Weltall

We don't know the details and won't until Brandon writes Dragonsteel, which is planned to be the Big Backstory Series and won't be worked on until after Stormlight Archive is finished. What we know so far comes mainly from things Brandon has said outside the books, though some of the stuff has started appearing in published works as well. Have a look at Mistborn Secret History for the most direct in-book statements about the Shattering of Adonalsium and the creation of the Shards. I'm not sure where you are in reading the Mistborn series so just in case, I'll warn you to not read Secret History until you have at least finished the original Mistborn trilogy because of spoilers, though reading it after finishing all six currently available novels would be best. We know that Odium has killed four Shards (for a given value of 'killed' at least, the power is still there in each case but not in a single coherent form) but we don't know exactly how many there are total which have been splintered or are otherwise 'not whole'. Brandon has said he doesn't want to canonize this just yet and it also gets into terminology questions as there are different ways a Shard could be splintered. There are currently six 'unknown Shards' and the only things we know about them are tantalizing and context-free hints that Brandon has mentioned outside the books. You could theoretically make a shardblade using Devotion's Investiture. Brandon has said that seons (and their Dominion equivalents the skaze) would act similarly to a spren bond though it would take some work to actually pull off and the system isn't inherently designed for it. In terms of 'embodying love' it might help to remember that when it comes to the magic systems, the Intents of the Shards generally have more to do with how you get access to the magic rather than what you can do with the magic, so there isn't a contradiction there. On the underlying nature of the universe and how it relates to the Shards, here's a helpful and very recent statement from Brandon: The spoiler tag is just for length

We don't know why he became a worldhopper but it must have happened after the events of Mistborn Era 1 because he was present during the events of the final book, at which point there were no accessible Perpendicularities on Scadrial. We know he's not the only Scadrian on the planet (Demoux also shows up) but we don't know if the two are aware of each other's presence. Similarly we have no idea whether or not he's aware of Vasher, though being a worldhopper he would at the very least have a better idea of what to look/listen for than most people. One bit of speculation-fodder: Some of the people working for House Venture are implied by Brandon to have been part of the interplanetary mercantile economy that's mentioned in Mistborn Secret History. It's possible that Felt was one of these people and was aware of the existence of other worlds during the time of Era 1. Yes, his 'less foreign' thing is a nod and a wink to the fact that he's not from Roshar, one that goes right over Dalinar's head just like Hoid's various dropped hints. We don't yet know why he's doing anything on Roshar, other than 'just because'. But I won't be surprised if someone asks Brandon about Felt's motivation for trying to see the Nightwatcher. And I'll be even less surprised if his answer is 'Read And Find Out'. xD

First off, welcome to the Shard and great first post! I'm going to take a shardblade to its premise, but it was still a very nice bit of thinking. As has been noted, it is (meta)physically impossible for a Shard to break an oath made with Intent (using Rayse's capitalization, not the sense of the driving mandate of a given Shard) for the reason that the Stormfather explains to Dalinar: Adonalsium's power permeates them and binds them to keep their oaths. It's even more impossible for Honor to betray an oath because that's diametrically opposed to the Intent of his Shard. Preservation can't destroy, Ruin can't create for creation's own sake, Honor can't betray. Now, I do agree completely that there's wiggle-room in the nature of the Intents and I have no doubt that it's going to be an ongoing factor, but not like this. Odium has murdered at least three other Shards and while he might argue that going after Devotion and Dominion was because they violated some unspecified agreement about staying apart, he can't use that excuse for targeting Ambition and per Word of Brandon she was first on his hit list. And one of the Shards he killed embodies the idea of love/compassion. So yeah, Odium does indeed appear to deserve his reputation even if we didn't have WoBs on the subject. Or in-universe characters holding similar opinions, chiefly Hoid, Frost and Khriss. Odium is deliberately keeping the whole 'I've picked you as my Champion' thing from Dalinar while subtly trying to manipulate him, so I'm perfectly happy to take anything he says in that exchange wiith a pinch of salt. The difference between Rayse and Ati vis a vis lying probably has something to do with the latter being 1) completely certain he was going to win, so it didn't matter and 2) thoroughly twisted by his Shard so he's not really capable of thinking beyond it. Though he is still capable of deception, see how he manipulates Vin and Spook for example. Rayse is noted by Brandon to be a very good match for Odium and he seems to have his original personality intact, so he's probably better at deceit in general. We also know that Harmony can lie. Oh, and on that note we do have some evidence from Oathbringer that Frost can be wrong. He thinks (per the WoR letter) that Rayse is now more a force than an individual, contrary to Hoid's assertion. OB seems to validate Hoid's take on it, that Rayse is indeed still in control. We don't have much reason to believe that Frost is wrong in his assessment of what Odium's Intent is however. Brandon's also said that he originally planned to call that Shard 'Hatred' for what that's worth. I suspect that wherever the name Odium came from in-universe, they were right on the money and Odium's whole spiel about how he's really the power of Passion is self-serving and more a side-effect of his power than the main focus of it.

I imagine that flaring atium/electrum or gold/malatium would extend how far ahead/back in time you can 'see' with them respectively, but it would probably be extremely limited in the case of atium since the metal already burns so quickly. Basically, a lesser version of what we already know you can do with atium plus duralumin, extrapolated. Relatedly, Brandon has mentioned that flaring bendalloy or cadmium could alter the rate at which time passes inside the bubble.

Yeah, I was looking for any WoBs on whether this is the case and didn't find an exact one but I did run into one that's relevant insofar as it provides an example of how far back you can go. And there's this, which talks about how feruchemy can protect you from some of the consequences of tapping. Which you can read into the hypothetical atium example, as in 'you can't age yourself into nonexistence' even if he hasn't come right out and said it anywhere I've been able to find. My guess in this situation is that the lower boundary of the ability to tap age is whenever your Initiation into feruchemy happened (ie, when you first became able to use it) since any younger than that and you can't tap any more, which would probably stop the process. We know f-atium has an upper limit to how long you can extend your life with it (because your Spiritual aspect 'knows' how old you truly are and is constantly trying to push against what atium does) so it probably has some form of lower limit as well, beyond which your soul simply says 'I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that'. xD

I hate to be a killjoy but as you point out, the text makes it quite clear that she is speaking with her mouth full and she's struggling to talk around the hankerchief; it's right there in the segment you photographed. Since she doesn't have any obvious accent on several of the other words she says under normal circumstances and said 'accent' disappears as soon as she takes the hankerchief out, there's no reason to assume that her pronunciation of 'shars' is anything but the effect of trying to talk with her mouth full.

Splintering a Shard just means that it does not have a mind actively guiding it and because it's dispersed it can't be (easily) taken up by any new Vessel and it won't develop sentience on its own, as a sufficient mass of Investiture will do if left on its own for long enough. However, splintering can be reversed. Your question about whether people connect to the Shard or the Intent is meaningless as they're one and the same. Here's the quote about how all Investiture is related to the sixteen Shards.

I've seen it mentioned (but can't find the original source) that Brandon has said that Lightweaving could theoretically be used to create lasers for offensive application, but the amount of Stormlight it would require would be ridiculous. Just because you can do something with a magic system doesn't necessarily mean anyone will do that thing. In an unrelated question, he mentioned as another example of 'possible but completely impractical' that you can theoretically use Forgery to turn a normal sword into a Shardblade, but it would be similar to us using a particle accelerator to turn lead into gold. So yeah, it is an interesting and valid idea, but I imagine that the amount of Stormlight it would take to pull off would be far in excess of any practicality.

Ahh, awesome. Good spot there.

Shardblades damage the soul in some way but probably not enough (it only 'cuts' the soul until it's severed from the body and probably doesn't do too much damage to the overall construct) to permanently kill the Fused, though it might leave a lasting 'scar' of sorts unlike a purely Physical means of dispatching them. They're Cognitive Shadows stuck in a Physical body so to properly kill them you'd likely need to hit their Cognitive aspect as well, which Shardblades don't do. The thing that makes Nightblood special as a weapon vis a vis a 'normal' shardblade is that it damages on all three Realms simultaneously. This would also explain why the Fused are leery of Azure's weapon. We don't know exactly what it is but it's safe to assume that it's a weaker version of Nightblood and may retain the same 'cuts all three Realms' property.

The thousand-plus Breaths that it took to Awaken Nightblood is the reason it's so heavily Invested, so your assumption was correct. That amount of Breath is roughly halfway to the Fifth Heightening, at which point the combined effect of all that Investiture makes you functionally immortal. Lots and lots of Investiture there. We also have Word of Brandon, here's the most straightforward one. Now, we still don't know exactly why Nightblood turned out the way it did, but it probably has to do with Vasher and Shashara trying to use one magic system to replicate the effects of a completely different system, which they may not have fully understood. Odd things can happen when you cross the streams- I mean, mix Investitures. xD

While that's true, Brandon mentioned that the Heralds and Taln are from the same place first and entirely unprompted, so I think it's safe to say that whether the Heralds as a group are native Rosharans or not, they are all originally from the same place. The other obvious option is that not much time actually passed between the arrival of humans on Roshar and the start of the Oathpact and that they're technically native to Ashyn. That doesn't sound right with what we know of the timeframe; humans had to have time to expand beyond the land they were given, trigger a war with the singers and then whatever happened that led to the former becoming 'of Honor/Cultivation' and the latter 'of Odium' had to take place before the Fused could start appearing and the conditions necessitating the Oathpact could happen. So my guess is that the RAFO on whether the Heralds were native Rosharans was of the 'keep them guessing' variety.

Brandon actually made fun of this, when describing a hypothetical Kelsier/Moiraine deathmatch (if you haven't, read it, it's fun) with the former pointing out that they got away with using 'hat trick' as an expression, even though the expression has its origins in a specific time and place on Earth that makes no sense on Scadrial. But yeah, translation convention is firmly at work here and the characters are 'really' speaking languages that are not English, but Brandon hs graciously 'translated' them for us so that we can read them. The fact that worldhoppers need to either learn local languages or manipulate Connection to speak with people on other worlds just makes this obvious, and we've got examples in pretty much every setting of multiple languages on the same world as well, all of which are conveniently presented to us in English. Either that or each book is actually written in many languages and they contain magical Connection that allows us to understand them. xD.

Actually, we do know they're all from the same place. I'm firmly in line with the obvious surface reading of Taln's background, that he was 'the regular guy' among all of the royalty, generals and scholars that comprised the rest of the Heralds.

Yeah, Brandon has mentioned that surgebinders who are already lighteyes don't experience the change because they've inherited the 'lighteyes sDNA' already, while people like Kaladin and Lift who don't have it, get the dramatic visual effect. Brandon (and internally, Hoid) have both implied that the reason Vorin culture turned the lighteyes into nobility is precisely because people remembered that at one time, surgebinding=light eyes and built it into their cultural framework.

Things can change dramatically between 'Prime' and 'published'. If you check out the posted samples of Way of Kings Prime and Dragonsteel Prime and then compare both of those to Kaladin's chapters in the published Way of Kings, you'll see exactly what I mean. That said, I found all of them interesting reads and quite enjoyable in their own right, even if nothing in them is canon and a lot of it never will be. Aether of Night in particular I had a lot of fun with, even though it's readily apparent why he didn't think it was good enough to publish as-is, and even though it's going to have to be massively rewritten since a huge part of it's 'A-Plot' was cannibalized for Mistborn. White Sand (prose) isn't likely to be changed too much (based on the current state of the graphic novel adaptation) and makes a good read on its own. Those are the complete unpublished works you can easily get your hands on; apparently some readers have also asked for and gotten copies of Mistborn Prime (which has the magic system but not the story) but I can't comment on its readability. In the incomplete side, there's Mythwalker, aka Warbreaker Prime. It's right up there on Brandon's website and while it's really obvious why it was never finished, it's got some neat ideas in there which Brandon might cannibalize one day, and it's a cool look inside his writing process and development as a writer. The one unpublished work that we have samples of but which Brandon does discourage fans from reading is The Liar of Partinel. He wasn't happy with how it turned out and described the process of writing it as a chore. He's particularly mentioned not wanting people to read it and get a mistaken idea about certain characters in it. We know this is going to be massively revised and Brandon is still deciding how best to eventually tell Hoid's origin story. One example of things we know will change, just from existing WoBs, is the presence of Aethers. When Brandon wrote the LoP draft, he tried cannibalizing the magic system from Aether of Night, hoping it would work as well as the combination of systems did in Mistborn: The Final Empire. It didn't, and since then Brandon has announced an intention to rewrite Aether so there's no longer any need to use that magic system in Liar. Which means that everything to do with them in the existing draft goes away. And lastly, there's Dragonsteel Prime... this is one that you can read samples of from the website and if you're interested in Brandon's development as a writer I highly recommend them. Specifically, the ones he's shared are the chapters that included the Shattered Plains setting and Bridge Four, which he cannibalized for Way of Kings. In addition to this neat 'look inside' there are tantalizing hints of plot elements that may play a role in the Dragonsteel series when it's eventually revised and published, but as with Aether of Night everything is subject to revision. It's theoretically possible to read the complete book, if you go to BYU's library. Brandon can't prevent anyone from doing it (it was his master's thesis, so it's part of the school's archive) but he does mention that he's not entirely comfortable as it's not his best work and as with Liar, so much of it is going to be changed. Here's a recent WoB on the topic.

Kelsier isn't known for subtlety with emotional allomancy but as Vin demonstrates, you don't need to be with a duralumin boost. Kaladin might be more resistant to its effects but we don't know that he would actually be immune completely, though with full shardplate and holding stormlight I imagine his resistance would be considerably greater. Still, as mentioned Kaladin is emotionally vulnerable so one good push at the right time, even if it doesn't hit quite as hard as we saw Vin do in WoA, could make a huge difference in a fight. So while not as useful against someone heavily Invested, brass and zinc do have their uses.

Honor was going mad not because of his Intent but because he was dying at the time. Brandon has mentioned that for Shards, death can be a protracted event; see Leras in Secret History for an even more extreme example. We also know that there are Vessels who are more resistant to having their personalities altered by their Shards, such as Sazed and Rayse. By contrast, Ati is called out as being someone who was not able to resist being twisted by the Intent of his Shard. Brandon has stated more generally that the Intent will strongly influence the personality but whether it will override it or not depends on the Vessel. Which is why Odium is noted to be so dangerous; the Vessel and Shard are such good matches for one another. It's also why Rayse splinters Shards rather than taking their power for himself. So yeah, while all Vessels are going to be affected by their Intent in various ways, they're not all complete slaves to that Intent like Ati/Ruin was and they're not 'going mad'. Though to a normal human they might certainly seem that way at times, like with Leras' admiration for Rashek. But Cultivation appears quite stable from what we've seen, Edgli/Endowment as well. Preservation had more problems than just his Intent weighing on him when we saw him and the same is true for Honor at the time of the Recreance. There are impliedly other Vessels who have also managed to retain most of their personality. And then there's Autonomy...

My guess is no on both counts but for different reasons. The 'charge' in a spike is essentially the bit of spiritweb that it's ripped from the victim and there's a bit of Identity coded to it. In other words, you don't get 'the ability to use allomantic steel' from spiking Coinshot Joe, you get 'Coinshot Joe's ability to use allomantic steel'. This is why it's possible for someone with feruchemy gained through hemalurgy to use the metalminds of the spiked person; they gain enough of the Identity of the original feruchemist that the metalmind recognizes them as the right person. Spiking a second person with an existing hemalurgic spike would be adding a second independent charge rather than a suppliment to the first one, even if it was the same power. I'm not sure how the spiritweb would interpret that if they came from the same spike, as opposed to coming from separate spikes. On the other question, I don't think it would work physically. In all examples we know of the spike needs to go completely through the victim in order to pick up whatever trait it's stealing, so even if you had a super-long spike in your body and managed to poke somebody in just the right place, I don't think you'd be able to trigger its spiritweb-ripping-off function. In both of these cases, another issue to bear in mind is that since the spike already has a charge (and a distinct charge with associated Identity), they're already Invested objects and it would be harder to get a second charge into them. We know it's possible for objects to be so invested that they can't really be made into spikes on account of being 'full' already (even if the example's we've been given of this are super-Invested things like Nightblood) so a small spike might not be able to hold a second charge anyways. Just found a WoB that seems to leave a little wiggle-room for multiple charges in a spike, but in general the answer appears to be 'no'

The thing is, the spren were still alive right up until the big scene at Feverstone. The Windrunners had to use their surgebinding to get there, the Radiants armor was glowing and Dalinar thought he could hear a screaming sound when they abandoned their shards, but he didn't know what that meant at the time. While perception is important in determining whether an Ideal has been upheld or not, that can't explain why all the spren were killed at the same time. The Recreance was a planned thing, they didn't all go there randomly and suddenly realize they weren't keeping their oaths the way they'd believed, it was definitely a conscious decision and one that they'd already thought through (including any implications of the truth of Roshar's history vis a vis their oaths) before going through with it.

I do like the idea that Cultivation is influencing the Diagram specifically as part of some long-range plan (Honor did say she's better at seeing the future and that sort of thing is entirely in keeping with her Intent) but I don't recall offhand when Taravangian visited the Nightwatcher. Cultivation said that Dalinar was the first person she'd shown herself to in several centuries, and that otherwise she allows the Nightwatcher to do all the boon-granting/cursing herself. If Taravangian visited before Dalinar, then her influence over the Diagram might be a lot less, if not completely absent. I feel like the timing is that Taravangian went first (if he went later it's no issue at all) but I don't have the books handy to check. In any case, absent a reason to believe that Cultivation lied to Dalinar it looks like no boon/curse that's more than about six years old was her doing.

Bacteria and virii don't need sentience any more than the common cold needs sentience to 'know' that its symptoms are an excellent balance between infecting someone in a way that encourages its own progapagion and in not debilitating or killing its host before they've had a chance to spread the disease. The ones that are too virulent kill off hosts before they can be passed on and so don't make it. That disease on Ashyn provides an actual benefit to the sick person is helpful for both disease agent and sufferer but it doesn't require sentience on the part of the vector. On the general question, spren existed on Roshar before the Shattering, there's no indication that this is the case on other worlds. Roshar has a good reason for this sort of thing to arise (the constant highstorms mean that the three Realms are in closer contact than normal) but those conditions don't hold (so far as we know) on Ashyn or Braize, so those worlds may not have spren independent of the Shards. The only spren we know of on Braize are the voidspren which are splinters of Odium, plus the Cognitive Shadows that are the Fused, who could be called spren by Rosharans because they don't have a separate term for it.

Yeah, between that line in the gem archive, Kaladin's general arc in the book and how it seems like he was almost able to put the Ideal in words but couldn't quite get there, my take is also that the Fourth Ideal is something like 'I will accept that I can't always protect everyone'. Vasher's musings that you point out do have some nice resonance with young Kaladin's belief in a third category of people who take lives to save others, but I don't see that as really fitting the Windrunners. Maybe one of the Dustbringer Ideals could be phrased in those sorts of terms.

And...? So...? Therefore....? If you want to look at things in very broad strokes, sure. The closer you examine things, the more superficial they become. Having 'darkness' is a shared trait of their respective magic systems, insofar as Initiation into the one requires snapping and an act of reaching out to preserve onself and the other requires a cracked soul into which the Nahel Bond can fit, but the nature of their traumas, their reaction to it and their family circumstances are all very different. The biggest similarity is that in both cases, their early lives sucked, but that's just on the surface. Compare their brothers for example: Yes, both are killed but in completely different situations and with completely different affects on the two. Reen tried to beat a particular mindset into Vin because it was the only way he knew to reinforce what he was trying to teach her, and it left her emotionally crippled for a long time. He was killed protecting Vin, though she didn't know that. Helaran by contrast was a far better brother-figure but who got himself killed in circumstances having nothing to do with Shallan, before he could make a difference in the Davar's domestic situation. OB spoiler And that's before delving into the insanity that is Shallan's love life. Or the insanity that is Zane.

Yeah, the appearance of the Dakhor monks has to do with their particular flavor of magic and what it does to them. The Epilogue has a part where Raoden (in the middle of his wedding) is musing on how there's clearly more going on in the world than he knew, between the Dakhor monks and Shuden's ChayShan apparently being another method of accessing the Dor. And he thinks specifically about how a bone recovered from one of the monks was twisted in an unnatural way, but recognizable as taking the shape of ancient Fjordell characters. No WoB needed, it's all there in the text. More details on why Sel's magic works the way it does can be found in Arcanum Unbounded, though we aren't going to get anything like a complete understanding until the Elantris sequels are written. Edit: Apropos of nothing, I find it extremely amusing that two of the three responses so far come from people with reputation titles of Gyorn and Elantrian.