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Bringing back the Greatshells would be a truly impressive feat and thus a sign of divine favor. Gavilar could then claim that his ability to bring back the Greatshells was a sign that the Almighty blessed his reign and it was the holy duty of all good Vorin followers to obey him, and a number of people would buy that. Sure, it's a stretch, but lots of people have claimed divine authority from much less. Since he is friendly with the Parshendi and most of his opponents aren't, anything that lets him triumph over his enemies would thus be good for the Parshendi.

Well, I'm using some pretty generous estimation techniques; the Alethi estimates probably account for Soulcasting to at least some degree. That said, lots of pre-industrial jobs are brutally labor-intensive, and the wildly unpredictable nature of Roshar seasons makes farming even worse in that regard because there wouldn't be a predictable slow period; thirty percent is much lower than historical rates. Also, for the purposes of this estimate it's not important for the military pool to have the same people in it at any given time. Having over 20% of the entire population (including children) as line soldiers is incredibly high as it is. Now, the flaw with this estimate is that I'm working backwards from the estimated number of soldiers to get the civilian population without knowing the assumptions used to calculate the number of soldiers in the first place. On the low end, if Sadeas calculated the number of soldiers by treating them as a military force on campaign instead of an entire civilization, the total may be as low as 90,000. It's also plausible he used an estimate that corrected for the presence of children, which would bump up the total. Also, armies flatly need support personnel; equipment must be maintained or replaced, food distributed, wounds treated. The Parshendi must allocate some people to these tasks, although not necessarily as many as the Alethi; their capacity to change forms just means that support and combat personnel can easily switch roles, not that they don't need them. It gives them a greater capacity to absorb casualties but does not permit them to effectively field more soldiers. The support personnel might be able to fight quite well, like with US marines where everyone must be able to shoot a rifle, but if they fight instead of carrying out their tasks for all that long the army won't be fighting all that well.

The Parshendi could still have sent Szeth in response to the black sphere; it's possible they weren't afraid of the sphere itself but of what Gavilar intended to do with it. It may be that they figured it would be harmless in the hands of someone who didn't know what it was. It'd actually be a pretty safe bet to assume the Alethi would dump in into the deepest pit they could find and Soulcast it shut if they found it. The thing is pretty creepy. As for why Gavilar was baffled, he may have been planning to bring back the Parshendi gods without realizing they didn't like that plan. Or possibly he intended to resurrect the extinct Greatshell species (Aside from Chasmfiends, they've basically been hunted to extinction), which would provide excellent grounds for proclaiming himself High King of Roshar by Will of the Almighty. Since the Parshendi had Greatshells and appeared to like their existence, and their leadership wouldn't need to worry about their followers taking the appearance of the Greatshells who were already there as a divine sign, and they were getting pretty friendly so Gavilar claiming supreme power over the Vorin kingdoms would have been in the Parshendi's best interest, he may have been honestly baffled that they'd want to stop him. The people he listed, however, have political ambitions, and would not like the idea of him being able to claim divine support; anyone in the Vorin kingdoms who opposed him would have to worry about their own populace rising in revolt. In this interpretation, he likely did not realize that reviving the Greatshells would also bring back the Thunderclasts and likely others.

From the sound of that article, it seems like they have implemented the externals properly, and the lifting and tossing involved getting clever with mixing them.

I kinda doubt this one. Our precedent is Allomantic Atium, which is used for a very powerful but highly specific purpose. This seems a little too broad. That makes Lerasium pretty hard to figure out, since Hemalurgy has a confined set of things it might potentially do that the regular metals have pretty well covered, and any specific improvement to the theft process leads to the question of which abilities it works on. Maybe pure Lerasium is ineffective, but alloys have non-decay for whatever they'd normally steal.

I think Awakening is technically powered by pigmentation, not by the light. As noted, you can't drain white objects, and white is all colors for light but colorless for pigment. Now, what they could be useful for is figuring out exactly how much color can be drained from a given object by measuring exactly how much light of any given frequency is reflected. Culture might be a bit more interesting; for one thing lots of people may take to using colored light on white walls so they can look pretty without fueling Awakening.

I'm worried about the interface, personally. It demands having a lot of options and very freeform movement while also being fast-paced. I don't know how you'd implement Pushing and Pulling in a way that would allow players to use them quickly and accurately without seriously altering how they work and strictly limiting the number of interactive objects.

Well, for one thing, you mostly don't. If the viewpoint character isn't burning bronze, there's explicitly no outward indication of most of the powers. I'd put a colored outline over viewpoint characters and anyone whose Allomancy is being detected, and otherwise the audience has to guess from what they're doing like Vin does.

Well, it's tricky to judge his limits from third-hand descriptions. I got the impression that his precog was good enough that he wouldn't enter a building rigged to explode. It would be possible to guarantee the deaths of everyone in a building with a sufficiently large quantity of explosives, say a kiloton-range nuke in the basement. That said, all we know for sure is that Fortuity apparently survived at least one bombing attempt, so your interpretation could easily be correct if no one used enough explosives.

Well, obviously he can't necessarily hunt down people who make it to another Epic's territory. So if Digzone started running long enough before Steelheart came after him he might have escaped. I did get the impression that the Reckoners expected him to hunt them to the ends of the earth if they backed off, though, since they'd deliberately scattered information that would absolutely confirm it was the Reckoners who were responsible. Certainly they didn't expect to be able to back off, put more work into figuring out his weakness, and come back around for a second try. However, none of the Epics would want to protect them; if Steelheart sent a guy to tell them the Reckoners escaped into their territory, they'd send their version of Enforcement after the Reckoners.

I think only the edge actually cuts. I doubt it's controlled by Intent, since dropped blades slice through the ground before vanishing and it is unlikely the user intended to cut the ground. Also, the blade can get stuck if it doesn't keep moving, so clearly it doesn't cut perpendicular to the blade.

The Alethi haven't located the Parshendi encampment, so they don't have much to go on for calculating their numbers.

Personally, I think Demandred and Shara were introduced perfectly. Granted, I actually saw it coming, probably in part because I bought the guide, which has a section on Shara (that's rather uninformative, there's a conversation between some Forsaken that hits the hightlights) and thus noticed that there were rather a lot of channelers over there, and so paid rather a lot of attention when Sharan merchants began making minor appearances. By Towers of Midnight, we knew that the Sharans possessed a lot of channelers, had recently experienced a sudden vacancy at the supposed top via Forsaken kidnapping, and had made a rather major policy change regarding foreign trade. We also knew that Demandred had secured control over an area with substantial military forces, and everywhere else was either in chaos or their leadership was accounted for. Yes, they did show up rather suddenly, but that rather fit. Demandred was the finest military mind of his Age; we've always known that. A sudden, overwhelming surprise attack on an engaged army using gateways is entirely appropriate. Likewise, Taim was frankly not competent enough to be Demandred. I guess it comes down to how much you bought into Demandred's buildup. He hardly ever appeared and didn't do much, but for me that actually made him more intimidating. We kept getting told he was a military genius, yet we had no idea what he was doing. The other Forsaken were plotting, feuding, and getting into fights with Rand, while Demandred occasionally showed up at team meetings to remind us he existed. He was the Shadow's finest general, and his actions were a complete mystery. Whatever he was doing, it couldn't possibly be good. So I didn't see him as a new supervillian introduced at the last minute; he'd been ominously present in the background for six books and finally took to the field personally, revealing his secret master plan in grand form. Frankly, I would have been disappointed if he hadn't been so wildly effective. However, I can see how you'd feel it was cheap if you did not have such a high opinion of Demandred; we certainly heard about his credentials a lot but his only prior onscreen battle was during the cleansing, where he demonstrated he was competent but didn't accomplish anything of particular note due to being badly outmatched by the linked circle.

I recall that Gemhearts are somewhat rough when removed from the Chasmfiend and need to be cut and polished to hold as much Stormlight as possible. Since there's no mention whatsoever of normal gems or fabrials hampering Shardblades, I tend to assume that they'll cut right through anything that's just holding Stormlight instead of using it to reinforce a material. They'd probably neatly cut through a Gemheart. That would be bad, though, since gems crack under use and smaller ones crack more readily. Now, since they apparently shatter into many pieces instead of breaking in half, it's hard to say exactly how much slicing one in half would cost you. But you'd get less use out of them before they cracked and they'd likely break into smaller pieces, so the total amount of Soulcasting you could do with two halves of a Gemheart before the fragments were too small to be useful would be less than an intact Gemheart.

I recall that somewhere it was confirmed that Gemhearts are distributed among all the gem types, so emeralds (used to soulcast food) make up only 10% of all Gemhearts. If the Parshendi can't buy food using the others, then they'd need to score ten a month on average to get one emerald. That would seem to make the numbers work out. I'd also question Saedeas's count; the most likely source for the number is an estimate of total Parshendi numbers from the migration divided by the presumed number of noncombatants per soldier. An estimate of thirty thousand combat-effective soldiers would probably represent a minimum total population of 90,000, and that's assuming the population ratios reflect an army with logistical support on campaign. For an average population, even total mobilization probably means only 10% of them are soldiers. Since the Parshendi have Soulcasters, they don't need nearly as many people farming. Granted, this would imply that their army is actually larger than the combined Alethi forces, but the Alethi soldiers fight in formation and have heavy cavalry, so as the size of a battle expands they become relatively more effective. EDIT: Let's get some actual numbers in here. Okay, we're starting from an estimate of 30,000 soldiers. Assume the estimate includes two camp followers each, for 90,000 combat and support personnel from Saedeas's estimate. If we then assume that's ten percent of the total population, Saedeas's estimate corresponds to a total population of 900,000. Unfortunately, we have no basis for calculating how many of these are too young to fight; I'll wildly assume that two generations are of combat age and their population is approximately stable, so the generation too young to fight makes up about a third of their population (They probably have many more than two children per couple and a high childhood mortality rate; to keep the math easy I'm only counting ones surviving to adulthood; this probably cancels out the drop in population associated with the war). Let's assume 5% of the rest are maimed or too old to fight, leaving us with 575,000 fit people of fighting age. This is where things become complicated. Okay, so the Parshendi can shift forms and have full gender equality, meaning that 575,000 makes up their entire possible recruitment pool. Normally, their technology level would imply most of those are farmers, but the Soulcasters change that. Let's mark 30% of the recruitment pool as farmers or not directly concerned with the military (who is in this 30% may change frequently), leaving us with 402,500 in "military" roles. However, some portion of those are in support roles. I'm not going lower than one camp follower per soldier, leaving us with 201,250 soldiers as an upper bound. The actual number is probably lower; I was very generous with some of those assumptions. While that's quite a lot more troops than the Alethi have, battles are much more complicated than simple numerical advantage. Breaking a shieldwall with an undisciplined frontal charge is extraordinarily difficult and the Alethi have become quite experienced at dealing with the Parshendi attempting to bypass them. Furthermore, lighteyes fight in heavy armor and often mounted while the Parshendi have no comparable force and lack a good counter to a frontal lance charge. Finally, the Alethi have a lot of Shardbearers while the Parshendi don't have all that many. Granted, the Shardbearers are of questionable relevance because they personally can't kill enough soldiers to decide the battle and the Parshendi don't really fight in formation so they aren't too badly disadvantaged by being disrupted. Properly employed, the Shardbearers could serve as a powerful mobile reserve and rush to reinforce a crumbling section of the line, but corralling a bunch of glory-obsessed, headstrong noblemen into a support role would be some trick.

Szeth is apparently not a Radiant, he just has very similar abilities. He holds Stormlight much less efficiently than Kaladin; he can only hold it for a few minutes while Kaladin spent half an hour using Full Lashings for rock climbing and had enough left to cushion his fall.

I've been watching a frankly embarrassing amount of Anime over the last year. TWoK would fit in quite well with, uh, anime that most of you have probably never heard of. A TV show would be an utter disaster because of budget constraints, and a movie probably wouldn't fare much better and run into time constraints.

I think the Aiel/Seanchan feud got settled with the revised agreement. Perrin probably does both at once because of gateways; it's actually not at all unusual for a king to be a lord in another country. Mat likely does eventually assist with the reconquest. From the column vision, the Dragon's Peace was pretty stable even without the addition of an enforcement mechanism, so if the pact nations don't get drawn into an Aiel/Seanchan conflict it'll hold for more than two generations. But, at the same time, not having all the answers is kind of the point. There are no beginnings or endings to the turning of the wheel of time; any arbitrarily selected time would leave more questions.

See, my assumption is that, since he can tell if a building is rigged with explosives in time for it to do any good, he must be able to see at least several minutes into the future concerning personal danger. Therefore, he would have had enough warning to not go where Davis was going to run him over in the first place; it only became a forced checkmate once he was out on the road.

I assumed it was like the Shin bargaining thing, where everyone criticizes their own stuff because the Prime is supposed to be humble. Lift is great fun to read.

Lift mentions that Wyndle has to obey her because she bound him with words. While she does not seem to have the best handle on how things actually work, it does support my old theory about word-centric magic on Roshar.

I actually don't think he has a shadow-cloud equivalent, or if he does it expands so rapidly it becomes entirely useless very readily. I base this assumption on how he died. Davis attempted to run him over, which caused him to dodge into a position where he got shot by Megan. This implies that he couldn't foresee that jumping would get him shot. You could say he wasn't able to jump anywhere else, but that simply relocates the problem; he failed to foresee that going where he did would result in being forced into an untenable situation. Apparently he can see very far into the future where it concerns his personal safety, since it allows him to avoid my excessive fondness for explosives as an anti-Epic weapon, so it's unlikely that getting shot would have been far enough in the future that he couldn't foresee it. I think that he can see into the future that would occur if he did not react to information from the future, so he can't see what will happen after he dodges something. Megan would not have shot at him if he didn't jump, so he didn't see that coming. How exactly this would interact with another precog is uncertain; if they both have the same restriction then the powers would probably be effectively useless. In the event that they can see the future where the other precog reacts to their own precognition, causality gets a headache and probably the precogs do too. Also, Fortuity's precog seems to be most effective defensively, although he can actively see into the future a short distance to cheat at gambling. If he could effectively engage his precog against a clone they'd probably stalemate because they'd be able to anticipate attacks better than they could anticipate dodging.

The thing is, any method of making the mobiles secure assumes, essentially, that the mobile actually does what it is supposed to. This is not a safe assumption, because it would seem that no one else knows how to make a mobile and therefore no one knows what the hardware should look like, so even if they crack it open and diagram it with an electron microscope they won't be able to tell if it's designed to send cleartext directly to the Foundry, associated with the serial number. It's a black box and the transmissions are apparently undetectable except by mobiles. The only way to be reasonably certain the Foundry can't listen in on your communications is to encrypt and decrypt them outside the mobile.

I think that at least some of the weird bubble physics occur because everything that enters or exits a bubble gets moved into the appropriate temporal zone, so generally things aren't interacting with stuff moving at different rates, and the interactions that do occur aren't locally noticeable. Even if the contents of a bubble get their gravitational pull multiplied by the time ratio, it'd take rather sensitive instruments to notice the difference. However, if Bendalloy bubbles did increase gravitational force outside the bubble, I'd expect Cadmium bubbles to increase the pull inside the bubble, which would be instantly obvious and quite possibly pull down buildings. And if the being inside a bubble is not analogous to being outside an opposite bubble that contains the rest of the universe, then relativity is violated. So it would appear that forces projected over bubble boundaries get corrected as well, so exerting a constant force into a x10 bubble for one second of normal time would exert the same force for ten seconds of bubble time, for ten times the work done on the contents for the energy used exerting the force. This violates conservation of energy pretty badly, but Allomancy is literally all about violating conservation of energy. This would explain why people generally avoid the boundaries of the bubbles; any interaction would exert its peak force for much longer than normal in the bubble reference frame.

I don't know about that. From what I could tell, he can't see very far into the future except for direct danger. It'd probably only help in a situation where he could kill Steelheart in the next few seconds.