Weltall

Humans on Scadrial 'internalized' the Metallic Arts because they were created directly by the Shards that power those systems. It's pretty much built into them by literal design. That doesn't really tell us anything about human evolution anywhere in the Cosmere, since each magic system has its own means of Initiation and we know some of them don't really care whether you're originally from a world or not. Anyone can receive Breath and perform Awakening, even if you have to be Nalthian to receive one innately or to Return. Anyone who meets the individual spren's requirements can become a surgebinder and that one definitely crosses the species boundry, much less the world boundary. The only world where we know a species was deliberately created to populate it is Scadrial, whose ecosystem was modeled after Yolen's. We don't know whether humans anywhere else were created by Adonalsium (Brandon has said it's widely assumed by in-universe scholars that Adonalsium created everything) or the Shards, or whether the humans on all other world but Yolen were transplanted. We know that in the Cosmere, genetics are sufficiently fuzzy that species with no common ancestor can have children together (the various human/singer and human/aimian hybrids on Roshar) and humans from different worlds can also have children so the exact nature of how any given population came to exist is pretty much irrelevant at the biological level, even if it's very interesting at the worldbuilding level. That was a metaphor, it doesn't necessarily mean the ecology was so badly disrupted. Once can understand the concept without having seen it in action firsthand, provided one can conceive of sufficiently long time scales. What we've seen of Yolen in The Traveler matches the description of the fain forest in The Liar of Partinel. Even with the caveat that neither is canon, the similar description suggests that Brandon doesn't conceive of the world being completely devastated ecologically. In fact, Khriss' comments on Scadrial in Arcanum Unbounded imply that the Yolish ecosystem is doing just fine, since she compares Scadrian life to the non-fain parts of Yolish life using the present tense. Also, per Brandon the Shattering meant 'everything and nothing' to Investiture. You can use Roshar as a case study, since its 'Investiture Cycle' with the highstorms and spren bonding to the local fauna predated the Shattering and continued after it. It's only after Honor and Cultivation arrived that things started changing and more sapient spren started to appear.

Welcome to the Shard! It's difficult for any Splinter or Cognitive Shadow to leave the system where the Investiture that makes them up is rooted, and this means that someone who's bonded to any of that Investiture faces a similar issue. By bonding a Cryptic, Hoid has made himself subject to that issue as well. As Calderis says, Hoid himself isn't bound but his spren is bound and that will make it hard for Hoid to leave. However, it's not an absolute restriction and there is a trick that can be learned which makes it possible to get that kind of Investiture away from the world it's bound to. We know of several people who've worked out the trick (WoB contains a Warbreaker spoiler if you're not familiar with its connections to Stormlight Archive) and Hoid almost certainly either already knows it or will be able to figure it out fairly easily. And yeah, we've seen Hoid off Roshar within a few years of the events of Oathbringer so he's definitely not bound.

There is in fact a Word of Brandon on this matter. Vorinism is more concerned with oaths, so as long as the two make the right pledges it's considered perfectly acceptable.

Atium compounding is only necessary because your Spiritual aspect 'knows' how old you are and will try to force your Physical body to match it. Cognitive Shadows (which Kelsier is at this point) are beyond that limitation because they simply don't age. When Kelsier became one, his soul basically got the messge that it was now 'eternal and endless' and it stopped being an issue. Ergo, his Spiritual aspect isn't going to try to age his body. This isn't unprecedented in the Cosmere, see what's been posted earlier about other cases of Cognitive Shadows in Physical bodies. None of them visibly age and many of the prominent ones we've seen have been around in those bodies for as long or (far) longer than Kelsier.

We've known for years that metal glows in Scadrial's Cognitive Realm because a Shard's power is essentially shining through it; The WoB is right at the top of this topic. It didn't require a thread necro to point out. Also, the same mechanics explain why gemstones on Roshar glow when infused with Stormlight: The glow comes from the Spiritual Realm. You don't need a Connection to a magic system to perceive it, it's just how the power flows down through the Realms. In the specific case of Scadrial, the glow simply isn't visible in the Physical Realm until you hit truly ridiculous levels of power, at which point the distinction between matter/energy/Investiture pretty much vanishes and everything starts to glow though metal shines brighter.

Being more Invested can interfeer with emotional allomancy but the converse is that if the allomancer is powerful enough they can force their way past that regardless (WoB here). Brandon's implied that someone with Susebron's level of Investiture might be able to shrug off Rashek-level emotional allomancy and while both of these people are massively invested, it gives you a good idea how much power you'd actually need to completely negate emotional allomancy. Much more effective to just buy a tinfoil hat.

I've got physical copies of everything, mainly because I want to eventually get everything signed (and in the case of Cosmere books, personalized). That said, I also have a large selection of his books in digital/graphic audio form thanks to the Humble Bundle sale from a couple years back, so I can read those on the go and if I know I'm going to be traveling when there's a new book out and expect to have a lot of reading time I'll usually double-dip for a digital edition (Kindle) so I can keep reading and save some room in my suitcase. But yeah, I love the feel of having a book in my hands (and the look of having it on my shelf) so in most cases I'll always go physical, and not just with Brandon. As for where I get mine, I try to support Borderlands in San Francisco whenever I can (it's where Brandon usually goes if he's on tour near me) but it's not close enough to be my regular bookstore so if I'm not in that area within a week or so of release I'll usually grab his latest books from a local store.

Amusingly enough, Brandon mentioned that one of the inspirations for Shardblades was that he thinks it's unfair that the coolest magic swords (lightsabers) were in a science fiction story and he wanted to make cool magic swords that would belong to the fantasy genre. xD

Hence the qualifier of 'normal' circumstances.

Under normal circumstances, nothing would happen. An allomancer doesn' have the right Connection to do anything with the metal.

Brandon has already explained this. We know they're made from godmetal, the exact composition of any given blade is going to depend on the spren but it will be a mixture of whatever the canon names for Honor and Cultivation's metals winds up being. This isn't going to involve cross-Cosmere crossover or any huge reveal. In addition to the WoB I already posted, there is a paraphrase you can read here where Brandon confirmed that shardblades are godmetal.

1) Assuming Cosmere dragons have weaponized breath. Brandon did not write that in Dragonsteel Prime and hasn't confirmed whether it will be the case in the published canon either. 2) Cosmere dragons can pass almost perfectly for humans, the only indication of any difference we've seen is a small detail you'd have to be looking very closely at their eyes to spot. We're not even certain that much is canon though. Brandon's said that if there were dragons onscreen in any of his published books, we wouldn't be able to spot them.

I think by that point any difference between your sword and an ordinary metal sword would be pretty minimal. You've already taken something that was once human, transformed it once, then reshaped it and transformed it again. The multiple transformations are probably going to fuzz up the Spiritual Connection of 'used to be human' that was there originally and by carving the wood from the first transformation you've taken something that resembled life and turned it into something that does not. Law of BioChromatic Parallelism and all that.

This is literally what Devotion already is; Brandon's confirmed it's a synonym for Love. Just like Odium was originally 'Hatred' but he changed it because Odium sounded cooler. If the Shard that just wants to survive and hide doesn't have an intent of 'Survival' the odds that another Shard has that intent are... not good. See the post just above this one.

Hmmmmm, I never considered that option. And looking at this WoB and Brandon's exact wording, I could totally see him pulling that on us and having a good laugh at our expense.

Was he? Because I can't recall anything we see him do with F-Gold that can't be attributed to just lots and lots of stored health and constant tapping and Brandon has said that savantism among feruchemists is probably not going to be a thing. There is a later WoB that suggests the possibility of doing crazy things with feruchemy and a lot of practice but that may only be a function of practice and expanding your ideas about what's possible via experimentation (given how big of a role perception plays in most magics) rather than savantism per se. And he phrased it as 'people in the Cosmere would argue that has merit' without actually confirming it. EDIT: Ninja'd by Calderis by seconds!

@SamsonSeaBorn Just for future reference, a Cognitive Shadow can have a Physical body but still be 'bound' to the system where the Investiture sustaining them is located. The Heralds and the Returned have the same difficulty leaving Roshar/Nalthis that Kelsier has leaving Scadrial. It's not impossible (as Vasher proves) but it's something you need to learn how to do and Kelsier hasn't learned it yet. Also, Kelsier kind of needs that spike since it's stapling his soul to his body and if Mraize had a chunk of metal through one of his eyes, it's the sort of thing that people would notice, I think. xD

Consider Secret History. It's possible for a Cognitive Shadow to feel pain if it thinks it should. During the Desolations the Heralds get Physical bodies that definitely do feel pain and they tend to get injured or die horribly, so they've got no shortage of mental associations between 'body' and 'pain' and we know that their minds were increasingly broken as time went on, making it even harder for them to try and convince themselves that their Cognitive 'bodies' aren't real and those knives, hooks, hot irons and other nasty things aren't really flaying and burning them day after day after day...

The third state of matter/energy in the Cosmere: 'Adonalsium' and 'Because Adonalsium' respectively: Where Adonalsium came from (if such a term is even appropriate) we don't know. It's possible that it created the Cosmere but it's equally possible that it arose and attained sapience on its own, the Cosmere becoming conscious as it were. Investiture is already known to do that on a smaller scale, if left alone for long enough. 'Pure' Investiture is in the Spiritual Realm but it also manifests as Investiture in the other two Realms (in things like spren, the godmetals, Perpendicularities and the Mists on Scadrial) and in its matter-state it's what everything else is made of.

We know that it's possible for Shards to create independent avatars but the only one known to actually do this is Bavadin and we don't know whether there are consequences of this (that Tanavast might not have wanted to deal with) or how much time and effort it takes to create one. Bear in mind that by the time he started recording these visions, he was dying. Creating an avatar like Bavadin might well have been impossible and creating a Splinter, ensuring it develops sapience and giving it more precise information to convey might well have been beyond him at that point too.

Shardblades are Honor and Cultivation's Investiture in solid form. In other words, the metal is the Stormlight Archive equivalent to atium and lerasium, a fantasy metal rather than a real one. We don't know the proper name for it but given the naming conventions of other godmetals we've taken to calling the metal associated with Honor 'Tanavastium' for now. The actual metal that makes up any given Shardblade is going to be a mix of the two godmetals, depending on the spren.

Yeah, the most likely outcome of spiking a Radiant and then using the spike on yourself is that you kill the spren and the Radiant and end up with a deadeye Shardblade, which would make you a grade-A chull. And it would probably not be all that easy to do in the first place as Radiants have a very strong healing ability which can definitely repair spiritual damage. The next most likely outcome is that you end up bonded to a very angry spren who will tell you to storm off, break the bond and possibly do unpleasant things to you before leaving if they're able to, hope you didn't try spiking a Dustbringer. On top of that, you now have a useless bit of metal stuck in you that can't feel good and Harmony might just start lecturing you. The least likely outcome by far is you becoming a Radiant yourself, since you need to match the Ideals (or the bond will break regardless of intent) and the spren has to be okay with what you just did. None of that is especially likely and Brandon's said that hemalurgy would drive most spren away by itself. Oh, and having a spike might make it it easier for Odium to mess with you...

Well, since this has been bumped I might as well add my two chips worth. I'm another of those people who really liked it from the first read, though I did find Vivenna somewhat grating at first. By book's end that whole journey became worth it though. And on a purely personal level I found her/Brandon's commentary on seafood weird, but mostly because I love seafood and grew up eating it all the time. I think that's the one time I haven't shared his characters' views on how delicious the food and drinks are or are not. xD And on a meta level, I really liked Warbreaker for being (more or less) self-contained amid some of the other works, and because it's something I can point to as a great introduction to his Cosmere writing for friends who don't necessarily want to leap into a multi-volume series but want something longer than one of his novellas. There's also Elantris for that but I like Warbreaker a lot more. Also, some of the twists make it feel especially like an entry from the Kiseki/Trails game series in the way your expectations get played with, so it's also a great book to use as a go-between for people who I know like one or the other. Like the feel of Warbreaker? Like RPGs? Here, try this game! Like this series? Like to read? Here, try this book!

Sazed's explanations in the epigraphs also add that Rashek was being influenced by Preservation's intent and so wouldn't have been able to fix the planet's orbit after his disastrous first attempt even if he wanted to.