Weltall

Yeah, there's a very similar feel to the worldbuilding, with the biggest difference being that the Cosmere has planets and a time scale of roughly ten thousand years once all is said and done while Zemuria deals with countries and a time scale of about twelve hundred total, with most of the 'action' confined to the last decade or so of that span. But there's a similar emphasis on the shared setting, character crossover and major events in one story influencing another, while the overall structure is still designed so you can take each piece of the greater franchise and (generally) enjoy it in isolation, though you'll get more out of it all the more you see of the whole. I've got to actually write down that list of fun parallels at some point and organize them, because even though I'm sure it's a coincidence it's very amusing to see such similar story beats and visual elements in both works. That does seem to be a popular ship. I dunno though, personally I'm with Rean in thinking that Machias and Jusis should just get a room already...

Which is why I specifically said that it's based on color instead of form and thus isn't something that can be conveyed in the book.

<continues munching popcorn>

Scadrial has symbols for its metals that also form the in-universe alphabet across multiple cultures and time periods (hence why there's different versions of characters for the same metal) and Roshar's glyphs are also an in-universe writing system. Sel's magics are all form-based so of course they have significant symbols and the Aonic language is built around incorporating them, there seems to be something similar going on with the Dakhor bone shapes and writing, etc. Nalthis' magic system doesn't lend itself to that kind of synthesis of writing and symbolism and the most interesting in-universe writing we know of is based on color, which doesn't translate well to a black and white printed page. If you're looking for an equivalent to the Steel Alphabet or the glyphs for Warbreaker, you won't find it.

I'd find F-Copper to be the most useful in day to day life followed by F-Zinc and wouldn't mind either, but for purely recreational use I'd find F-Cadmium to be a lot of fun. I like diving and no breathing means no need for a large air tank, no risk of nitrogen narcosis or the bends, no decompression and a bottom time limited only by how full the metalmind is (and temperature). Storing does sound kind of sucky and I imagine it would take a good while to get enough breath to last a dive, but the advantages outweigh that.

If the metal isn't in direct contact, you can't burn it. It's why you can't coat one viable metal with another and burn both at once. Coating the metal with a shell of something unburnable would presumably work the exact same way, with the added fun factor that you won't be able to sense when that shell dissolves to the point the metal is burnable until it's too late and you end up with a literal case of explosive indigestion. Coating harmonium in a burnable metal and making a thin patch that reduces as much as possible its surface area (and thus exposure to water) might buy you a bit of time to get access to the metal to try and burn it before it explodes in your stomach if you can burn away that thin bit first, with the benefit of being more controllable. I think you'd want an unsealed goldmind handy before even thinking about testing it, though.

The intents are more flexible than you seem to think and we know that the Vessel can influence how they get expressed, so if you pick a Shard that's a good match for your personality you aren't going to be twisted by it, or not nearly as much. Bear in mind that the names are not the intents, they're what the Shard feels best matches the impression they get and are open to a degree of interpretation. Brandon goes into some detail here. The personality being overridden by the Shard depends on the person and Sazed and at least one other Vessel are doing quite well due to their comparability with their Shard(s). If we had to pick one, Rayse would be the obvious choice since Brandon has said that he's very well-aligned with Odium but nothing says he has to be the only one.

Would you be surprised if I said there's actually a detailed WoB on this topic?

Investiture Does Not Work That Way. Yes, you can hack systems in various ways and fuel one with another but you can't just say 'Hey, Nightblood's Invested so I must be able to use that Investiture to power some other ability'. It's like suggesting that if you gave Susebron a medallion for A-Steel, a coin and a metal vial he could somehow execute super-pushes because he really wants to and you can't just ignore very clear WoBs that the amount of Investiture is what's important and that it's an inherent property of all Investiture. I'll give you another example: You can't use Lashings on someone else wearing Shardplate, even if you're both full Radiants and you can literally talk to your spren and say 'hey, would you play nicely with this other Investiture so we can fly?'. Doesn't. Work. That. Way. Also, your analogy is flawed: Sazed's two Shards are still in conflict and this is manifested mainly in how he find it difficult to act and also in how harmonium is so unstable. This is something Sazed has no control over even though he's one mind directing both intents.

It's not a factor of Intent, it has entirely to do with how Invested the thing being pushed/pulled is and Nightblood is astromonically heavily Invested. The reason that pushing something Invested is harder is because you have to work through the Investiture of the object; Nightblood can't just 'turn off' its Investiture and allow itself to be pushed.

For future reference, you should combine things into one post rather than double-posting. Red in the Cosmere is a sign (though not invariably) of corrupted Investiture, it's not associated with any Shard in particular, as Brandon explicitly states here in response to someone making the same assumption you are. Other godmetals are, by definition, imaginary. As for additional Blessings, there's a pattern to the ones that we've seen which is that they're created from hemalurgic spikes that aren't stealing allomantic/feruchemical powers. With the hemalurgy table we have a couple of potential candidates for other metals that could be used in the same way: H-Chromium ('might steal destiny') and H-Duralumin ('steals Connection and Identity'), maaaaybe throw in H-Nicrosil ('steals Investiture') as an option too. Note that Rashek deliberately suppressed knowledge of these metals and two of them were so far as we can tell known only to him during the Final Empire, so it's not like anyone had a chance to experiment with them and see if they'd work as Blessings. And of course once you add godmetal alloys to the mix, the sky's the limit on potential Blessings since we haven't a clue what those alloys could do. However, we know that the alloys work in allomancy with various mental/temporal effects and Khriss talks about new feruchemical powers that could be discovered through these alloys, but nobody has been able to test them. There's no reason to think that godmetal alloys wouldn't work hemalurgically as well.

Because Brandon can write magic or stuff that's indistinguishable from it without needing it to be set in that specific universe, it just means it doesn't operate under the same principles as the Cosmere variety. Examples of other systems would be Silimatics and Smedry Talents in Alcatraz or the various Epic powers in Reckoners. One advantage to not setting those works in the Cosmere is that Brandon can do things with them that he couldn't do within the rules he's set for himself and play around more with various ideas. Now, the reason that Rithmatics feels so similar to Cosmere magics is because, well, it started out as a Cosmere system. Brandon set up a very quirky version of Earth with not only very different geography and an alternate history but where the entire planet is actually smaller, but he still decided that having any form of Earth caused way too many complications so he pulled it. But you can still see traces of the Cosmere influence in the way Rithmatics operates (especially Melody's chalklings working better because she puts more effort into the drawings and thinks they should, very much a Cognitive thing) and there are some Spiritual Realm echoes in the way that the Forgotten, wild chalklings etc. react to the notion of 'time' because they were originally conceived as being pulled from there into the Physical Realm and some of the concepts stuck.

Not according to Preservation, who I think knows what he's talking about. He says that allomances last longer, he puts no qualifiers on that statement and didn't even know Kelsier was burning malatium at the moment of his death until later when Kel told him. I do agree that un-snapped people probably fade as fast as normal people, but once you've snapped, it doesn't matter if you're burning or not when you die.

Miles is explicitly burning gold in that scene allomantically rather than burning it for compounding or tapping stored health out of it. He's not getting both effects at once and his dialogue makes it clear that he only goes through the experience of seeing the gold shadows occasionally but we also know he's tapping health constantly and is compounding frequently to keep his reserves up, hence the comment that he always needs more gold. We also have a WoB that's quite clear about this: In other words, you only see the gold shadows when you're specifically burning gold allomantically and it's a piece of metal that isn't holding any feruchemical charge.

Per the beginning of Secret History, that's irrelevant. Preservation quite explicitly noted that it takes longer for allomancers to be pulled Beyond; Not 'allomancers who happened to be burning metal right as they died', just 'allomancers' full stop. We get to see a contrast with non-Invested people, particularly with one recently deceased woman who popped in and almost immediately faded away. My instinct would be to say that the same process of Initiation that awakens whatever allomantic power you might have is necessary to buy you that extra time in the Cognitive Realm and people who theoretically could have become one but never snapped would be treated the same as a completely un-Invested person.

Unlikely, as Dalinar himself recognizes when he runs into Odium, the forms that the Shards present themselves to people as aren't really them. Swinging Nightblood at the projection of Cultivation isn't going to do anything to the Shard except maybe annoy her for the rudeness of the act. Consider how many simultaneous projections we see a dying Preservation make in Secret History.

Option 1: Go to BYU and read the copy there Option 2: Wait until Brandon does release it, which he's stated he'll do eventually as part of the 'Sanderson Curiosities' collection that he just kicked off officially with Way of Kings Prime. Inter-library loan is technically an option if BYU and your library have an arrangement but it sounds like it's been harder and harder to get it that way.

He did, where do you think that healing was coming from? You can't have something like stored Health independent of a metalmind. When he was stripped of all the ones he was wearing, they missed at least one goldmind that he'd previously swallowed. Remember, jewelry is used for metalminds because it's convenient to carry around and generally touches the skin while worn but any piece of the right metal can be used as a metalmind. And you can indeed use a hemalurgic spike as a source of burnable metal, briefly. You can also use them as metalminds, but burning at least some spikes as an Inquisitor would hurt and trying to burn the lynchpin spike would presumably kill an Inquisitor, same as pulling it out.

We don't know how it works but there's some way to use feruchemy to enhance allomancy similar to how normal Compounding uses allomancy to provide a massive boost to feruchemy.

- What did Rysn say when asked why she was playing pranks on Vstim? I was just having a larkin. - What did the one-armed Herdazian say when he ran off with his girlfriend unexpectedly? I'm a-Lopen. - Wit wanted to give away copies of his tell-all memoir as part of a contest but the publishers insisted on a disclaimer that the offer was Hoid where prohibited. - Why did Vin know she could always rely on her husband? Because he'd always be there to Elend her a hand. - What do you call a mercenary oral hygienist? A Denth-ist. - I've heard that the world's greatest Forger doesn't like talking to people but I'm sure she's just Shai.

Oh, we've known this for quite some time: Elsewhere Brandon has described Nightblood as being 'far beyond' a Shardblade in terms of how Invested it is (and resistant to other forms of Investiture) and that it's one of the most heavily Invested things in the Cosmere that isn't a Shard.

1. They 'harbored a false god' is what they're being punished for; it's the group that Kaladin found early in the book. The singers basically treat Radiants and the Fused both as gods. 2. Dalinar is a Bondsmith and he's bonded to the Stormfather, who not only represents the largest single chunk of Honor's power but is also a fusion of the original spren and Tanavast's Cognitive Shadow. Those things combine to give him the ability to essentially speak as though he were Honor, for at least this specific purpose. 3. It's implied to be related to Lift's boon/curse, which is itself implied to be something she got from Cultivation directly rather than the Nightwatcher. Her condition is weird and we know she asked for something the Nightwatcher would find puzzling in similar ways to Dalinar asking for 'forgiveness' or (very strongly assumed) Taravangian asking for 'capacity' did. All three of these people have unusual boons/curses. 4. Not sure if it's confirmed, but presumably he did. 5. Not a clue, odds are we'll never learn exactly who most of those ancient Radiants were. 6. We know she was being influenced before she became Yelig-nar's host but we don't have a timeframe. Considering how Odium and the Fused treat the singers as expendable, the fact that Aesudan ordered the city's parshmen executed doesn't really mean much. 7. Presumably it takes time and effort to corrupt a spren, so it's not going to happen all at once. We really don't know what this corruption does to the spren aside from changing their appearance so it's hard to come up with theories, though we know that the Radiants of old considered it to be a Very Bad Sign. 8. He has Lightweaving of his own but it's not fully functional. Brandon has said that he's guiding Shallan's powers in their Oathbringer interactions. 9. Hoid knows so many people, we really can't say... 10. Hoid and Vivenna don't meet in Warbreaker (though Siri meets him) so this presumably happened sometime after that story. 11. Her sword is an Awakened weapon like Nightblood, but not as dangerous. The color-draining is similar to the effect of something becoming a Lifeless. 12. We don't know. Possibly they've eaten more frequently than they remember and their wits are being scrambled about that as well as the passage of time. When there's not one, not two but three eldritch abominations running around in the city, things are undoubtedly going to get just a little screwy. 13. Possibly, again with three Unmade around things are kind of weird. 14. Brandon mentioned well before OB that a Shardblade can theoretically kill a spren but it probably doesn't happen often. More likely what typically happens is that a shardblade damages their soul but doesn't kill them and you have to hit them just right. We know for example that at Shardblade won't permanently kill the Fused, since Brandon has said that Nightblood did truly kill that one thunderclast and this isn't something Odium or the Fused are used to dealing with. 15. Not yet, but it's tbeen heorized that one of those black gems he had was imprisoning an Unmade. 16. She didn't, really, Ashtermarn seems to have been baiting the infiltration team, fleeing in order to give them an opening to use the Oathgate (which Odium knew wouldn't work properly). Whether Ashtermarn did that on his own or was ordered to is uinclear, but there's evidence that he's more intelligent than Hessi gave him credit for. 17. We don't know. 18. The idea was that the corrupted Oathgate would kill them when they tried to use it. Sja-anat says that she'd try to work things so that it didn't kill them, which happened via dumping the team into Shadesmar instead.

Given how big the books are, a summary short enough to fit in a post here would be so short as to be not terribly helpful. There are very good rereads of the first three books at Tor that go chapter by chapter if you want something with both summaries and a lot of analysis that might help you find things you missed: Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Oathbringer. Or you can use the Coppermind summaries here, here and here if you just want a quick review of what's in each chapter.

Yes, but here's the thing, he would have to do that knowingly and Sazed is perfectly aware of the inequality that's causing his two halves to currently be in balance. He has no real reason to consume that atium and every reason not to. It's been implied that Sazed is doing something with this extra Ruin and we have another WoB that it would be possible to create thinking life with extra Ruin, so there's a possible (if potentially dangerous) way for him to lock in the balance should he get thrown out of whack by expending any excess Ruin in the creation of new life so the powers balance out again. Disprovable by many words of Brandon in which he's stated that the two Shards were equally balanced (initially and during the events of the books) and were polar opposites. For example:

It's going to be revealed that he chooses to call himself Kaladin I-am-not-a-storming-Lighteyes, but most people drop all the words in the middle and just call him Kaladin Lighteyes. Good enough?