Weltall

With apologies in advance to anyone this quote triggers: "Hey! Listen!" - Syl

Here's a WoB where Brandon discusses this. The gist is that what Denth tells Vivenna about giving all your Breath is a lie but it's widely believed to be true, so if she realizes Denth was wrong it will look like he made an innocent mistake rather than that he was lying. In addition to the obvious method of partitioning your Breaths through a series of smaller Awakenings, it is possible to selectively give only some of your Breath with the 'My life to yours' Command. It's a skill that comes with practice and is an extension of what people do all the time, where they give just enough Breath to Awaken a Type-III Entity instead of giving everything they have. Ahh, I didn't see that one. I'm not sure if it's actually canon though, as Brandon wrote that while he was working on the book and said that he would use the idea, but it doesn't seem to have been incorporated into the final published version. I did a quick skim of older versions and he doesn't seem to have incorporated it into any of the drafts either, or at least none of the obvious search terms panned out. It's possible he changed his mind on this point. Either way it's probably one of those things he'll go into more detail on whenever Nightblood is written.

Welcome to the Shard! Brandon has said that the numbers have more to do with the planets the Shards have Invested in than with the Shards themselves. Odium's thing with nine as opposed to ten is because of Braize, for example.

@Draginon ASoIaF/GoT, Bronn versus Ser Whatsisface in Tyrion's trial at the Eyrie. xD And related: "We heard you were dead!" "I was, I'm better now" - Spook and Kelsier Or in a slightly more literary flavor: "The report of my death was an exaggeration" - Kelsier

Awakening is end-neutral and in typical circumstances you don't lose Breath, ie when you're creating Type-III Entities. Breath 'sticks' to Type-II entities (Lifeless) and so are lost to the Awakener and Type IV's (Nightblood) are special. The only way you can lose Breath while creating a Type-III Entity is if the object you've Awakened is damaged, in which case there may be a loss of Breath. In any case however the Breath gets recycled so it's not permanently 'lost' to Endowment. Non-Nalthians do not have Breath but they can be given it and use it. Because of the way the magic works, Brandon has said it's the easiest system in the Cosmere to get access to. You just need to find someone who already has Breath and is willing to give some to you. Relatedly, I asked Brandon at a signing whether there's such a thing as 'Breath decay' where over time your store of Breaths gets weaker for Heightening purposes (in the way we know individual Breaths can be more or less 'vibrant') and he said that it wouldn't be noticeable once you accumulate enough Breath.

He knew of all the metals but he may not necessarily have had all of them for the reason that Thunder_93 gives. And even if he did have them, he might not have used them for the same reason that we don't see him using F-Steel or any of his other absurdly powerful abilities: He was so arrogant and had gone for so long without needing to use anything close to his full power that he didn't think he'd need to, until it was too late.

"Brilliant! YES! Four serial suicides and now a note! Oh, it's Koloss Head Munching Day! Tillaume, I'll be late. Put the kettle on." - Wax

My reponse still stands. Mistborn can burn atium despite it being Ruin's power and allomancy being Preservation's magic because they have Connection to Ruin. The need for Connection to a Shard to use the corresopnding godmetal in the Metallic Arts and why it won't work for non-Scadrian metals was exactly what I was responding to in my first post. As for why Investiture's solid form has to be metal, Brandon has essentially said 'just because'. Also, creating a table for godmetal alloys is likely to be an exercise in futility. Brandon has stated that he hasn't nailed down what most of the atium alloys do (not to mention the feruchemical/hemalurgic uses for the lerasium alloys) so they're unlikely to be important in the long-term or something we'll even learn all of. Brandon has said that the sixteen base metals are basically it.

Brandon literally said that non-Scadrian godmetals are not viable in the Metallic Arts under normal circumstances, that's pretty definitive. For point one, everyone on Scadrial has Connection to both Preservation and Ruin because they made the planet and permeate it. It's kind of an essential plot point. For point two, just because the godmetals are the condensed power of a Shard still does not mean that they are automatically usable. See Brandon's multiple WoBs on how you need Connection. And burning atium doesn't deplete Ruin's power per se and it eventually gets recycled. What happened in Hero of Ages was just keeping that part of Ruin's power out of his reach so he couldn't absorb it. For the last point, magic systems are not created by the Shards as such, they're the result of interactions between the Shard, the planet and the sDNA of the people on it. Preservation and Ruin didn't 'base' the metals on anything, it just happened that way. They may have had a bit more control over how their power would manifest due to their creation of Scadrial but it doesn't matter in this instance because again, Scadrians do not have Connection to the other Shards so those other godmetals. Will. Not. Work. Unless the Shard does something or the user creates the necessary Connection themselves.

No worries, we're all used to the experience of finishing a new work by Brandon and having tons of questions and a burning desire for answers. Anyhow, on to yours: Brandon has RAFO'd how he lost his eye but he's confirmed that Gaz wasn't heterochromatic and no hemalurgical weirdness was involved. There may or may not be significance to it but we can at least rule out those options. I think all we know about his debts (aside from that his owing people money is why he deserted) is that he was considering taking out a loan in order to keep gambling with the rest of Shallan's men during that scene in the book, so it may well have been a gambling addiction. This is entirely possible; there's a lot of hints that he started out a fourth son or lower and thus trained as a warrior and his wife implies that there's something very significant about the recent death of his brothers. Whether he was actually a brother to his nuatoma or whether he really was a cousin but is still the closest in line of succession, it seems like he should be the leader of his people now. Rock's ability to see spren and almost hearing the Rhythms is probably not anything special about him, all Horneaters have some singer blood, so do Herdazians. Jasnah's childhood affliction is a mystery, one we may not get explained for a long time since she's slated to get her book in the back half of the series and apparently one of the last ones. But yeah, given the relationships we see her having with Dalinar and Navani it seems like she's refering to Gavilar when she thinks about people she loves hurting her. On the guilt, it may be that she didn't put together clues about the Parshendi/Voidbringer connection fast enough and feels responsible but it could also be that she feels directly responsible because she caught his attention just before he fell from the balcony. It's possible she thinks that if she hadn't been there, he might have been more focused and been able to either avoid the fall or survive it? I don't think that Ivory was trying to kill her, despite the riskiness of what happened in the WoR Prologue, I think that was just part of how one bonds an inkspren. Do you have this WoB handy? I'm curious and I can't find one right now that implies this. I think it has more to do with Eshonai's people being closer to the Cognitive Realm and thus being able to see more of the spren as they appear 'over there', so what she sees and what a human normally sees wouldn't be exactly the same thing. But yeah, Brandon has mentioned pre-Oathbringer that spren can have other genders and linked this to the Parshendi having four, so it's fairly clear that those spren were 'created' by the Parshendi's thoughts rather than being shaped by human thought. Brandon has said that all the Heralds are from the same place but he's RAFO'd whether they're native Rosharans. However, since the timeline doesn't really fit the idea that they came to Roshar with Tanavast (humans didn't arrive until after he'd settled in) they're probably not pre-Shattering. That they know about Adonalsium is interesting but doesn't have to be terribly significant' it's entirely possible that Tanavast explained the whole thing to them at some point during the thousands of years they were his Heralds. Similarly, knowing one of Hoid's aliases is interesting but he's gone by so many and it's possible he simply reused one, or that Brandon wanted to shift his use of 'Midius' to later in the timeline so that whatever he was calling himself during Liar of Partinel is now something different. Since the Heralds are all connected to one another, they might be able to sense the presence of the Honorblades. Or they could have learned independently that one of the Blades the Shin were keeping was given to Szeth without having a special connection to the country. Unfortunately, Szeth's book is planned to be the fifth so we probably aren't getting answers for a while. His name was the result of a non-Vorin mother trying to give him a Vorin-styled name while also incorporating some of her own culture and resulting in something that doesn't actually make sense in traditional Vorin terms. It's probably not significant in terms of its meaning, just as one more thing poor Renarin had to deal with growing up. For the other questions, I wish I knew. Glys seems to have some way of hiding since Rock never sees him but it's probably not a gemheart thing. All the evidence we have is that every non-Skybreaker Radiant broke their oaths. That would include killing all of the then-bonded ashspren. Voidbinding is related to Odium albeit we don't know all the details of it. Speaking generally, all the Shards on Roshar are using the same fundamental system of magic, with the Radiants drawing on both Honor and Cultivation, even if the former's influence predominates. Fabrials seem like they would be 'of' whichever Shard is associated with the captured spren, which in practice means that most of them would be some mixture of Honor and Cultivation. Here's a WoB on the subject. I'll have to take a look at the books later, I don't remember what we have on this offhand.

Because allomancers are generally not going to have any Connection to Shards other than Preservation and Ruin, so trying to burn 'Tanavastium' isn't going to accomplish anything. Basically, non-Scadrian godmetals will only work if the Shard does something to make the metal viable or if the allomancer is able to form the right sort of Connection to the other Shard. Since there were no mistborn prior to the lerasium beads, this is sort of adding an unnecessary step to the process. There may be some mechanical similarities (in that both modify the spiritweb) I doubt they're that closely related.

Yeah, the desert full of the sand that's the cornerstone of their powers is a sacred place for them and that location is specifically called out as such. It's far enough away from civilization that only the Sand Masters go there but not as inhospitable as the deep sands.

As he was genuinely attracting a Cryptic his paranoia clearly had some basis in reality. (and by definition he'd need sufficient cracks in his soul) so combine that with the way his father was assassinated by a man with powers that shouldn't exist and I think we can forgive him for being just a bit worried. And there's still the mystery of his gemstones during the chasmfiend hunt and Jasnah's research on how bloody dynasties in Vorin kingdoms have been historically, which just might have been a worrying factor for him if he knew even a fraction of the stories his sister had been researching.

Paalm isn't a perfect example since kandra aren't human and thus don't function entirely the same (their bind points are a lot more flexible for one thing) but she does have multiple spikes and as we saw her using multiple powers, she was swapping between them depending on what she needed at a given time. Add to that, with the exception of hemalurgic constructs who are heavily dependant on their spikes (though for the Inquisitors it's only both eye spikes or the lynchpin spike, all others are fair game) there's no reason to think that you can't 'hot swap' spikes as long as doing so wouldn't cause secondary complications (having a hole in your chest for example) and as long as you don't mind the potential loss of charge if you don't swap them very quickly. You could also argue that Vin and Wax are essentially 'hot-swapping' every time they put their earrings on and removing them. This idea reminds me a lot of the various neural implants you see in science fiction and especially cyberpunk. I wonder if we'll see 'hemalurgic microsofts' as it were, once we get to Era 3 or 4, or especially that idea Brandon has mulled of doing a 'Mistborn Cyberpunk' story.

True, but Brandon has repeatedly pointed out that most godmetals would not be automatically viable so we're unlikely to see much in the way of non-Scadrian godmetals being used in the Metallic Arts.

There may be harmonium alloys but whether they are conventionally usable in any of the Metallic Arts would depend upon whether the alloys retain harmonium's 'explode when wet' property. Brandon has said that for most intents and purposes, the base sixteen metals and their interactions are going to be where all the attention goes. Brandon has said that he hasn't canonized even in his head what most of the atium alloys do so we're not likely to see all of them, or all the lerasium alloys. Brandon was asked about the number of metals and said that fifty was 'nearly' correct, with the then-unseen harmonium being one more. The number of known viable metals is 52 (sixteen base metals, three godmetals, thirty two alloys from the base metals and atium/lerasium and lastly an atium/lerasium alloy) which tracks that statement. Since it fits so closely, Brandon may not have any current plans for harmonium alloys.

@BitBitio Did you perchance notice how old this topic was before you posted in it? Six. Years. Old. You miiiiight want to consider in the future whether you're posting something new when resurrecting a topic that old, as opposed to something we've known for about three years. Also, he has a potentially earlier name in Midius, though even that may well not be his 'real' name insofar as he can be said to have one.

Mraize was trying to lure her with the painting and that doesn't work if the person he's trying to lure doesn't know about it; he probably made sure to show off the paintings to people who would them gossip about Mraize's excellent taste in artwork, then waited for that information to filter down to Ash. As for Hoid's drawings, while the text doesn't explicitly say so I think we can assume that after looking at the picture, Jasnah lowered it enough that Ash could see what was on it and the text simply didn't mention it.

Like MountainKing said, it's possible that Jasnah has either progressed far enough that she can summon Plate or what we saw was her just about to reach that point and she had some sort of 'Proto-Plate'. The way that the shapes are said to be outlining her and how she was (apparently) throwing grown men around like ragdolls are suggestive, and Jasnah has been in full paranoia mode over the Ghostbloods so her keeping the ability to summon Plate a secret wouldn't be at all out of character for her.

If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All Shards are bastards!' - Narration, describing Hoid So long and thanks for all the chouta! - The Parshmen It turns out you were only MOSTLY dead. See, mostly dead is still slightly alive. - Nale, to Szeth

We don't actually know this for a fact, we just strongly assume it because of how Nightblood works. And since it came up in another topic recently: The man killed by 'the hog' in Interlude 10 is Sheler, the same man who was responsible for getting Tien killed.

Singleminded dedication to a goal could be pretty useful depending on the circumstances. For example, ignoring fear or pain could be useful in dangerous situations, or help you resist torture (assuming you're not deprived of a metalmind). It could also be handy for things like scholarship, if you need to remain focused while searching for some bit of information amid a lot of boring text and you don't want your mind to wander. I imagine it could help fight off certain forms of emotional allomancy as well.

Very nice. Running with this theme: "There can only be one." - Odium And dipping into misattributed TV sci-fi quotes: "We are all Bavadin." - Autonomy

Oathbringer Spoilers:

Oh dear, that Wax 'quote' fits him so perfectly. "The wind does not respect a fool" - The Stormfather And slightly tweaked from the original: " I can't believe it! My very first Oathgate trip! We're gonna have the BEST TIME. How much money do I get to spend on sweets and stuff? Oh, oh! Do bananas count as snacks?" - Lift