Weltall

@HermanBolivia This topic was almost seven years dead. Let it pass Beyond in peace.

Welcome to the Shard! I wrote up a theory about that advertisement a while back, linking it to Khriss and Nazh's appearance in Secret History. I think they're looking for an Awakened object too.

To add to what Yata says, the look of Nightblood doesn't match a Shardblade. Remember that Rosharans are on average somewhat larger than normal humans, then remember that even they think that Shardblades are really big. People would be commenting on Nightblood being ginormous if it had used a Shardblade as a base, since the dead blades default to their oversized fantasy poster/JRPG protagonist sword size when the spren are killed. Another thing to consider is that Shashara and Vasher were both surprised by the outcome. If they had used a Shardblade as a base or gotten their hands on some of Ruin's Investiture (ie atium) and used it as part of making Nightblood, it would have been pretty obvious to them what caused things to go screwy even if they didn't understand why. They're savvy about Investiture and could easily have figured out that whatever they were using interacted strangely with all the Breath. I think it's much safer to assume that Nightblood's unexpected sentience is a result of some quirk of BioChroma that we don't understand yet (Brandon's admitted there's a lot we haven't been told yet) without positing that it's the result of cross-system interaction.

Preservation's 'weapon' was the atium cache (and the atium mistings) who could at the last moment burn away Ruin's body and prevent him from reclaiming his full power for long enough that Vin could carry out her role in Preservation's Master Plan. Nothing to do directly with Adonalsium. That the number sixteen is important to both may not be a coincidence but it's not a deep connection. We know that Shards can exert some degree of influence over the magic systems they create even though many aspects of it are out of their control, such as Preservation tweaking things to make his sixteen symbolism work out, Ruin leaving a hole in hemalurgy through which one could control sufficiently spiked entities and probably other things we don't know about yet. So Preservation may not have been able to control how his magic manifested but he might have been able to tweak things so that there were sixteen metals to correspond to the sixteen Vessels, as a way of preserving a memory of the Shattering or for some other reason.

Per Word of Brandon, Hoid isn't spiked. In another WoB he says that while hemalurgy is the easiest way to get other powers, Hoid would prefer to do things the hard way because he doesn't want to be opened up to Shardic influence.

Connection medallions might be a short-term workaround but you'd still need to do whatever steps are required for Initiation into a given magic system in order to get the magic and really screwy things might happen if you stop using the medallion and are no longer connected to the region. We don't know what metal might steal Connection but since Brandon has said it's possible we know one or more of them can do this, not counting atium which can by definition. And we have a number of metals with no currently known Hemalurgic property, even before you start looking into godmetal alloys.

If you take parts of Allomancer Jak at face value, the current generation of koloss use leather wrappings once their skin starts to tear to the point that this becomes an issue. So more advanced technological replacement in a later era wouldn't surprise me, same with their hearts. But as King Cole says, there's probably an upper limit to what technology can do for them.

This would be the same population that forgot that Strifelover and Peacegiver were the same person in less than three hundred years. The priesthood probably encouraged this since a heroic Returned saving the kingdom makes for a better origin story for the God Kings than 'our leader started the Maywar, then thought better of it and set about ending it, whoops'. As for Kalad's Phantoms, the average inhabitant of the city isn't likely to have ever seen these new Lifeless and would accept at face value that what looks like very well-made statues are just that. Especially since they were a new concept (and one not rediscovered since) so there was no basis for the average person to even think that a statue could be a Lifeless.

@kenod @TheKittyOfAtlantis Chapter 47, Obliteration does mention that he can't teleport while charged.

It's also possible that Sazed told other members of the crew about pre-Final Empire wedding customs in the course of discussing religions with them and one or more of them had an association of flowers and weddings. Though it's fun to see Scadrial in Era 2 and learn that the Church of the Survivor uses ash instead of flower petals, despite the latter most definitely existing by then. Neat touch.

Roshar's climate being what it is, this has probably never been an issue for them. Maybe if we got some Listener worldhoppers...

Ummm, because Odium controls all search engines?

Great, that mental image is going to be stuck in my head all day now.

These two questions may be related. And the two 'missing' polestones are the ones associated with Nale and Ishi. Hmmm... we should ask Her Pancakefulness to investigate this further.

Brandon still calls it The Silence Divine in the most recent State of the Sanderson and the plan is still for it to be set on Ashyn and focus on disease-based magic.The work is unfinished and with no indication when he'll finish it but it's not been abandoned. He did a reading of part of its prologue during the Words of Radiance tour, here's a recording someone made.

Randomly on the thunderclast discussion, Dalinar's vision implies that they can be harmed by ordinary humans with hammers. I don't want to know what the death toll would look like after an encounter but with enough people bashing away it seems like they can be stopped without needing Shardblades. My guess is that you'd first try to smash one of the legs to slow it down, then do the same to the remaining limbs while it's at least sort of crippled, then go for whatever amounts to a killing blow against one of the things. Dalinar's vision of Presumably!Nohadon points out that at the end of one desolation, Yelig-nar deliberately targeted everyone in the capital who could write. Imagine that there's standing instructions for Odium's forces to destroy the sorts of things that give continuity to a civilization and it's easier to imagine how these things could become so devastating.

It's the kind of question that nobody's likely to ask because it wouldn't provide much useful information, it's a good candidate for a RAFOing and there are so many other questions we could be asking instead. Like why Hoid is so looking forward to instant noodles. That said, there was an open-ended question a few years ago about who would win in a melee among the protagonists and Brandon named Hoid as one of the last two people likely to remain standing, at which point it would get awkward. Doesn't confirm he's Nightblood-proof but it's at least suggestive.

Someone recently pointed me to the video of GRRM interrupting Paul and Storm playing their little ditty Write like the Wind. Staged as it was, I have to imagine that going through his head at that time was 'You can kiss Arya goodbye now. And Jamie? Were you starting to like him? Doomed. And who else should I kill just to show em who's boss?' Funniest thing about that song though, it's been over five years since that song was written and nothing has changed, except that the HBO show finally did overrun the books it's based on. To make this sorta-related to Brandon and inspired by the lines in the song about other authors writing paces, in the period since A Dance with Dragons came out Brandon wrote the final Wheel of Time book, three Mistborn books, the entire Reckoners series, Rithmatist, The Dark Talent, two Stormlight Archive books that are every bit as doorstopper-worthy as GRRM's output and a whole lot of novellas. Really makes you appreciate Brandon's method of switching projects to keep himself energized when you realize just how much he writes. xD

You can pretty safely assume that anyone who's a Mistborn+Feruchemist and has figured out Compounding will trounce nearly anyone in the setting below the level of the Shards with only a few possible exceptions: Another person with the same powers (then it comes down to skill), an Elantrian (depending on what they can do with AonDor), Vasher with Nightblood and a lot of Breath (possibly, based on Brandon having him as one of the last two protagonists who'd be left standing in a hypothetical melee along with Kelsier) and Hoid (because he's described as being more or less unkillable). In the specific case of Radiants, they draw most of their power from a single limited resource (Stormlight) and without it they can't do any Surgebinding, don't get the enhanced physical abilities and lose their healing factor. Unless they're fighting in the middle of a highstorm, the 'Fullborn' (has anyone asked Brandon if he's developed his own term for a Mistborn+Feruchemist?) could simply outlast the Radiant. Also, Radiants are restricted in various ways by their Oaths which could hurt their effectiveness in a fight depending on the circumstances. It's one of the reasons Brandon mentioned that Vin would win in a hypothetical Vin/Kaladin matchup, and she's 'only' a Mistborn.

Even with no moon there would still be tidal forces caused by the local star, they just won't be as pronounced as tides on Earth. And there will still be currents produced by the combination of factors that cause them on our own planet (chiefly wind and the Coriolis force). Sailing and fishing would be affected by the reduced tides compared to what we're used to but it wouldn't be the end of the world, figuratively speaking.

Sometimes there can be really funny goofs where retailers will give an obviously wrong release date; I think it has to do with a requirement that there be a date before they can take your money for preorders, so if they don't have one they'll just make it up. See for example Amazon's continually mutating release date for The Bastards and the Knives, even after the author said that he gave up on the project. Or The Thorn of Emberlain, though that one might actually come out someday...

@Cowmanthethird Haha, that's one of mine. As mentioned we already knew Hoid had Breath from his comments to Kaladin but extra evidence certainly never hurts anything. I was mostly interested in working out whether there was a BioChroma equivalent to 'hemalurgic decay' for some ideas I was mulling at the time. Now to start working out what I'm going to ask him at the Oathbringer signing...

Word of Peter that Decay was the basis for Ruin. I think it's fair to say that Brandon hadn't quite wrapped his head around the power levels of Shards and various other entities, but since the work as it currently exists isn't canon the distinction is academic.

Yes, Brandon has confirmed that the ages given in the books are in-universe ages and if we were to convert them to Earth years, the characters would be slightly older.