Weltall

Cultivation helped Honor in the fight against Odium, which is pretty much the opposite of helping kill him:

Adonalsium might have allowed it to happen even if it would normally be impossible (or at least extremely implausible) to accomplish, or there could be some exploit that we don't know about that made it a lot more plausible than might be apparent. We know the Shards are all bound by certain rules because of Adonalsium, so maybe there was some way these rules also bound Adonalsium and were used against it. Also, magic was a thing before the Shattering so it's not like the Vessels were just a group of people standing in a field somewhere with nothing more than harsh language. It's possible they had resources we can't yet imagine, like this mysterious weapon that Brandon told us about. If a remnant of this weapon was able to make Hoid super-immortal, it's clearly something special. And there's at least one dragon who was involved in some way and it's likely that one or more of the Vessels was a dragon, so they might have more resources at their disposal as well.

Silence swears by the God Beyond, so I think it's pretty safe to say she dues believe in a god.

Yeah, ingesting a feruchemst to mimic their appearance would do nothing to grant a kandra feruchemical abilities. Now, if you had a hemalurgic spike, a kandra could use that (it's very easy for a kandra to use spikes) and then use any metalmind the original feruchemist filled with the corresponding trait or fill their own metalminds, because the spike steals enough Identity to make them the same person, as far as a metalmind is concerned. But that's a separate application of magic.

That doesn't really follow from the dialogue though. (Crossbell spoiler included)

She does indeed age and the plot in Edgedancer is kicked off when she gets an unmistakable sign of it (ie, her first period). Brandon had this to say on the topic: She asked to 'not change' and assumed that she got her wish and stopped aging, but that's not what she actually got.

The Tai-na on Roshar are believed to be sapient by the Reshi and what we've seen in the books suggests they're correct in this belief. Adding to the above WoB, we have this one that much of what we see on Roshar was the result of evolutionary processes. Brandon has mentioned that natural selection is a thing in the Cosmere but to make it work in the timespan he's working with, he uses 'Investiture Did It' to explain how fast some of the adaptations are.

Because chewing gum is really easy to make (there's evidence of stone age populations chewing an early form of it) but instant noodles are a mid-20th century invention and the Scadrians haven't figured out all the necessary elements yet. They'll get there eventually, it just hasn't happened so far. Also more broadly, the northerners haven't developed stuff like instant noodles for the same reason they haven't developed better farming methods: They live in such a cushy environment that they haven't needed to innovate. Harmony has figured out that he kind of made things too easy for them, fortunately things are looking to change between the realization that the Southerners have all kinds of Cool Stuff they don't like airships and Sophi Tarscel being a one-woman revolution with steady financial support.

Earth is not and never will be Cosmere because it causes way too many worldbuilding issues. The reason Scadrial seems so Earth-like is because Brandon deliberately set it up to be the Earth analogue. Technically there's also Yolen but it has some funky things going on, so Scadrial (which Preservation and Ruin deliberately patterned after the non-fain bits of Yolen) ends up being the closest to Earth by default.

All we know is that some weapon was involved (the 'opposition' mentioned being the group that killed Adonalsium) and while it no longer exists in its original form there are remnants of it and Hoid's immortality is linked to it in some way. Oh, and that people who've read Dragonsteel Prime would apparently know something about it, so there must be hints dropped in that book.

Falcom actually started outsourcing the OP movies with Tokyo Xanadu's (which was really good) and they sort of went downhill from there. Ys VIII's wasn't bad and the game kind of demanded a moodier OP than the usual Ys fare, and IX eliminated the OP entirely. Meanwhile CS3 and 4's were.... eh. You can tell what they were going for in each case and there are some good bits to them but as a whole they're just kind of disappointing. That being said, I really like what they've done here since it means keeping things in-house rather than spending the time and money on either an animated movie or paying someone else to do it. That it looks a bit cheesy is fine by me, it's not like that's new for Falcom openings. And expanding the company just to have a dedicated team to do animations and nothing else would be a poor use of resources, since you have to pay those people to work full time and you're not going to get that money back on increased sales (nor can you cover it by increasing the price) so that's just a money sink. I would like to see a traditional OP whenever the next arc begins, but we'll have to wait and see. Now, thoughts on the OP itself, le spoilers for Crossbell and Erebonia:

Where does Khriss mention a 4-centric system? I'm not recalling it at present. But yeah, Aeither has been canonized insofar as one of the things appears in Words of Radiance and Brandon has plans to eventually rewrite it, but a lot of the details are up in the air. We're not really sure how much of the original concept will remain, since Brandon tried to write a new Aether series once already (Aethers of Lor/Climb the Sky, from which he cannibalized Syl) and then tried to repurpose the aethers as pre-Shattering magic in The Liar of Partinel. Given all of this, the number of aethers and the specific aethers themselves might change drastically from what's in the current draft. About all we can say with reasonable certainty is that something resembling Amberite will appear in the rewrite because the crystal in Mraize's trophy room resembles that one.

True, allomancy would be extremely difficult to make work with other forms of Investiture because of how it operates but 1) It's almost irrelevant because metal is ubiquitous and more importantly 2) we're talking about using the specific application of feruchemical bendalloy to fuel Lift's unique method of Surgebinding, not the other way around. F-Bendalloy stores the exact same thing that Lift uses to create the Investiture she needs to Surgebind. Allomancy only comes into it because F-Bendalloy on its own doesn't really add anything to the picture (except letting her store food energy for later use rather than needing to make use of it right away) but compounding would let her accumulate all the caloric stores she needs without having to carry around a kitchen's worth of food at all times.

And yet it wasn't used in the ending, Brandon has said this was deliberate and he'd previously made it clear that he regretted allowing it into the first volume to begin with and that it's something small enough that he could change it.

A Page of Inkspren? [ducks] Okay, more seriously now: A Paragon of Honorspren A Zeal of Highspren A Destruction of Ashspren A Convocation of Cultivationspren A Gleaming of. 'Truthwatcherspren' An Array of Cryptics A Progression of Inkspren A Journey of Reachers A Stand of 'Stonewardspren' And for the Bondsmith spren as a groop 'A Tabernacle of Godspren' For some of the lesser spren: A Drunkenship of Intoxicationspren A Murder of Deathspren A Triumph of Gloryspren A Weight of Gravityspren A Chorus of Musicspren A Prism of Rainbowspren

Yeah, I don't think that if Lift ate a lerasium bead or got a hemalurgic spike for some allomantic power that her food>Investiture conversion and allomancy would interfere with one another because Lift can't metabolize metals. But if Lift had a properly designed medallion giving her A and F-Bendalloy she could utterly break things with infinite fuel for her Surgebinding. Brandon's confirmed that she could use the one system to power the other and compounding would let her start with a small amount of food and turn it into huge amounts of Investiture. I'd say that she could also break thermodynamics this way, but we know there's an extra Law in the Cosmere due to the presence of the Cognitive and Spiritual Realms so reality as we know it is safe Also, I'm now picturing Lift with a medallion bracelet on one arm, bendalloy nuggets in one hand and a whole lot of bendalloy jewelry, sitting behind an enormous mountain of food and just chowing down and converting the food energy into stored Investiture until she's got no more room for more. And then running off to the bathroom to get rid of it, rinse and repeat until her jewelry is so Invested with potential Awesomeness that she could tank a hit from Nightblood.

As mentioned, these aren't as distinct as you think. A spren is a kind of Splinter (a fragment of a Shard's Investiture) which under certain circumstances may develop sapience. Seons and skaze are both types of sapient Splinters, all spren are Splinters, the Divine Breaths that sustain the Returned are non-sapient Splinters. Splinters can be created intentionally by a Shard (the Divine Breaths for example) or unintentionally as a consequence of a Shard being Splintered by an outside force (the seons and skaze). The Unmade are intentionally created Splinters of Odium, meaning they're literally made of his Investiture. I'm not sure if you could capture it the same way that gems capture stormlight (which is more a Spiritual Realm thing) but we do know that Autonomy's Investiture is one of the easiest to access in the Cosmere and would have been another good place for Vasher to go had he been able to get to Taldain. We also know that you could use it mechanically with enough knowledge and technology. But I'm not sure that a polestone and the lichen on Taldaini sand necessarily function similarly enough that just exposing one to the light of the sun would infuse the stone. That said, the lichen living on the sand reacts universally to kinetic Investiture so it would definitely work and Brandon has said that after the Metallic Arts, Sand Mastery is the easiest magic system to use offworld without hacks.

We know that synthetic gemstones could work in place of the polestones, so while it's currently beyond the technology of Roshar it should be possible in the future for stones to be created. Ambiguities about Radiant Soulcasting and supercharging via Highstorms aside, I'm inclined to agree with @Quantus that you simply can't Soulcast polestones because it would be too easy to break the system that way, like how it's practically impossible to soulcast godmetals (imagine having an infinite supply of lerasium...) and how slatrification was retconned out of the end of White Sand's graphic novel due to how it broke Sand Mastery's chief limitation. Coal is a sedimentary rock formed from peat due to heat, pressure and lots and lots of time. All of the polestones are explicitly gemstones, which means crystals. Graphite could qualify but Brandon has told us it's quartz and Karen has told us that it's translucent. So yeah, smoky quartz is the general assumption.

Yep. But I'll say that given his own background and beliefs he writes Jasnah (an atheist) really well and has taken pains to not only do justice to her worldview but construct things in a way that it can be every bit as valid as someone like Dalinar (reformist theist), Navani (orthodox theist) or Kaladin (agnostic) and it's up to the reader to decide which perspective they support, in the same way that questions like the existence of a soul, the Beyond and the God Beyond are always going to be the subject of in-universe debate and belief rather than something he's going to assert, even if he has a particular idea about the subjects. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/117/#e1695 https://wob.coppermind.net/events/332/#e9596 https://wob.coppermind.net/events/31/#e1733 And by extension, I think he handles religion in general really well. You can tell he's fascinated by it and the possibilities for storytelling that different beliefs can offer. .

It's Wednesday so that means more Hajimari news and this week's a big one for characters, rounding out the core Cold Steel cast. (Obvious CS4 spoilers are obvious, also Crossbell arc)

Yes, I even said so in the post and I'm not sure what's confusing you here. Ym could have become either an Edgedancer or a Truthwatcher in theory because both types of spren were interested in him. This supports the idea that the hypothetical individual in your original post who breaks a bond (or never actually forms one) to a spren of one Order could eventually bond a spren belonging to a different Order. The point is that one person can attract spren from multiple Orders and we've seen it happen. I can also throw several WoBs at you that say essentially the same thing in different ways.

Yes, but that's not exactly relevant. He was bonded to a... whatever the name of the Truthwatcher spren ends up being (Brandon first and the text of Oathbringer second confirm this) but Edgedancer tells us that he could have become a member of that Order instead had things gone differently. Quoth Wyndle: The chances of this referring to anyone but Ym are somewhere in the vicinity of 'nil'. So it's possible for the same individual to attract spren associated with different Orders.

@Karger For bonus points, not only does Brandon describe him that way but Isaac tells us his accent would sound somewhat Scottish to us. And apparently he looks like a young Peter Capaldi. I suppose that being a Time Lord would explain a lot about Nazh... He shows up twice in the broadsheets in Bands of Mourning albeit indirectly. There's an advertisement about talking metal that directs people to contact 'K or N', so the pair is clearly doing some sort of research during the events of the book. More obviously, the Nicki Savage story has her encounter the 'Haunted Man' who is Nazh. Oh, and Hoid shows up in that one too... Nazh also appears indirectly as the person writing annotations on so much of the interior artwork. For example, he gripes about the cartographic inadequacies of the maps of Opelon/Sycla and Elendel, he's the one who recovered Shallan's sketches from the bottom of the sea, wrote the entirety of the explanation on Rosharan glyphs in Oathbringer etc.

If for some reason you break a bond (or never quite form one in the first place) it's possible that you could later bond a spren corresponding to a different Order, assuming that you met the qualifications that multiple types of spren are looking for in potential bond partners. We know this is possible (Ym was a proto-Truthwatcher but could have become an Edgedancer under other circumstances) and there's a popular theory that something similar to but not exactly like this is in the cards for a particular character.

Welcome to the Shard! Yes, and Brandon has said that 'fabrial' will become the widespread term for such devices in the future, but that doesn't mean they'll all work the same way. The Southern Scadrians for example already have their own means of using the Metallic Arts in a more mechanical fashion, plus the medallions that grant allomantic and/or feruchemical powers. The machines don't use gemstones however but harmonium, while the medallions make use of F-Nicrosil to store the ability to use some other power, with that metal plus the one corresponding to the granted power being required.