Weltall

@Stark Good point in general, although when Wax remembers the man the text points out that he's smiling so it seems more likely than not that he's either still alive as of Alloy of Law or at least died peacefully.

Presumably he quit at some point after Wax and Wayne got things running smoothly and he wasn't needed any more. Or possibly moved on to somewhere else. All we know is that he wasn't around when Wax and Wayne left Weathering because Wax left Wayne in charge and Wayne left someone named Barl in charge.

@The One Who Connects No worries, I'll take your word for it. Didn't know about that WoB, thanks for sharing it.

We don't know she was following Hoid, the two could have entirely unrelated interests in Wax. Khriss is a scholar interested in the mechanics of the Metallic Arts (and was obviously happy to have a chance to interview one of only three Crashers who have ever existed to get more information) while Hoid is aware of Wax's importance to events currently on Scadrial and apparently wanted to both guide him to the solution to his current problem and ensure that someone got access to that Coppermind memory for... some reason.

I agree that Dalinar might be the best choice to bond the Honorblade but I just want to dispute this point. We don't know an Honorblade would work for an Oathgate any better than a dead Shardblade works (ie, not at all). It might be able to activate the gate but that depends on how the mechanism actually functions. I suspect we'll see them testing it out in Oathbringer because it would be an important thing to know. EDIT: Apparently there is a WoB that they do work on Oathgates, so I retract my statement. He could... except that he has no training in fighting with a shield so he'd really be better off just sticking with Syl the Shardspear who can occasionally become other things as needed. And as noted there's not much of a power boost to be had from a Radiant carrying the Honorblade corresponding to their Order so aside from bonding the blade to someone to keep it safe there's no real benefit to giving it to Kaladin vs. anyone else. But giving a Radiant an Honorblade which grants non-overlapping Surges... well, I don't think we'll see it any time soon because Brandon still has to reveal a lot more about the existing Surges and known combinations but maybe later in the series we can see some Awesomeness happen from the pairing of unexpected Surges.

Just to add, Khriss has not (yet that we know of) appeared onscreen in Stormlight Archive but Nazh has. He's posing as an ardent early in Words of Radiance and his margin notes can be found in a number of the artwork pieces. So Khriss will probably show up eventually but at this point, the Mistress being Shalash is pretty solid fact.

Taking a look at the copy I received about a year and a half ago... yep. Also listed as draft 2.7 and I can't imagine Brandon going to the effort of touching things up so it should be identical. And RIP me, I realized that after a certain point the newsletters have somehow been going into my spam folder; I found the most recent one thanks to this topic calling my attention to its existence but several are gone forever.

We know there were more because the ones who left their Blades and Plate at Feverstone Keep were just the Windrunners and Stonewards. While we can't know how many Knights composed the other Orders (given that the Bondsmiths typically numbered all of three it seems) we know that some of the others were at least similarly numerous and when you remember that Dalinar saw more Blades in his vision than all the ones known to exist in the present era, that means a ton more sets of shards unaccounted for that could find their way into various hands. For example, Adolin's Shardblade has been confirmed to have once belonged to an Edgedancer, meaning it wasn't among the ones abandoned at Feverstone.

There's been a lot of speculation on this. For example: Anything on a series-specific board regarding stuff from other series needs to be spoiler-tagged so yeah, you'd need a tag in that case. The Cosmere Q&A and Cosmere Theories boards are the ones where everything is fair game.

If Scadrial the planet had power then Khriss would presumably have found that worth commenting on in her AU essay on the system, just like she explicitly pointed out that something like that is apparently happening on Sel. Now yes, it is vaguely possible that Scadrial has a spiritweb and could be spiked but it's also possible that gravity is controlled by invisible purple snakes that are pulling everything down. Just because something can't be proven wrong doesn't mean it's in any way likely. There's also the 'so what?' factor at work here. Nothing we see Rashek do is outside of the bounds of what we already know his abilities were, with recourse to the Well and later his fullborn power. Kredik Shaw somehow being a Hemalurgic construct does not explain anything that needs explaining and would require that many assumptions with no support be true. And since the place was wrecked by Vin and we're now three hundred years past its destruction there's no continuing relevance or reason to revisit the place. On top of that, Brandon has said that while it works on animals, Hemalurgy doesn't work on plants so it's extremely unlikely it works on rock. And the Hero of Ages epigraphs reinforce this with Sazed (the guy who is at that point the god who empowers Hemalurgy) remarking that Hemalurgy would be useless without people to steal powers from. Occam's Shardrazor slices and dices.

Another point that has to be raised is that your premise is based on a fundamental flaw: Hemalurgy doesn't work on anything without a spiritweb. You can't spike the land because it isn't alive; maybe on Sel you could manage it but we're talking Scadrial. There isn't any 'power' to steal and there's nothing he could do with Hemalurgy to 'add' to the land that he couldn't and didn't already do while he was using the Well of Ascension's power. Also, Rashek wouldn't want to do anything to mess with the Well even if such a thing was possible since keeping it intact is all part of his goal and Hemalurgy and the Well don't interact well. Oh, and since Hemalurgic spikes lose power when not in contact with fresh blood, even if the spires of Kredik Shaw somehow started out as spikes, they'd be drained to the point of functional uselessness by now.

[Brandon] RAFO [/Brandon]

Brandon likes exploring similar themes with different variations across his works (for example, what it means to be a god and what makes a god worthy of worship, or what ordinary people will do when presented with extraordinary power) so it's not surprising that there are some concepts that seem similar in Reckoners and the Cosmere, without there having to be an in-universe connection. As for the idea of a 'Cosmere 2.0', well, we actually know this is the case. Sort of. Reckoners, Apocalypse Guard and Snapshot are all part of the same multiverse, each one being a 'Core Possibility' (source). So they don't occupy the same universe per se but they are linked within a multiverse. But just because that's the case doesn't mean that their multiverse and the Cosmere are linked. Oh, and welcome to the board! Have a delicious Shardcookie.

Khriss is a scholar so she could easily have left with the knowledge of how to make guns and constructed the one we see in Secret History after the fact. But we don't know when Autonomy isolated Taldain or how it's done so it's entirely possible that she brought a gun with her when she left and Autonomy either couldn't or didn't do anything to stop her. There's also the fact that Autonomy has no problem messing around on other worlds (Bavadin just seems to want to keep outside influences away from Taldain) and so might not care about Khriss taking technology offworld even if she had the power to enforce such an interdiction.

Possibly one of the conditions of the Oathpact is that when the Heralds die, Odium knows it and uses his Shardic Power of Shardyness to yank their souls to Braize. Mistborn Secret History spoiler: As for how the Heralds willingly go there if they aren't killed in a Desolation... well I suppose they could suicide if they don't have a means to physically go there. Since staying is supposed to trigger a new Desolation they had an incentive to do it for the good of Roshar, until Aharietiam came along and they figured out how to game the system.

Chiming in that I also think a short-term rule about mandatory spoiler tags for the prose version in the general boards would make sense, to give people who want to read it time to do so before being exposed to theories and potential spoilers left and right.

Ahh, technically they don't appear in the Era 1 books, they appear in Secret History which takes place alongside them. So you didn't overlook anything.

@maxal Brandon has also said that writing other things keeps him energized so if it comes down to him trying to grind out Stormlight Archive and not enjoying it just to get it done faster or taking it on the way he's done everything so far (with some nice surprises along the way) I'll pick the latter approach any day. Given that Era 3 Mistborn is perhaps my most anticipated story, I've learned to take a long-term view of things. Brandon has confirmed that for certain behind the scenes reasons, the Elantris sequels need to be finished before Mistborn Era 3 can begin. The earliest we can expect 'Elantris 2' according to the most recent State of the Sanderson is between Oathbringer and 'SA4' and apparently he'd like to get Nightblood written before Misborn Era 3 as well.

Brandon has confirmed that Scadrial had gunpowder (and steam power) before Rashek's rise to power. Khriss in AU mentions that if it hadn't been for the man deliberately stunting innovation for a thousand years, Scadrial would be Silverlight's equal even without the benefit of all the cross-cosmere knowledge sharing. It is in short a world with a distinct innovative bent and as it's an analogue to our own world it can be expected to develop along roughly similar lines, supplimented by the Metallic Arts. Elantris as noted is one of the earliest novels and there's still one major civilization we know nothing about, plus who knows what's happened there between the time of TES and, say, the Era 2 Mistborn/Stormlight Archive period of the timeline. Up until Aharietiam, Roshar kept getting its civilization reset to possibly stone-age levels on a regular basis so it's not surprising they didn't develop gunpowder during that period. They've had to rebuild from scratch since then, with some interruptions along the way. Roshar's famously violent weather and unusual flora probably make it harder to get the components necessary to make black powder and nobody has yet had the opportunity to do sufficient experimenting to produce the stuff. That might change assuming Roshar has a future, but with Dustbringers due to reemerge along with all the other Radiant orders and the implication that all kinds of Surgebinding can be replicated with the right fabrial, gunpower might well be redundant. Nalthis during the Manywar and at least Hallandren in the 'present' make use of Awakening in places we would use technology We don't know enough about the planet as a whole to say much more though. First of the Sun and Threnody have gunpowder with the former also having explicit offworld contact. According to a reading Brandon did from the beginning of The Silence Divine, Ashyn also has gunpowder, though that's not canonized yet.

We don't know how they met or when they met, though we do know White Sand is currently the earliest work in the Cosmere and we know they've been together since the next-earliest work which is Elantris (based on Nazh getting his hands on a contemporary map) and our first time seeing them together was in Era 1 Mistborn. I suspect we'll have to wait until Brandon releases his planned later Taldain works to really get details since one assumes that's how we'll learn how Khriss becomes the worldhopping arcanist we know and love. Or possibly he'll sneak a reference into his recently announced Silverlight novella, who knows?

Feruchemy during the Final Empire period is an all-or-nothing thing so if you have the ability you can use all the metals, it's not like Allomancy during the same time period where if you have it you get one metal or all metals. It's only with the mixing of Allomancer and Feruchemist sDNA post-Catacendre that the single-metal Ferrings emerged. The gist of it is that the sDNA for Allomancy and the sDNA for Feruchemy interfere with one another.

We know they can absorb Stormlight like a Radiant can and get a similar boost to their abilities and also the healing properties. We know that not all orders have squires and we know the Windrunners have more squires and more powerful ones than other orders, this being their Resonance. Source We don't have much in the way of details beyond that so far. For example, unanswered questions include how their efficiency with using Stormlight compares to a Radiant, what sort of variation there is with different orders (aside from Windrunner squires being particularly strong in some way), whether their abilities might improve with practice, with additional Ideals sworn by the Radiant they follow or a combination of the two, whether any of them can use Surgebinding or not...

Welcome to the Shard and awesome first post. It's not exactly a new theory (for example here's an earlier formation of it) but it's one that's gotten a certain degree of traction so hat-tip for independently deriving it and doing a nice job arguing it.

Admittedly we don't have a lot of details on what makes them tick but I think that someone would have to actually break a law (where death is an acceptable sentence and where they have authority to act) before they could kill anyone. So they could probably summarily execute the revolutionary with proof of guilt but unless 'being a bad person' or 'exploiting the workers' are capital crimes they probably couldn't kill them. The trolley driver... well, maybe. Have an upvote for the laugh regardless.

It would be interesting if Hoid does indeed dispense similar pearls of wisdom at the end of each book. In the absence of any clue what he'll talk about I've decided to have some fun and tweak the real-world version (well, one version since there are several versions/divisions) in a Hoidian manner. Tagged because wall o'text. That would be... depressing. And yet entirely in line with what he tells Dalinar in WoR and with a lot of speculation that Roshar as a planet might not make it to the end of the Cosmere.