Weltall

Welcome to the Shard! This is one of those things that Brandon has addressed in the annotations, so if you don't know about those you can find them on his website and they contain tons of interesting comments on the writing process, behind the scenes notes and details that we can infer but which didn't get spelled out on-page, plus some things we'd never have guessed had he not told us. Here's one comment on the caches specifically:

Amusing as it would be with the nickname and everything, Ash is the patron of the Lightweavers. You want Chana as she's the one with the same powerset as the Dustbringers. Anyhow, while Nale proves that it's indeed possible for a Herald to attract a spren and become a Radiant, you'd need for them to do whatever is necessary to attract the appropriate spren in the first place. It's rather more likely for a Herald to attract the spren of their associated order simply because they already exhibit the traits those specific spren look for. But I do expect that at some point Brandon will give us unusual Surge combinations (after he's firmly established most of what the system can do 'normally') and he has mentioned that the Heralds occasionally swapped Honorblades to use different Surges, not unlike Szeth having trained in all of them. But it's probably going to be a long time until we see that and it's probably going to be one of those 'in exceptional circumstances' things.

I'm in the camp of Renarin being the wildcard because of his ability to see the future, full stop. We know from other examples of this that two individuals with access to the Spiritual can interfere with one another's prescience, so even though Taravangian may have been much better than Renarin on his day of brilliance and Odium is far better all the time, Renarin's ability to see even a short distance into the future can interfere with other forms of prescience. Since Renarin's power comes unpredictably (from what we can see) its ripple effects would likewise be harder to predict and thus create more potential interference. Basically, Renarin fits nicely into already known mechanics so right now I don't think we need to posit additional explanations for why two different prescient individuals couldn't predict his actions. If it was just Odium or just Taravangian it might be a different matter and we could look at potential weaknesses in their respective methods of foresight (possible Focus issues a la metal being invisible to Ruin, the one-instant nature of the Diagram etc.) but with both, I'm inclined to stay with the simplest explanation for now. I doubt Jasnah's oaths are in any danger. First, we don't have the slightest clue what they are yet so we can't know what may or may not go against them (aside from what we can deduce via negative implication, like there being nothing in her current oaths involving not soulcasting sapient beings) and second, immediately afterwards Ivory declares that Jasnah made the right choice, even if he doesn't understand what just happened or why.

Chapter 3 of Bands of Mourning confirms that the earrings are made from melted down Inquisitor spikes. Brandon has also mentioned on occasion that Wax's earring specifically must have started as a spike in order for Harmony to be able to communicate with him. Slightly trimmed WoB: Hemalurgy could be used to give a kandra allomancy so it doesn't seem like snapping is required. And since it's a 'universal' magic system it seems like it really should automatically perform the necessary Initiation on you for whatever power it grants, otherwise it wouldn't be nearly as useful as Khriss (and Brandon) have implied.

The Returned aren't splinters though, they're Cognitive Shadows. A Splinter is a somewhat flexible term but in general they're self-aware Investiture that was never originally human. With the Returned, you have a human whose soul has been stapled back into their body by a Splinter of Endowment, which is not the same thing. So we can't use the Returned as an example of Splinters and what a Shard can do with them; they're qualitatively different things. Since Brandon says the Unmade are Splinters, they pretty much can't have been originally human. While Shallan thinks that Re-Shephir might have originally been human, that doesn't mean she's correct.

It's an interesting idea but from what we know of the timeline, Rayse was planning to kill the other Shards more or less immediately after the Shattering (he went after Ambition right away) and was likely planning it even beforehand. Also, Adonalsium's mind would have been destroyed in the Shattering so whatever influence the Intents have on the Vessels would be passive rather than an active 'punish the other Vessels for killing Me' sort of thing. Brandon has mentioned that if you could reunite all sixteen Shards (and he's left this a RAFO) the result may not necessarily be 'Adonalsium reborn' which suggests there's not enough mind there to be the sort of driving force (separate from the Intent itself) you're envisioning. If there was a more active influence on the part of Adonalsium's original mind, Sazed would probably have noticed and commented on it in the HoA epigraphs, especially since he'd be getting a double-effect.

More than that, a sample chapter has Jerick refer to Realmatic Theory, which means that not only are they aware that there are three realms but that they've studied (to some extent at least) how they're interrelated. And yes, Dragonsteel has been repeatedly confirmed to take place before the Shattering. Here's one example and in the most recent round of signings Brandon mentioned that he still considers almost all of the worldbuilding in it to still be canonical. Brandon has stated that Odium would be willing to work with another Shard if he were in charge and implied that this may have happened already. The latter is a big reason why people have speculated that Rayse and Bavadin worked together to kill Aona and Skai, along with the observation that their respective Shards have largely opposite Intents.

Yeah, here's the Word of Peter/Isaac on the above statement: Brandon has also given Shard names for things we know don't actually exist (for example, a hypothetical shard for the Alcatraz series would be something like Betrayal) so there's definitely cause to take the statement with a grain of salt.

Actually, I was trying to figure out exactly what you're arguing...

Yes. Breath is literally designed to be given away at will and it keys itself to the Identiy of its recipient so that they can use it immediately. Exchanging Breath is integral to Nalthis' magic system. Allomantic/Feruchemical sDNA is not 'designed' to be given away, in order to transfer the power it must be violently ripped away by stabbing someone through the heart with a metal spike. There is just a small difference between these two methods of Investiture transfer. Why are you assuming that the current level of Investiture is somehow insufficient to sustain the future Scadrian civilization? They don't need allomancy or feruchemy for a lot of what they're doing, though it certainly makes things easier. They've independently developed steam power (twice over, it existed pre-Final Empire and they were getting close to railroads) and the radio and have an extremely advanced understanding of metallurgy. There's no particular reason they couldn't develop the principles of flight exactly how we did on Earth, or computing, it's just that they have the Metallic Arts to provide alternative means of doing these things that they may come up with instead. The only nut we know they're set to crack and we can't explain is FTL travel because it's not something we know how to do, but if real-world humans ever figured it out there's little reason to think the Scadrians couldn't as well. Remember, it's the Cosmere's Earth-analogue. The Metallic Arts enhance their civilization but they aren't dependant on it to the extent that they need soul-ripping blood magic to make it work, or for Brandon to revise what he's established about hemalurgy. This is indeed a good subject for debate, in and out of universe. It still doesn't mean that Scadrial needs hemalurgy to progress unless you can demonstrate somehow that there are things that absolutely require more Investiture in the population than currently exists. All we know is that feruchemy is the magic system that resulted from Scadrians being made of both Preservation and Ruin. How it arose and why it was limited to the Teris people are RAFOs. As for producing more atium or lerasium, Brandon has said that those no longer exist but there could be some left over from before the Catacendre. The Terris elders are already working along these lines as of Bands of Mourning (reread the conversation with VenDell in Chapter 4) so yes, I think so. We don't know what the excisors are and there's clearly more to it than just 'hemalurgic spike' or the Southerners could use those to give themselves powers and not need medallions at all. They're clearly able to produce the things in some quantity and Allik describes the creation of multi-power medallions as a thing of skill. This WoB might be of some interest: In any event, you have asserted but not demonstrated that Scadrian society is somehow dependant on the Metallic Arts, when there's no evidence that this is the case except in the extreme long term with FTL travel. In the absence of a very good argument, there's no reason to think that Brandon would need to rewrite the book on hemalurgy to make future Scadrial work.

What precisely about the severity of it do you think needs rethinking? Hemalurgy is literally ripping away a part of your soul so that someone else can profit by it, originally created by the anthromorphic personification of entropy. If you think about what a Drab is, the idea that a hemalurgy survivor would be worse than one of them makes sense. Nalthians are mostly normal humans (mostly, Brandon has mentioned that we would not be considered Drabs) who have a higher than average amount of Investiture due to their natural Breath. This Breath is literally designed to be something you can give away, but at the cost of losing its advantages that you've taken for granted up until then; life sense, better appreciation for colors and boosted immune system. There are serious downsides to giving away that Breath but you're still a mostly-normal human afterwards. Hemalurgy now steals things that are integral to your soul and which are not designed to be taken away from it. Taking away an allomantic or feruchemical power is going to leave a nasty Spiritual scar (not to mention a physical one) and taking away a 'human attribute' like the kandra and koloss spikes steal would be even more obviously debilitating, if they're even survivable at all. 1) We don't know how feruchemy got into the Scadrian sDNA in the first place so we don't know what if anything Harmony can do about those. Mistborn only exist because of lerasium and that no longer exists, except for the possibility of additional undiscovered beads. What's happened now is that Scadrians have mostly reverted to their baseline level of Investiture that they had before the Final Empire. The existence of ferrings and twinborn is new but it's been speculated in-universe that they could get feruchemists again through bloodlines with less non-Terris sDNA. 2) Harmony could rewrite people like he did with Spook at the end of HoA but this would go against his beliefs regarding non-interference and could lead to exactly the sort of problems he wants to avoid by doing too much direct response to prayer. He's already worried that he made things too easy for the Elendel Basin area as it is. 3) They already have a method of expanding access to the Metallic Arts without needing hemalurgy and which is available to anyone, Southern Scadrian medallions much?

Don't worry about it, this happens to everyone sooner or later. There's always another secret and nobody expects anyone to know every single thing Brandon has said in the books, everything he's said outside the books and everything we've said in trying to figure things out. Especially in a case like this where the only published references are the ambiguous reference Ati makes and one slipped into an Ars Arcanum entry in a reprint of a completely different book. Doubly-especially people who are new to the series, to the Shard or both. So please, keep posting. You never know when you'll see something from an angle everyone else has missed unless you try.

Just going to toss out that I did ask Brandon at a signing if F-Chromium worked like ta'veren probability manipulation from Wheel of Time or the entropy curse from Dresden Files and got a RAFO. I didn't record it so I don't have his exact words but he did say something to the effect of 'what I have in mind may be different than what you're thinking'. RAFO's being what they are, it doesn't rule out the possibility but at the very least he seems to want to keep us guessing on what it entails. Personally I suspect it's one of those 'keep them guessing' ones and F-Chromium does involve probability manipulation but that's just my take on it. It's also safe to say that F-Chromium does something different from at least one other form of Fortune-manipulation, given a scene in Oathbringer where the mechanic is mentioned explicitly and what we see makes no sense in the context of 'things you could reasonably do with feruchemy'.

Ummm, okay?

Spren are quanta of Investiture that have developed sentience, so spiking them would probably fundamentally change the spren, assuming you could spike one without killing them. We're told that spiking a human without killing them is technically possible but it would be 'worse than being a Drab' so keep that in mind when thinking of what would happen to a spren after ripping a chunk of their essence away. Anyhow, there's no need to posit a hemalurgical solution to the problem because we know that it's something that can be overcome with knowledge. Vasher does it despite his Connection to Nalthis for example.

Yeah, I edited a comment about that in. I think that knowing it could work (perhaps helped with a demonstration, Miles-style) would be sufficient. It's not a question of approval, it's a question of Cognitive self-image. The fat in your body isn't going to 'see' itself that way, it's going to see itself as an indivisible part of you, which it is, biologically-speaking. And it probably doesn't even have an independent Cognitive image such that you could soulcast it. Maybe Doctor Strangelove's hand...

I don't believe that's something you can steal, hemalurgically. We know there are 'human attributes' that can be stolen and they're what make kandra and koloss spikes, but they relate less to 'having an arm' and more 'strength of body', 'strength of senses' etc. There is a known spike that grants enhanced mental capacity including an increased resistance to insanity which might be useful in treating mental illness, but given the side effects I doubt that experimental hemalurgic psychiatry would be approved under whatever the Scadrian equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath is. Transformation doesn't work that way; it takes one Cognitively whole thing and transforms it into another thing. Conservation of mass appears to be the rule as well, meaning that you can't create more flesh and bone from nothingness. You might if you possessed an exceptional degree of knowledge (and I emphasize might, the human body is an amazingly complex thing and I'm only assuming this degree of precision is possible) manage to soulcast a full arm out of sufficient mass but that wouldn't be attached to you Physically (I suppose you could sew it on, Frankenstein's monster-style...) and it certainly wouldn't be a part of your Cognitive or Spiritual self. In any event, I believe you're overthinking this. If you want to use the Metallic Arts to create a universal healing system, all you need is a medalllion granting F-Gold and a sufficiently full metalmind. Brandon has said that Bloodmakers can heal the body so that it reflects their Spiritual ideal, which would cover missing limbs whether 'killed' by a shardblade or removed through purely Physical means. As long as the user knows what the power will do and believes their limb will regrow, it should work.

Another thing to bear in mind is that all kandra have the same threshold before Harmony can control them (which just happens to be the same as the number they need to remain fully sapient and sane) and all koloss are controllable with their four. Assuming that baseline humans are an exception and that different people can have higher thresholds requires an assumption with no existing foundation. Actually, the evidence we have goes in the opposite direction; Ruin was able to influence people with particular forms of insanity even without spikes (Zane spiked himself, for example) so if anything, it should be easier to control a human with a cracked soul with fewer spikes. Even though he's speaking in the first person when he says he's limited to three powers, there's no reason to think that Edwarn only meant that that applied to himself; he also uses the plural in reference to what the Set has learned about hemalurgy and the most natural reading is that he was speaking generally and only using himself as an example.

Yeah, he seems mostly if not exclusively interested in spren manifesting in the Physical. His quest for intoxication/alespren for example only makes sense in the physical where there's alcohol to drink; everything drinkable in the Cognitive would have to come from the Physical anyways. If it's of interest to him he might eventually hop over to the other side and see what all the spren look like in the Cognitive but it doesn't seem to be a pressing concern for him at present. And given all the new cataloguing he can do of how spren change when Sja-anat corrupts them, he's got lots more potential research fodder to keep him in the Physical for the time being.

'Getting Yoda'd' could now become a euphamism for being trolled. Frost doesn't just say that, he says that Rayse wanted to become 'hatred'. So I'm skeptical that he started as something else and then changed, especially as all the evidence we have says that Intents Do Not Work That Way. If a Shard can be splintered entirely and still keep its Intent, it's hard to imagine knocking a chunk of power off of an intact Shard (however big a chunk) would have that kind of effect.

Yep, Wax couldn't have seen that memory otherwise since he's not an Archivist. We know from WoB that Hoid did it in part to correct a lie that was being perpetuated. We also know that he has other unsealed metalminds of unknown composition.

Oh yes, we're very spoiled. Just the pace with which Brandon releases new books is a huge treat, especially given certain authors I shall not name who've gone half a decade or more between releases... but their names might rhyme with Mynch and Lartin. Then factor in how awesome he is about engaging with his readers and that's another thing we're spoiled on. That all his books are really fun is another 'spoiled factor'; I've never minded much if they're not the ones I most want to see released because I've still enjoyed the hell out of them. When I finally got around to reading Rithmatist I made things worse for myself because now I'm firmly on the hype train of wanting that sequel too (along with every other sequel he's announced...) but I wouldn't have traded the experience of reading it for anything. xD

A am in awe of your swag collection. All I've got of that is the books (excluding leatherbounds and some of the special runs like Defending Elysium), the earphones, the SoS/BoM broadsheets and the Roshar map. I hoped I could at least have one thing over you (the Stormlight Archive booklet that was released on Independent Bookstore Day two years back but... you've got that too.

@MountainKing@Stark I refer you to my earlier post here. Awakening a gas may be theoretically possible but it wouldn't actually work that way. Awakening something Nightblood-style would be a much better option but that's not one that Susebron may have. Shashara and Vasher were scholars who performed lots of research into Awakening and they thought long and hard about the procedure of awakening steel and the Command they would give it before they went about doing so. Susebron, it's safe to say, doesn't have their experience and probably couldn't perform the necessary visualization of the Command on the spur of the moment. And Rashek is an allomancer so he's not going to be carrying enough metal on him to Awaken, other than his metalminds which, being Invested, are harder to affect with other magics. As noted, awakening his clothes to strangle him runs into the problems that Rashek has effectively infinite reserves of health and strength so he can keep himself alive long enough to either remove the affected clothes or wait for the Breath that's animating them to run out. Or he could leech them; we're told that Rashek did know about chromium and it's an abundant metal so he might indeed have kept some around just in case he ever needed it, so it's a valid option for this hypothetical matchup.

Hoid would certainly agree with this statement.