Weltall

Hoid does still slip up though; there are a couple WoBs where his use of the word 'coin' on Roshar comes up as an example of how Connection-hacking can lead to errors if the speaker hasn't learned at least some of the local language. Here and here, for example. That said, he does stand out a lot less than other character at least as far as his speech goes. Now if only he did something about that name that he openly uses on pretty much every world... One of these days he's going to show up with a new look and a new name and we're going to have to actually work hard to spot him. Cameos where he doesn't actually get any lines like in Alloy of Law excepted.

Another detail that's of interest is that while Yolen is the first inhabited world in the Cosmere and is Earth's equivalent in size and gravity, Scadrial is the planet that's the most similar to Earth. Yolen has a second competing ecology and some weird geology which Preservation and Ruin consciously omitted from 'their' world, which leaves Scadrial as the most Earthlike planet; same size, same gravity and unless explicitly noted we can assume that the flora and fauna would all be recognizable to us. Also on the language side, most of the worlds we've seen so far have more than one language. Sel has a whole bunch of regional ones like Aonic, Fjordell and Duladen, Scadrial has at least the language spoken in the Final Empire/the Elendel Basin and the language of the Southerners (assuming you don't count High Imperial as its own language...) and Roshar has a whole bunch of language families. See here if you're interested. Not only are all of these conveniently translated into English for us by Brandon but worldhoppers use various methods of Connection-hacking to speak the local languages. One of the reasons that people from other worlds can often be identified by odd speech patterns or expressions is that the magic doesn't know how to interpret what they're saying but they're trying to force it through anyways.

Welcome to the Shard! Yeah, if you repost this in General you'll get a lot more responses since it's a busier board.

A WoB actually, I'd forgotten about it until you mentioned that. So there might have been a slight boosting of his ability to hold out, but I doubt we're talking anything significant given that both parties in the scene admit that Vahr breaking and giving the priesthood his Breaths was a question of when, not if. Again, holding out for just two weeks isn't a particularly impressive achievement on its own; there are plenty of real-life examples of people who have endured much worse for much longer periods. As far as healing goes, Brandon has said that there are things you can't do by yourself with BioChroma due to the nature of Endowment which includes self-healing with Breath. So it's unlikely that there's a significant boost to one's rate of natural healing for having a ton of Breath or a Divine Breath, aside from any improvement that could be attributed to simply being much healthier on average due to the immunity boost you get from Breath.

The prologue of Warbreaker disagrees. Vahr and Vasher both recognized that the former would succumb eventually, the only question was whether he'd give his Breath to someone he hated, or to someone he really really hated. Bear in mind that the torturers were being very careful to keep him alive and in a state to say the necessary Command so the fact that he'd resisted for two weeks doesn't really tell us anything.

You have an Edit button, please use it next time instead of triple-posting. Now, your argument seems to be 'Secret societies exist in the Cosmere, therefore the people with BioChroma-granted immortality are part of one because we don't hear about them in Warbreaker'. You're missing a couple of steps between your Premises and your Conclusion. Those are not really analogous situations. Allomancy is only detectable with A-Bronze when someone is actively burning a metal so the only thing a skaa misting/mistborn needed to do to stay undetected was avoid burning their metals unless there was a Smoker nearby or they were otherwise certain there weren't any Inquisitors nearby. Breath aura by contrast is visible to everyone and the more Breath you have, the more pronounced the aura. Hence, if anyone has reached the Fifth Heightening they're going to want to be extremely circumspect about it, lest they make themselves a target. It's not required to posit that they all joined a secret society to explain why they don't get mentioned in Warbreaker, especially since it's clear that the ability of the Nalthians to accurately remember even three centuries worth of history is... sketchy. If nobody can remember that Strifelover, Kalad and Peacegiver are all the same person despite being, respectively, the guy who started the Manywar, the namesake of the biggest boogeyman around Hallandren and the guy who ended the Manywar (y'know, all kind of important figures) then it's not hard to accept that they might be able to overlook people who've reached the Fifth Heightening and who are actively trying to avoid notice. This would also explain why they aren't working as bestselling authors of books like The Many Names of Vasher: An Eyewitness Account. Publicizing that kind of knowledge would be the exact opposite of keeping a low profile. Plus as already mentioned, Breath doesn't make you any more durable than an ordinary person and you need a comfortable Breath reserve on top of whatever got you to the Fifth Heightening or there's a chance you'll kill yourself very quickly when you try any significant Awakening. Even if Brandon doesn't canonize that WoB, any Awakening that drops you below the threshold would still cause you to start aging again even if it's only at a normal rate. We have no idea how Adonalsium was killed so to say this is an unsupported logical leap is putting it mildly. Especially since it's almost certain that Adonalsium allowed the Shattering to happen.

It's technically possible but would be difficult in practice. Presumably this has to do with a combination of potentially conflicting Ideals and the way that a Nahel Bond fills cracks in the Radiant's spiritweb possibly making it harder for a second Bond to be formed. As far as Squires go, we know that it's possible for someone to be a Squire of one Order but eventually become a Radiant of a different Order. Whether you could become a Squire to someone from a different Order after already attracting a spren of your own hasn't been addressed but I imagine it's possible in theory, the same way that bonding two spren associated with different orders is possible in theory.

While Breath may have been around for quite some time beforehand (and it may well not have been) Hoid says quite directly in Warbreaker that Awakening has been known for barely four hundred years as of the time of the story and the first Returned appeared only two hundred or so years before that. Knowledge of Awakening is a prerequisite to gaining any more Breath than the one that a Nalthian is born with. So no, the ability to learn about the Fifth Heightening much less attain it has not been around for nearly as long as you're assuming.

You do realize this topic was two years old, right? But since the topic's been revived, might as well point out that we know from both observation and WoB that it's possible to have a lot of Breath and suppress the visible signs of it while still getting the passive benefits of having them and being able to use them for Awakening. Vasher's lifesense works to detect Kaladin in WoR even though he doesn't have a visible aura and Hoid and Vivenna both have no aura but perform Awakenings in OB.

Technically it's just incredibly resistant but for all practical purposes it's a complete Investiture sink.

No, it's what's specifically being done to their spiritwebs rather than the (relatively minor) amount of Investiture involved that causes it. Inquisitors have many more spikes without the same degree of 'dehumanization' and Rashek is many orders of magnitude more Invested but still human.

It's probably a bit of both really. They've got bits of 'extra soul' spliced onto their own (not very much though, an individual spike only steals a little bit) and because those spikes contain 'strength' they're doing something that would not be possible through a natural process. Contrast the effects on a koloss with Inquisitors who could come by the allomantic powers they get from spikes 'naturally' and have many more spikes with far less in the way of physiological changes. You'd probably get different warping if you tried spiking a person with, say, four zinc spikes or a mix of iron and zinc but there would still be warping.

Hoid knows the Ghostbloods exist and isn't impressed by them. We know that at least some of the Ghostbloods are aware of him and would love to learn things that he knows. As far as the Ghostbloods' links to Scadrial go, they don't have any direct links as far as we know. Iyatil is descended from people who used to live on Scadrial but she wasn't born there (she's from Silverlight) and we don't know if she's ever been to Scadrial. That the Ghostbloods are worldhoppers is certain given Iyatil and the trophies Mraize displays and they've got interests on other worlds but we haven't a clue what those are yet. Hoid is of course aware of the Seventeenth Shard and they of him, since they're playing a game of cat and mouse with one another.

Using hemalurgy on anyone (assuming you actually manage to create a spike) rips off some of the victim's spiritweb. As far as 'losing humanity' goes with the koloss, it has to do with what they're is spiked with, not just how many spikes they have. They're specifically given iron spikes which have been used to steal physical strength (which can be taken from anyone) which causes the physical and mental transformation seen in the koloss. Aluminum in feruchemy stores Identity, which is not the same as 'humanity'. It's more a marker of who you are and is the underlying mechanic that explains why two feruchemists can't use each others' metalminds. Now, someone storing Identity is more vulnerable to certain things than an ordinary individual but they're no less human for doing it. In fact, it's established in the Era 2 books that it's possible to briefly store all one's Identity and in fact doing so is required in a particular application of feruchemy. Minor spoiler for The Bands of Mourning in case you haven't read it:

Yes, just as Sazed points out that anyone with A-Zinc/Brass used to be able to control a koloss or kandra due to allomancy's raw strength being initially stronger before getting diluted over a thousand years, it's possible for a stronger Seeker to see through a weak Smoker's coppercloud. A Savant could also do it in theory and Elend could do it with brute force. It's less likely than you'd think. Exceptionally strong mistborn or mistings aren't very common and we know that a lot of Seekers became Savants without even noticing due to how often they flared their metals. Presumably Smokers would also tend towards becoming Savants due to how often they'd be flaring their metals, so the relative scale of power between Seekers and Smokers would remain more or less stable even as the overall power of allomancy waned. Also, people did know that copperclouds could be pierced in theory since the Steel Inquisitors were able to do it, they just didn't know how it was done.

Actually yes, your idea is crazier than those things because it directly contradicts everything we've seen and that Brandon has said regarding the Ashyn exodus, how Cognitive Shadows work and how the Thunderclasts are their own thing. 'super-permanent tattoos because of spiritual ideals' is consistent across the Cosmere with how healing is affected by your Cognitive self-image. Your idea is not consistent with anything we've seen from Brandon in regards to Cognitive Shadows or travel. To reiterate: Thunderclast =/= Fused. The one is a spren animating stone and can theoretically appear on Roshar even when there isn't a Desolation going on. The Fused are Cognitive Shadows (ie, the 'souls' of dead singers) who possess currently living singer bodies. They're not the same type of entity and you can't use the mechanics of one to justify an argument based on the mechanics of the other, plus you still can't explain where the human bodies come from on the other end. Your idea raises far more questions than it answers and the explanations we already have not only don't raise these questions but don't raise additional ones. In other words, you fail Occam's Razor hard. The Heralds started out as human, positing that they (with the possible exception of Ash) became Cognitive Shadows to go to Roshar, then humans again, then Cognitive Shadows again is rather silly on the face of it when you can cut out the entire first transition and accept that they all came over to Roshar as humans and only became Cognitive Shadows after the Fused started appearing. Brandon not being settled on the process does not mean your idea is more valid than either of the known methods of getting from world to world. Either they use Brandon's current method which uses the Spiritual Realm and is related to how the Oathgates function (which we can observe is nothing like your theory) which also meshes with other forms of Spiritual travel we've seen in Elantris, or they use the well-understood method of bodily transitioning into the Cognitive Realm, walking/sailing/whatever from their origin to their destination on the other end and then transitioning back. You'll note that he left 'Shadesmar travel' as the fallback alternative to his Spiritual travel, so even if he changes his mind on the 'magic/technology like Oathgates' conception, the fallback is the well-understood method of subastral travel, not 'LOL let's make human Thunderclasts somehow' that you seem to think is in any way logical.

The Cognitive Realm is not always consistent across worlds so what you see on one will not necessarily be the case on another. For example, the land/water inversion is not a universal trait:

A very cute joke, that rank going with that reputation score. But for me, I think Tarachin Superstar has to be the best because it means that like Lightsong you are an expert in thinking like a sphere, circularly. xD @PrinceGenocide Hopefully this has encouraged you to reread Warbreaker, or Alice Arneson's reread, or skimming one or the other.

Given how much fun Secret History was, I also think that Kelsier needs to punch his way through the entire list of Vessels... and then find some way to make time-travel work so he can include the ones who Odium already killed. We know from Brandon that he'd find the idea of punching Tanavast really really fun.

'Spren' is a Rosharan term, not a Cosmere-aware one. Rosharans would call the Shards spren even though there's a distinct difference between a chunk of self-aware Investiture and a functionally infinite mass of non-aware Investiture bonded to a formerly mortal host. The Fused are not Splinters, they're Cognitive Shadows. Are you confused by the distinction here? Also, as we have been telling you, even if the first humans to cross over from Ashyn somehow became Cognitive Shadows, they would have no way of getting bodies back at the other end. The Fused can only regain Physical form because the singers (who are the same race the Fused were before becoming Shadows) are there to be possessed. A human CS coming from Ashyn would have nowhere to go. The idea that they somehow go 'into the landscape' makes no sense because that doesn't answer the question of how they have normal human bodies. Also, Thunderclasts are not Fused: The Fused by definition cannot exist on Roshar except during a Desolation but a Thunderclast theoretically can. Ergo, not the same thing. Also, your entire line of thinking goes against Occam's Razor. We know Spiritual Realm travel exists and it doesn't require you to sacrifice your body. Cognitive Realm travel requires you to physically cross the distance between locations but Oathgates, Aon Tia and whatever the Dakhor monks use teleports you instantly from place to place. Brandon's current conception for how humans got to Roshar is similar to how Oathgates function and makes use of the Spiritual, ergo instant teleportation and no 'They needed to send their disembodied souls over' required. Even Cognitive Realm travel doesn't require you to become a Cognitive Shadow first, it just requires that you have a way to transition between Realms at each end of the journey. So yeah, your premises are all completely wonky and contradict what Brandon has said.

Definitely something that could be done, I'm not gonna deny that. If we're gonna talk about how to make it more likely that someone pulls it off, in addition to the shooter having F-Zinc, having a Slider supporting them would be helpful. Or a couple Sliders more likely since you'd increase the odds of getting it right if the intended recipient can also take advantage of slowed-down time to verify they're standing in the right place and adjust if necessary, instead of relying entirely on the idea of lining up the shot perfectly. A recipient with Slider support and access to A-Electrum would be even better. Still got a lot of variables of course, but those would all make the stunt easier to pull off.

Spren are Splinters which means they were never human. You might as well wonder whether the first Chulls escaped off someone's plate of escargot on Earth, fell through a hole in spacetime and ended up on Roshar where they grew to enormous size. That makes just as much sense as what you're asking.

How about a repeat of the "You!? Me!' scene with Hoid, Kaladin, Adolin and Shallan from WoR, except that it's a whole bunch of people Hoid has annoyed and they take turns punching him.

It's been out for almost four years now and people have asked a lot of questions about it. Just apparently not about this one bit of it.

Allomancers and feruchemists will not naturally arise on other worlds because the people on those world don't have the right Spiritual DNA to access Preservation and Ruin's Investiture. Someone of Scadrian descent born on another world could theoretically have allomantic or feruchemical powers but you're not going to see any native-born Rosharans or Nalthians with those powers. Hemalurgy is different from the other two in that it is universal but it requires that the person creating a spike have the necessary Intent to do so. That means they have to know what hemalurgy is and specifically intend to make a spike. Nobody is going to be making hemalurgic spikes by accident, on any world.