Weltall

Given this WoB, probably not Surgebinding but it would do something. Given Nightblood's Command it would be kind of amsuing if it provided some equivalent to the Surge of Division since that seems to be the 'destroy things' Surge, it fits Nightblood's nature and it would fit Szeth since it's a Skybreaker power. But I don't think we really have any idea what it would do since Nightblood is a unique entity. For all we know it would give Szeth the magical power to be really good at cupcake decorating. Very true, but it's still of considerable academic interest since we know that other types of bonds would be percieved by Roshar's magic system as similar to a Nahel Bond and would produce some sort of effect. Basically any example of multiple Investiture systems interacting has the potential to tell us some cool things about the underpinnings of the cosmere.

Spy movies nothing, I want Blade Runner-style enhancement technology. That stuff could transform a 2d photograph into a 3d recreation that could see around corners and magically enhance everything.

Pattern also finds the human excretory system fascinating (cue Shallan's 'we are not having this conversation' moment) so his interest could have to do with what she was writing, what she was writing with or just a fascination with madness generally. Might be something to file away for future reference but it could just as easily be a bit of narrative fluff.

Both of those are surely the best Commands ever. Now why can't we Awaken the entire internet and command it to do those?

Have you ever read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? At one point his protagonists are inventing useless fields of study as an intellecual game and one of them was Tetrapyloctomy, or the art of splitting a hair four ways. It's a great word. xD

To make up for my earlier failure to source a WoB, here's that transcript. And below are links to the rest from the event.

As others have said, either this beggar or the one in the WoK prologue could be Jezrien (or they could be the same person, I don't know if we have enough description to even guess at that) since we've accounted for most of the other male Heralds and neither is lucid enough to fit what we know of Ishar. But by the same token, both of them could just be random beggars with screws loose. Brandon does so love messing with us and has cautioned us on more than one occasion not to read too much into everything he does. But if we assume for purposes of argument that we have seen Jezrien already, my money would be on the beggar from the prologue since we know that multiple other Heralds were present at the event and both of them have mentioned Jezrien, with Nale additionally implying a level of familiarity with his current circumstances. Hair-splitting time. Lift thinks about Hoid in Edgedancer but he doesn't actually appear onscreen. The begger she directly interacts with in the novella is not Hoid, but we could be forgiven for suspecting he was at first (I know that was my immediate thought). Turns out he's something rather different...

'Investiture Did It' can explain the eye colors and the Lighteyes/Darkeyes social divide; Hoid thinks to himself that it's not the weirdest system he's seen and this one in particular has a good reason, even if people don't consciously remember it. We're not sure about why hair color works the way it does but it is presumably a quirk of Rosharan sDNA. We'll no doubt get an explanation in the fullness of time. And this works for the Doylist explanation too, though there's probably more to it than just that. If nothing else, you need more exotic colors to match the associated colors of the Radiant orders because normal human eyes don't have quite enough colors to make that work. Though how the Skybreakers will work when their associated gemstone/color is black is anyone's guess. On a simiar Doylist explanation, Brandon has said that he came up with Shardblades because he wanted a setting in which the ginormous swords so beloved of fantasy art and games would actually make sense and that he thinks the 'coolest magical swords' ever were the lightsabers of Star Wars and wanted to do something about that. Mission accomplished, I'd say

Given that Hoid has extreme difficulty harming people (if it's not completely impossible, but there seems to be a bit of wiggle room there) I'm not sure whether him coming into contact with Nightblood would just make him violently ill and thus pass Vasher's 'Nightblood Test' or whether the two would merge into the second-awesomest thing in the Cosmere after Stick. And then the resulting contrast between Hoid's 'no harming' thing and Nightblood's drive to Destroy Evil would result in the Cosmere dividing by zero. Either way, I think this is an experiment that needs to be done. For Scholarship!

Well yes, but the point is that he hasn't done that because he's had other things he wanted to write, so the question is more 'with what we know now, how would you do it?' Though in terms of 'Hey, I recognize that from X' I figure this is a good time to repeat my prediction from an earlier topic that Duskr from the Liar of Partinel draft was conceived as a cooler-sounding name for Night. And that after not getting to canonize the word Amberite from there or from Mythwalker, that the word will finally see the printed page whenever Brandon does the Aether rewrite. He could advertise it as 'a word twenty years in the making' or somesuch. I don't know why I find that word so interesting but I do. Brandon has also tweaked names in rewrites (see White Sand) so I won't be terribly surprised if a few changes are made. Things like Ynaa (poems) or the Irae as the local term for their temples seem likely examples, especially the latter as it's close to the Ire and the Iriali. And I dunno if it was intentional or not but the name immediately makes me think of Dies Irae which is... just a bit on the nose, given the reveal at the end that they're behind the Forgotten. Anyhow, changing one of those two so their names aren't quite so similar wouldn't be unexpected, though givine Alean a nickname of some kind would work just as well.

Just to add, we know that a Radiant could access Surges they aren't 'supposed' to have via an Honorblade but we don't know for certain if they would gain all the abilities of a particular Order that way. For example, we know that Resonances (the provisionally canonical term for the perks you get when different powers combine) only appear when you have a small set of powers and get overwhelmed if you have too many. Since we know the Windrunner perk for sure let's use that as an example. Shallan with Jezrien's Honorblade would gain access to Gravitation and Adhesion but she might not also get the 'more/stronger squires' perk that Kaladin has, either because the way Honorblades grant Surges doesn't allow for that kind of interaction of powers or because having four Surges would meet the unknown 'too many powers' threshold. Conversely, if Kaladin had Shalash's blade, he'd get Illumination and Transformation but he probably couldn't do all the things we see Shallan and Pattern do, because he doesn't have the artistic talent or the facility with lies that are such a big part of Shallan's Lightweaving. Whether Syl could be used as a Lightweaving prop like Pattern can is another open question. In a related note about Honorblades, I can't find it right now but we have WoB that in the past the Heralds would borrow one anothers Blades on occasion so this is something that's been done before in the setting.

Maybe some sort of compromise can be worked out? Can we all agree that well-made zucchini sticks are delicious?

Presumably there are no naturally occurring Mistings who could burn atium alloys. We'll ignore lerasium since it has 'anyone can burn it' as an explicit property and a lerasium Misting would be even less impressive than a Gnat. And for atium, we're told that Preservation had to mess with the system to make the Seers in Hero of Ages work, so the system probably isn't set up to allow for, say, a malatium Misting. We know for sure that you can't burn alloys just because you can burn the base metal. For example, a Rioter can't also burn Brass even though it's an alloy incorporating the metal that the Rioter can burn. If this wasn't the case then the test Kelsier used to see if Vin was a Mistborn or just a Misting wouldn't have made any sense. Per Word of Brandon, we know that Investiture condensed in solid form has to take the form of metal so yes, under certain circumstances every other Shard could create a metal. However it would require effort on the part of the Shard to make a metal that could work with a completely different magic system and it wouldn't automatically be Allomantically viable. Brandon has confirmed that Shardblades are godmetal but that they would be difficult if not impossible for an Allomancer to burn due to a combination of 'wrong system' and being heavily Invested. Here's another quote on the topic:

Welcome to the Shard! Brandon hasn't given us pronunciation hints like with Elantris or Stormlight Archive so we're kind of on our own. I tend to pronounce it Duh-naa, the first part being like the D in Deer by itself, and running the two halves of the name together. Be curious to see if others read it the same way or have a different intuitive interpretation.

Yeah, what makes those three Radiant orders special is that they're able to access/manipulate the Cognitive Realm with their powers so they have more options once they're there and they have a better opportunity to figure out how the place works, Elsecallers most of all. But the realm can be accessed in other ways as well; The easiest is to use a Perpendicularity, where the huge concentration of Investiture makes it easy to transition between Physical and Cognitive. There's also other magic systems that require the user to have a good understanding of realmatics, like Forgery, the effectiveness of which has a lot to do with Cognitive perception.

We don't have a written description, we just have the busts that decorate the chapter headings. But Ishar sticks out for being depicted as balding and with an enormous beard. Assuming the artists got it right, either one on its own would merit comment from Jasnah. But I hadn't even thought of the way the two interact, given what we learn of Ishar in Edgedancer so that's a really good argument for the man being Kalak.

Technically it hasn't but by process of elimination it basically has to be. We know he's a Herald because he talks about how Ash is 'getting worse', how 'we' weren't supposed to be getting worse and that he's feeling worse just thinking about it. He can't be Jezrien from the context of the conversation and Taln was stuck on Braize at the time. That leaves Ishar (who in fairness we do know has been in contact with Nale) but if the chapter headers showing him are at all accurate he's got a distinctive appearance (and is visibly older) which Jasnah should have commented on, like she does with Nale's appearance. But she doesn't, so in the absence of any serious reason to think otherwise it's reasonable to assume that the mystery Herald is Kalak.

Yeah, we have WoB that Hoid has a very hard time hurting people and we eventually see some of this firsthand (like in the Middlefest interlude, then in Hoid's Secret History appearance) but it was noteworthy that this aspect of him seems to be well known, at least to the Horneaters. Makes you wonder what else they might know that we'd love to.

I don't remember the exact text where highstorm timing is discussed but they're described as coming every few days. The Weeping is significant because on every other year there's a two week gap between highstorms on each end (start to Lightday, Lightday to end) and on alternate years there's four straight weeks with no highstorms. For a two week gap to be significant, the average period between storms necessarily has to be a lot shorter than that. Roshar also has very odd seasons and those tend to last a couple of weeks before transitioning to another, unpredictably.

There's been a variety of theories on the cause of their encroaching madness and the way each one expresses it but we don't have enough solid examples to establish a pattern. For example, Ishar could be perverting his associated divine attribute of 'Guiding' by misleading others, he could have a madness unrelated to these attributes (ie he's just in denial) or he could be actively misleading people instead of it being an expression of madness, if you want to assume there's more up with him than just some screws loose. That leaves us with two Heralds whose madness we can quantify with a reasonable degree of certainty but two isn't really enough to establish a pattern. It's quite likely but I'd prefer to have a third Herald whose madness we can describe in detail before I'd bet money on the idea.

We have WoB that Taldain would have been another good place for a Returned to go to obtain 'easy Investiture', were it not inaccessible right now so it probably is as easy as 'walking outside'. And if it requires manipulating the Invested sand in some way, well, we still know that it's easy to get Investiture out of the system and that a Returned could figure it out without much trouble. 1. As mentioned, they've gone for ~4500 years without Stormlight so Heralds clearly don't need a regular infusion of Investiture in the same way that a Returned does. Whether this one week lifespan is an intended part of the system (keeping a Returned alive perpetuates the Intent of Endowment) or if it's a result of trying to do something with the system that it's not ideally set up for (like, say, making Shardblades) we don't know. But given the great variety we've seen among Cognitive Shadows or CS-like entities we probably shouldn't assume that what applies to one type applies to all of them. Brandon has mentioned that the term is an ambiguous one in the cosmere. 2. Breath-effects are baked into the system in Nalthis so anyone who obtains Breath (and anyone can) could gain the advantages of it but you shouldn't develop BioChroma-like powers just by going there. Brandon hasn't said this directly as far as I know but it's implied when he says that if you were to wave a magic wand and make someone from another world suddenly able to Awaken, they could not use any Investiture they already had to do Awakening. If you can't Awaken with what you've already got, you shouldn't be getting any perks either since they go hand in hand. 3. We don't know. Shades do seem to have degrees of cohesion but we don't know what causes this. 5. Probably not. We don't know the mechanics of the Oathpact yet to debate this kind of thing with much confidence, but Brandon has said that the original parties to it were Honor and the Heralds, Odium not included. Substitutions might not be accepted by the system and of couse, we have WoB that the Oathpact isn't as broken as the nine seem to think (or would like it to be) so they probably couldn't have someone 'tag in'.

Very interesting finds! Between this and whatever he was planning in Liar of Partinel's original draft, he's definitely got lots of raw material for the rewritten Aether plus whatever new stuff he wants to do. I wouldn't be too surprised if he brought a couple more Aethers into the rewrite to open up opportunities to do cool things with the magic system, maybe one per 'side'? As long as he keeps Ferrous in the final product in some form; I want to see that one developed more. Vaeria is explicitly referred to as a world in Agaris' thoughts in AoN (and he should know) so if Brandon was mulling the world name being Lor(e) and set on the same planet as Aether of Night for this project, it would have to be a retcon. Not a difficult thing to manage as AoN is unpublished so only his beta readers (and now everyone with access to the manuscript) would know that it had ever been something else, had Climb the Sky ever been written and published. With that, I don't think we should use his mulled change to rule out that Vax could be Vaeria renamed. Thirteen years is a long time and he could have mooted that change and gone for a new spin on the original name during that time. Of course Vax could still be a completely different setting and the similarity with Vaeria a total coincidence but I don't think these posts really tell us anything one way or the other.

Another point that adds to the 'you'd just start aging normally' answer: Heightening aren't (generally, it gets wonky at higher levels where our knowledge is limited) a magic on/off swtich for powers remember, they're just the designation for whenever you max out a particular perk gained from accumulating Breath, but every one you add before that point is an incremental boost. Here's something Vasher thinks in Chapter 5 Notice how this priest gets boosted life sense and an appreciably extended lifespan even though he's something like 950 Breaths off on average for the Fourth Heightening where life sense peaks and 1950 off from the Fifth where you stop aging entirely. Now, anyone who does a lot of Awakening is going to bounce around in their number of stored Breaths all the time. If this worked like a certain other system where you were essentially tricking your body about its age, we'd have heard of it not just from anyone who lost the Fifth Heighteining but from anyone who did lots of Awakening because they'd regularly experience unusual spurts of aging.

Ahh, so much to think about here and it is awesome how more people will be able to get the book now, and how quickly the posts are piling up in the request topic. Hopefully this board will become more lively in short order, even if we're still discussing something that's not canon until it's rewritten. - I think that some of the big issues with the story and especially the ending can be resolved as a natural function of the rewrite For example we know that Brandon cannibalized elements from Aether to make Mistborn so all of those elements have to get modified as a matter of course. Removing or altering Decay and the Former (who became Ruin and Preservation) means that the shoehorned-in bit about the Verdant source can be removed entirely or repurposed. Agaris and Makkal's final clash sort of became the end of Hero of Ages but I would be okay with Brandon keeping that part wholesale as long as they stay dead. - Brandon has mentioned that he never got more than a couple chapters (IIRC) into his thoughts on an Aether sequel and I doubt that's going to change so when he rewrites it, he's almost certainly going to tighten it up to be a self-contained story. That means that the last paragraph (which existed solely to set up a sequel that never happened) can be removed entirely. Especially if he also removes the Former/Decay plot and just focuses on the Fell Twins. - I agree that keeping both halves of the story would be preferable and that reducing the number of bridal candidates early on would allow the remaining ones to be more developed. When you get down to it, only three of them are actual characters right now (D'Naa, Nahan and Alean, and see below for why I'd include Tae in the rewrite) so trimming out the other ones would tighten things up. - The need to get Raeth out of the city and in a position to learn the history of the world from the Shentis and/or the Cognitive Shadow of the former Shard (see below) could be attained while also resolving a plot from the original novel that didn't go anywhere: Laene working for Agaris' agenda, knowing it would be the death of half the Aedins. It wouldn't be too difficult to manage either, have the Patriarch send a message to him after the battle with the Forgotten has been won, promising ruin to the entire world if Amberite and Bestarin are not destroyed. Laene works behind the scenes to persuade the Ferrous line to back him (for example 'join with me and Tae doesn't have to become a Corpate') and together they stage a coup. This drives the core cast out of the capital while setting up Laene for the comeuppance he didn't really get originally. As long as Alean isn't directly involved in this, her threat to Raeth can remain a factor until the end or she could be effectively removed from the choosing by association or by actual involvement in the coup. That might actually work better as the way she's disposed of in the current novel is kind of uncomfortable. And since Raeth realizes at the end that the senate figured out who he really was and it was a non-issue, Alean's threat to expose his true identity doesn't need to remain a factor all the way to the final chapter so long as it's present in the middle of the book where it's most relevant, along with the complications posed by Tae and Nahan. - I would remove the Gol and the mentioned but never seen Viglix entirely. The one Gol we interact with contributes nothing that couldn't be done through Makkal's voice in Raeth's head and removing these races tightens up the worldbuilding a bit. I imagine Brandon had future plans for these but if those are never going to happen, they might as well be axed and more time spent on the things that are relevant to Aether's story. I do like the Shentis and want that to stay but I'd have Shateen get more screentime, sooner, so they aren't just an afterthought at the end of the book. - I would devote a bit more page time to Ferrous bonds. How this Aether works realmatically would be an interesting topic of exploration and they were one of the least-developed aspects of the magic system. Making the Ferrous bride candidate a somewhat more prominent character would probably be the best way to do this without needing to add too many additional plotlines. For example, she could explain what it means to be a Ferrous Aedin to Raeth in the process of trying to convince him to choose her and only reluctantly drop her ultimatum (which she really doesn't want to go through with) once it becomes obvious he's not entertaining the idea. Still puts Raeth in the bind he finds himself in at the end but makes her at least somewhat important as a character in her own right beforehand, and if she's developed a bit more it makes the idea for Leane's Verdant/Ferrous coup have a bit more weight. - This is less 'how would I fix it' and more 'how would I integrate it' but might as well have a go: Aether needs to be worked fully into the cosmere vis a vis the Shards/Adonalsium and the Fell Twins need to remain a credible danger to the future of the planet. I kind of like the idea that Aether has a connection to the 'Vax' that Elantris 10A mentions (and Ati just before he passes Beyond in Secret History) which would be a cute nod to the role Aether played in creating Mistborn, but having the planet play host to a currently unknown Shard might work better from a narrative perspective. So I'm going to indecisively split the difference and say that it's actually both things: A currently unknown Shard Invests the planet which is how the Aethers come about in the first place, but eventually it gets tired of godhood and wants to renounce the power. We know the Vessels can have children so I'd keep the idea of the twins as the children of a greater entity, with each splitting the power equally and then fighting one another over the planet for some time. Rather than creating the Aethers each wound up associated with one half of the ones that emerged from the original Investing of the planet, but they can still be responsible for the Shentis and other things in the backstory without doing damage to the existing narrative. The original Vessel could still play a role as a Cognitive Shadow, providing Raeth and the others with the necessary backstory exposition but without being an active participant in matters. The twins eventually get imprisoned by Preservation and Ruin who were roaming the cosmere prior to creating Scadrial, thus explaining how Agaris and Makkal aren't free to directly interact with the world but without leaving the Decay plot completely unresolved as it is in the current story. And that's all I can think of right now.

Yeah, we know Nazh was on Scadrial at the relevant time (because Khriss showed up at the party to grill Wax on Crasher mechanics and she and Nazh also put in an advertisement in the same broadsheet) and the description of the mysterious gun sounds very much like it's Shade-derived technology. That said, determining exactly what in these broadsheets is true and what's exaggeration or outright lies isn't an exact science. But you might recognize the name of that story's protagonist. 'Nicki Savage' also appeared in the Shadows of Self broadsheets as Nicelle Sauvage in the 'Visitors from another world' story.