Weltall

At this point you still pretty much need Word of Brandon to know that the third man is Baon. Well, that or quite a bit of staring at the text sideways to figure out that Vao could be Baon as filtered through the local language. But yeah, Galladon is really obvious and a nice illustration of how speech patterns and odd words can give away some worldhoppers. Vasher's another great illustration of that principle at work.

That was a long night but as always, totally worth it. Too dead on my feet last night to check the quality of the recording I made of my questions but I'll do that in a bit to hopefully make life easy for our Arcanists. I'll post the exact questions and answers after I've had time to go back to the recording. I also got the general Q&A which I think turned out well enough to be useable, despite me being way in the back. I can do those later too. For now, a quick summary of the interesting bits I got from him: - I asked if there was anything he was willing to tell us about the third great empire on Sel and he said no, because he's still working on the details and doesn't want to canonize anything just yet. - He RAFO'd my question about whether the advertisement in the BoM broadsheet about talking metal was related to the knife that Nazh gave Kelsier in Secret History (a followup to the theory I came up with after last year' signing) but he mentioned that Isaac and Ben wrote a lot of the broadsheet content. And he did confirm that Nazh wants that knife back. - One of the WoK annotations mentions that Syl originated in an unpublished Cosmere work that wasn't going anywhere. Brandon confirmed that it was from a planned work using Aether of Night's setting. Oh, and hello to the fellow Sharder who was taking the pictures in the signing line! Sorry, forgot to get your name when we talked as I was leaving but nice to meet you. That turned out to be the reading and I'm really looking forward to it. His 'what I'm thinking about right now' discussion involved the process of breaking into the industry, Heraclitus and Chinese Spaghetti. xD

Oh hey @Pagerunner, I asked Brandon at the San Francisco signing and he confirmed that Syl was from Climb the Sky. And was very surprised when I asked. Also, there was another Sharder who I talked to right afterwards about it. Sorry, I didn't get your name. Nice meeting you!

Mantis shrimp are inherently Awesome, in the Liftian sense. Heck, I'm sure that if you stuck them on Roshar, with the right spren they could even replicate the cavitation bubbles. Now there's a thought, Rosharan domesticated (giant) mantis shrimp with fabrials replicating the Surge of Adhesion, for the atmospheric pressure effects. Coolest guard pet ever.

I'm going, though I'm probably going to wind up arriving a bit late. Got my books still needing signing, a list of questions and a burning curiousity for whatever topic Brandon will decide to talk about this time. xD

Yeah, the short version is that most Nahel Bonds are opposite gender but same-gender ones happen, the gender of the spren doesn't necessarily imply anything about the Radiant's sexual orientation and spren gender tends to be fluid so it's all kind of a moot point. As Kurkistan and Jonathon mention, it's got more to do with storytelling than anything in-universe.

For reference, here are a couple WoB's on the subject: "I just don't want Earth in the Cosmere at all" "[Earth] adds too much baggage" EDIT: Ooh, didn't realize this is your first post. Welcome to the Shard! And I love your username; Hoid having the TARDIS would explain many things.

Mistborn Era 2 happens after the first half of the Stormlight Archive but as Brandon hasn't written the whole thing he doesn't want to set in stone exactly where it falls in the timeline, so it might be after SA 5 or it might be after a later book. In any event, none of the 'present day' action in those books has happened yet as of Oathbringer. Depending on exactly how long the timeskip between SA halves is and exactly when Era 2 is set within that gap, some of the flashback sequences (like the one that opens Shadows of Self) might be happening in parallel to events we've seen on Roshar but we won't know for sure until Brandon nails down the dates.

Welcome to the wonderful world of figuring out possible applications of Forgery. xD 1. The exact WoB (here) says that even if Shai were able to make an Essence Mark that not only plausibly rewrote her background to 'be from Arelon' and 'was taken by the Shaod' (and bear in mind that the former would conflict with Forgery's 'be from MaiPon' requirement so that would probably be very tricky to work out) what would probably happen is that she would only look like an Elantrian but wouldn't actually be able to use AonDor. She'd need something else to actually become an Elantrian that way. Also, Brandon has said that you need to be of Aonic descent to be taken and if your descent is more distant then you have to be in Arelon for it to happen. Hrathen fooling people into thinking he'd been taken isn't a counterexample since 1) obviously he was faking it and 2) the people he was fooling don't know how the Shaod works exactly to know that it wasn't really possible. His faking it with Sarene actually was plausible (whether anyone actually knew it or not) because she was genetically close enough and in the right geographical area. 2. Aviar talents are species-linked so it's not the kind of thing you could realistically Forge. 3. This is probably the simplest thing to do and I imagine it would be possible if you had enough Investiture to override the Shardplate's own resistance to being changed, but for the amount it would require you might as well just regrow the Plate normally. 4. Brandon has said that you coud Forge a spike from one type to another but it would require a boost of power and it's not the sort of thing Shai could do on her own. He's also said that it's theoretically possible to make a spike from someone who used Forgery to make themselves an allomancer and it would work, but it's the sort of thing that belongs more in the realm of in-universe philosophical debate than 'a realistic possibility' because it would be extremely hard to do. I imagine that since Forging yourself to have allomancy is possible then you could also Forge yourself to have hemallurgically-granted powers, but again it would probably be an extremely complex bit of Forgery and no doubt easier to just Forge yourself to have gained the ability some other way. Or get your hands on a medallion. 5. There's some debate over whether or not something like this is pretty much what Ashravan now is, Realmatically speaking. But my guess is that creating a genuine Returned via Forgery would be a 'no' for two reasons. First, because Brandon has said that this sort of thing requires more Investiture than a Forger can pull off; the hypothetical was 'Can I Forge myself to die, check out the afterlife and then come back?' and Brandon said that transferring Investiture to/from the Cognitive is more than a Forger could do. The second reason is that you need to be Nalthian to Return and then you have to meet whatever criteria Endowment has set up and then you have to accept the offer and then you have to receive a Divine Breath. That's a lot of variables to work around and even if you had a Nalthian corpse, I'm not sure you could cheat your way into making a Returned. Brandon has called out Surgebinding as a magic system you can't cheat your way into using Forgery or crazy A-Gold tricks because a spren has to actively choose you and you can't fake that. Trying to Forge a Returned would be like that, only much moreso because you'd be trying to Forge the consent of a Shard.

Another thought-provoking read. Interesting spot on Adonalsium being an anagram. I'm not sure that's intentional on Brandon's part (he's said that he was inspired by the Hebrew word Adonai so the anagram could be an amusing coincidence) but interesting all the same. Also, I had to grin at your use of the quote about Taldain and Vasher as I spent a long time (re)finding that one during a discussion of magic system hacks. As a potential bit of support for the idea of water as a system-wide catalyst, Brandon mentioned that magic and ecology are very closely tied together on Taldain, in a discussion of how magic might work on Darkside. On the Shattering, I have two observations. One relates to the 'creation' of the Intents (or Mandates). We have Frost's reference to Odium as 'God's divine hatred' which strongly suggests that it wasn't Rayse imprinting onto his sixteenth of Adonalsium's power but something already there. We also have WoB that while a Vessel can influence how their Shard's Intent is expressed, they don't leave any permanent imprint on the Shard. So I don't think that the sixteen parts of Adonalsium's power were shaped by the first people to take up each piece but they were already 'set' in some way at the time of the Shattering. There's also Hoid's observation that Ati used to be kind and generous, which doesn't seem like the sort of person who would 'create' Ruin. I think there might be WoB that Ati was especially incompatible with his Shard which is why he was so badly changed by it; I know there's one that Rayse is particularly attuned to his own and the degree to which Vessel and Shard align affects the extent to which the latter alters the personality of the former. On the formation of the intents themselves, Brandon has been RAFO-happy on the question of whether the Vessels all knew what they were getting before the deed was done but he has said that Adonalsium could have been divided in other ways. My own guess is that the Intents were created when Adonalsium's personality split along 'fault lines' as it were and what each one represented had more to do with how many pieces Adonalsium was split into than anything else. For example, if he'd been split into fewer pieces then perhaps Preservation and Ruin would have remained a single piece, or maybe Ruin and Cultivation would have become a single Shard, per WoB that those two were compatable. The other observation is that I'm not sure aluminum would have been enough to do it. We know the material resists being Invested (Emperor's Soul) and can block at least some manifestations of Investiture (various uses of allomancy) but it doesn't seem to actively drain Investiture or damage it, for lack of a better term. For example, we know aluminum is used to make the guards used for Shardblade sparring but this doesn't damage the highly-Invested blades themselves and nobody we've seen so far has noticed any oddities in using Investiture that isn't explicitly directed at the aluminum while carrying it. I'm thinking of Shallan with her necklace, Kaladin around the wrapped Blades, anyone in Era 2 Mistborn who was simply carrying aluminum guns/bullets on them while using their powers normally) etc. And Brandon was asked if aluminum could be used to prevent someone from Returning and he said it wouldn't be enough. Specifically, he drew a distinction between being intert/blocking Investiture and actually absorbing it. So if you can kill someone with an aluminum weapon, leave it in their body and they can still Return, I'm not sure that dropping aluminum in a pool would do the kind of damage you're positing. One other thought in that vein is that we have one example of a pool where someone tried to put something in it that the Investiture didn't like: Vin entering the Well of Ascension while wearing her hemalurgically charged earring. While this is painful for Vin, it doesn't seem to do any damage to the Well itself and she's able to use it even though she drops the earring into its depths. This isn't quite the same thing as aluminum but we know it's from an opposing power and it didn't seem to disrupt the functioning of the pool. And that's all I have time for right now but I'll be back later after I've had time to read the rest of the posts.

It's possible he misspoke there, since in other WoBs he mentioned cadmium and bendalloy specifically, and they're genuinely impossible to have been sourced during the Final Empire era while aluminum was available and known to have an application to the Metallic Arts so it would be strange for that one to have been removed, even if it's effectively useless to a Misting. You can also see in the WoB where he says aluminum that he's bouncing between it and chromium (which aren't even linked metals) and when you read the full quote you can see that he was clearly dividing his attention, which makes it seem more likely that he simply goofed there. Despite being The Man With All The Answers he does sometimes make mistakes, especially later in signings when he's been talking to fans for hours and it's getting late.

Dalinar seems to have had a lot of factors helping him out. Even what we can take from just the first two books (ie, ignoring all the backstory we're going to get in a couple days) shows that he was powerfully influenced by his perceived failure to protect Gavilar on the night of the latter's assassination, which helped catalyze his study of the Way of Kings and his desire to act more honorably per older understandings of the concept rather than under current Alethi standards like Sadeas. That he was also on the receiving end of visions from Honor didn't hurt but it seems like the biggest motivator for him was remembering Gavilar telling him to 'follow the Codes' on that fateful night. Sadeas never seems to have gotten a moment like that, or whenever a potential eureka moment came he completely ignored it. Like failing to recognize all the implications of Dalinar giving up Oathbringer, which really should have started the gears turning in his head if they were ever going to. That he completely failed to grasp the implications of the Everstorm arriving was just the last straw. So yeah, I think that if Sadeas had been exposed to a powerful enough stimulus at some point in the past he might have become a different enough man that a redemption arc would have been a possibility but with what actually happened he was too set on his course for that to be a realistic option. I kind of think of him as the Londo Mollari of Stormlight Archive, having initially good intentions that end very badly for all concerned and given multiple chances for redemption, knowing that's what was being offered. The difference is that Londo finally took the last chance while Sadeas did not.

This has come up before and there's debate over whether Brandon really slipped up and gave us a new Shard or if he made one up on the spot to answer the question. Brandon also followed up by saying that readers could interpret his response however they wanted to. If Brandon was an RPG character he'd totally be a dodge tank.

Yeah, the holder can affect to an extent how the Intent gets interpreted (we have WoB that if Sadeas could take up Honor, the result would be different then what we see with Tanavast as Honor's Vessel) but we have another WoB that makes it clear that this 'interpretation' doesn't permanently alter the Shard. So a different Vessel could interpret 'Odium' differently than Rayse is currently doing. Brandon has said that he doesn't consider any of the Shards in and of themselves 'good' or 'evil', though in the case of Odium I'm not sure how good a Shard you could really get out of 'God's divine hatred' without some other Intent acting to help channel that hatred. I imagine that even the best-intentioned of Vessels would get twisted over time, like Ati and Ruin.

For future reference, here's an annotated version of the chart that comes in the Way of Kings with all the Orders and Surges labeled. Makes it easy to see who gets what at a glance.

The 'Half Shards' are an interesting development but they're just an outgrowth of known fabrial science so it's extremely unlikely the Unmade had any hand in their creation. As for use in the upcoming Desolation, they might have some use but we don't know how economical it is to produce them and we do know they're not much help against a sufficiently skilled surgebinder, so they're unlikely to make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. That said, this is Brandon we're talking about so he'll probably bring them up again in some unexpectedly awesome way several books down the line.

Clod being Arsteel is also in the annotations. An interesting point the original question unintentionally raises is 'how does Yesteel know the secret of creating new weapons like Nightblood'? We know that Vasher and Shashara were the ones to discover the trick and Shashara's death was intended to prevent anyone else from learning how it was done. Yesteel's known to be doing further BioChroma research (he originally developed ichor-alcohol for Lifeless and apparently has come up with a newer version) but for him to learn how to make Type Four entities suggests that he's not only done even more advanced research but has a huge stock of Breath available to him with which to do it, since it's only at the Ninth Heightening that the ability to Awaken stone and metal is gained, per our understanding. That's gonna be an interesting thing to see in the eventual sequel.

It's more likely that he was hinting at something that was revealed the following year in Arcanum Unbounded, that Devotion and Dominion's power resides in the Cognitive Realm rather than the Spiritual as a result of Odium trying to prevent the power from being taken up again. With all the attendent weirdness on Sel being a result of the powers being both forced together and into a realm where they wouldn't normally be found.

Maybe that's the real secret of the non-existant Tenth Pancake. It was deemed too horrible so they stopped making them.

For reference, a WoB that Hoid is (probably) the second-oldest entity in the cosmere. Frost is slightly older than Hoid, the original Vessels younger but still the only things we know of that would be anywhere near his age. He's definitely refering to Cultivation here.

We know that the blade Taln was carrying at that point was an honorblade because of how it behaved when he fainted; a shardblade would vanish at that point while an honorblade would not. That Hoid calls what Taln was carrying a shardblade just means that from Hoid's perspective, it was one. Just like Nightblood could be called a shardblade even though it was made using an entirely different magic system. Basically, all honorblades are shardblades but not all shardblades are honorblades. Think of it from Hoid's much bigger perspective and you can see why he'd think that way. It's literally just a terminology thing because Hoid is exactly 475.1 times smarter than we are. I know, I took measurements.

Khriss' essay on the system from Arcanum Unbounded.

Yeah, my interpretation is the same. Jasnah is assuming that the Parshendi are the abberation and the Parshmen are their natural state when we know that it's really the other way around. That she was wrong about this doesn't really affect things though; She felt the need to go there to study the Parshendi to try and learn why they're different in the hopes of preventing it from happening to the Parshmen. Her conversation with Hoid at the end of WoR makes it pretty clear that she was hoping the transformation didn't happen, unfortunately she got back too late to make any difference.

The evidence that pointed us to Adolin's blade originally belonging to an Edgedancer wasn't the shape of the blade itself but the fact that the mist that it forms from when summoned is noted to resemble vines. This is what Brandon was asked when he confirmed it. The shape of the blades probably has more to do with the preferences of the original Radiant than anything specific about the Order they belonged to.

So where does Shardplate fall on the Star Wars scale? It sure can't be Stormtrooper armor; that stuff wouldn't stop a stiff wind while Plate actually does block a Shardblade. And I dunno if you're aware of this WoB or not but Brandon has admitted that Shardblades were inspired in part by lightsabers.