Weltall

I found one WoB where Brandon was directly asked this question and his response was a RAFO, but it's possible he's responded differently at another time.

Glowing generally isn't a sign of Investiture use, it's a sign of a lot of Investiture use. This is why Elantrians glow for example, they're extremely heavily Invested. Allomancers normally don't glow for example, it's only in extreme cases on the power level of the Bands of Mourning that you get such an obvious visual effect. Similarly, Feruchemy only has obvious visual effects when using Pewter (and I suppose Steel, to the extent that 'moving so fast you can't see them' qualifies) while Hemalurgy has a very obvious visible effect in the presence of the spikes. They can be concealed if the spikes are small, or hidden in plain sight in the case of an earring but there's always going to be the tell of metal piercing your body. And if you're in the mists, there's a subtle but noticeable visual effect as they'll swirl to avoid touching you. BioChroma also has an extremely obvious visual effect, which has to do with the properties of Breath. Colors increase in vibrancy around someone with Breath, with the effect increasing the more Breath that you have. However, it's also mentioned that the effect is very easy to overlook until you have a certain number of Breaths yourself. The God Kings have a much more extreme version of this, creating prismatic effects around anything white. Seperately, Returned all have very obvious visual differences that set them apart from ordinary humans, owing to the presence of their Divine Breath. Surgebinders glow because the Stormlight itself glows, but only if they're currently holding a lot of it. That said, a Radiant who's reached a certain level of progression will have one very obvious visual indication (their eyes) so long as their Shardblade is manifest. TLDR: Investiture doesn't always make you glow, but if you are glowing it's generally a sign that you're currently holding a lot of Investiture.

We've also seen Hoid take advantage of the passive benefits of BioChroma on Roshar when he mentions that tuning his instrument has become so much easier since he gained perfect pitch. Basically, with a few exceptions Investiture can be used anywhere as long as you have any fuel or other necessary components (Stormlight, metal for Scadrian magic though it doesn't have to be metal from Scadrial etc.) that the magic requires. The noteworthy exception is Selish magic, which has issues owing to the Dor being stuffed into the location-dependent Cognitive Realm, as opposed to the location-independent Spiritual Realm.

The thing is, there is a Shard we know whose Intent already nicely fits with what we see happening on Scadrial and that's Autonomy, which we didn't know by name at that point but we'd been told of them by way of the Way of Kings epigraphs in which we learn that Hoid has a grudge against two of the Vessels. One is Rayse (holding Odium) and the other is Bavadin, who was later revealed to be the Vessel of Autonomy. There are other possibilities as well, but they generally involve a combination of Shards that we know. Odium/Autonomy together for example, or if you really want to go with the 'order' concept we already know of a matching Intent: Dominion. EDIT: Oh, just saw these are your first posts. Welcome to the Shard!

Per Word of Brandon, other forms of Investiture would work but some are easier to access than others. For example, we're told that Taldain would be a good place for Vasher to get easy Investiture, except that it's currently impossible to travel there. Scadrial would be "a lot harder" but it would be possible. Brandon has said that Vasher has tried to Awaken using Stormlight but hasn't been successful. Given the way Breath works, it may not be possible to substitute another Shard's Investiture for it and get the same results. Or it may be and Vasher hasn't figured out the trick yet, but if so I suspect the hack would have to be pretty complicated. The way that he feeds off Stormlight in place of Breath is much simpler, since his Divine Breath doesn't care what form of Investiture it gets as long as it receives an amount equivalent to one Breath every Nalthian week.

I can't check right now but I think it wasn't that all Oathgate traffic had to pass through Urithiru but rather that a Radiant was needed to use an Oathgate, because only a living Shardblade could unlock them. So it wasn't that they were forcing goods to go from A to B by way of C, but that the people using the Oathgates to go from A to B were being required to pay increasing amounts for the priviledge of using the gates. Or something like that, Jasnah would probably caution us about not having all the facts.

Taravangian's lie indicates that he thinks they have them all, Szeth's response confirms it. He's the one who brings up 'the other seven'.

Interesting idea but yeah, we do know where they all are. Taravangian's lie to Szeth about a stolen blade tells us that they have seven of the things, plus the one that Szeth is carrying at the time (Jezrien's). The other two are accounted for by Taln (the Shin never had it, we don't know who's got it right now) and Nale (who went back for his at some point).

We know that Vasher subsists on Stormlight most of the time, which means that he's covered for effectively the entire year aside from the twenty days of the Weeping. A week on Nalthis is seven days so he only needs to go three weeks without a new source of Investiture, give or take depending on when the last highstorm before the Weeping and the first after it arrive. And every other year there's a highstorm in the middle of the Weeping. Figure that he might be able to store some Stormlight in gems at the beginning of the Weeping and he might only need two weeks worth of Investiture in a given year. That's not a whole lot. Now remember that could have a store of Breaths either within himself (with some trick being done to supress the color aura) or stored in one of his possessions and so it's not hard to imagine that he has an emergency reserve to see himself through the Weepings if he can't get Investiture any other way. He ended Warbreaker with roughly two hundred Breaths (per the epilogue he had enough to reach the Second Heightening) and could certainly have obtained more afterwards. For illustrative purposes, let's assume that he was still at that point when he worldhopped to Roshar and needs three weeks worth every year. Realistically he'd probably need slightly less on average but we'll just go with that. 200/3=66.67, he can survive for a long time on that.

Yeah, none of those points require that she be a worldhopper and none of them stand out as being something you couldn't imagine of a Rosharan, in the way that other 'worldhopper clues' have. Zahel for example is seen having life-sense, he drops references to things that don't stand out to his listeners but make our ears perk up (like making the choice that lets you sleep at night and wishing he'd done that, or retroactively his comment that makes it clear he's used to hearing Nightblood's voice in his head), at one point he looks to be playing a miniature version of Tarachin and the biggie: His language. Brandon has mentioned that one of the cues for worldhoppers is that they'll say things that sound weird because they're not natively speaking the local language and things they say aren't translating properly. So, Zahel's color and flower-based metaphors for example. Similarly, we had really obvious cues for two of the three Purelake characters but we needed WoB to identify Baon because White Sand hadn't been released then. Galladon's speech pattern stands out as being odd and matches how he talked in Elantris, and Demoux had his scar.

Yeah, he could be posing as a mercenary or one of the many people an army needs to operate outside the soldiers. We know of at least one worldhopper in Dalinar's army (Felt) who's managed to get in without attracting attention so a native Rosharan should easily have been able to manage it, and Mraize is Thaylen per WoP. But no, we don't yet have any confirmation on exactly how he came to be there.

I doubt that a chapter was removed, since 29 (effectively the final chapter) has lines talking about what happened in the timeskip between the end of the previous chapter and the present time. If there was at some point another chapter in-between, those lines would have been redundant. More likely, it's just a typo that would have been caught had the book actually been published but which slipped through in the draft form that we're seeing. Oh, and welcome to the Shard!

On the appearance thing, Brandon has said that it's mental. Hallandren Returned look the way they do because that's how they subconsciously think a god should appear. Vasher looks scruffy because that's how he sees himself. Brandon mentioned in the Warbreaker annotations that this is part of how he supresses his Divine Breath but it's not all of it. He's also mentioned that Returned appearance follows the same realmatic fundamentals as whether Forgery will 'take' or not based on plausibiility, so it's clearly a contextual matter. So an Idrian would probably not change in appearance much upon Returning since culturally they don't think of Returned in the same way that the people of Hallandren do.

Topaz was a name Hoid used pre-Shattering and we know that at that event he was know to the Vessels by yet another name. The Desolations far postdate that. It's almost certainly a coincidence.

My fault, I screwed up the link. Fixed it now.

WoB confirming this here

I don't think so for two reasons. First, Kalak's description of Jezrien in the WoK Prelude talks about how he wore 'once-fine clothing scorched and stained with blood' but makes no mention of armor even though he observes Radiants moving around who were in Shardplate. The implication is that none of the Heralds have Shardplate, else they'd have been wearing it and Jezrien would either still be in it (this scene taking place just after the end of the battle) or he'd have changed out of it and his clothes wouldn't look like he'd, err, just been through a battle. Also, the way that the Stormfather tells Dalinar that he won't transform for him and that he'll be a knight 'without Blade or Plate' basically tells us that Shardplate is a consequence of the Nahel Bond. I suppose it's possible the Heralds could do make something like Shardplate since the spren were copying what Honor did with the Heralds but then you get to the issue of why Jezrien was clearly fighting in ordinary clothing during the Desolation.

@Yata@Steeldancer Here's where Brandon mentioned what a atium/lerasium alloy would do. Yata's memory is correct and since we've already gotten the 'metal that explodes violently' result of a fusion of Preservation and Ruin's powers in metal form with Harmonium, I think it's a safe bet that an alloy of these two metals would do what every other lerasium alloy is known to do: Make Mistings.

Aside from previously not needing Stormlight to perform Surgebinding and Brandon's general statement that there are 'other things' they're capable of even without their Honorblades, we know that they have at least enhanced senses and reflexes, based on the scene where Taln foils Iyatil's attempt to kill Amaram.

Brandon has mentioned that most of the Seventeenth Shard uses a particular (unspecified) method to extend their lifespan. Seeing that one of the Shard's members is Baon and Khriss works with them, it's a fair bet that she uses the same method herself, though given her depth of knowledge she might know of and have access to other ways as well. In any case, she and Nazh are capable of living longer than a normal human lifespan.

Can you blame him though? He lives in a dynamic universe where things are happening all the time and he likes that. In Westeros, five or more years can pass with literally nothing happening.

Shardblades default to zomgHUGE by Rosharan standards, picking one that doesn't have a crazily elaborate blade means nothing when it's still at least twice the size of any other sword. And again, if Vasher and Shashara grabbed one from Roshar then the fact that Nightblood developed unexpected sentience wouldn't be a case of 'we have no idea what happened' but 'we know it probably has to do with this strange sword we picked up' and they'd have a place to start with further research. And since Shashara intended to mass-produce the things, it's clear that the process doesn't involve the kind of ridiculously intensive Step One that 'worldhop to Roshar, steal a Shardblade' would require. 1000+ Breaths is half that of a Splinter of Endowment. That's a lot of Investiture, compared to the very small amount present in a hemalurgic spike. If you can't make one of those from a Shardblade there's no way you could stuff hundreds to thousands of times more Investiture into that same limited space. Brandon hasn't actually confirmed that Nightblood's 'corruption' is the result of mixing powers, just that in many circumstances that's what's going on when people think of something as being corrupted. Not all RAFOs mean 'you're right but I don't want to say so'. It's also possible the weirdness isn't literally a mixing of powers with Nightblood but the result of Shashara trying to create something that's a part of one magic system, using a completely different magic system that wasn't intended to work that way.

It's entirely possible they were actual siblings. While Returned lose memories of who they were before their death, the institution of setting them up as gods and not telling them anything about their past lives only took its current form after the Manywar. It's entirely possible that the priests told them that they had been siblins when they returned or their deaths/Return was staggered so they could learn it from each other. Say, Arsteel dies and Returns. Yesteel tells him that they're brothers. Then Yesteel dies and Arsteel greets the new Returned as his brother. Or somewhat less likely but perhaps not impossible, they were twins who Returned together as infants. If if can happen to a single newborn, it's possible it could happen to twins too. But we don't have any official word on this yet.

To add, it's mentioned in the annotations that the priests would have preferred an actual child of Susebron and Siri because that gets the bloodline of Vo back into Hallandren but they would have used the Returned infant that the annotations state was born should Siri not have a child quickly enough. As far as the God King's own priests are concerned, the treaty and the timing of an infant Returning vindicate their faith but the end result wasn't critical for them. They just want the Breath store passed on safely and the treaty gives them an opportunity to do so. And since it did postpone the possibility of war for at least twenty years, it was a good deal for them even if they had to go with Plan B. https://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-warbreaker-chapter-forty-four/

Offhand, I think the only times anyone has used electrum has been specifically as an anti-atium measure so we haven't seen attempts to use it under 'normal' circumstances. But yeah, while I can also see some cool potential applications for it, I'd think that when it comes to avoiding danger A-Tin would be better in most circumstances.