Overlord Jebus

Here's a little post-word for those interested:

Chapter Six: I'm Sorry Epilogue

Moved to Fanworks at the request of Firerust

You can't ban him, you're the one that made the pun!

I so thoroughly enjoyed this. You have an art for dialogue and character Matt. damnation you for using the "There's always another secret" line, well done. Also hot damnation this moment: You KILLED it here. Loved it.

Well that's the thing, because they are able to burn the beads away immediately without any refinement implies that they are pure atium. We've never had any hints that they aren't pure atium. Again, this is why it's interesting and kind of confusing. The beads also aren't an ore, they form from Ruins investiture leaking into the pRealm via the geodes. They are more similar to clams forming a pearl than any sort of natural process of mining/refining metal.

@SteveD Whilst that may seem to be the most "boring" answer, that would imply that the atium geodes (Assumedly what the atium is being "refined" from) is an alloy and that all the atium affects we've seen (From beads that grant future sight to metalminds that store youth) aren't actually atiums attributes but the attribute of the alloy that your answer implies it to be.

You guys did good, I've got 'em

I mentioned on this podcast that Defending Elysium was Brandon experimenting with how many sci-fi concepts he could fit into as small a package as possible. I tried to mention them all during this podcast but one that I missed (And probably the biggest one) is the story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove. In this story, aliens arrive to conquer Earth only to find the Earth is far more advanced than their civilizations (The alien ships are made of wood and they are still using muskets). The reason for this is because anti-grav and FTL are actually absurdly simple technologies that the rest of the galaxy normally discover very quickly. Humanity simply missed it, hence the name of the book. The book ends with the aliens defeated and the humans reverse engineering the FTL tech. The final exchange has two aliens sat together and asking themselves "What have we done?". With what we learn from Skyward of the human empire, it seems this universe is simply a continuation of this Road Not Taken idea, with the addition of The Eyes, it seems. Hope you enjoy! EDIT: It seems I also completely fumbled the explanation of levels of intelligence/civilisation. I believe the idea is from Joe Haldemans Forever Peace, a story centred around a science experiment that could end the universe. Think the LHC-black hole controversy turned up by a million. The idea goes like this: First level: Every member of a species is able to kill one another, but choose not to. This includes communal animals and rules out things like predators that kill each other on sight due to territorial reasons and such. Serial killers generally wouldn't reach this level. Second level: Every member of a species is able to kill their immediate community, but choose not to. This is generally attained when guns are invented. Once you have automatic weapons, the ability to pick one up and kill everyone around you becomes trivial. Most people in the world have reached this level so you'd generally say we've reached this level as a species. Third level: Every member of a species is able to wipe out whole cultures/civilisations, but choose not to. This is where nuclear weapons, bioweapons, just your general WMD's come in. We, as a species, have not reached this level yet. We have a few people in on Earth with access to these weapons (And unfortunately, those willing to use them) but we aren't even close to everyone having this sort of power at their fingertips. Would you trust everyone on Earth with their own nuclear weapon? Fourth level: Every member of the species is able to wipe out every member of the species, but chooses not to. This is where the hypothetical of the book comes in. Right now, we don't even know of any sort of technology that exists that would even put us in this category. The idea being that each and every single member of the species is able to end the whole species but doesn't. But my application of this to Skyward is that this is the level where Cytonics become very common and each user risks The Eyes coming down and wiping them out, so they choose not to use them too much (Or get locked away). That's what I think they are referring to in Defending Elysium anyway. I always liked this idea and it always stuck with me. The Kardashev Scale is nice (Where civilization is judged on how much energy it is able to harness) but this scale takes into account not just technology level, but also empathy. I should really write up all the various references and ideas in Defending Elysium and where I think Brandon got them from...

He was one of the original 16 Shards so he would have been aware of at least one other planet for sure and knew more were out there. Harmony doesn't know because Sazed doesn't know.

Oh I didn't realise I was being propositioned for a specific guild! Maybe some other time If I was you, I'd be worried for everyones safety.

Glad you liked it! Alyssum helped me a lot with grammer and capitlisation (I'm really bad at remembering 's and punctuation around speech marks, they're good at them). Ladymxdnight helped with the plotting and pacing of a lot of it. For example, I originally had them appear inside the Oathgate building until Lady pointed out that the platform is a wide open space that, in Thaylen City, had been converted into a statue garden so I had to rewrite that whole section. And I've never thought about it really. This is my first time writing something this long and complex. Most of my writing projects never break 5k (Tragedy is now up to 13k).

Chapter Five: Smoke and Ash Big thank you's to @Alyssum314 and @ladymxdnight for helping with this chapter!

Rig McAffrey is a nod to Anne McAffrey who wrote the Dragonriders of Pern series to which this seems to have a few homages to (The caverns analogous to the Keeps, the waves of Krell from the sky are like the Thread, the characters been descendants of ships that landed on the planet, even the cytonic teleportation and the "nowhere" seem to be homages to the teleportation in the Pern books).

I am in favour of referring to these books as the storm-lite archive! I will go into this in detail on next weeks Shardcast about this but I felt there were unsatisfying answers. My biggest issue was probably the explanation of Detritus. The reasoning behind the planet being how it was being "We found it that way" felt very... unSanderson. The planet basically arbitrarily existed to allow the story to happen and seemed generally unconnected to the rest of the story. It's not bad, it's just... a boring explanation. Maybe we will get more information on Detritus in the future but in Skyward, I felt the explanation was disappointing.

I get what you're saying and I probably could have included a few more nicer moments to contrast the bad. I still let Renarin beat the thunderclast, I couldn't off him without at least giving him that but I will take this into account for the next couple of chapters (It looks like this will only last 2 or 3 more chapters). Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I'm not even going to hide the fact I goddamn love Taln. I would have had him singlehandedly save all of Roshar this chapter but I felt that would have gone against the spirit of this fic. I'm glad I had the desired affect!

Apologies for how long this took to get out, I normally wait until I finish the chapter after the one that needs posting so that I can clear my head for when I do a revision. I've been really struggling with Chapter Five so I just never got around to posting Chapter Four. It's been done for ages. I apologise. Anyway, enjoy.... Chapter Four: Herald of War

So the cats out of the bag! I mentioned in my review that I felt that some of the reveals weren't my favorite. I'd love to know what people's thoughts on the information we get regarding the following mysteries was and how people liked them, warning, this list spoils what answers we get: We're doing a podcast on skyward soon and I'll go into my specific opinions on that. More questions! Who is everyone's favourite wingmates? What do people think about Spensa as a character and the growth and changes she goes through throughout the book? Just gimme opinions in generallll!!!

I'm with the idea that Spensa will most likely get kicked out completely of the academy at some point and she and her ship will become operating basically autonomously.

Why even mimic? Kal has said he didn't need to renew his lashings when he lashed things in front of the storm so he could just lash the ship and it could ride the front of the stormwall forever.

The body thing definitely clicked with me as something important. I'm of the opinion that the Krell might be in a similar position to the humans but in space. Their actions aren't the actions of an overwhelming space force. These bit and bob attacks with only a few ships attacking locations with lifebusters and such, the almost half complete ships. I reckon the Krell fleet (If it can even be called that) is in just as bad a state as the human ships. I think they are most likely scavenging material from the debris ring and building ad hoc ships as they need them. I'm also wondering that if the ship that Spensa found has an AI, maybe AI tech is something that was a bit more prevalent pre-detritus landing (Do we have a name for the battle that resulted in the humans getting into this situation yet?) and that the Krell could be an AI enemy, flying AI ships it's thrown together in some futile attempt to complete it's mission parameters. And finally, whilst I'm feeling pretty good about this theory, it provides no explanation for why they can't take the fight to the Krell in space. That ones a big mystery to me.

I wonder if he'll avoid calling it that as he was trying to avoid a eighth book in a row called X of Y with Oathbringer. I just came up with "The Dawnsong" out of nowhere and that's my guess now.

I imagine it would. It seems the "strength" of an allomancer can really only be attributed to how much investiture that allomancer is being given from Preservation (This is not the same as the skill of an allomancer. If anyone has any suggestions as to other explanations as to what makes one allomancer stronger than another, I'd be curious to hear them). As a stronger allomancer is receiving more investiture for the same metal burnt, then they would be able to fill a metalmind quicker and would therefore be more efficient at compounding.