Sunblesser

i think we have to assume that storing or tapping mass amounts of feruchemical power does not harm the feruchemist. wax doesn't crush himself under his increased weight. as mentioned above, sazed's skin doesn't rip tapping strength. a cadmium ferring couldn't accidentally oxygenate themselves to death, and a brass ferring can't cook themselves in their own skin, though i can't imagine that they would be very comfortable. i only say this because it follows the evidence we have from other feruchemical powers, as i see it. i could be missing something obvious. edit: if anything, a brass ferring would have a period of intense cold if they tapped a lot of warmth then stopped.

a well articulated theory. just to speak to one point, it is entirely possible that once sazed ascended, he altered demoux's genetics to allow him to worldhop/be immortal. he altered spook to be mistborn, why not demoux? one lieutenant to found elendel, the other to travel shardworlds on w.e mission you give him.

Hmm shard names... Perception (would have a sweet magic system) Sacrifice (silence divine apparently deals with powers granted after becoming sick or disabled) Avarice ( maybe bavadin? I think hoid would dislike such a shard)

I think you need to replace sapphire with either diamond or clear mark. Are sapphires even used in spheres?

Clubs is Albert while Bruce Wayne gets his own character in Breeze. Ham is the commissioner

re: spren and planet-hopping - i bet that with a strong enough nahel bond, and skill with the lashings, the ancient windrunners could have taken their spren with them to other planets. it seems like lashings should be able to allow space travel. or maybe fabrials based off of them.

i've thought of something that could make the case for putting nahel-bond/truthspren in the place of spiritual focus/input for the initiation of Shallans Memory ability. when she draws, and the truthspren show up, she's not seeing them, not really; not consciously. the spren are providing the spiritual input to try to make themselves known. maybe it's the only way the know how to communicate. there's no reason why forming a nahel bond has to follow a set of rules. it could be different for every order, or even every individual. we can already see that syl and the truthspren are wildly different creatures. anyway, the way the truthspren tie into her Memories is that they are completely faithful recollections of a moment of time; honest. what we thought cameras could do for journalism. then she recreates them in a beautiful fashion, often due to her creative choice of timing. eventually, after a long voyage of doing this with a multitude of people, not to mention flora and fauna, some truthspren couldn't help but take notice (though i think it's possible that the truthspren are originally from her father's broken soulcaster). this is all part of forming the nahel-bond with a truthspren, imo. syl starts talking to kaladin after he's done a whack of honourable things, leading people and doing his best to protect them. shallan, thanks to her drawing, and her generally creative/honest personality (she even robbed jasnah honestly), has begun to communicate with truthspren, and will soon learn more. i wonder which kind spren jasnah bonded with.

I agree wholeheartedly. mistborn backs this up for sure. aren't the mists in the final empire actually the spiritual third of preservation? going around snapping people, whether by activating dormant sDNA or mutating vanillas into allomancers; being used as the pure fuel of allomancy by vin. i'd say there's a strong link between mist and the spiritual realm.

not quite, i'd say. it seems more like endowment shows them the future, and then lets them decide if they have something important to give.

very interesting. what does the line "Return to men the shards they once bore," mean in light of this? my only question is, where do you hide that much shardplate? could the shin be hiding so many? could anyone hide so many? remember, the number of shards accounted for in dalinars vision, involving one and a half orders, is more than he knows exist in his world. dalinar also says that the shardplate light eventually dims and goes out. he doesn't mention the glyphs, but i can only assume that they likewise went out. i'm more inclined to believe that nobody has yet been able to unlock their shardplates potential by living according to the ideals and saying the oaths. as dalinar's story progresses, i'm guessing we'll learn the truth.

but that doesn't mean there isn't a spren around there that's just starting to notice dalinar now, at his most desperate, when his honour becomes strongest and his mind untroubled. two things we know nahel-bond spren are attracted to if syl is anything to go by. she first notices kaladin because of his honourable choices, and once she becomes sentient, she needs kaladin. if we do suppose that the shardblades and plate are corrupted somehow by odium, or at least are not working properly, or that the thrill is of odium, then dalinar might only be overcoming that negative influence there at the end of his life. whatever order he ends up being (resolute/builder, leading/protecting, w.e), his whole mindset seems very open to the intent of the shard at this moment, so much so that he hears the damnation words in his mind. "Life before death." he's also been acting honourably for quite some time now, and i wouldn't be surprised if soon he's noticing a particular spren following him around and playing tricks. maybe he could have it talking by the end of book two. i could also see some funny situations between him and kaladin occurring. in any case, one of these particular spren that he sees might be that future spren, or they might not, but if there isn't a spren hanging around with dalinar's name on it, then knock me down and call me susan.

my theory is that if helaran was the man killed by kaladin, he was using a shardblade given him by the ghostbloods.

when Kalak mentions dustbringers, i'd always got the feeling, at least after reading the entire book, that they were an order of knights, not an enemy. the way he says it, "the dustbringers had done their work well," seems like someone reflecting on his allies efforts. sort of a "well done, dustbringers" thing. otherwise, i think your reasoning is sound there, GHM. voidbringers seems to be linked directly to desolations in the modern mind, as if desolations only brought voidbringers, which we know is untrue. as a catch-all term, it works.

"Bet he's never held a spear in his life..." oh you silly silly man

good theory. i like it. sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one.

this is a good point, and it brings to mind some of the limitations the alethi impose on themselves. women are great scholars and engineers, i'm sure, but just as women can also be great warriors if given the chance, there is a potentially vast and untapped well-spring of creativity and innovation that is never allowed free-rein, because their men are placed in very strict roles of farmer, warrior, etc. sure, ardents don't have to worry about all that, but it is a certain type of mind that accepts becoming property to gain the freedom to study things. besides that, men can't even read! think about how intelligent kaladin is, then imagine if he was allowed to study, and read, and turn an active, inquisitive mind to the problems faced on the shattered plains, armed with a host of scholarly learning and employing critical thinking. basically, the alethi have stunted themselves with all these strictly defined gender roles, but i suppose that's what rigidity brings.

i posted a theory last night in the feruchemical powers thread, that the author of the AoL AA could be the autistic kid from elantris. to quote: "hmm, just had a thought... what was the name of that kid in elantris? the autistic savant who was taken by the shaod but his family hid it? anyhow, it could be him, as he definitely had a mind that would be suited to scholarly pursuits, and as an autistic person, he might be less likely to view hemalurgy as an evil thing, since his mind does not necessarily reason in those terms. the language of the essay might at first seem incongruous with his character, but he's had a lot of time to blossom and develop as an elantrian since we last saw him. in fact, this might even be a little teaser from Brandon, since this kid is apparently the main character of the second elantris novel, iirc. we could go back in time and see how he grew into a respected scholar and member of the seventeenth shard."

i still object to this splintering idea. effectively splintered? what do you mean by that? preservation made a prison for ruin out of his cognitive aspect. he simply shaped power in line with the intent of his shard. he splintered nothing. the mist-spirit is a shadow, a finite shred of left-over power, barely able to retain form, and is certainly not a splinter. in my mind, the definitive proof that preservation was not splintered is the fact that three separate people hold the shard over the course of HoA, and if a shard is splintered, nobody can hold it (this is based on the assumption that hoid knows what he's talking about in the letter).

hmm, just had a thought... what was the name of that kid in elantris? the autistic savant who was taken by the shaod but his family hid it? anyhow, it could be him, as he definitely had a mind that would be suited to scholarly pursuits, and as an autistic person, he might be less likely to view hemalurgy as an evil thing, since his mind does not necessarily reason in those terms. the language of the essay might at first seem incongruous with his character, but he's had a lot of time to blossom and develop as an elantrian since we last saw him. in fact, this might even be a little teaser from Brandon, since this kid is apparently the main character of the second elantris novel, iirc. we could go back in time and see how he grew into a respected scholar and member of the seventeenth shard.

i think you're right to say the pools are the cognitive representation of shards, but you're argument falls apart a bit after that. preservation was not splintered, yet we still had the well of ascension on scadrial, because preservation chose to create it. i think it's even explicitly stated by sazed in the HoA chapter headings that preservation sacrificed his mind to make a prison for ruin. this doesn't mean that preservation was splintered though, as both vin and sazed (and presumably kelsier, for the short time he held it) were able to seize the full power of the shard. so i personally am angling more toward shardpools being a choice made by the shard, usually for a specific purpose. if we look at aona's pool on sel, we can see that this is true as well, as the pool seems to act as an assisted suicide centre for elantrians. what's uncertain is why the pool still exists, if aona has been killed, since that should presumably remove the cognitive aspect which gave shape to the pool. it could be something simple: that the power concentrated in the pool by aona was potent enough to persist beyond the direction of a guiding mind, and that the voice Raoden hears is just an imprint left behind by aona. or it could be incredibly complex. brandon has said himself that the pool was originally just a reason to get raoden out of elantris, so he may be having to retcon the reason for it's persistence.

AWESOME! that thing raises all kinds of questions. especially regarding chromium.

regarding the order of dalinar's vision; i was never under the impression that they were coming in chronological order. that's just a gut feeling though, if anyone has evidence to the contrary, do tell.

i think that this theory is quite sound, and ties together a lot of the incongruities of parshendi behaviour. dalinar is clearly becoming a KR, and Kaladin is also well on his way, so the respect given them makes sense if they are aware of what surgebinders are and what they can do. i'm still of the opinion that jasnah is mistaken about the parshendi being the voidbringers, but it could be possible, meaning that the parshendi might have drawn the alethi to the shattered plains in order to train them against the parshendi themselves, in anticipation of the change that afflicts them when a desolation occurs. drawing out potential KR would then be part and parcel of that strategy.

^^^ This. I'll add that i don't think Nohadon was directly involved in setting up the orders of the KR. for some reason i feel like it was the heralds who actually organized surgebinders into different orders, possibly because each order has specific abilities and essences that associate with specific heralds

"To buy: element polish, heat lamp for that old reptile, new pillars for the sky, milk, eggs, and bread crumbs for the false trail" seriously though, it's an interesting point you make about aona and skai perhaps having the ability to stand up to rayse. now iirc, it's pretty much confirmed that aona and skai each had their own shard, but they did share something in common, namely, the Dor. the Dor could have formed from an interaction between their two shards, or perhaps it was already there as the Power of Creation. even if it isn't, we know that it is powerful. powerful enough to worry rayse? maybe so, since he apparently felt it necessary to go and remove the guiding minds holding those two shards, and make sure that no one else could take them up.