Weltall

This WoB says it's because Vivenna feels more in control of her life again that she's able to change her hair afterwards, without saying anything about Breath. Since the Royal Locks are essentially a fragmentary Divine Breath that's passed down through lineage without being a part of one's regular Breath reserves (ie, you can't give it away) I don't think there's any need to have Breath in order to use their power.

You're misunderstanding both the nature of the 'end-x' designation and the way the Cosmere works. When Brandon describes a system as end-positive, it means that the Investiture providing the power to do whatever magic you're trying to accomplish is external to the user. It doesn't mean it's a net gain of energy, as Investiture is another state along with the matter/energy duality and the Cosmere follows real-world thermodynamics with Investiture layered on top. Allomancy and Surgebinding are end-positive because the power for the magic is coming from outside the user, feruchemy is end-neutral because it's all coming from the user and hemalurgy end-negative because the power is being taken from someone else with a net loss before it reaches the recipient. In all cases however the net 'energy' in the system is unchanged since the Investiture recycles and any lost matter is simply converted into the Investiture state. Allomancy is of Preservation because the user's own power is preserved while the energy comes from the Spiritual Realm, shaped by the metal being burned.

As mentioned, it's possible in theory as splintering is not necessarily permanent. On the second question, there's no reason that one Vessel couldn't accumulate the power of the others over a long period of time and there's no reason to believe that anything different would happen if it was all done at once. Of course, this overlooks the question of whether Adonalsium was just 'the sixteen Shards in one' or if there was something different there. For example, if Adonalsium didn't have a Vessel in the way the current Shards do and was the result of sapience arising from Investiture (which we know can happen, and we've seen examples of it on various worlds at a small scale) then its 'mind' might not have been a limiting factor, in the way that the finite minds of the Vessels limits their ability to comprehend and direct the effectively infinite power they possess. So we really don't know if combining all sixteen Shards again would result in 'Adonalsium 2.0' or something else. You noticed with Sazed the issues he deals with, it's possible that combining all sixteen Shards would result in similar effects on its Vessel that the original Adonalsium never had to deal with. We don't know the answer to your recombining question but we do have an answer of sorts to the first one: The Shattering meant everything and nothing to the Cosmere at the same time. The worlds as they existed continued on as if nothing had happened, as all the Investiture simply got 'assigned' to the different Shards which were now separate entities, but that power had always been associated with that aspect of Adonalsium. That said, we also know that the splitting of the power into the Shards has resulted in things that either could not have happened before or would have been extremely unlikely to have happened. The presence of Shards on a world allows for more direct and powerful access to magics and there were certain rules Adonalsium enforced (how and why, we don't know) which no longer apply. For example, we're told that fabrials would not have been possible pre-Shattering unless Adonalsium allowed it.

Welcome to the Shard! As already mentioned not all Shards have opposing intents like Preservation/Ruin but we know that all Shards can be combined, in theory. You might find this topic of interest, since it contains a lot of speculation on what various combinations might look like:

Given that Shards warp the realms by their Physical/Cognitive 'presence' even if Nightblood could form a connection with a Shard to track it, it would be completely redundant. If you're in even roughly the right part of the Cognitive Realm and know what to look for, you can locate their nexus.

'Somewhat immune' in this case means that you don't get the sick to your stomach reaction when around Nightblood but it does not mean you're immune to dying if Nightblood eats the Investiture that makes up your soul. Vasher was at risk of death when he drew Nightblood in Warbreaker (in fact, this is what Denth wanted to happen) and Szeth remains at risk if he ever draws Nightblood without a sufficient supply of Stormlight handy.

@Koloss17 'That's not a sword, mate, that's a knife. Now this [summons Shardblade] is a sword!'

Given both the disconnect between Elhokar as a person and Elhokar as a king and his self-perception as an unworthy heir to Gavilar, he's probably been telling himself some really good lies to keep going. Remember that this is the man who engineered an apparent assassination attempt on himself and then lied about it in order to get Dalinar and Sadeas to take his concerns about actual assassins seriously. I'm sure a Cryptic would have a field day with him.

If a spike has decayed to the point of maximum loss then you can probably burn the metal with at least reduced weirdness if not eliminated weirdness. Not that we know what burning a spike does right now, except that burning one that's in you is really not advised. You can burn a metalmind that's been completely drained with utterly no consequences since at that point there's no extra Investiture to do screwy things. Of course, burning a metalmind is generally not going to be a problem even if it's filled; if you filled it then you're compounding and that's generally a Good Thing (as long as you have another metalmind or can use all that released power immediately) and if someone else filled it you can just burn it like any other bit of metal with no ill effects. We saw Vin do that in The Final Empire with some metal that Sazed gave a slight charge to. She could sense the charge but couldn't do anything with it and the metal functioned normally for her when burned.

Caveat to this, the series-specific boards do not require spoiler tags/warnings for anything that's sufficiently old (ie it's been out for longer than six months) so the Stormlight board for example will have discussion for all three published books and there's about half a dozen topics on the first page whose titles alone are some degree of spoiler or another. So the series boards are safe... once you've finished all the published books.

The Kaladin stuff is the biggest given where you are in WoK and the series generally, but like RShara said you haven't 'blown the biggest surprise' and even though you know some of what will happen in the future, you don't know how or why they happen so even for those things you'll have more to discover. There's a reason that a character's catchphrase from one of Brandon's other books (There's always another secret) has been borrowed by the fanbase to describe his writing generally. And have another welcome to the Shard!

@Quantus We have other WoBs that are more explicit that it was a gift.

We know that feruchemy was a gift from Preservation and was the result of that shard and Ruin both being on Scadrial. It's kind of an open-and-shut case. The WoB where Brandon appeared to say that Hoid had feruchemy was a paraphrase and exact recordings of what Brandon has said since make it clear that either he misspoke or (more likely) the person who recorded the original line misunderstood. Hoid doesn't have feruchemy but his 'Hoidsense' makes use of the same underlying mechanic as F-Chromium. That doesn't mean that Hoid has 'Yolish proto-Feruchemy' and gave it to the Scadrians any more than it means that space-traveling Aviar somehow were responsible for A-Electrum having the same effect that Sak's Talent does. Magics can use similar fundamentals without being more closely related;

And we know it's possible for people with access to Transformation to be partially in the Cognitive while still mostly in the Physical, so I'm not sure why this is such an issue for you. Her shadow was behaving weirdly because she was in the process of being drawn there. Also, please don't double-post, use the edit function instead.

Her shadow is specifically moving towards the source of light rather than away from it like it should be. We know that Siah Aimians have shadows that behave the same way. Brandon has confirmed that they're happening for the same reason:

Stormlight glows not because it's a plasma but for the same reason that metal glows in the Cogntive Realm on Scadrial: The Investiture trying to flow through from the Spiritual Realm casues it to glow.

Probably for the same reason that you need to drawn Aons in the exact correct shape (or design soulstamps properly, or make the right motions in ChayShan) in order for them to function: It's a function of how the magic works and it is that way because it's what the realmatic interactions of Endowment and Nalthis allow for. In a Doylist sense, it's a limitation on the magic so you need to know the correct Command (unless you're at such a high Heightening that you can fudge the basic ones) and you can't simply create any Command you want.

Hoid is probably the most likely person in the Cosmere to figure out how to make Selish magics work away from the geographical area the individual systems are linked to, or possibly Khriss depending on what trick is needed since she's got a better conceptual understanding. Hoid has actually been working on the issue and it's a part of why he wanted the Moon Scepter, though Brandon has mentioned that it's only one piece of a larger puzzle. So I don't think we can read the fact that he wanted to become an Elantrian as a sign of what his goals are, as far as he's concerned the range limitation is just one more puzzle to solve. Because nobody has proposed that as a possible goal for him before now... Hoid doesn't like being influenced, one reason he prefers to acquire magics the hard way instead of using hemalurgy is because the latter approach opens him up to Ruin (later Harmony) influencing him. He also defines himself by not having to follow the rules the Shards do. I doubt he has any interest in taking all the Shards and making himself even more bound, when he had the option to take only one Shard at the Shattering and refused it.

Because Odium can't simply smite Dalinar. Shards are bound in various ways and while he could kill any Fused he wants to, he can't do it to any random Rosharan. The 'where they are' is important here. Odium isn't actually on Roshar, insofar as his power is concentrated on Braize and he's not linked to the two worlds to the same degree. The situation where he briefly showed Dalinar his true nature was taking place in a vision which means he was partially in the Spiritual Realm at the time. This isn't the same set of circumstances as when Dalinar briefly Ascends at the end of the book, and at that point he's not vulnerable in the same way so it's a moot point. We don't know what the original 'win' condition of the agreement that Honor and Odium created is for the latter, but it's implied very strongly that simply killing everything on Roshar wouldn't be enough and Odium would still be bound. What makes Dalinar really important is that due to his being a Bondsmith who's bonded to the Stormfather (who in turn merged with Tanavast's Cognitive Shadow) which means he has the power to essentially let Odium off the hook if he releases him with the right Intent. Convincing or forcing him to say whatever needs to be said would probably be the easiest way to win. Failing that, winning a contest of champions would do it. In either case, turning Dalinar into an agent of Team Odium is a very smart idea either to get him to release Odium on his own, or to have him as Odium's Champion.

As mentioned, you need enough Breath and a very clear mental image of what you want the Awakening to do, plus the right words spoken in your native language. A lot of trial and error resulted in the discovery of new Commands and the Five Scholars were instrumental there. It helps that at the Sixth Heightening you gain an instinctive understanding of basic Commands and it becomes easier to learn new ones. The annotations for Warbreaker even mention that it's almost required to be at that Heightening to discover really complex ones. The best thing about BioChroma is that as long as you're trying to create a Type-II Entity (ie, most Awakening) you can afford to make mistakes because all that happens if you mess up is that the Breath gets stuck in the object and you have to retrieve it, like we see with Vivenna when she's experimenting, only she didn't know the retrieval Command at first so she couldn't recover her Breath immediately.

Assuming for purposes of argument that someone with allomantic powers could Return (which would require either lerasium or some Connection hacks, depending on the circumstances) they would presumably retain their powers but since the Returned lack memories of their former lives, they wouldn't remember they have those powers so they would be like Vin at the start of TFE, using whatever metal they ingested instinctively without knowing what they're really doing. So they might have the same powers but they would need to relearn how to use them. We know how to make a 'normal' sapient Awakened object, it just requires a lot of Breath for both the Heightening and the actual Awakening, which is why they were theoretical until Shashara and Vasher actually did it. Nightblood is not a typical Type-IV Entity and he's got some Ruin-flavored Investiture in there along with what comes from Endowment. Yesteel knows how to make other Type-IV entities (and may have been the person who Awakened Vivenna's sword) so Nightblood is likely to go into more detail on the topic. In general, Investiture will attain sapience if you leave enough of it alone for a long enough period of time (the more there is, the faster it'll happen and the closer to human-like intelligence it will have) but things can be done to speed up the process.

Cosmere healing doesn't affect age, which is a part of the Spiritweb that always 'knows' how old you are or should be. Someone with unlimited healing ability could be perfectly healthy but eventually drop dead when they hit the time they should have died. There's a long WoB here that goes into immortality in the Cosmere and how healing power by itself doesn't affect your aging. There are various ways to trick the soul but they don't apply here, as the entire point of the soulstamp actually enforces some of the mechanics that the soul uses to know your true age. WoB here (warning, Mistborn Era 1 spoilers). So yeah, Ashravan's not immortal.

I think that if you stick a spike of what Brandon's called 'super-cesium' in someone you're not going steal/gain Twinborn abilities, you're going to end up with a very large explosion. Also, please don't use all-caps, it's distracting and especially with this topic title it just makes you look obnoxious.

Not yet, but they will be. Relevant WoBs: And trimmed for length:

Since you could feed Nightblood with the Investiture while actively burning metal, there are probably other things you could do with the Investiture. Feeding a Divine Breath would be an obvious use, since like Nightblood those don't care what the Investiture is doing and see all of it as just another food source.