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I don't know why Fain would help them, or be relied on to do so, and I don't think he controls the Black Wind as such given how it totally ruined his planned schedule back in book 2. I also doubt Mordin can control it, but it probably fears balefire, so that might be it.

Galladon's father allegedly died of heart disease. I personally believe he went to the Shardpool and Galladon was told he died of heart disease. I'm sure some reasoning could be constructed for an Elantrian to need daily restamping, or at least desire it. But it could also be left out and just be used like the Shaizan stamp, becoming an Elantrian for a day before reverting to being a Forger, then reapplying the stamp if needed. Rewriting ancestry would probably simply fail, or last for a few minutes at most, at least at Shai's level. Parentage is simply too heavily bound up in people's self-image. I guess Vin might have been able to pull it off if she were a Forger, because she knew who her parents were but had no particularly strong connection to them, but I think even so it might be impossible. At most she could swap fathers to another nobleman.

Probably referring to the attack on Andor. Which raises a very good question: How DID they get an invasion force through the Ways?

I read through it just now.

I'm pretty confident AonDor is not actually region-locked but Elantris itself is a power boosting Aon with a limited range.

Actually, at one point Dalinar discusses the long-term inflationary possibilities of gemhearts. At the moment the warcamps definitely are countering inflation by using up the recovered gemhearts. There are numerous reasons for the value of gems, but it's a pretty basic and generally agreed upon principle of economics that the value of something goes down when you have more of it. For instance, in the modern world steel is useful, but it's also cheap because there is just so much of it. Meanwhile, diamonds are expensive because a shadowy international cartel is artificially restricting the number of gem-quality diamonds for sale. 1. They're probably the best for demolition or cutting like Jasnah removing that rock. 2. Gems being used in soulcasters are not cut into sphere-sized gems. 3. Right, but soulcasting shatters gems on a fairly regular basis, so they'll still suck down the overall supply. Plus, people with soulcasters won't buy gems for more than the value of what they'd make with them; what would be the point?

Glacier lake. They're actually pretty common.

I assumed that the Dark One was radiating a generic depopulation field. It seems like the population has been falling since the War of the Hundred Years for no readily identifiable reason. Sure, plagues, famines, and wars can take a big bite out of the population, but it doesn't seem like they've been frequent enough to explain a majority of the land area being basically abandoned. The birthrate just doesn't seem to be high enough for a sustainable population given the massive childhood mortality rate typical before modern medicine.

Guesses: #1 is probably Rand talking. I've thought that the two non-Oath rods from the tower (the balefire generator and the super-sa'angreal) are among the Nine Rods of Domination mentioned in the series prologue, so there would be a male sa'angreal in the set too. That would certainly be a handy surprise. #2 is just too vague, as the most plausible canidate of known characters for actually visiting there is presently dead. #3 seems like Gaul to me.

Social tendency only goes so far. If values fluctuate enough they'd move to another multiple of five. They might also break away from strict multiples of five when the spheres are very large, but we don't see much of Roshar high finance in detail.

It's stated somewhere emeralds are the most valuable because of their use in soulcasting. Presumably most emerald gets used by soulcasters instead of turned into spheres. The warcamps are keeping that true at the moment, because they lack the capacity to effectively supply such a large force for an extended period of time so far from their agricultural base without soulcasting, but Dalinar notes that isn't a permanent situation. The question of what types of gems are found as gemhearts has been raised, but I suspect they're not equally distributed or the impact would already have been felt in ruby and diamond(fire and crystal soulcasting) values. Bear in mind that most of our detailed numbers involve small values, and unlike historical metal currencies there is no way to split a sphere. Also, chip-mark-broam exchange rates would be fixed, because the ratio of gem size remains constant. That being said, in the areas we see there is a strong social tendency to make things multiples of five or ten.

Well, the epigraphs apparently either come from dying people seeing through time and space, or from the Heralds, or both. So I would not consider them emblematic of what the general population knew at any time in Roshar's history.

Because then people like me would spot and call out any instances where he screwed up the count. By leaving all the values nebulous, mistakes would only be noticed if two scenes gave conflicting valuations. Also, Roshar does not have a fiat currency system. In the modern era, one hundred pennies are equivalent to one dollar because the issuing authority says so and anyone can go exchange the two at exactly those rates at a bank. Roshar, or for that matter individual nations on Roshar, is not politically unified enough to have an issuing authority. At best each nation, or possibly just major powers, makes spheres at the royal gemcutters and they're used interchangeably, and at worst moneychangers manufacture them without any political oversight. Either way, the numerous and decentralized nations of Roshar simply lack the capacity to enforce any fixed exchange rates between types. So in any given transaction the ratio of values between different types of spheres is what the people involved decide it is. The average exchange rates would presumably be set by gemstone supply and demand, but would fluctuate with market forces. So if a disproportionate number of gemhearts are emeralds, we could expect the relative value of emerald broams to fall once the warcamps disband and soulcasting food is in less demand. So any table of exchange rates would be temporary and approximate. This is why dun spheres are worth less, since the value is taking into account the risk that they're counterfeit and can't be charged. If Roshar were as unified as Scadrial, the government would probably tell people to knock that off and accept dun spheres at the same value as charged spheres.

I assumed he managed to locate and conceal allomantic metals. It could be that sending Tin mistings to the pits is safe because they only use tin in alloys, namely pewter and bronze. Also, I assume there are mistings in the guard force, whom Kelsier could have killed and looted. As for how he knew, that is an open question. Clearly it can't be obvious to people that they've snapped, or hiding the existence of six metals and half the misting types would have been kind of difficult.

No, I meant a gold ferring, with a feruchemical and an allomantic gold spike so he could compound and transfer the metalminds. A gold misting would lose the ability to tap the metalminds when the gold ferring spike was removed. It'd save a spike, but there would be a hole puncturing an artery where the spike is inserted that would require treatment. Granted, the spikes could be small and he would regenerate the blood loss once he got both of them back, but it's still less than ideal.

If the hemalurgic effect is giving people allomancy/feruchemy, that's not a huge problem. Though you clearly can stick a spike in someone without having a hemalurgic effect if you miss a bind point. I think that might slow decay somewhat compared to just leaving it sitting in the open, but I'm not sure. That being said, hospitals could store their gold spikes in someone who is naturally a gold ferring. They could compound while the spikes are inserted and store those to non-spike metalminds to heal the wounds as soon as the spikes are removed. Get five or six of them and have them present on rotating shifts so the spikes never go unstored. Though personally, I'd advise taking advantage of hemalurgic spikes giving people access to metalminds filled by other users to not hand unbounded super-regeneration to random people off the street, instead having a trusted person make a warehouse full of charged metalminds keyed to spikes.

I suspect that only creating the Dakhor monk glyphs has a specific requirement, and anyone can receive them.

I'm a bit dubious of that because of the requirement that the test subject have known the emperor well. It seems that the cognitive or spiritual aspect of other objects alters how an object responds to a stamp. So if the cognitive aspects of other objects can cause a stamp to be rejected, could a sufficiently powerful and incompatible stamp cause backlash, forcing the related objects to change instead of being rejected due to them?

Dilaf was fully enhanced at that point in time, I think, although the Aon-disruptor might have been added later. I think it passively protects the user and actively disrupts Aons at a distance. He certainly actively targeted Raoden's illusions at an opportune time, and he also withstood a massive barrage. If it's a triggered wide-area effect, it is possible he activated it as soon as he saw the Elantrians preparing their strike.

-Probably. I wouldn't be entirely suprised if it ruined the Essence Mark in the process and made it (and probably every other Essence Mark) not take even if they survived the experience. -Nope. Even though all the appropriate spiritual components are probably available, Bloodsealing uses blood, not metal. -Maybe? We don't really know a lot about how the skeletals track people. They're clearly not thrown off the scent by stamps, but we don't know exactly how those interact with the other Realms.

I think it might be possible for a Forger who was actually a candidate for being taken by the Shaod, or for one who was exceptionally powerful. It would need to be a pretty intricate stamp, but anyone of the appropriate ancestery could write an alternate past where they got taken by the Shaod. Whether that would actually work on a fundamental level is an open question, though. There's limits to how much a stamp can change, or they wouldn't need to be reapplied and things wouldn't revert if they were removed. Magic system access might be one of those things. Also, I think that for it to work they'd need to understand the Shaod in a way that non-Elantrians clearly don't. They would need to know exactly why certain people became Elantrians and others did not in order to incorporate that into the stamp. And since Shai clearly doesn't know very much about gyorns, I doubt she is terribly familiar with the Shaod. A Dakhor Monk rewrite would probably be much easier to pull off, again assuming it was fundamentally possible, but again that would require being familiar with the monastery in a way no one, not even the Teod spy network, outside of the Derethi hierarchy is. I wouldn't be surprised if no one in the palace has even heard rumors of the Dakhor monks.

It struck me that Shai seems to actually know what is going on with Realmantics to a major extent, although ironically she doesn't know as much about her own magic system as Raoden knows about his. For instance, she doesn't realize it's geographically based. I also kind of have to wonder about the external interactions of Forging. Apparently, it rewrites the target's personal history. So does this have any ripple effects? We probably wouldn't notice any external effects from Shai's work, since anything that would be severely altered by her changes would cause the stamp to not take, but there's a lot of "rules" that could be overcome with raw power in Allomancy. If someone with Inquisitor brawl Vin power levels used Forging to change the entire palace by making an ancient siege successful, would they alter the historical records that say it hadn't been? Also, what physical changes, especially to people, revert? The Essence stamps revert, but would an "on fire" stamp revert? This book also provides some more fuel for the power ranking of Cosmere magic systems. Forging can manage some pretty dramatic changes, but it's a lot of work to set up and the results can't defy physical laws, and even getting a very temporary change to take requires some degree of study. Plus, while Shai managed to pretty effectively take down an experienced guard and a batch of skeletals with the Shaizan stamp, any Mistborn could have swatted her aside even without Atium, and I wouldn't fancy her chances against a Thug. It seems to feed into a general pattern where most systems can do more versatile and possibly more effective things than Allomancy, but Allomancers can do stuff a whole lot more easily and faster, and can kill the users of other systems as long as they aren't walking into a trap or possibly even if they are. I wonder if Forging is properly a distinct magic system from AonDor. We've got two Shards and had three magic systems, with Forging making four. It's based on physically drawn runes and appears to require devotion to percision and art, so I wonder if it's just the local region's AonDor. Shai says anyone can do it, but certainly no one in Kae that we know of does. There is a gyorn in the palace. There is a gyorn in the palace. No one in the palace seems to realize the significance of a gyorn in the palace. Somehow, Elantris resurgent or not, I don't feel too confident Shai's effort to reform the empire via the stamp is going to have time to play out. Also, why is there a gyorn in the palace?

Soulstone is easy to work with for making soulstamps, but there's no particular indication that it makes the stamps more powerful than an equally well-made stamp from another material. In fact, crystal is apparently superior but not as easy to work with. Then again, Atium and Lerasium were massively powerful fuels for a system which depends heavily on specific types and compositions of metals. It's possible that a Mistborn could burn Soulstone to perform Forging by staring at things and thinking about how a Soulcaster could have used them in combat by turning them into fire instead. Or something equally outlandish.

We've already speculated one religion was spread to or from Nalthis by worldhopping to Scadrial, so a second isn't much of a stretch.

Pretty sure it's referring to a rocky slope. It appears to be connected to the order of the Stonewards.