Weltall

Brandon may be involved but nothing in the games is canon unless he explicitly says so. We know from WoB that the MAG's rules for the various metals' feruchemical applications are not canonical. This was made abundantly clear when The Bands of Mourning came out and we saw that F-Nicrosil doesn't work at all like the MAG rules. So anything that the rules for the dice say are interesting but they're not canon and are subject to future revision by Brandon.

You continue to miss the point. The problem isn't that you're making assumptions, the problem is that your assumptions presuppose your conclusion to be correct. Maybe if I bold and italicize it, this will sink in. Let's go back to your initial argument and work through the points one by one to show why this is a problem: That's two examples, which isn't enough to establish a pattern. To draw an analogy, Aviar only appear in two works so far, Sixth of the Dusk and Oathbringer. Both works prominently feature worldhoppers who are interested in them, therefore the Ones Above are the Ghostbloods. It's a silly argument yes, but it's meant to illustrate that two examples do not a pattern make. The only way this assumption means anything is if you presuppose that Vax and the Ire share a connection. The words never occur in even remote proximity to one another in Secret History and Khriss makes no mention of any connection in either the Arcanum Unbounded essays or the Elantris 10A Ars Arcanum, meaning that there's no logical reason to try mining them for potential anagrams. That makes this argument circular. It also relies upon the assumption that the Adonalsium anagram is intentional which is unproven, so it's an exceedingly weak argument. As already mentioned several times, Adonalsium is derived from the Hebrew word Adonai. Both of these are completely dependent on your circular argument for why Vax Ire should be seen as an anagram and are thus worthless. The fact that Khriss explicitly identifies it as having a magic system (which is dependent on a Shard Investing somewhere) means that Vax being a place actually makes a great deal of sense, but we'll let this point stand for now. Also, remember that Brandon sometimes likes to stir up controversy where none actually exists, just to keep us talking. Case in point, insisting on calling Taln 'the man calling himself Taln' for years, even though this was never a real issue and Oathbringer confirmed that he's really Taln. As I already pointed out and gave a counterexample, the idea that the Ire orb was expected to work and not a test does not require that they've already done this before, nor is it actually all that hard to be Connected enough to a Shard to Ascend. Kelsier and the Ire's problems were a lack of Physical Realm connection/being too connected to Ruin for the former and being too connected to Devotion for the latter. You're assuming that the Ire have already done this before in order to argue that Vax is somehow the 'Ire Shard'. Which is, y'know, circular. You're presupposing that Vax is a Shard and connected to the Ire in order to explain the reaction. You're also ignoring that Ati could have drawn a connection between the Ire and Vax at any time after Kelsier's Ascension while the two were interacting but did not. Ati only thought to make the comment about Vax after he popped into Scadrial's Cognitive Realm. Parsimony suggests that he was reacting to that, not to who he first saw. It's also concordant with Khriss' comments on Vax having a method of Initiation. This point presupposes that Vax is a Shard and didn't Invest in a world, which is circular. It also ignores Khriss' statements in the Ars Arcanum which draws a very clear distinction between Vax and Selish Initiation. Repeating myself, you're ignoring the actual context of Khriss' statement, which is that Initiation for Vax and Taldain are different from Sel, to highlight just how different the latter is. This has nothing to do with where Investiture comes from. This presupposes that the connection exists, never mind that it's a gas giant... I skipped over your Rithmatist point because it's a counterfactual conditional and thus not useful. Once you strip away from your argument the circular reasoning and the points that depend upon them, all you're left with is a couple of banal statements that don't actually add up to anything you're trying to prove and the whole thing collapses like a house of cards in a highstorm.

It doesn't matter, the point is that you are assuming your conclusion is already correct in order to demonstrate that it could be correct. - You are assuming that Vax and the Ire are connected in order to argue that Brandon might have encoded a hidden anagram. - You are assuming that Investiture can be used outside of a formal magic system, even though you can't provide a single example of where this actually happens. - You are assuming that Vax isn't Invested on a planet, even though the fact that it has an associated system of Investiture (stated outright by Khriss) means that by definition it's Invested somewhere that can be accessed. - You rely on the former assumption being true to explain why Taldain and Vax are linked together by Khriss even though this requires you to completely ignore her clearly stated reason why she's mentioned them side by side. And to ignore that Taldain is, y'know, a planet, so even if Autonomy's Investiture radiates from that system's sun it doesn't actually say anything about where Vax's Investiture comes from.

Becoming Connected enough to a Shard to Ascend isn't really that difficult. Also, saying 'Fortune' doesn't answer the root question: Even if you manage to get enough of a look into the Spiritual Realm or use an application of Fortune to see a future where a Shard might be up for the taking and are able to retain that knowledge (and bear in mind that even Preservation found it difficult) you haven't answered where this free Shard is coming from. Again, it's not like there are many things that can actually kill a Vessel and literally the only thing we know that's actually done it has been trapped on Roshar for well over half the timeline we're working with. You're engaging in circular reasoning again. Here's the problem, you're assuming that Thing X is possible in order to prove your conclusion which is that Thing X is possible. There is no indication that you can do anything with Investiture outside the boundaries of a formal magic system. You're trying to assume that such a thing is possible in order to prove an argument that requires such a thing in order to make sense but again, you're getting your logic backwards. ,,,do you not see the problem with assuming your conclusion is correct in order to 'prove' that your conclusion is plausible?

You're presupposing that your conclusion is true here in order to create an anagram that proves itself. In other words, you're doing your logic backwards. Also, as far as I'm aware Brandon has never confirmed that the anagram in Adonalsium is anything but a coincidence. We know where Brandon got the name from and it's entirely possible he picked the exact tweaks he made to the original word for aesthetic reasons that have nothing to do with creating anagrams. Not being a test does not require that they'd already tried it and succeeded, it just means they knew what the orb was supposed to do and they expected it to work the way it did. The same could be said for Odium's splintering of Devotion and Dominion; he knew what he wanted to do, he wasn't 'testing' whether he could splinter a Shard but he was actively splintering a Shard and it worked out, just not quite like he'd hoped in the long term. Just like the Ire and the orb. For your theory to work you'd also need to explain how the Ire managed to find a Shard that was in a position to be taken. They only moved on Preservation because they knew that Leras was about to die and the Shard would be open for the taking. The only force we know that's in a position to actually kill other Shards is Odium and he's been trapped for thousands of years. Literally all Investiture other than the Dor comes from the Spiritual Realm, some of it just condenses in Physical form. Allomancy's power comes from the Spiritual and metal seen Cognitively glows because of the power trying to come through it from the Spiritual, Stormlight glows because of power flowing through from the Spiritual, Selish magics originally would have drawn power from the Spiritual Realm before Odium stuffed it into the Cognitive Realm and created the massive Investiture plasma storm that is the Dor... Also, you're conflating two different things here. Khriss describes Taldain and Vax together in the process of Initiation, that is how you get access to magic associated with those places. She's not saying anything about where the Investiture in those systems comes from. Literally all we know is that Initiation on Taldain and Vax are different from any other system mentioned in that Ars Arcanum entry.

That wouldn't result in an Awakened lightweaving though, it would just be fueling one magic with the other in the same way that we already know you can feed a Divine Breath with Stormlight instead of Breath. Bear in mind that even if it's all your own Investiture, different types will still interfere with one another:

You'd be trying to affect Investiture with Investiture and those interfere with each other, so no. There are situations where you can overcome this interference but for all practical purposes what you're asking isn't going to happen.

Preservation set up the system of atium cycling through the Pits of Hathsin when he imprisoned Ruin, well before Rashek's Ascension. From the HoA epigraphs: As for the idea that there's more to the Deepness... why? What we already know thanks to HoA and Sazed explains everything that we've been told and now that Ati's gone, they're not relevant any longer.

Only the Central Dominance during the time of the Final Empire, not the world as a whole then or in Era 2. Elend and Straff for example are specifically noted as hailing from an area with more of a Germanic vibe and they'd have an accent to someone like Vin's ears.

Not unless Brandon has said it at a signing and stated it's the 'correct' way to do it, bearing in mind that he admits even he frequently pronounces names differently from how it should sound in-universe. He's also said that for the most part there's no 'right' or 'wrong' way to do it. Aside from Elantris where the pronunciations of Aonic is tied in with the Aons and the magic, we don't usually have much in the way of firm rules, though we do know about how J in Alethi is sometimes used instead of a Y, so Jasnah's name would sound like 'Yasnah' if you were saying it properly. But even on stuff like this, Brandon's not dogmatic about it.

Brandon has confirmed that Odium just wants to be the strongest thing out there and once he's splintered the other fifteen Shards, that would make him the strongest by default. He doesn't need to become stronger than he is (which would necessarily change who he is) he just needs to make sure there's nobody else who could possibly compete on his level.

So... Sazed would be a literal Deus Ex Machina?

A research assistant working for Khriss, living in Silverlight. You get to interact with people from all sorts of backgrounds and the benefits of as much gathered Cosmere-awareness as possible (aside from what's in Hoid and/or Frost and the Shards' heads) and a cool city with the benefits of about as much technology as you'll find anywhere. Give me the choice and I'll take that over powers any day.

I suspect that Stormlight Archive is likely to resolve in a way that, if it doesn't end the hatred between humans and singers (after all, there's thousands of years of bad blood there) will at least offer the promise of eventual reconciliation. With that in mind even if some version of the Oathpact could be restored I don't think it's going to be. And @RShara provides a lot of reasons why that's not such a good idea. Also, since the Fused are sustained by Odium's power, taking Rayse out of the picture one way or another could lessen or eliminate the threat they pose even if no reconciliation is possible. If Odium is forced to flee he's going to want to reclaim as much Investiture as possible before he goes and the Fused probably represent low-hanging fruit compared to some of the other things he's got going on. Of course if Rayse should be killed and someone else takes up Odium there's all sorts of options for how things could go. Oh, on the reconciliation idea: Remember that while the Fused can be forceful, they can't actually possess a new body unless the current occupant allows it. Convince enough of the listeners to resist the process (say, isn't there a proto-Radiant listener who's covertly resisting Odium...) and you deny the Fused their reincarnation without having to kill them or their potential singer hosts. Actually now that I'm thinking about it, what's probably the worst potential outcome for Roshar would be if Odium were somehow splintered like he splintered Honor, because we know that systems a Shard put in place can keep on going even if there's no Vessel holding on to the Shard. If Odium gets splintered and nothing has happened with the status of the singers, the Fused and the Everstorm prior to that point, you've got the makings of a Big Problem.

1) The intents of the Shards aren't related to what you can do with the magic but how you access it in the first place. Allomancy lets you preserve your own strength by drawing on Preservation's power, hemalurgy results from an intent to ruin someone else, feruchemy lets you ruin yourself in the short term and preserve your strength for when you need it. 2) The intents of the Shards are not inwardly-directed, which is how Preservation can 'give' Investiture in the first place. Ruin has no problems giving a tiny bit of his Investiture to power hemalurgy (which results in a net increase in entropy) or however it works in feruchemy, since that evens out to neutral but doesn't really go against his intent either way. End result is still going to be the same. 3) Ruin isn't 'just' entropy or destruction, he's capable of creating for the purpose of destroying. Sazed puts it well in one of the epigraphs.

It's not from the books but from WoB:

You don't need to burn your metalminds to access your stored healing at all times, just when you're actively compounding. Then you can store that massive burst of health in another metalmind and have it available whenever you need it. For normal purposes, all Miles has to do is what we see him do every time we're looking at things from his POV: Tap his massive reserves of health.

We know you can't counter spiking with aluminum: From this we can extrapolate that negating Ruin/Harmony's influence by simply burning a spike is probably also something that wouldn't be possible On a related note, Brandon almost wrote a scene where someone gets spiked and burns it but it didn't make it onto the page so we don't know how things would have gone with that. We do know from other WoBs that burning a spike is possible but it would be excruciating (at least for some spikes) and for Inquisitors probably lethal to try to burn the lynchpin spike and we know that Weird Things would happen if you tried it. An old WoB says that it would splice your sDNA with that contained in the spike with strange consequences while a newer one says it doesn't function like a permanent graft of the stolen spiritweb (which seems to contradict the first one) but there would be 'interesting effects'. The lesson here is: You probably don't want to be burning any hemalurgic spikes.

Not really. Remember that Forgery is based on both the actual and the Cognitive plausibility of the change. Forging a window to have been repaired after it was damaged is far easier than turning that window into something else and forging a piece of lead into something of gold would be almost impossibly implausible since the idea that someone would have used the one in place of the other originally is so unlikely as to be generally impossible. Shai explains this directly in the story. Some kinds of change could be done (Shai herself points out that gold-into-lead is a lot more probable) but simply taking a bit of iron and transforming it into anything else, no. There's another magic system in another of Brandon's books called Soulcasting that's better at 'anything into anything' transformations, though even it has some limitations.

There are still sixteen Shards, two of them just happen to be held by a single Vessel and four (that we know of) by no Vessel at all. I think you're reading way too much into that discussion of Avatars as being 'Adonalsium's Investiture'. Literally all Investiture in the Cosmere is Adonalsium's originally. You might be overlooking part of that WoB where Brandon describes how Investiture has a sort of 'spin' which led it to getting assigned to one Shard or another at the Shattering. It's the same reason that so much of Roshar was attuned to Honor and Cultivation even before they arrived, especially the latter. As for taking up enough Investiture to become a new and separate Shard, Brandon has RAFO'd direct questions on this (which frequently are some variation of 'Is Hoid trying to do this?') but given how much Investiture a Shard represents (effectively infinite) and how all of it is linked to a Shard already even if they're not consciously aware of it, the mechanics necessary to actually absorb a sufficient amount of Investiture that's not actively claimed (scattered as it is around the Cosmere) would be staggering if it's even possible in the first place.

Yep, I edited a couple in. I didn't see anything on feruchemy in the Cognitive but given that we know allomancy can be used there's no real reason to assume any other magic system would be different. Kelsier's inability to use allomancy is more his own circumstances after all.

This question has a very simple answer: Yes You're stealing the bit of spiritweb that lets you use any given magic system so whatever power would originally fuel a stolen magic continues to fuel it in the recipient. Khriss even explains the system as creating false Connection which no Shard ever intended. So hemalurgically-granted allomancy is fuelled by Preservation, feruchemy by Preservation and Ruin however that works, Surgebinding would (assuming you make it work, we know it would be difficult) be fueled by Honor/Cultivation etc. Hemalurgy itself doesn't have a 'fuel' except that Ruin provides the initial bit of magic that steals the spiritweb if you do it properly. I suppose I should clarify that I'm using 'fuel' in the sense of what Shard empowers the magic, rather than the more technical 'color as fuel for Awakening' or 'stormlight as fuel for Surgebinding' sense to avoid confusion. One thing that might be relevant to consider is that a Shard can't refuse to fuel someone's magic once they've got it, though they can interfere in other ways. So even if a Shard finds out that someone is running around with access to their magic, stolen from somebody, they can't just say 'well, you're cut off!' and put a stop to it. Though we do know that in the specific case of the Old Magic, Cultivation would be Very Unhappy with anyone she found doing that. Harmony misses the people killed via hemalurgy because the damage to their souls means there's not enough left to talk to and they don't stick around in the Cognitive Realm for as long as a normal person anyways. It's like the inverse of someone who was very Invested before death.

Asked and answered several times: Also, welcome to the Shard!

Technically doing something to any human followers still wouldn't create spren, it would create Cognitive Shadows. They're two very different things Realmatically, Rosharan classifications aside. Yes, Odium threatens to revoke his 'gift' but we don't know that it's something that can be done quickly or en-masse. We know that a Shard needs time if they want to leave a world without leaving chunks of their power behind which suggests that reclaiming all his Investiture would take more time than Odium would have if Cultivation suddenly attacked him.

One thing to bear in mind is that Odium doesn't like to Invest any more than he absolutely has to. He's been forced to Invest some of his power by default since he's been stuck in the Rosharan System for thousands of years and the Fused are useful to his plans but I'm not sure he'd really want to go giving anyone who sides with him a similar boon since every bit of Investiture he has to expend to do that means that much less readily available power to use if Cultivation ever decided to attack him directly. When it comes to spren like Ulim having very 'human' mannerisms and appearance, bear in mind that the exact same thing can be said for all honorspren and (on the Cognitive side) to most of the radiantspren we've seen to some degree or another but especially the reachers. None of these were originally human, that they look and act that way has to do with perception. Presumably spren like Ulim look that way due to a combination of how the singers perceived them and due to some influence by Odium whether consciously or otherwise. It's an interesting theory but I'm not sure it holds up.