Weltall

The Spiritual Realm is... very different. We've seen people 'visit' it before but using it for travel is implied to be impossible for pretty much anything short of a Shard. Secret History shows us what can happen to someone trying to spend too much time looking into the Spiritual without having a mind capable of processing what they see. Trying to fully transition there would probably fry your brain, or cause every atom in your body to decide to take a separate vacation to different parts of time and space. As for Cognitive Realm travel, yes, it's done manually. If you have a form of Investiture that aids in travel you can use that, or you can hire local transport like the OB crew does with the ship. In all other circumstances, you walk. This works because space in the Cognitive is affected by thought in the Physical; where there's no thought happening (like, say, in the interstellar void) space is so compressed that you can cross light-years in a single step. Edit: Ninja'd by @Calderis

Welcome (again)! Uhhh, let's just say that recent developments have been very suggestive on this front. Or as Brandon would say: Read And Find Out.

Here's a couple of Words of Brandon where he's stated that under most circumstances, a metal from another Shard would not function in the Metallic Arts. The Shard could make it work but it would not be something that a Mistborn could naturally do.

First off, let me say welcome to the Shard! While the blades have many advantages there are situations where other weapons are simply more desireable. For example, if you don't want to kill someone then a rod like Lift summons in Edgedancer is useful. A hammer is effective when fighting someone with Shardplate for the same reason that hammers and maces were historically used against armored opponents in the real world: You don't need to penetrate the armor for the shock of the blow to hurt the person inside. With Shards, since the Plate is going to block a blade anyways the use of a hammer means that you're doing more damage, first because it's still damaging the Plate and second for the secondary effect on the shardbearer. For bows, you get a super-strong metal bow that's superior to even a 'Shardbow' (really an ordinary bow with a fabrial attached) which is perfectly sized to you, so if you're a good archer it's a pretty sweet deal. You have to carry your own string and arrows but that's not a huge hassle and you don't have to lug around the bow when you aren't actively putting arrows in things. Technically you could have a normal bow and make your spren the arrow but there are various reasons that's not the best of ideas, which have been discussed around here at some length. We don't know how far the spren can go from the Radiant while maintaining their Physical form and because of how such an arrow would function, it wouldn't really have any advantage over a normal arrow under most circumstances. Chief among the issues is that you can't kill someone with a 'Shardarrow' unless you bisect the spine. Brandon has been asked about making a bow and an arrow or about making multiple weapons and has said that it's possible but this would require splitting the soul of the spren and this 'wouldn't be very fun'. So it's not something we're ever likely to see happen. Lastly of course, there's simple preference. Just because you have a sword that's exceptionally lethal doesn't necessarily mean that you're very good at using it. Switching to a weapon type that you're more comfortable with means you'll fight better and have less risk of making a potentially fatal mistake, without really sacrificing all that much. Look at Kaladin and how he defaults to using Syl as a spear whenever circumstances allow it.

@leboralli Like RShara says, space in the Cognitive Realm depends on whether or not there is thought taking place in (or thought taking place about) the corresponding Physical location. There's a very long WoB where Brandon goes into a good amount of detail.Spoil-tagged for length, and it's got Secret History spoilers for anyone who hasn't read that yet.

On Nalthis, yes. It will consume Breath as the easiest form of Investiture to access and as it does so, you'll lose any benefit you were receiving from them and obviously can no longer use them for Awakening, so your range of options there decreases. And then you run out of Breath and Nightblood eats the Investiture that makes up your soul and you die. On other worlds, it wouldn't work quite the same way because the Investiture Nightblood would feed on differs. However, none of the worlds we know of have Investiture that stacks quite like Breath does, so while Nightblood could consume things like stored feruchemical charges (depriving you of those 'abilities') he won't actually consume your ability to use magic; that's hardwired into your spiritweb and the only way he can consume that is in the very last step when it's the last bit of Investiture you have to feed it. At which point consuming your ability to use any given magic system is academic since, well, you're dead.

Oathbringer plot details, you need to put a spoiler warning in the topic title. It clearly can't just be size or it wouldn't have been so important for Dalinar to get that one specific stone (and for Team Odium to work so hard to secure it and keep it away from Dalinar). The Gem Archive epigraphs mention that the theory about imprisoning an Unmade require a 'special prison'. A later entry (in-book, we don't know when it was recorded relative to the earlier one) makes a point of mentioning the 'perfect gems' that the Elsecallers safeguard, the specific one described might even be the same gem that Dalinar used, going by a different name. In any event, Roshar has no shortage of large gems so it's clear that for a prison to qualify as 'special' it has to be something more than mere size. The flawlessness of the cut is the most obvious explanation since we already know that Dalinar needed a flawless stone to imprison Nergaoul and they're already known to have the unique property of perfectly holding Stormlight, so other unique properties aren't a stretch. Probably, so long as the gemstone is flawless and cut perfectly the exact shape shouldn't matter. Given the mind-blowing amount of Investiture that a Shard represents and the lack of a single Physical presence that stands for the entire entity which you could try to imprison, I'm thinking the answer is: No. Also, we've seen what was necessary to imprison part of another Shard and the answer is: Another Shard. Pretty sure a shiny stone isn't gonna do the trick, no matter how large it is or how perfectly you cut it.

Ahhhh, how much do you know about the shared universe that Stormlight Archive is a part of? Because this definitely touches on that material. xD Welcome to the Shard!

Since there were two Shards that heavily Invested on Sel, there should be a second pool associated with Dominion and it would have remained in place after Odium's visit. The Dor is described as being dangerous because of the conflicting nature of the two Shards so while the power has been forced together, it isn't unified in a way that would see its Physical manifestation merging in the way that Scadrial only has a single Perpendicularity as of Era 2. Which also involved a mind guiding all that power, while the Dor is mindless. So yeah, there's every reason to assume that Sel has another Perpendicularity somewhere. We know that Shu-Dereth is more associated with Dominion while Elantris was more associated with Devotion so it's possible that the second Perpendicularity is in/around Fjorden, though it could just as easily be in the unknown third great domain or for all we know it could be part of the Dzhamar swamps or Galladon's favorite fishing pond when he was living in Duladel. As for relative safey, the entire Cognitive 'zone' of Sel is dangerous due to the power of the Shards violently clashing, so it's unlikely that the CR region around the second Perpendicularity would be any safer on average. It's likely that there are times when any given Cognitive location might be less dangerous in the same way that there are lulls in a storm, but not a standing region of greater stability. Probably. Given the other weird things happening on Sel due to all that power being stuck in the Cognitive instead of Spiritual Realm, there's more room for our predictions to be thrown off by factors we don't yet understand.

Was it really necessary to resurrect a topic dead over a year to repeat something that you yourself had already said?

We do however know that Sel's Cognitive Realm is still dangerous close to the time of Stormlight Archive, as all the essays in Arcanum Unbounded were written at the same time and context clues let us place their writing sometime after the end of Mistborn Era 1. We also know from WoB that Brandon wants to write the Elantris sequels before Mistborn Era 3 for some behind-the-scenes reasons he's not sharing. However, chronologically these would all take place before the start of Mistborn Era 1, while it's clear that the Dor was still a dangerous thing for some time after that Era's end. So it's unlikely that those books end with newly reformed (or combined) Devotion and Dominion and all that power withdrawn back into the Spiritual, or Khriss wouldn't talk about the dangers of the Dor in the present tense. .And as I mentioned earlier, we have evidence that while dangerous it is still possible for beings not named Hoid to traverse Sel's Cognitive region safely, so there's no obvious reason why Galladon couldn't manage it.

She actually does quite specifically, she just doesn't provide details. Khriss mentions in the essay on Taldain that for a long time it was assumed that Autonomy's Investiture only influenced Dayside but they now realize that's not strictly the case. Considering that Daysiders don't consider Sand Mastery to be 'magic' it's quite likely that if Skycolors/Shifting Colors are a Darkside form of Investiture, the inhabitats there don't think of them as 'magic' either. And if it's a more subtle application of Investiture (as the essay implies) it's quite possible that most Darksiders could be familiar with them as a concept but have no idea how to do anything with them, making it even harder to make the connection between the colors and Investiture. As for why the essay doesn't go into more details, there are two easy explanations. First, the Watsonian: It's not really relevant to the capsule summary of the planet that Khriss is giving, so she mentions it briefly and then moves on to more important matters. Then there's the Doylist explanation: Brandon's saving the information for some future project.

Welcome to the Shard! Brandon has confirmed that Nightblood does have an easier time communicating with the insane. It's in the annotations. Some form of Connection-manipulation seems like a good culprit for the underlying telepathy mechanism, given that Brandon has talked about Nightblood forming a connection with people who he's fed on and it sounds a bit like what we know of Connection's application in feruchemy.

We've seen gems crack when used in Soulcasting, of both the fabrial and Radiant-directed varieties. It's mentioned in the books that one thing that's especially important about gemhearts is that their size makes them less susceptible to cracking. I think Mestiv is right in that a gem will simply stop storing Stormlight when it hits its capacity rather than be damaged, much like how a metalmind can become 'full' but there's no indication you can damage one by trying to store beyond its capacity. The excess Stormlight then would either be available for the Radiant to reclaim it or if they didn't, it would evaporate in a short while.

You can hear Brandon (repeatedly) show off how he pronounces it in this WoB via the audio link, if you're curious Because apparently how names reflect language and culture can only differ from others in one way, there can't be multiple things distinguishing Shin names and language from other Rosharan groups, of more or less subtle form... So... your father is Praxton and Kenton is your little brother? I have so many questions about Dayside I want to ask you.

Given that Brandon used almost the exact same words to describe what he was considering doing with the ideas he'd come up with for Mistborn: Birthright, I would not be surprised if that's what this new graphic novel is.

Just as a reminder, we don't actually know how F-Chromium works yet. We do know that Fortune as a Cosmere-wise mechanic is part of seeing the future and Brandon has mentioned that future-sight involves reading Spiritual Connection but we do not know how it manifests in feruchemy. I actually asked Brandon about it at a signing since it's an area I'm really interested in and I got a RAFO. I didn't record the exact language but he was quite emphatic that we shouldn't assume how it's going to work based on what other authors have done. That said, since we do know that F-Chromium has something to do with future-sight, it would probably be useful in a fight but given the existence of A-Atium or the A-Electrum/F-Zinc combo, it would be only one more broken ability on top of a whole lot of broken abilities. A Fullborn is kind of like a player in an FPS with all the cheat codes activated.

'Hoid being Hoid' can explain just about anything. For the Elantrian that Raoden and the others take to the Perpendicularity, well... (OB but not exactly)

Welcome to Cosmere 101, where the unofficial motto is 'There's Always Another Secret'.

Indeed there are. If you look at the Tags page it's rather hilarous to note that Hoid has more than anything else, except for 'Writing' and (big surprise here) 'RAFO'. xD

Well, there's definitely some real theories about the Fools being connected to the Heralds so let's go with that. The Tenth Pancake that is only symbolic thus stands for the Tenth Fool, Sir-Not-Appearing-On-This-Menu, ala The Man Calling Himself Taln, aka the Fool who dreamed he was a Herald and believed it to be true, but he was actually a butterfly dreaming he was a man dreaming he was a Herald.

What @Yata said. The original WoB source is here.

<Activates the Surge of Nitpicking> Okay, you got me on the terminology coming from him. But... Brandon has admitted that his phrasing isn't always ideal when speaking off the cuff and the question about metalminds asks whether Hoid has more of them, when the only metalmind that we know he has was the unsealed coin (because Wax could use it) rather than an unkeyed one. So a response that Hoid has 'more' of something only makes sense in the former context of something we already know him to have. <Deactivates the Surge of Nitpicking> So... we could probably argue ourselves in circles over this one. xD

He literally says as much in the Epilogie, having concluded that for whatever reason that Cryptic is the reason he was drawn to be in the city. And he explains that he knows where he's supposed to be but not why during his earlier conversation with Shallan. Here's a WoB on the subject too, for future use.

Well, assuming that Mirror!Tia isn't also an Epic (I don't recall it was confirmed that Mirror!Prof was the Epic of the couple, but Tavi's not surprised to see him sharing her powers so...) then Tavi is an example of an Epic with essentially the same powerset as their one empowered parent. So we have some evidence for Epic/non-Epic couples essentially passing on power directly. There's a pre-Calamity WoB where Brandon mentioned that 'Epicness' doesn't necessarily get inherited but it can be, so it's hypothetically possible for an Epic to have only non-Epic children. As for the hypothetical children of David and Megan... well, I'm pretty certain they'll be small-e epic whether or not they're also big-e Epics, given who their parents are. xD But I'm inclined to guess that they would either get one powerset or some weird hybrid (like maybe 'creating illusions out of steel objects' or something) rather than getting both sets. Largely because just imagine how broken the combination of both of those would be in a single person.