Weltall

Vasher's trick requires the person to do the Awakening on themselves, meaning they need Breath to do it. Why are you assuming it has particular applications beyond Nalthis? As for how it works, since most things in the Cosmere that do similar things are working off a shared underlying principle, the Awakening to alter memory probably works somewhat like F-Copper, altering your Cognitive self.

We don't.

This isn't entirely impossible, as it's exactly the lie Taravangian comes up with in the aforementioned WoR conversation and Szeth is willing to accept it. Both at least consider it a possibility at least. Both also implicitly assume that at the time of their conversation, the Shin were still in possession of eight of the ten including Jezrien's Blade which Szeth was currently using. Speaking of which, they apparently expected to get Jezrien's Blade back; Szeth was quite certain they'd retrieve it from him after he died.

That case at least was a very specific case of wish-fulfilment. He really wanted full Lightweaving.

As a reminder, we've known that the Stone Shamanate had possession of eight of the ten Honorblades since Words of Radiance, as Taravangian and Szeth mention this fact during their meeting. They started out with the nine the Heralds lef behind as seen in the Aharietiam vision in Oathbringer, then Nale retrieved his at some point (first mentioned by Brandon, confirmed in OB when he summons it) and Jezrien's Blade was given to Szeth and eventually made its way into Moash's hands bringing their collection down to seven.

Uhh, not really, Taldaini sand is incredibly easy to recharge, which is why it works as an Investiture Radar in the first place. The lichen will absorb most kinds of Investiture and Roshar at least is so lousy with the stuff that it's probably almost as easy to keep the stuff charged there as it is on Taldain, with no real worries about efficiency.

We know it's theoretically possible to split the soul of a spren in two but they wouldn't like it at all. Something like this is probably being done with all examples of pairing fabrials including spanreeds, with non-sapient spren.

@Booknerd Hoid is incapable of even thinking about hurting people so... not actually that scary. But credit for trying to go full munchkin. xD

Welcome to the bottomless rabbit-hole that is the Cosmere. xD Anyhow, Zahel gives his identiy away pretty easily once you know what to look for: His appearance and clothing are described in a similar manner to Vasher in Warbreaker (the long hair/scruffy beard combo and using a rope for a belt are giveaways), Kaladin notices that his eyes seem 'old' while his body doesn't and he uses extremely odd expressions related to flowers and to colors that nobody on Roshar understands. This last one is almost always a tell that the person is a worldhopper, with the unusual expressions being a quirk of the way they're able to understand and speak local languages without necessarily learning them. He also can sense Syl's presence and knows when Kaladin is nearby before he actually knocks (which is his BioChroma lifesense working) and he uses Cosmere-aware terms for phenomenon that native Rosharans don't. A big one is that he describes highstorms as Invested, which only worldhoppers use. He also notes that he expects to hear a voice in his head but hasn't for quite some time, referring to Nightblood. Azure has a color-oriented name that's not at all Alethi-sounding and it (and her choice of outfits) just happens to match her use of the color blue by the end of Warbreaker. She's noted to be on the short side, which on Roshar is something to keep an eye on because people on that planet are taller on average than humans on other worlds. When you see her fighting she does some Awakening (and her men describe phenomenon that can be recognized as the same thing when telling Kaladin about her) and her sword stands out for a couple reasons; it clearly does something unusual since whatever it kills has the color bleached out to a shade of gray (the same as a Lifeless) and it's clearly not a Rosharan Shardblade because the spren she shows it to make a big deal out of how it isn't made from one of them. Like Zahel she uses color-related expressions that puzzle people around her. Also, her hair visibly changes color when she's exhausted. All of these would point to her identity even without Brandon giving us advance notice to look for Vivenna in Oathbringer. The fact that she explains that she's hunting for Zahel and a sword he brought with him just makes it especially obvious. There's probably other clues I'm forgetting right now but that gives you an idea how much detail Brandon sneaks in and what sorts of things to keep an eye out for in the future. Keep your eyes peeled on a reread (or just peruse the Coppermind a bit) and you'll probably spot a few more worldhoppers...

Ummm, it's right there in my comment: The Liar of Partinel, the unpublished origin story for Hoid set some time before Dragonsteel. Brandon shared a draft of the first few chapters and while they're currently unavailable due to some backend stuff on the website, they should become available again at some point. At a couple points in the draft it's mentioned that the people of the city of Partinel have an aether named 'Duskr'. We don't know exactly what it would normally do (just as we don't see the story's one Amberite user actually do anything obvious with their aether aside from holding a conversation with it) but the name sounds similar to 'Dusk' which then leads to 'Night' by association and is where I got the idea that it might have been an intended reworking of the latter. Of course it's an unpublished work and subject to massive revision before it's finally released (just like Aether of Night itself) but still, it's a seventh name.

Depends on how much is stored in the metalmind. We know a 'full' metalmind is more Invested than a hemalurgic spike and a spike isn't very heavily Invested, but a metalmind is still way down the list from the things Brandon has told us are probably inherently too Invested to be usable as spikes (ie, Shardblades and Nightblood) so as long as you're not talking about something in the same range as the Bands of Mourning or something made via a lot of compounding, you should probably be able to take a metalmind in the appropriate shape, spike someone with it and have it still work. Mind you, you might still get a weaker charge depending on how 'full' the metalmind is and the size of the thing, and just being spiked by a metalmind won't do anything to let the spikee use the metalmind unless the spike grants the same feruchemical trait and the metalmind was either unkeyed or the spike donor was the person who made the metalmind to begin with.

Bear in mind that the Survivorists are right, just not for the real reasons: While they believe he's a messiah figure because of the ruse he and OreSeur set up, that doesn't change the fact that Kelsier did survive death and was (at least briefly) the closest thing to godhood in the Cosmere. And the Pathians are worshipping Sazed who (re)made their world for them and is the heir to the power that literally created Scadrial, so it's hard to just dismiss that as a false belief. That he's not an omnipotent, omniscient creator of everything doesn't mean he can't be considered a god. Anyhow, to answer the original question that would depend entirely on where in the Cosmere I was born and whether I had any inkling of the big picture. We know a great deal more about how the universe works than most characters living within it, like the fact that the Shards were originally mortals (not counting any potential dragon Vessels) who took up fragments of what used to be a much greater power. Most people aren't going to know that, so when they see a Returned who is an idealized physical specimen and possesses divine powers (or you are a Returned and encounter Edgli) you're probably going to say 'yep, that's a god'. Whether you think they're worthy of worship is another question. Also, whether your worldview can encompass the idea of other people having their own gods, something that most ancient civilizations were quite happy to wrap their minds around. So just knowing that there's some other world out there with another Shard on it doesn't necessarily mean automatically rejecting the notion that the Shard on your own world is a god. So yeah, it would be a lot easier to imagine being an atheist if you're from Silverlight (with the caveat above) and harder to imagine it on most worlds, though not impossible. Jasnah's an obvious case in point and she did it without any Cosmere awareness. So there are some situations where atheism is a tenable position even without big picture knowledge, but much harder to imagine reaching that conclusion if you're in somewhere like Fjordel or Hallandren where the supernatural elements of religion are right there for everyone to see.

Eh, could be, it's certainly open to interpretation. My own read is that it's referring to what Brandon mentioned in the first WoB (about there being a mix of time dilation and actual slowing of the aging process in a lot of cases) since I don't think of time dilation as actually slowing your aging. It lets you live longer in relative terms but you're still aging at the normal rate while you're doing it. Let's imagine you've got some trick using the Cognitive Realm that lets you skip over ten years of time in a day. While in relative terms you haven't aged as much as you should have in ten years from the perspective of an observer, you've still aged exactly as much as the amount of time you directly experienced, one day. So your aging hasn't literally slowed despite the way you skipped over ten years. I see that WoB and its description of slowing the aging process as something more akin to accumulating Breath, where you actually do age at a slower rate the more you have, up until the point that you hit the Fifth Heightening and stop aging altogether.

To add to that, while time dilation helps explain some of the temporal 'distance' the characters are able to cover (especially Baon and Khriss) we know there's also some actual slowing of the aging process at work in most cases. We know that most members of the Seventeenth Shard use a method that considerably slows their aging, though it doesn't make them truly immortal. Galladon is obviously an exception since as an Elantrian he actually is immortal.

Uhhhhh, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a lot of information so soon. While we do have a good number of Cosmere projects expected to release in that window, it's unlikely that we'll get a lot of information on the Spiritual Realm in any of them. White Sand is set before anything else in the Cosmere and the person who'd be most helpful in informing us is, at the time of the story, completely in the dark about this sort of thing. The Lost Metal's not likely to give us much since we know so much is being set up for Era 3 and Scadrial doesn't currently have a convenient way to hop between Realms other than Harmony's Perpendicularity, so them learning about the Spiritual isn't likely. At best we might get more tidbits on mechanics related to the Spiritual Realm if some ferrings or medallions for the appropriate metals show up. Rhythm of War's also unlikely to give us much because everyone has more pressing concerns and most of what we get on other Realms from SA has to do with the Cognitive Realm. Really, this is the sort of thing that I'm not expecting an in-depth explanation of until maybe the back half of SA, if not Dragonsteel or MB4.

I really don't think there's room for that kind of trickiness though. The question was to give us the name of an intent we hadn't seen before. We know that the name of the Shard is their intent (Odium's protestations about being 'Passion' aside) so giving us information on a Shard that we'd already gotten a name for would not be answering the question at all. Brandon clearly feels he gave us something significant with the 'hide and survive' comment, which doesn't make sense if he's talking about a Shard that we already know about and which is clearly not hiding, since she's directly opposing Odium. Also, we know a Shard can leave a world in a relative hurry if it doesn't mind parting with all the Investiture they've sunk into a world. The mystery Shard is described as 'know(ing) what's going on and is smart enough to get out of there', which isn't Cultivation who is still on Roshar, very much not getting out of there despite it being possible for her to do so if she really wanted to be elsewhere.

No Shard 'designed' the magic of Roshar from scratch, like all the worlds in the Cosmere the magic is following certain natural pathways that were set up before the Shattering and the Shards are tinkering within those pathways. Since Adonalsium created the entire Rosharan System from scratch, the fundamentals that all three Shards are working within were already established long before they arrived. Spren for example predate the Shattering, though the sapient types who form Nahel Bonds arose after Honor and Cultivation arrived. Odium came later, ergo the spren associated with him are the relative latecomers to the party.

The reason that Surgebinders 'power up' when they swear further Ideals is because the underlying Initiation mechanic is linked to the nature of the Shard(s) whose magic you're accessing. Swearing and abiding by oaths is acting in accordance with the principles that underly the Shard Honor. For Voidbinding you'd be accessing Odium's magic which wouldn't operate on those principles because the power's coming from an entirely different Shard. So yeah, with the possible exception of a Surgebinder who's bonded to a spren Sja-anat has corrupted, I don't see Voidbinding having the same kind of progression that Surgebinding does. Exactly how that first step works is a whole other question. That particular death rattle is interesting since it's such a perfect contrast to the First Ideal, though like you suggest it's also possible that it's just a Radiant who completely gave up. I don't have to stretch my imagination too hard to envision someone saying that in the aftermath of the Recreance.

For 1 and 2, neither of those. In my head they've always been Shall-an and Sa-day-chull (with the second and third run together). For 3, I always immediatley think of Humuhumunukunukuapua'a when I see his full name. No doubt because I'm an airsick lowlander. EDIT: Oh wow, the board's auto-correct feature decided it didn't like the syllable I use for the end of Sadeas' name so it replaced it with another one that's perfectly appropriate for him.

To add to what RShara said, one other thing about Odium is that Brandon originally intended that Shard to be named Hatred. He mentioned separately that the reason he picked that word was quite simply that it sounded cooler. Between that, what Brandon has said about Rayse not being honest with himself and Frost's very clear description of him being 'God's divine hatred' I think it's safe to say that any reinterpretation of that Shard's nature has to account for the fact that deep down, it really is primarily about hate.

I fully expect to find a message written in letters of fire on the side of the greatest mountain range on Yolen: We apologize for the inconvenience.

I think that you're relying way too much on the idea that Brandon forgot that he'd already revealed Cultivation to us. Which we know he hasn't, check out the dates on these two WoBs: So for your theory to work, Brandon would have to remember that he'd already introduced Cultivation well enough that he brought her up with no external prompting, then somehow forgot this within two months. I suspect the likelihood of that happening is about the same as someone asking Brandon at the next signing what Hoid's goals are, why the Shattering happened and what his own views are on the God Beyond and getting comprehensive answers to all three questions.

[CITATION NEEDED]

All Investiture in the Cosmere is related to the Shards and feruchemy was explicitly brought about due to the combination of Preservation and Ruin's Investiture. The Southerners have allomancy for the same reason that it existed before Rashek's Ascension: The seeds of the magic are in everyone on Scadrial. WoBs for reference:

As a terminology matter, calling the spren that form Nahel Bonds 'true spren' is misleading. The more common but still unofficial term is 'Radiantspren' (with or without a space) and it's worth noting that they actually arose after most of the other types appeared, mostly spurred by the arrival of Honor and Cultivation.