Weltall

The Spiritual. Here's a collection of WoB's where Brandon talks about how Shardblades damage living matter by directly cutting the soul. Once something is dead, it can be cut by a Shardblade in the Physical Realm as well.

That would be The Silence Divine, still on Brandon's back burner but there's a reading he did of some of its prologue floating around. And it's not too hard to cast any magic system in 'weird' terms if you think about it sideways. For example, AonDor is magical drawings in midair that Do Things, ChayShan is interpretive dance, BioChroma involves eating (part of) someone's soul and then consuming colors and using heavy breathing to make inanimate things live and so on. Weird, no? The Metallic Arts probably have the best 'violation of common sense' rating of the systems we know about so far though, since most people would think that eating metal flakes is a really dumb idea and then there's Hemalurgy...

Brandon has repeatedly stated that he wants the Cosmere to be the latter, with individual series capable of being read on their own and not requiring 'big picture' knowledge from the reader. He's particularly restated this with respect to Stormlight Archive so even though it's currently the most obvious about its crossover elements, he still wants it to ultimately be a series that can be read stand-alone. (WoB) This probably won't apply as strongly to Era 4 Mistborn which is slated to be the big crossover work and the end of the timeline but even there. he's mentioned not wanting to force his casual readers to feel like they need to read dozens of books before everything will make sense so we'll have to wait (a looooong time) and see how things go there.

It has to do with your age. We know that a Returned can feed on any old Breath and get another week of life but the Breath of children are noted to be 'healthier' and the Returned feel more vibrant and alive with them. (Annotation). As an aside because this subject interests me, how healthy a given Breath is has a slight effect on progress towards the Heightenings, so someone whose Breath stores come largely from children would take fewer Breaths to reach a given Heightening than someone who got them from the elderly, for example. I got a chance to ask Brandon about what happens to Breath health at a signing last year and he said that once you accumulate enough of it you wouldn't notice a difference in your Breath health over time, for Heightening purposes.

We know that Mraize is a worldhopper (albeit one who's a native Rosharan) but we don't know that Taravangian knows that. If that passage does refer to Mraize then it doesn't necessarily require that Mr T knows about other worlds. And if it turns out that passage refers to Hoid instead (which I think it does)... well, that still doesn't require that Taravangian know about other worlds, or know enough about them to consider that enough to 'save humanity' in the event of Odium's release. One could also speculate that since humans on Roshar have unique traits and culture, he wants to preserve those to some extent, not just the idea of humanity generally. Note that none of this is to say that Taravangian's current plan and the Diagram aren't the result of outside influence. I have little trouble imagining that in any number of permutations.

...maybe.

Brandon has said that Listeners historically didn't become Radiants or squires but that it's not impossible so... my guess is yes. And that we'll probably get at least one Listener Radiant before the series is done. Though my money is on Eshonai becoming a Willshaper as the most likely option if there's only going to be one.

While it's possible there are still some out there, there are two main problems I can think of with the idea that we could have an Envisager Radiant out for revenge. First, Nahel Bonds simply don't work like the Envisagers imagined. If you put yourself in a life or death situation and survived because of Surgebinding, it's because you already had it beforehand and while their understanding of Surgebinding and Radiants has clear limitations, one assumes that anyone who'd already formed a spren bond would have noticed that something was different about themselves before going all Supervillain Deathdrap on themselves..Second, while Teft does think that there could be Envisagers still alive he has no idea where they might be or how to contact them. It's likely that this works both ways and any possible survivors wouldn't know about Teft since they weren't part of 'his' group. One other possibility worth considering: Of any of the Envisagers did become a proto-Radiant, the nature of their bond might become an issue when it comes to seeking revenge. We know there are Orders that would be totally cool with, say, stabbing a bastard in the eye so we can't be sure that revenge is completely incompatable with all ten Orders but it's something worth thinking about. But the idea of a generally crazy proto-Radiant is certainly interesting as a conflict hook, whether it's aimed at Teft or not.

To add, someone asked Brandon about the content of a hypothetical essay on Nalthis in Arcanum Unbounded (it doesn't actually have one because there are no short stories set there) and Brandon responded that two of the things that would have been discussed were the Realmatic awareness of the five scholars and hints as to the location of Endowment's perpendicularity. So yeah, until given reason to suspect otherwise we can reasonably assume that Vasher hopped into the pool on Nalthis (wherever it is) and emerged via one of the perpendicularities Roshar has.

Blue is also pretty commonly used (though I think it's just a preference thing, not a standard) to provide a visual depiction of magnetic fields and blue is commonly used on magnets to represent one pole with red for the other. And since steel/iron 'sight' functions on a somewhat similar principle (just with the addition of 'Allomantic innertness' on top of things) it seems a reasonable enough color to use. As for why not red? Well, we know that color has some significance across the cosmere even if we don't know what it is yet so presumably Brandon steered away from that color on purpose.

That's easy, ever play the Ultima games? Glass Swords>Everything.

Free Kingdoms marriage laws might have something to say about that question, ie if they don't recognize marriages between more than two parties then the Talents couldn't transfer that way. And as noted, while all Smedrys have a Talent being an Occulator is a separate thing and not unique to their bloodline even though they're also prodigious in that respect. Bastille for example wanted to become an Occulator when she was growing up and her problem wasn't 'not being a Smedry' but simply not having whatever genetics make it work. Or look at the Dark Occulators among the Librarians for the really prominent example of non-Smedrys with the knack for it.

To add to what's already been said on this, we know that Vasher and Nightblood came to Roshar together.

...Storm it! I made another post before I realized that. I should have screenshotted it because you're right, that is fitting.

TLDR version: We don't know. We aren't sure if the ability to use Allomancy and Feruchemy via medallions and the Bands constitutes a 'charge' that can be consumed over time or if it's an 'in or out' thing kind of like how copperminds work, where tapping the F-Nicrosil gives you access to whatever Allomantic/Feruchemical ability was stored in it and when you aren't using it, it returns to the metalmind without any depletion. But the Bands definitely don't directly contain the 'fuel' for Allomancy, as Marasi and Wax both had to down metal vials before they could perform Allomancy with the Bands. That said, when it comes to the 'charge' question Wax has clearly given some thought to the issue of draining the Bands' Feruchemical reserves because he brings up the possibility of recharging them via compounding but he doesn't seem to have noticed or thought about any similar 'draining' sensation when it comes to using the Bands for Allomancy, so that might be evidence that you can't actually 'use up' abilities granted by Nicrosil once they've been created in the first place. It's definitely one of those 'we'll learn more later' things. Err, I realize that I might have been answering two different questions there. I wasn't sure which exactly you were asking so sorry if that sounds barely coherent.

Very unlikely. Brandon has said that it's theoretically possible for a living spren to become two smaller weapons or a weapon with multiple components but that it would require splitting the spren's soul and 'they wouldn't like that'. It's mentioned that at least some Radiants of old made their spren into (true) Shardbows, but they required separate arrows and bowstrings so the spren only formed the main body of the weapon. Even the simplest gun is more complicated than that in terms of the number of parts that would be required. So if we're ever going to see a Rosharan gun equivalent, I'm holding out for fabrials. Actually, depending on what Division does there are probably multiple ways you could get a gun equivalent out of a fabrial. Though Lightweaving-based lasers have been discussed and deemed by Brandon to be 'possible but ridiculously impractical, so it's not happening' so we'll leave that one out. Now, using technology to turn a 'sprenblade' into a long-range weapon might be possible (imagine a ballista with a spren shaped into a bolt), but there's some debate over how far the spren can get from the Radiant they're bonded to while maintaining their shape and whether such a design would provide enough benefits to be worth the effort. But it's fun to speculate about. Now you've gone and done it, you've made me try to think of the craziest possible hybrid weapon you could make in the cosmere as we understand it right now. Okay, assuming my 'fabrial railgun' idea is plausible (and if Szeth can make a huge stone block into a projectile and you can replicate Gravitation with a fabrial, I'm going to assume it is) then how's this for ridiculous: A fabrial rifle making use of Gravitation, produced by Ranette and Navani in collaboration. With Harmonium (thus explosive) bullets. And there's a bayonette that's been Awakened for the 'gunblade' angle. And the stock is an unsealed F-Chromium medallion so the user can pull off insane shots (or if Fortune doesn't work that way, F-Zinc and F-Tin together should do as a substitute). And then you give it to Wax... Can anyone out-Munchkin that without invoking the Bands of Mourning?

@Ciridae made the point I'd have. Brandon had aleady talked about the significance of the epilogues being from Hoid's PoV vis a vis the description of Taln's Honorblade as a Shardblade so something similar could easily apply here. He could call Jasnah's accessory a bandolier because that's what it looks like to him. At this point we know he's been to at least one world with firearms in the form of Taldain and it's possible he was also familiar with them from other worlds like pre-Final Empire Scadrial; we suspect he may have some connection to the Worldbringers for example. So him thinking of Jasnah's outfit as including a bandolier doesn't necessarily imply that it is one in the 'harness for carrying ammunition' sense. Assuming we're talking modern-style bullets, even if she were to learn what one of those is I doubt you could soulcast them. We haven't seen any transformations that complex yet, generally it's been 'Essence to Essence' or '<complex thing> to Essence' while a modern bullet requires multiple types of metal, the propellant and the primer all arranged Just So if you want a working bullet instead of a small paperweight. You could probably create the slug itself out of something cheap and easy to work like wood then Soulcast it to lead, but if you wanted a jacketed bullet you'd probably need to do that by hand. Maybe much more complex soulcasting is possible but if so we haven't seen it yet. Of course this is Roshar where we're told that you could replicate any Surge with the right fabrial so eventually you could probably make the equivalent of a fabrial railgun via Gravitation manipulation, rendering gunpowder firearms unnecessary.

And then your Awakened Bagel transforms part of itself into a tiny blade and begins carving a maze on your tongue as you eat it. "Oh wait, you said amaze, not a-maze! Hey, I'm just a bagel, I'm not good with abstractions!"

@iamstick They're described as such in Kalak's thoughts in the Prologue but the fact that nobody picks up on Szeth and Taln's Blades being visually different in a significant way other than the sense of 'I've never seen that particular Blade before' suggests that they aren't so radically different that one could tell at a glance. At least not right now, maybe in the past it would have been more obvious. And Oathbringer can't be an Honorblade because all ten are accounted for. The Stone Shamans had eight of the things (one of which they gave Szeth and it's now in Urithiru), Nale went back for his at some point and Taln's was unavailable due to him being Odium's guest on Braize for the past 4500 years.

@Mestiv Very true, although most of the 'Old World' diseases that were introduced were ones that were more likely to kill people infected by them, either on their own or due to complications. For example, influenza and smallpox. The common cold is a lot less dangerous and we still get it all the time because it can't be vaccinated against; it's annoying but very rarely anything more than that. It's having a bigger impact in the Purelake simply because they've never seen it before and that's worrying but on its own it's unlikely to cause lasting harm. Especially as Roshar generally seems to have a good knowledge of medicine. Now if the worldhoppers had accidentally passed on something nastier, that would be another matter...

The first thing that popped into my mind when reading this is 'Blight huh? So when do the Trollocs show up?'. But that's a very interesting observation and now I'm even more interested in learning about the Scouring. It certainly fits the goals of Odium and the Unmade to turn everyone against one another, including getting humans to turn on the Aimians who used to be their allies. At this point, I'm half-jokingly assuming that every god and goddess or similar religious figure that we hear about and which we don't know has a more specific origin (ie, Shards, Heralds, Returned) is one of Bavadin's many identities. In fact... how do I know you aren't secretly Bavadin? While this is true, maybe it was a really bad cold?

On the question of sensing how much of an attribute is left in a medallion-metalmind, the answer would seem to be 'yes'. We know that people using the Bands of Mourning can tell what the feruchemical reserve status of those are. If there's any specific comment about the medallions from any of the characters who used them, I don't recall it offhand but.I don't think there's any reason to assume they'd be different from the Bands in that respect.

@Yata Well, relatively speaking at least. Threnody's 'Evil' is likely caused indirectly by what happened with Odium and Ambition and while Sel seems fine in the Physical Realm, it's noted to be extremely dangerous in the Cognitive. Depending on how literally we're meant to take Dalinar's final vision in Way of Kings, Odium's endgame for Roshar might be less 'mess the planet up as a result of my actions' and more 'destroy the place once I'm free to do so'. Tanavast at least seemed to fear that was a possibility.

Sharing what Extesian wrote in your topic on Nightblood vs Honorblades because it's very relevant.

We don't know what lerasium does feruchemically but it's extremely unlikely that 'become a Mistborn' is the application. A lerasium medallion would let you store whatever a Feruchemist could store in the metal but it wouldn't let you tap into the Allomantic application of the metal, any more than an atium medallion (which would let you store age) would let you see the future. One point worth mentioning as an aside is that as far as we know, there are actually two lerasium beads out there. Peter said there were at least twelve beads, nine for the original lerasium Mistborn, one for Rashek, one for Elend and the one Hoid took. At that time it wasn't known that Rashek used the Well to make himself a Mistborn rather than use lerasium so 'Rashek's bead' is still unaccounted for. And that's assuming there were only twelve as Peter's phrasing was 'at least one more' when getting to that figure of twelve.