Weltall

While it's not canonical, we can still take a couple things away from the Liar of Partinel (Hoid's origin story) snippets we've seen. One of these is that Yolish Lightweaving was a magic that could be taught. We can assume this is still canon to a great extent because in his appearance in Warbreaker, Hoid uses it in his storytelling and mentions how he learned it "many years ago from a man who didn’t know who he was, Your Majesty. It was a distant place where two lands meet and gods have died.". Also, if there's in-univese evidence that the Old Magic was pre-Shattering (and I can't think of any evidence this is the case offhand) then it presumably would have been mentioned by Khriss in the Ars Arcanum, much as she talks about how interesting it is that Rosharan Lightweaving is similar to Yolish Lightweaving. She does mention the Old Magic but only to imply that it doesn't fit into the Vorin model where everything is grouped into tens.

I am totally down with the 'that's no moon, it's an ancient spaceship' idea. Actually, the exact concept was used in an anime called Gun x Sword, which also had a population transplanted from another world, but so long ago that almost nobody remembered this, and Bad Things happened to the original world. We also know there's definitely something screwy going on with those moons. Throw in that Hoid tells a story involving them (for reasons Brandon Only Knows) and we've definitely got reasons to be suspicious of the things. It must have been before that, though I don't know how long. The city existed before because one of Dalinar's visions (the 'Starfall' one) has the Radiant telling Dalinar to come to Urithiru for training, to prepare for the next Desolation which he thinks is coming soon. Implication, the cycle of Desolations is still going on and thus the Oathpact isn't broken yet. We also know that Nohadon walked to Urithiru but the Radiants didn't appear to exist as a formal institution at that time, even if surgebinders did. He also expects the Heralds to return, suggesting that he too thinks the Desolation cycle hasn't ended. There's probably enough clues in the various visions and Navani/Jasnah's observations to make a more specific approximation of when the tower was built, but I don't have the books handy right now to dig through them.

Scadrial's mentioned to be the Cosmere's big Earth-analogue so it's probably safe to assume that with the exception of things like the mistcloks, its fashion would be more familiar to our eyes than on some of the other worlds. In reflecting on Rashek's actions, Sazed mentions in the epigraphs that Rashek appropriated the fashions of Khlennium for the nobles and we know that pre-Final Empire the world had steam power but hadn't quite gotten to the train, (and the Khlenni were apparently the leaders there too, being where pocketwatches came from) so fashion probably should track the styles of the early nineteenth century that they seem to represent, or at least their fashion should be pretty close to it. Here's wikipedia's summary, which might give a good idea what Scadiran gowns of the Final Empire era would look like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1795–1820_in_Western_fashion#Gowns

Very unlikely. with some exceptions Scadrial has been mentioned as a 'low Investiture' world in terms of how much of it is actually going through you relative to places like Roshar, (paraphrased, but see here) so the amount of Investiture-based resistance you get from burning a metal at the moment of impact isn't likely to make much of a difference. A charged metalmind can block a Shardblade to an extent, depending on how full it is. F-Gold would theoretically work (subject to the caveat in Brandon's response above) not because of the Investiture itself but what it's doing as the Shardblade is hitting you, ie healing the damage as it's being inflicted. Pewter (or any other metal you're burning or attribute you're tapping) wouldn't provide much resistance. Now, while looking up WoBs to see if people have asked Brandon about shardblades vs much more heavily Invested people, I started wondering. We know for example that Returned and even the Godkings (who are heavily Invested) are just as fragile as normal humans so how would a shardblade react to them? I'm pretty sure the Divine Breath alone qualifies as enough innate Investiture to resist the Spiritual damage, but would the shardblade just look at that and go 'okay, time to be a normal bit of sharp metal now' and just cut them normally or would it get blocked as if it were hitting shardplate and only damage the Breaths until the level of Investiture wasn't enough to resist the blade? Same thing for Elantrians (not counting potential defenses like Aon Edo) since they're extremely Invested individuals. Brandon was asked about a Reod Elantrian vs a shardblade and said it would be weird, treating them as half-dead and half-alive and might cut either way. But I don't think anyone's asked specifically about other cases.

It's been discussed but it's an extremely tenuous argument. Anthropomorphizing abstract concepts is something people do it all the time. Mother Nature, Lady Luck...

F-Gold can heal shardblade wounds, with an asterisk. Earlier Brandon was asked this and said much more definitively that F-Gold could heal shardblade wounds but this response is newer and it sounds like he's going back and forth on it. But even with the hemming and hawing the answer does seem to be 'yes'.

Anthropomorphizing concepts is nothing new, 'Mother Earth' being perhaps the most obvious. If that expression were used on Roshar it might have a bit more validity than elsewhere but used just about anywhere else in the Cosmere it would be just an expression, and even on Roshar it's not literal as the world was there long before Cultivation arrived. Just to give an example everyone's likely to be familiar with. Nietzsche similarly opened his Beyond Good and Evil with the line 'Supposing that Truth is a woman, what then?' and expanded on the anthropomorphizing for a couple of sentences before moving on. With a bit of digging I could probably find other examples in Brandon's writings but none spring immediately to mind. Also, if it were really a Shard we would expect the name to be capitalized. Even when a bit of dialogue is from the point of view of a character who doesn't know that something is a proper noun, we've seen Brandon do that as long as the speaker is aware of it. See, both Vivenna and Rayse using Fortune (which we know isn't a Shard, it's an underlying principle of the Cosmere) in capitals when talking about it even though the people listening to them (Shallan and Taravangian respectively) don't know enough about the Cosmere to grasp the full implications. Same thing happens in Secret History all the time, for example.

Given that we're talking about a universe where you can literally change the nature of gravitational attraction for a single person or object without affecting anything around you, animate lifeless objects, alter the flow of time (where Brandon has admitted some handwaving to avoid redshift issues) and rewrite your entire personal history with magic, I think we can probably say with some confidence that Investituredidit when it comes to how Abrasion manipulates friction and trying to think too hard about the mechanics will only induce madness. xD More specifically, it's probably stormlight creating a field around the affected area that alters the coefficient of friction to produce whatever result the surgebinder wants, without them having to actually know the underlying physics. Brandon's explained how Kalad's Phantoms are able to move along somewhat similar lines, with Breath acting as 'magical sinew' to let the things move.

If the gem archive is to be believed, the term 'parsh' came into existence shortly before the Recreance, though we don't know where it came from. Since nobody we see on Team Odium uses the word and it fits in with the human terminology ('Parshendi' apparently meaning 'Thinking Parshman') it probably originated with the humans. Given the revelation that the Dawnsingers of Vorin mythology were the original inhabitants of the planet, it seems like the Fused and Voidspren are being honest about what the race used to call itself, with the 'singer' term. Given that Book 4 is Eshonai's and what happened with Venli in this one, we'll probably learn why the group that became the listeners chose that name for themselves... in a couple years. xD

Aside from various inconsistencies between the Heralds and the Unmade, there's the color issue. With the exception of Nergaoul, every Unmade we've seen is associated with black. Re-Shephir is a black blob, Sja-anat is a humanoid black shadow, Ashtermarn looks like a black heart and Yelig-nar is a black cloud... except that while possessing people he seems to have a thing for purple given that the crystals growing out of the ones he possesses are all described as amethyst. There's also Dai-gonarthis who may be associated with black as well, given the nickname Black Fisher. Since all the Heralds gained their Cognitive Shadow nature from Honor's Investiture permeating them, if all of the Unmade were somehow created from the broken Heralds, they should all be red because of Odium corrupting a part of Honor's Investiture, not just one of them. As interesting as the numeric relationship is, I think it has less to do with anything Odium did directly and more a coincidence that resulted from Honor and Odium being associated with numbers so close to one another.

Brandon's been asked and generally comes down on the side of 'Rand would win'. It's just the way his magic system works and how over-the-top powerful he is, versus what Brandon usually writes. Here's an example where he was given a hypothetical situation of 'Randland just before Tarmon Gaidon vs. Scadrial during the Final Empire era if everyone cooperated and Vin was drawing on the Mists'. In another response, he also gave the win to Rand versus Rashek, even with compounding. Mind you, this was before Bands of Mourning showed us what a 'fullborn' can do, but Brandon's response seems to have anticipated that one anyways. Though he did say that Rashek with the power of the Well of Ascension would win against Rand at the end of AMoL. But for most intents and purposes, I think the main way that anyone in the Cosmere would beat Rand is to do what Brandon suggested in the example I posted: Cheat.

Welcome to the Shard! Great question on the Cognitive effects of space travel. My guess is that if they're using FTL in the Physical Realm, their presence in any given bit of CR 'space' would be so brief that it wouldn't have time to create anything on the other side. Considering how compressed Cognitive space where there's no Physial thought is implied to be and how quickly a ship traveling FTL in the Physical would be moving through that relatively compressed space, any effect on the Cognitive side would probably be so brief that you wouldn't notice it. Maybe if you had very regular traffic through a given bit of space there would be enough regularly occurring thought to leave some sort of Cognitive impression but even then I imagine it would be pretty tenuous. As for the hemalurgy questions, the Metallic Arts only use metal as a 'key' to accessing the powers of Preservation and Ruin. The Shards' power is concentrated in the Spiritual Realm where time and space are irrelevant, so the powers granted by these magic systems can be used anywhere in the Cosmere as long as you have the necessary metals, and where you get the metal isn't important. Allomancy and feruchemy require that the user have the necessary sDNA while hemalurgy can be used by anyone as a built-in feature of the system. The only things you need to perform hemalurgy are a spike of the necessary metal, knowledge of the points you need to hit in the donor and recipient's bodies and the intent to actually create a hemalurgic spike. It's this last one that's the most important and it's the reason that 'accidental hemalurgy' isn't possible. By the way, it's not only the Metallic Arts that are usable offworld, they just happen to be very easy to use on other planets because metal is ubiquitous. BioChroma works anywhere as long as you have Breath (pay attention to Hoid's appearances in Stormlight Archive for examples) and it's the easiest system we know of for non-natives to access because the Breath keys itself to your Identity when you recieve it. The only thing that's restricted to native Nalthians is becoming a Returned, which Brandon has said would be 'really hard' for a non-native to do. Surgebinding theoretically can be used offworld, as long as you can solve the two problems of keeping a supply of stormlight and getting the spren whose bond makes the magic possible away from Roshar's Cognitive region. We've been told this is possible if you know how to do it. Sand Mastery's another potentially universal one. with Brandon saying that you could recharge the sand anywhere light from Taldain's star is visible. And it can be recharged with other forms of Investiture as well. Literally the only magic system that we know is actuallly impossible to use offworld (right now) is Selish magic in all its manifestations, because of what Odium did to try and prevent anyone from taking up Devotion and Dominion's power after he left. Thus, it's actually location-dependant unlike everything else where you can do the magic anywhere so long as you have the right sDNA and/or the necessary catalyst(s). Here's a Word of Brandon that summarizes a lot of this stuff, in addition to the other ones I linked.

Yeah, Rlain's absence from the story after his PoV chapter was quite conspicuous. I'm on board with the idea that he's somehow gotten involved with the other obvious dropped listener plot thread and thus he didn't appear because he was off doing other things that we won't learn about until the next book. The idea that he really was there and the other characters just didn't think about him because of unconscious racism has plenty of validity too, but I'm going with the 'something happening offscreen' idea as feeling more likely.

They're described (with the exception of Taln) as having been kings, generals and scholars before they became Heralds and Ash is Jezrien's daughter so they were clearly part of the human culture or cultures that were around at the time, including ethnically as none of them are remarked upon for having Shin-like features (contrast with Odium as seen through Dalinar's eyes) so it's unlikely they came from 'somewhere else' before the start of the Oathpact. Mraize does appear to suspect that 'Tezim' isn't of the local species but that's open to a couple interpretations. Despite all the things he does know, he may not be aware that Tezim is Ishar. He also might be referring more broadly to Ishar not being a 'modern' Rosharan but part of an ethnicity that no longer exists due to thousands and thousands of years passing, though that's a bit of a reach. It's also possible that we've been guilty of assuming he was talking about Tezim (being the only named individual we know in Tukar) when in fact Mraize wasn't referring to him at all. The last possiblity I can think of right now assumes that Mraize was referring to Tezim and that the Heralds were still part of the original group of humans from Ashyn, so they're the only living people not born on Roshar. The timeline of early Rosharan history is sufficiently fuzzy that it's at least possible. Anyhow, to get to the main question they're aware of Adonalsium which is a pretty big deal but as RShara says they had a long time in which they could have learned things from Honor (who we know was not an aloof god, given the Stormfather's explanations and the gem archive making it clear the Radiants of old were also directly communicating with him) and Ash at least knows Hoid, who also could have given that sort of information. They've probably encountered other worldhoppers as well but Hoid's all you really need. How much they know beyond 'there's something beyond Honor, Cultivation and Odium' is up in the air right now. Though I imagine that Dalinar would be most interested in learning about Adonalsium given the mental gymnastics he's been performing trying to keep his faith and deal with the Ardentia's reaction to his rationalizations. Last point of some interest is that Ash knew Hoid as Midius. While not canon, Liar of Partinel seems to establish that was Hoid's original name and we know from Warbreaker and the WoR Letter that 'Hoid' not being his birth name is canon. There's no way the Heralds actually knew Hoid in his youth given the latter's comments about their relative age, but it's interesting that at some point in the post-Shattering era he actually used Midius as a name.

He's just being poetic in his manner of telling Shallan what sort of person he is and isn't. So no, we haven't gotten a 'Wisdom' Shard confirmed.

Ahh, sorry. Yeah, that's what a couple of other posters suggested and now that they've put the idea in my head, I really think that's what it is too.

@Jeffo It's a concept from an unpublished work of the same name, actually the name of an entire planned series but only one book has been written so far and it's on hiatus until after Stormlight Archive is done. Brandon released a few sample chapters from the book recently (see here for the first one) which is why we know about it. Since the book is unpublished nothing in it is canonical (the revealed bits especially, as Brandon cannibalized them for Kaladin's story in Way of Kings) but Brandon has given no indication that the title is going to change when it is finally rewritten so the concept of dragonsteel itself is probably going to be pretty similar in the final product. It's a liquid metal that can be shaped by the will of its owner, at which point it assumes solid form and is then supposedly indestructible. FYI, the Dragonsteel series is going to be the prequel to the entire Cosmere and will include Hoid's origin story (intended to be published separately) and the Shattering of Adonalsium.

There's a fundamental flaw in your assumption; a hemalurgic spike does not contain the entire soul of a person, it just contains the specific bit of spiritweb corresponding to some desired ability. When we see Koloss die and the souls appear in the Cognitive Realm, we're seeing the humans that the Koloss used to be, not the humans and the four spikees. There's no indication from Kelsier's narration or the number of souls which appear that suggest that there are more souls popping up than there should be. Kelsier is just shocked because he didn't know what the Koloss were until that point. Here's a WoB that indicates that people killed to provide spikes just pass on very quickly.

I think it's more than just getting a system to recognize the Investiture because we already know that can be done (specifically, we know Divine Breaths don't care what form the Investiture is in and will happily consume Stormlight or Autonomy's Investiture) and since Breath automatically keys itself to your Identity, your spiritweb is probably already capable of recognizing it for what it is. Otherwise the Breath should be destroyed when the metal is burned, just like when Vin tries to burn a bit of metal that Sazed gave a tiny feruchemical charge to and got nothing out of it.

Playing Odium's Advocate here, this happened before people started grumbling about 'too many apparent resurrections' in Words of Radiance and the seeds for this spoiler were established years and years before it was actually confirmed, so it's sort of a different thing.

Yeah, he's obvious in all the books but Well of Ascension and Alloy of Law since he's going about with his usual name, and Wax doesn't seem to notice he's met the man twice in Era 2. For the non-obvious books we have Word of Brandon and for WoA we have Secret History as well. Speaking of Well of Ascension, Brandon mentioned that he necessarily retconned what Hoid was doing in that book with the release of Secret History but since the only thing it actually changed was a single annotation rather than anything actually published, it's not a huge deal. So yeah, he's seen in the book helping the Terris refugees and those are still his footprints at the Well. As for what he went to Terris for, we still don't know. Brandon was asked this recently and he did canonize what Hoid was doing but just then he couldn't recall what it was. I don't know if the person who asked followed up to establish the specifics.

When I first read it, my thought was that it's probably literal silver and its astronomical value is because of how precious the metal is to at least Threnody; it would probably be just as valuable in the Cognitive Realm if you encountered Shades there and per Secret History there are people who are concerned about such things in the CR. However, the more I think about it, the more I really like the idea that it's dragonsteel, especially with that WoB that there's a 'super big RAFO' involved. It could be a more mundane material and the RAFO is how it got there but it seems a bit excessive on Brandon's part to phrase it that way, were that the case. Like Cam mentioned, aluminum was incredibly rare and valuable until about a hundred and fifty years ago when an economical way to isolate it was discovered. Brandon is aware of this and cited it as why he used the metal in Mistborn. Bands of Mourning even pointed this out, in the context of how much easier it became to get ahold of once knowledge of chemistry advanced sufficiently.

@Yata That's my assumption as well. Brandon has hinted that Harmony could be doing something with his 'excess Ruin' to maintain balance and putting more of it into harmonium than Preservation could add to the existing explanation of its explosive property (that it's composed of opposing 'particles' as it were) and that the annihilation would leave behind something important. As a godmetal, atium or an atium-ish byproduct would be of interest in the Cosmere for general study purposes and since it makes the best hemalurgic spikes, it would be really valuable for anyone who knows of that magic and wants to do a little spiking without having to figure out exactly what metal you'd need to steal any given attribute. And like you said, it would be a neat way to reintroduce the metal as well. This is true but it's open to interpretation whether he means silver has a wider Cosmere role or it just has a Cosmere role, on Threnody. And while there's just enough wiggle room in that WoB to argue that silver has some role to play in Scadrial that nobody currently knows about, the fact that it's not one of the sixteen metals makes this kind of unlikely. Atium has known uses on Scadrial and for the wider Cosmere so it seems a much more likely option. There's also the obvious question of why a common metal would be a byproduct of a harmonium reaction. You can get silver just about anywhere (Brandon even says he didn't swap it for aluminum because silver is just too easy to obtain so it wouldn't work as a 'surprise' metal) so it's hard to imagine many situations where such a method of obtaining it would be useful. And then there's the fact that as the condensed essence of a Shard in Physical form, there's no real reason for harmonium to have silver in it. That WoB even specifically calls it out as an element, not a compound.

You have to intend to create a spike, you can't do it by accident. And you have to hit just the right point in the victim's body. And then you have to get it into a recipient before too much of the charge decays. And surgebinding has been noted to be a system that's hard to capture with hemalurgy due to it being bond-based (much the same's said of spiking for an Aviar talent) and since he hadn't even finished swearing the First Ideal, Elhokar wouldn't have much to offer there, aside from the 'human powers'. Literally the only way that could work would be if Odium knows enough of hemalurgy to provide Moash the necessary intent and he was directly controlling him at the moment he struck. So yeah, it's extremely unlikely that Moash created a hemalurgic spike there. Even the dagger he kills Jezrien with is only mentioned to use a similar fundamental and even there, we don't have any evidence that he was being guided like he'd need to create a 'proper' spike.

Silver is invaluable on Threnody because it repels Shades and if applied quickly can reverse their withering effect. That said, it can't be what Brandon was referring to as a byproduct of a harmonium reaction because the metal is useless in the Metallic Arts while Brandon said that whatever was left behind would be relevant to Scadrial. And 'really relevant' to the Cosmere, which so far as we know does not describe silver in a broader sense; the only planet where we know it's valuable or has any special properties at present is Threnody.