Serack

There is a portion of Adolin's Arc in Wind and Truth that speaks to my life in a way that had me put the book down and cry for several minutes. For some context, let me quote some stuff wrote back in 2018 after Oathbringer in a reddit post In a response I wrote more specifically about myself and potential parallels to Adolin: The parts of Adolin's arc that hit home for this lived experience are spread out over multiple chapters, 125, 128 which hit hardest, and a little in 133. Reflecting on them would probably just end up being a quote fest, and I've already got enough of that from my own writings above... but I really, really felt seen and represented in this book.

So about the Aviar that lets you see new colors. I wrote extensively here about how Lightsong's offhanded description of someone's red lips being “three shades shy of the seventh harmonic” basically only makes sense if the fundamental harmonic is in the infrared spectrum. If this Aviar were to allow vision in the infrared (and if breath also had some of that property) it would retroactively have this off handed comment make more sense.

Just some back of the envelope calculations based off of info from TSM and the Arcanum Unbound (roshar being ~0.7 of standard gravity), I've come up with the following rough values for Canticle. Note, the numbers for earth that I used to get this (assuming standard gravity is earth's) resulted in a calculated density for earth that was off by about a factor of 1.5, compared to what the internet says is the average density of the Earth, so consider these very back of the envelope, on the scale of less than an order of magnitude. Mass (kg) =~2.7x10^21 (4/10,0000 that of the earth) Density (kg/m^3) =~ 2x10^5 (~30x as dense as earth) Note, this is about 10x as dense as Tungsten or Gold. The density is within the range of densities of white dwarfs provided by wikipedia (10^4 to 10^7), but the smallest of those has 0.17 the mass of the sun, or 100,000,000 as massive as Canticle (and is much larger in size than 200 miles in diameter). Denser objects like Neutron Stars and stellar black holes are even heavier. A Black hole with Canticle's mass would have a Schwarzschild radius way smaller than the earth's (0.88 cm) so that's probably not what is going on either. Conclusion: Canticle is 10x as dense as pretty much anything we encounter on earth, but can't really be compared to any stellar objects because it has way too little mass. Footnote: mass was calculated using Newton's gravitational force equation assuming Canticle's force at the surface is ~0.7 that of earth's with a radius of 100 miles.

I'm just going to point out that I think it's much more likely that Vivenna's blade was made by Yesteel Also, very interesting theory OP

Didn't the sample chapters or a WoB imply that Nomad has visited more cosmere planets than Hoid by the time of The Sunlit Man? Edit: I couldn't remember it in my read of the book itself, but it's right there, Hoid says he blieves Nomad seen more of the cosmere than he has. When I first read that I took it to mean that during his nomadic run from the Night Brigade he had visited way more planets than Hoid, our prime planet hopper who had been doing it for millennia before he got started.

I’ll point out that she pretty much flat out calls Hoid a god in her thoughts. This calls into question her ability to accurately call herself an atheist.

Ground can be where you put it in an electrical system so basically, either magenta or cyan can be ground. In the context of the spirits given in my OP it would make more sense if the hion were a simple DC system, but in AC systems, they are usually generated and transmitted on power lines with 3 phases that can conceptually be considered the vertices of an equilateral triangle. From there they can be set up as "floating" with no defined ground (generally safer because if one is introduced, it just accepts it without really any ground fault current, and less chance of an injury) or grounded in any of a number of ways including a "y" ground you could consider the center of the previously mentioned triangle concept. If you look at power lines through your town, they are almost always in floating sets of 3 with another ground wire physically above, below, or adjacent to it. In the US, residential feeds off of these transmission lines are from a transformer between only 2 of the phases stepping the voltage down to 220VAC on the load side with a "center tap" defining the neutral as in the middle of that 220, with 110VAC from it to either of the other 2 lines. It's difficult to define that "center tap" neutral without a device like the transformer to get it from. In a DC system, and theoretically in the hion system, you could get it from the heating element described in the narrative by tapping from the center of it, however, any device you put across only one half of that center tap would throw off the balance some unless it were a trivial load compared to the heating element, or an equal load were also put across the other half. When considering/working with AC systems instead of DC systems, there are all kinds of weird ways it can be set up that are difficult to describe and even when worked with are usually reduced to working models that resemble Sanderson style magic systems (or perhaps you could turn that around since those are modeled after what-ifs deviating from real life physics).

The arcanum (is that the term we are settling on for investiture rules/magic for a particular system?) for Komashi seems to follow a yin/yang Taoist style heuristic that makes me think Virtuosity's number may be two. However someone else quoted a WoB from last year that called attention to how the missing yellow in the standard pigment color pattern (Hion's Cyan and Magenta) may still have relevance, so maybe I'm off here.

So I saw some discussion comparing the hion to the Ire's investiture conduit in Secret History or "essentially wires" which I think are missing some points about the hion and spirits that seemed obvious to me so I'm going to write about them. Here are a few relevant quotes, then some conclusions and theorizing. And from the final epilogue: From this, I conclude: When investiture on Komashi manifests on the physical realm and performs work (it's arcanum) it manifests as a dualist polarity, possibly inspired by Yin/Yang Taoism/Daoism (something I am largely ignorant about). Hion is a specific manifestation of this dualist nature that closely resembles positive and negative conductors of an electric power source. The investiture serves as a force much like voltage potential, pushing two opposite force carriers (i.e. positive and negative charge in electromagnetics) apart across the opposite colored hion lines and anyone can then perform work when the hion lines are connected to appropriate terminals on properly designed devices. As an electrical engineer, from there I want to start getting dirty with Maxwell's equations, determining if yes indeed there are no magnetic monopoles in this physics and all the other primary conclusions that come from them. I'm still drafting, but my AMA question about this book is:

It hasn't really been revealed in canon much, but the coppermind collects everything we know, some of it not canonized since it's from dragonsteel prime and the liar of partinel https://coppermind.net/wiki/Fain

huh? They've got 4 legs (2 are practically arms in the image) and a pair of wings, that's the 6 limbs of a fain creature. WoB: (full one from what I quoted partially in an earlier post)

Actually, this may be an artifact of their being fain, which presumably are modeled after the "fae" which have similar lore about having to make trades. WoB:

Yah, it’s worth asking in a Q&A if he had an in world justification for the coincidence

Yah, the You Are Not So Smart podcast episode on Bayesian Logic made it easier for me to consider things like this in terms of degrees of certainty. I gave room for Brandon to surprise me, but when Huck was talking about Hoid's curse I was applying it to him too. The cognitive dissonance was in the stuff implying his family were all rats too. https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/04/08/yanss-073-how-to-get-the-most-out-of-realizing-you-are-wrong-by-using-bayes-theorem-to-update-your-beliefs/

So I think I suspected Huck was Charlie pretty early, but I can't be sure of that memory. I did however write a note in my e-reader for the following passage on page 75 Where I wrote "Huck is Charlie." It was easy enough that I'm pretty sure Brandon intended us to figure it out early, so I'm wondering what your experience was. Edit: I think there when Huck gave his "name" and seemed to stick around Tress early I was already suspicious, but this is where I pretty much flipped from suspicious to fairly certain.

So u/Leather-Tutor4116 over on reddit commented that assuming the ghostbloods that helped sink the ships were skybreakers, it demonstrates that Radiants are already surgebinding outside Roshar. Later commenters pointed out the reasoning for thinking they are skybreakers is because they are preoccupied with the legality of sinking the ships, and because they "steelpush" which is probably just the gravitational surge.

This occurred to me after I finished writing. Although I don’t consider it invalid, there is only one follower of Odium that this appears to have really happened to, whereas all the other “voidbringers” are quite passionate. We were told otherwise in text. The below quote is of the Stormfather from page 1138 of Oathbringer, and it pretty explicitly states that there is another, world shattering reveal yet to come. Edit, this is reinforced when Maya testified at Adolin’s trial on RoW

Is the “void” in “voidbringers” and “voidlight” just a fantastical stand in term for the “bad” or “hell” or something or is there actually a property of the “enemy” that makes the meaning of the term “void” particularly applicable? from Merriam-Webster online The only in-story property that immediately comes to mind that vaguely makes “void” relevant is the near ultraviolet nature of “voidlight,” making it maybe slightly analogous to an absence, or lack of light. My motivation for exploring this is that our expectations on just what “Voidbringers” means have already been violated twice, so maybe another shoe is bound to drop. Also the loose ties to ultraviolet light are just an unsatisfying reasoning for the term “voidbringer” to me. So either I’m missing some other, more valid reason for the term that explains what we already understand, it’s just not that important, or we are missing something fundamental that the term reveals about the true threat of the “void.” Some other mysteries that may tie in We still don’t know what was so scary that the old Knights Radiant perpetrated the Recreance We don’t know how the original Ashynites (Particularly Ishtar) ruined their own planet. Oh, or how they apparently heel-face turned (tvtropes link) and became the forces fighting the Void. More speculatively related, we don’t know what was rocking the original 16+ that they thought killing Aldonasium was the best option to deal with it. I bring that last up because I suspect the Dawnshards were related to all 3, and it makes the question possibly even broader. We have been contentedly identifying the “void” with Odium, and his not entirely understood motivations, but there may be a more significant big bad that’s been hiding right under our noses in the term “Void”

Gosh, the question itself isn't a spoiler if he's read HoA, but honestly, the books themselves are a terrible resource for understanding it. If he only wants what he has read in the books to be his source though, you should respect that. I recommend you discuss with him the option of the annotated version of Warbreaker. My e-book has the annotations at the back and Brandon is careful to call out when an annotation has spoilers for the story so you can skip those parts. They break up the flow of the story a little though so they may not be ideal. However it is a really good, printed-in-the-book way to demonstrate just how rich the outside-the-story info from Brandon is.

A lot to unpack there and I didn't read the other replies. Relmantic theory (physical realm, Cognative realm, and Spiritual realm) is really important for understanding the magic systems of the Cosmere, but they are just one aspect of the relevant "theory" necessary to model and explain things. Other important concepts, some you mentioned but I will describe anyways, are: Investiture: A fancy word for magic in the Cosmere. Some flavors of the term are Investiture can kind of be thought of as a modifier to physics. It's an extra term in E=MC^2 and is the handwaving that allows magic to work beyond the physics of the real world. In Mistborn the mists and the fluid in the Well of Ascension are actually investiture condensed into a gaseous and fluid form. Atium and lerasium are a solid form of the same. Stormlight, and some other things in The Stormlight Archive are manifestations of this too. An "invested" being or person is one... blessed by cosmere magic (usually associated with a particular shard) so that they can manipulate investiture according to the rules of that particular form of magic Intent: Most cosmere magic requires the will of a being to shape it, and this is called Intent. Occasionally, if enough investiture is sitting around idle it can shape a will on its own. When magic gets handwavy, it's intent that allows it to work. Identity: How objects see them selves effecting them in the cognative realm is an aspect of this. An example of this being relevant in cosmere magic is healing and shape shifting. Some invested beings "heal" by using investiture to revert to how they see themselves. Older injuries are typically harder to heal because they become part of the individual's identity. Connection: This seems to have ties to the "Spiritual Realm" when it comes to connections between people. Also, some magic systems (particularly in the world Elantris is set on) require "Connection" to a region to work, and as a byproduct of that, they have less influence if the practitioner moves away from the region. Fortune: We know less about this, but it gets dropped a bit. It may be related to seeing into the future. For a lot of cosmere magic, these things can be considered in terms of how they limit a particular magic system. Hemalurgy requires intent for a spike to tear off a portion of a being's soul to be able to invest the spike with it and then drive it into the spirit web of another person. Breath is kind of special in that once someone with Intent endows theirs onto someone else, there really are no other limitations like "Connection" or "Identity."

If you're like me, you don't really spend time in the White Sand sandbox of the forum, and maybe this belongs there, but if someone else posted it there I'd definitely miss it entirely. Brandon just announced in his weekly update video that Dynamite has some extra copies of the White Sand omnibus they produced for the IndieGoGo campaign, and he provided the below link https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/category.html?category=DF-White_Sand It's been discussed in the youtube channel, and also in this 17th shard announcement that "This project has been in the works for quite some time, with Isaac Stewart and Dan Dos Santos contributing. In addition to some continuity fixes, it also includes an all-new prologue drawn by Nabetse Zitro and an Ars Arcanum." I didn't participate in the IndieGoGo, and would rather purchase directly from the publisher than wait until it's open to mass market in November so I just now purchased my copy.

Some relevant WoB: Unfortunately I couldn't find the main one I wanted to. Even before the epilogue of RoW, I knew that (RoW spoilers) Would Bloodmaker Ferrings exist in this category as well? If not, what about someone Compounding Gold? Brandon Sanderson Yes, you are correct. Shagomir As a Bloodmaker ages, what keeps them from healing the damage and carrying on as a very old, but very healthy person? Do they come to a point where they can't store enough health to stave off the aches, pains, diseases, and other things that come with old age? This makes sense for traditional Feruchemy as it is end-neutral, so storing health becomes a zero sum game - eventually, you're going to get sick and you're not going to be able to overcome it with your natural healing ability no matter how much you manipulate it with a goldmind. ...Unless you've got a supply of Identity-less goldminds lying around. Would a Bloodmaker with a sufficient source of Identity-less goldminds (or the ability to compound, thus bypassing the end-neutral part of Feruchemy) eventually just die from being too old? Brandon Sanderson Basically, yes. They can heal their body to match their spiritual ideal, but some things (like some genetic diseases, and age-related illnesses) are seen as part of the ideal. Depends on several factors. Stormlight Three Update #5 (Nov. 29, 2016)

Reserved. I've spent some time writing on this, but my view has shifted as I re-listened and read others opinions. I'll probably re-write my bulleted opinions here revising my earlier post with my newer understandings. I also need to read the text version.

@LewsTherinTelescope, I put a lot of effort into summarizing the main discussion going on in this topic about the theory that someone is impersonating The Stormfather here Do you think you could link this in the OP, or could I possibly make a new post of it?

I'll have to re-listen to it, but I don't remember it quite the way you portray #1. As for your #2, I already wrote about the lies. However, I don't think we saw him lie once in the prologue, just in what Gavilar remembers of past understandings which we don't have context for. Please see the counter argument in my earlier post.