Weltall

As noted, we have a WoB that Mraize's bird is an Aviar. Brandon has RAFO'd the question of exactly what Talent it has though.

If there's some poetic way in Alethi to say 'Taln's Vow' or similar I'd probably call a set of plate that, because if you want something that's gonna stand up to everything Roshar can throw at you, it's hard to think of anything more dependable than Taln. Bonus points for getting to sound pious at the same time.

As mentioned Hoid is from Yolen, which is the world in the Cosmere where humanity first arose. Hoid is slightly older than the sixteen Vessels and almost the oldest being in the Cosmere, though we don't know exactly what is giving him this immortality except that it's somehow related to the means used to kill Adonalsium. Also as mentioned, Yolen is where the Shattering happened and (as you can probably guess) where all sixteen of the people who Ascended to the Shards called home at one point. Yolen still exists but it's been 'shrouded' in some way that made it extremely hard for Khriss (the Cosmere's premiere scholar) to find. The letters seen in the Way of Kings/Words of Radiance epigraphs are being written to and from another character who's still living there. As for how Hoid gets around, as mentioned there are these things called Perpendicularities that allow you to transit between the Physical and Cognitive Realms ('Shadesmar' on Roshar is a part of the CR), prior to that term being given to us they were unofficially called Shardpools since they tend to resemble bodies of liquid. Because the Cognitive Realm is shaped by thought, any space where there isn't anyone in the Physical Realm doing any thinking is extremely compressed. This means that while you may need weeks or months to cross a planet's Cognitive 'zone', you can cross the space between worlds in a matter of minutes.

Not exactly, Aura Recognition per the Ars Arcanum: Vivenna can instinctively compare auras to her own experience and has an idea what that means but she knows the specific capabilities of each Heightening through education, so she's basically looking at an approximation of how many Breaths so and so has and working out what that means in Heightening terms; she's not getting all of that directly from the auras. When she looks at Susebron, her aura recognition basically pings his Breath store as 'off the charts'. It really tells us nothing either way.

There are only ten canon Heightenings, if there were officially more we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Just because 16 is significant to the broader Cosmere doesn't mean it's magically significant everywhere. The only world where we know it actually is would be the one where the resident Shards had (by implication) a good deal more control over the magic systems than elsewhere. So while there may well be tangible effects to having significantly more Breath than the Tenth Heightening's loose threshold indicates, that doesn't mean there are necessarily fifteen or sixteen discrete levels. That said, the Ars Arcanum does state that there are rumors of unknown powers associated with the Tenth Heightening. This could mean the Tenth is the limit and these extra powers (if real) are associated with it or it could be there are Heightenings beyond and that's where these rumors come from. A rough calculation based on the initial size of Peacegiver's Treasure and the number of weeks that have passed since it was bestowed suggests the initial quantity of approximately fifty thousand Breaths has grown by close to another sixteen thousand since, if the God Kings always receive exactly one extra Breath per week. Susebron however says that some weeks he receives three or four so that number could be decently higher depending on how often the God Kings get that many. There's probably some benefits to all of that excess and the rumors Khriss has heard of additional powers might (if true) be related to how much extra Breath the God Kings have, a fact that Khriss presumably doesn't know about.

One other relevant WoB that confirms the figure we saw at the end of BoM is Kelsier and not Spook. This only makes sense if the person whose eyes we 'see' through in the coppermind vision is Kelsier himself and Brandon is quite explicit that it's not Spook's body. Now, Brandon has RAFO'd questions about post-Era 1 Spook which leaves open the possibility that he's not dead, but the caveats about how he'd attain and maintain that immortality come into play and we need to remember that sometimes a RAFO just means 'I want to keep you guessing'. All we know for sure is that there's more Brandon wants to tell us about Spook at some point. True, he's a unique case there, but Kelsier himself notices at the end of Secret History that he's not feeling the pull of the Beyond and thus won't pass on unless he chooses to go. Presumably he could be killed in other ways since we know of ways to damage a Cognitive Shadow's soul, but he's immortal insofar as he won't die of whatever the CS equivalent of natural causes would be. As for how we know he won't 'age', we have multiple examples of Cognitive Shadows in other Cosmere works who don't, in at least somewhat similar situations. Tagged since this is the Mistborn board. So yeah, the balance of the evidence says that Kelsier is ageless regardless of how many twists and turns his soul has gone through to get to where he is at present.

There are different kinds of immortality in the Cosmere. Fifth Heightening immortality means you stop aging and (as a side effect of all that Investiture) you are functionally immune to all disease and poisons including alcohol, but you can still die from any other cause. We know they use coins of some metal which are referred to as 'bits' and a single bit isn't worth much since Vivenna thinks that one wouldn't get her more than a mouthful of food while she's living on the streets.

Accessories block those effects just fine, you have to be equipping the right ones though. Stat Downs and Mute are easily prevented with storebought accessories, Nightmare is trickier because it's treated as a separate effect from the similar Sleep condition and the accessories that prevent it are rarer and require item exchange at the point you're at. Since you're probably out of luck there, stock up on Mint Drops beforehand. That effect can only hit one target at a time so you can't get into too much trouble even if nobody can resist it... and if you aren't equipping Wing you probably should; Even at minimum level that's a 50/50 chance to no-sell any status ailment.

Yeah, the resolution at the end had some... issues <looks at Alean>. As far as splitting the book goes, there's plenty of worldbuilding Brandon could have done and the setting seems to have been written as one he could have come back to repeatedly given the little details sprinkled here and there, but I'm not sure Brandon actually had enough plotted out at the time to even know where he was going next with that sequel hook, much less to have a second book worth of expanded material. We know he jumped from this to his stillborn plan for a mega-series that never amounted to more than a few pages of material in the form of Climb the Sky, which may have jettisoned most of the earlier worldbuilding anyways based on what little we know about it. So yeah, as a general solution to the problems the book has I'm more inclined to pare down than expand. But if we're dreaming about alternate universes in which Brandon did invest more time in Aether and had enough material for multiple books... yeah, ending the first book with 'we won for now but there are all these questions we need answers to' and then raising the stakes in the second would work pretty well. If we're limiting it to two books then the Twins being freed a la the sequel hook would work better as an act one ending so there's time for it to be developed without rushing the conclusion. Taking an idea from an older topic on 'fixing' Aether, you could have the second book start with Laene staging a coup at the urging of the Patriarch (setting the former up for the comeuppance he didn't really get in the original) and the protagonists dealing with that, culminating in the release of the Twins. That would give everyone a very strong motivation to learn all the information they get from the Former in AoN as they figure out what to do about the godlike beings making a mess of their planet and generally would be a good opportunity for worldbuilding.

Having an ending to a series where the antagonist wins is one thing, having an ending that leaves half the cast and several major plot points in various forms of a cliffhanger is quite another. The former can be enjoyable when it's done right and it fits the tone, the latter is unsatisfying in the extreme and makes you ask why you bothered with the journey in the first place. It's also not the kind of writing Brandon does and it's not the kind of writing you'd expect for a book aimed at preteens in any case..

Ahh, finally finished Hajimari including its big expansion and that was one hell of a ride. And now I'm really really hyped for Calvard given the setup it's gotten. Hajimari Postgame:

Yeah, I wouldn't say 'the antagonist gets what he wants and is free to do Bad Things' is exactly an ending that 'wrapped everything up'. Sure, we know that Team Smedry prevails eventually because, well, Alcatraz and Bastille are around to write the books, but knowing that and actually seeing what happens next are two entirely different things. A similar example from my go-to comparison to Brandon is in the Kiseki/Trails JRPG series. A series of major events happen during the end credits of one game via a timeskip but being told how they ultimately resolve is no substitute for actually seeing it resolve... which finally happened five games later when the plot finally caught up. PS, Brandon always planned for there to be a sixth book.

Let's see, going from memory here so the order might be slightly off... - Vaeria is the way it is because two godlike siblings had a spat over who was better, they did Very Stupid Things to try and win and it backfired for both of them. - Oh wait, one of the Fell Twins is in Raeth's head?! - Hey, Raeth's power is the inverse of the Vo-Dari, that's handy! - RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY! - Oh, the Vo-Dari are betraying us, that's just storming great. - The Forgotten are created from Night-bonded Dari that Agaris has touched and the Irae have been forming this army of them in secret for a long time. - The Proto-Shardpool Agaris is trapped in is right here? Aren't these powers perfect opposites? That gives me an idea! - Raeth pulls a Vin several years before Vin, but Makkal is nice enough to get out of his head first and teleport him away. KABOOM. - We'd better temporarily relocate our capital since our last one is now a huge crater. - Oh, the senate saw through the whole Raeth/Hern ruse and were playing along. - Hijinks straight out of Shakespeare's comedies as the political situation gets resolved and the bridal choosing reaches its inevitable conclusion. - And they lived Happily Ever After! - Oh wait, sudden sequel hook, but you can basically ignore it because that sequel's never getting written.

@Somebody from Sel Paragraphs! Okay, that aside, we know at least one Shard isn't on a planet and we know that the one that just wants to hide and survive is extremely unlikely to be hanging out on a planet since those are kind of easy to find, especially when they have Shards on them. Also, we know there are only so many planets with multiple Shards and Roshar is remarkable for being a system that's a host to three, so the idea that there could be six Shards associated with one system is... absurd. Also remember that the intent of a Shard has almost nothing to do with what one can be done with a magic powered by that Shard; instead the intent affects how you get access to the magic in the first place. You act to Preserve yourself when you snap as an allomancer, you intend to Ruin someone when you use hemalurgy, you act Honorably in swearing the ideals of a surgebinder and so on. So using the nature of the various aethers to try and figure out the intent of the Shard(s) powering them is kind of fruitless. To really drive the point home, bear in mind that the Former and Decay essentially became Preservation and Ruin.

In theory this should be possible. They're Cognitive Shadows but we know from Nale's example that a CS can indeed form a Nahel Bond. Practically however, I wouldn't expect it to happen. The Fused are after all made of Odium's Investiture and I don't think the spren are going to like that very much...

This isn't something we can answer definitively because we don't know how many hordelings are needed to form the necessary critical mass (we know the consciousness can persist 'as long as too much of the horde isn't wiped out') so it's possible that dividing them in half would result in too few to maintain their identity and it would essentially kill their personality. Or maybe not, but the point is that we don't have enough information to be sure. If half of any given Sleepless' horde is still large enough for the personality to survive however, my guess is that they would operate similarly to the case of Cosmere healing where someone is hypothetically divided exactly in half and then healed: The consciousness/soul would randomly jump to one or the other rather than creating two separate beings.

There's actually an interesting WoB on this exact topic. The short version is that the hordelings in the Cognitive would be cut off from the central consciousness.

Think Hero of Ages, only Brandon was a less experienced writer. And he added a sequel hook for a work that won't ever be written. What in particular is confusing you about it?

He's not the only one. Hoid flippantly mentions that one of the last seven times he got involved in religion, a god wound up worshipping him by accident, and Vivenna refers to him as 'maybe a god' at one point, though she tends to use that as a standin so she doesn't have to explain the complex nature of the Returned to non-Nalthians. But in this case she might well be talking straightforwardly, given that Hoid makes the Returned look like children in comparison.

Yeah, she kept herself alive with stormlight healing and then jumped into Shadesmar to escape. The Surge of Transportation creates a temporary Perpendicularity that allows inter-Realm transfer, while Dalinar doesn't create one but is able to open Honor's Perpendicularity.

Since those were my comments... the reason the tenses are like that is because I was writing it as an after the fact report; I didn't record his exact responses and I didn't want to put words in his mouth.

First off, welcome to the Shard! Brandon's schedule for Stormlight is roughly 'one book every three years'. Since Rhythm of War is coming out this year, that means that the fifth book is almost certainly going to come out in 2023. Brandon releases a summary of his plans for the near future every year in his State of the Sanderson blog post. Here's the one from 2019 for reference. The schedule isn't set in stone as projects might get moved around or something unexpected might come up, like how Skyward was a late replacement for the planned Apocalypse Guard series which is being revised. But that gives you a pretty good idea what to expect out of Brandon in the next few years.

Echoing @RShara here's the WoB where Brandon makes this explicit:

Probably some of his cheerfulness was a mask. If Elhokar could be lying to himself that he's a good king, Tien could be lying to himself that he's happy. Or it could be something else, but that's what springs immediately to mind.