Mistborn Eras.

@Yata you are correct that it is not a perfect theory. But if we allow for the fact that Adonalsium as a whole was at least an order of magnitude more powerful than any one shard, and was everywhere, permeating all things by being God, I can argue against your points. The tricky part will be for me to do it without sounding whiny. 1) Adonalsium was everywhere, theoretically, pre-shattering. All investiture that we know of originated from this being. It is conceivable that the metallic, physical representation of its body (if such a thing exists) would be everywhere, and a bit weird. 2)This one I have the hardest time arguing. The only thing I can think of is that the Vessels took all of Adonalsium's investiture, more or less. Maybe it has a similar charge to all other investiture, making it resistant, or non-reactive. I can't really argue it as my Cosmere theory is not strong enough to make me comfortable doing it, but it is the fact that Aluminum seems immune to all other investiture that makes me wonder if it is of Adonalsium, and either not reacting because that power is gone and divided from its source, or not reacting because its not whole. 3)For this I'd argue that we have not seen a Mistborn burn any god metals other than Lerasium and Atium. We have asked about burning shardblade metal, which is supposedly Tanavastium or Cultivation-ium, depending on the spren, but we have not seen what happens. In the first Mistborn, the Scadrians thought that there were 10 base metals, with Atium being one of them. They later found that their knowledge was incomplete. I think the knowledge is still incomplete, and it is possible that we have been misled. 4)Harmony knows a lot. But he does not know all. He knows a lot about Scadrial, but has admitted his ignorance about much of the greater Cosmere. If Aluminum is the body of the long dead deific figure of the Cosmere, a being who died long before Harmony came into existence, it is conceivable that this would be one of the many secrets he may not yet be aware of. 5)Another really, really good point. But, if the investiture has been removed from the body, divided into sixteen and spread out, it is possible that the husk would not contain that much investiture. Part of the problem with Soul Casting Atium was that you were trying to create something permeated with the investiture of a living Shard. You cannot create something from nothing, so you need to insert as much investiture into that reaction as you would get out of it, and Atium was overflowing. But, Adonalsium is dead, and their Investiture has been stolen. It could theoretically be possible that with the investiture gone, it becomes easier to Soulcast the shell. I don't think I've done a fantastic job of arguing, but what it mostly comes to is the idea that we don't know enough to really say definitively one way or the other. I think it may be the case that Aluminum is in some way linked to what was Adonalsium. I could very easily be entirely wrong. But the fact that this one material has a bizarre immunity to all investiture we have seen so far, and is causing a heavy debate in team Sanderson as to whether a Shardblade could cut it (to the point where they don't want to give a canon answer yet), raises huge red flags for me. Which is why, if ever I get he chance, I will be asking if a Shardblade could cut Atium, Lerasium or Harmonium the same way it cuts everything else. If not RAFO'd, that will hopefully allow me to plan other questions to test this theory. Sadly, Brandon does not often come to Montreal. I'll have to see if I can get to Toronto for his visit there...

@Pagerunner My counter point is that Malatium was an Alloy of Atium, and had Allomantic properties. And Atium had Feruchemical and Hemalurgic properties too.

Thanks @Yata. I only ask because I'm starting to feel that Aluminum may be one of the biggest fakeouts in the Cosmere. It seems to be inert in all magic systems, or resistant. Which has me wondering if maybe it is not one of the basic sixteen Allomantic metals (because in world lore about the number of metals and their IDs has been wrong before), and not another God metal.Which could mean that there are another two Allomantic metals out there that fit the table. But more interestingly, if other God metals are resistant to shardblades, which I believe we have a WOB on indicating that the metal of shardblades is honor's God metal, then we have God metals being unable to cut each other. Or in other words, being inert in other Shard's magic systems. Which, as Aluminum is inert and resistant everywhere, puts it as a contender for being a God metal too. Potentially as Bavadin's (as she seems to be everywhere). Or (Linking to Atium being Ruin's body) Adonalsium's body. At the end of writing this, I realize this may not be the best place to discuss this idea, but my next few questions I will ask, when I get a chance, will be in the vein of trying to confirm this - how do God Metal's interact, and do those interactions have similarities to Aluminum.

Has anyone ever asked if a Shardblade could cut through other God metals? Atium, Lerasium, Harmonium, etc? If not, that will likely be my Oathbringer question in my signed copy.

I have this horrible image that I can't scrape out of my mind after reading this: Someone in the Dominator/dominatrix getup saying "I am your God now". And interacting with Saze, who might go along with whatever they suggest to maintain Harmony... Thanks for that.

Huh, this is really neat. I always focused on how he seemed to be talking about whether or not reconstructing Adonalsium would be a good idea, or if it even result in the same entity. The whole part: "I wonder if you could do that to a man. Pull him apart (into 16ths), emotion by emotion, bit by bit, bloody chunk by bloody chunk. Then combine them back together into something else" seemed to be a discussion on what you would get if all the shards were recombined. Would you get the same, or an anagram? I never looked past it to try to decipher an anagram from Adonalsium. Really neat stuff guys! Too bad that " Figgldygrak " does not seem to be an anagram of anything yet...

Wow, nice. Thanks @The One Who Connects!

I'm not sure if the following has been asked yet or not, but here goes: If someone brought a Seon to Roshar, could they develop a Nahel bond with it? If yes, would they develop surges related to the Seon's Aon, the existing surges in a new pattern, or something new and scary/interesting?

Thanks for the vote of confidence @The One Who Connects! The motivations of the original 16 are among my top curiosities. I know that we have years before we learn anything, and they are massive RAFO bait, so I won't even bother asking for a WoB on those. But I figure, no one wakes up one morning and decides to kill God for no good reason. The decision to band together with fifteen other people (one of whom will eventually betray and try to kill the rest of you) who all have different motivations, murder God, and graft a portion of God's fresh corpse onto yourself? That cannot be a choice anyone came to lightly. And I have to figure, the reason they came to that group has to colour how each of the sixteen chose which Shard they grafted to. Something had to make Leras desire to have the power to Preserve, and then get stuck with the Intent to preserve all things without change. I can see the loss of a loved one, be it a spouse, a child or other. And then, at his moment of death, after thousands of years shepherding Scadrians into the Great Beyond, I can see him uttering her name as he finally goes to join her in the realm beyond his sight.