Weltall

Sadeas was trying to play the political game by the political rules. He completely failed to realize that his little plots were suddenly rendered completely irrelevant by the coming of the Everstorm. If Adolin hadn't murdered him, someone else eventually would have in order to get him to stop undermining everyone else, or he would have done something to get himself killed not unlike what Amaram eventually did. He could have reassessed the situation and realized that suddenly there were things much more important than his personal desire to take the throne and at the very least, put those on temporary hold. He didn't. The Vorin church is in a similar situation, with beliefs that do not match reality and where continuing to rely on those beliefs (or allowing them to continue unchallenged) would do far more harm than good. As already noted repeatedly, the church is sticking its collective head in the sand and hoping that the Heralds will arrive, wave a magic wand and make everything better. We know that's not happening and Dalinar knows that's not happening. If you're going to confront the biggest crisis Roshar has ever seen, you can't have a massive and respected organization run around telling everyone a message that you know is counterproductive without at least challenging it, otherwise you just get division and Team Honor can.afford that far less than Dalinar can afford to have the Ardentia annoyed with him for questioning their beliefs.

This is pretty much exactly what Dalinar does. He doesn't announce announce that he's stopped believing in the Almighty per se, he's even got a firmer foundation for believing in his existence because he's actually seen him and heard his voice. It's just that what Vorinism teaches about the Almighty has been distorted by thousands of years of false belief and continuing to propagate those false beliefs would do far more harm than good. That was one of the main points of his conversation with Kadash about tradition. Your problem is that you assume 'the rules' are a constant when as the books go to great lengths to show us, the nature of the game itself is changing as everyone is playing it. Sadeas' ultimate downfall came from failing to realize that the game had fundamentally changed by the end of Words of Radiance and kept trying to play the game of poliical intrigue. Remember how well that ended for him?

Secret Project is something Brandon has not talked about before and it's also not Cosmere. That nixes it being just about anything we can guess, since he's already told us about things like The Dark One, the Rithmatist sequel and various other cool non-Cosmere potential works like Adamant. Also, Brandon's not in control of when it releases and has a very strict non-disclosure agreement about whatever it is, which means that someone else is involved and calling a lot of the shots. That would also nix it being anything like Rithmatist even without the first WoB.

Like @Calderis said, there is no such thing as 'non-Shardic Investiture'. There can be Investiture that's operating on a planet with no Shard in residence (like First of the Sun) but that's still Investiture which is associated with a Shard, in this case Autonomy. Here's a very long WoB that discusses this. Similarly, Trell is very certainly related to a Shard and moreover, a Shard that we already know. A very common assumption is that Trell is one of Autonomy's avatars.

And this is precisely why it's so hard to come up with theories on the endgame of the Cosmere. We know the Vessels had different reasons for wanting to Shatter Adonalsium (so we can't really generalize) but we know at least some of them saw it as the only good option available. Good for what, we don't know. The Vessels made some sort of promise to one another which Frost appears to have been part of but Hoid was (probably) not. What did they promise each other, when did they do it and why did they do it in the first place? We can conjure up any number of hypothetical reasons for why the Shattering had to happen but until we get answers to all of these questions we're largely stumbling around in the dark. For example, let's imagine that the Vessels who saw the Shattering as a regrettable necessity did it because Adonalsium represented some sort of danger that had to be gotten rid of. If Adonalsium itself was the threat for some reason like 'It simply had far more power than even an infinite mind should be trusted with' then trying to reassemble it in a single Vessel (whose minds are not infinite, just greatly expanded) would probably not be a good idea. Likewise if it was doing something the Vessels thought had to be stopped (like if they feared the spread of fainlife and worried that Adonalsium was going to bring it to all the other worlds and displace everything already there) they wouldn't want that power concentrated in one place again, because who's to say that the next person to hold all that power wouldn't be equally dangerous? Or perhaps Adonalsium was protecting the Cosmere from something (whether by intent or by the simple fact of its existence) but the mind controlling all that power was beginning to wear down and wasn't going to be able to keep it up, at which point the Vessels split Adonalsium to distribute the burden while keeping the power in large enough chunks to do whatever it needed. In that case, you'd also have reasons to not want to reassemble it in a single entity again. These are just random ideas but you get the picture, we can't simply assume that recreating Adonalsium is logical or desirable.

Like @Invocation said, there are two planned Elantris sequels in the works (the first of which is planned to be set a decade after the events of Elantris, star Kiin's family and focus on Fjorden) but Brandon has said that The Emperor's Soul worked so well the way it is that he's not sure he wants to write a sequel to it. That said, he's got plans to reference TES in the Elantris sequels so we might get some more glimpses at that part of Sel in the future regardless.

Except that the effects aren't discrete like that, they're inseperable from you having a certain number of Breaths. It's why you need a certain number to reach a given Heightening and will lose that heightening if you give away enough of your Breath through one method or another. The same fact is also why Breath-granted powers are a continuum and the Heightenings just represent when some given power reaches its maximum. Even if there was a particular combination of metal and bindpoints that you could use to steal something like the sense of hearing or sight specifically, you wouldn't get perfect pitch or perfect color recognition from spiking an Awakener because those are directly linked to having hundreds of Breaths, which hemalurgy can't steal.

I think you would, it's just that we've never seen a natural combination like that so we don't have data to draw on. Brandon was asked a question about people using the Bands of Mourning and Resonances and said that a ferring who only uses one power from the Bands could develop a Resonance between their original power and whatever they were using. He didn't specify it had to be an allomantic power so I think you could get a double-feruchemy Resonance or by extension a double-allomancy one under the right circumstances.

Aluminum is an elemental metal created through well-known processes and these are mirrored in how we see the stuff obtained on Scadrial at the very least. It has unusual properties we can't currently explain but we know that it lacks a property of godmetals: You can't soulcast other things into a godmetal but you can soulcast things into aluminum.

'Very carefully'

There's a difference between an unkeyed metalmind and an unsealed one. An unkeyed metalmind is one that has been filled by someone who was simultanously storing their Identity via F-Aluminum. Using the example of the gold bracelet, whoever filled it was using F-Gold to store Health in the bracelet at the same time they were storing their Identity in a separate aluminummind. The result is that the Health stored in the bracelet is not associated with the Identity of any specific person. Thus anyone who's able to use F-Gold can take that metalmind and tap the Health stored in it. However, it only works if you already have the associated feruchemical power, which is why Wayne can use it but Wax can't. An unsealed metalmind is one that actually grants you one or more feruchemical/allomantic power. We don't know exactly how these are made yet other than it involves the use of F-Nicrosil (which stores Investiture) and something called an Excisor, but there's been lots of good discussion on the subject. Here's an example:

Since the symbols that you draw in all the magic systems on Sel create the conduit through which the Dor flows into the Physical Realm and does its thing, I suspect that an Aon made out of/carved into aluminum would fail as soon as the power tries flowing into the Physical and the first thing it runs into on the other end is a hunk of aluminum. Aon Ehe is a good example of where I think you'd have an issue, since the fire comes from the Aon and its facing determines the direction the burst of fire goes in once the Aon activates. I don't think that would work if you tried making the Aon out of aluminum and it would just absorb the Investiture as it transitions Realms.

Ialai isn't nearly as smart as she thinks she is and so it's not that hard for Mraize to sneak around being suspicious right under her nose? And Amaram is the real 'right hand man' for Sadeas' forces once he arrives in the city so Mraize isn't really tasked with all that responsibility in his 'public' persona and most of what we know he's up to can be done from his rooms, sending orders out for other people to do the grunt work.

It's an interesting idea but unfortunately it's contradicted by Word of Brandon that the influence of Shard on Vessel is strictly one-way

He was wearing multiple bands and only the atium ones were actually important, vis a vis how Vin killed him and because they were valuable as a source of revenue. Given that people could see how many bands he was wearing, there's certainly room for stories to spread that some other set of bands he wore could have been important in another way. It's not like this sort of thing is all that farfetched, consider King Arthur for example. There was probably some awesome guy who was the basis for all the legends. It's not until centuries after he would have lived that stories start to give him magical weapons, or at least written evidence of the same. We've had three hundred years for stories to accumulate around Rashek, plenty of time for someone to imagine that he had a magical means of granting his power to other people. Not to mention, consider the source of the Bands. Kelsier probably helped spread the legend among the Elendel Basin himself, just as he did among the Southerners. He certainly constructed the true hiding place of the Bands in a way that uses iconography that only someone from that part of the world would recognize. And being Kelsier, he probably also did it just because he thought it would be funny.

Anyone here read Timothy Zahn's Conquerors trilogy? Given what we saw of the Krell in orbit, I wouldn't be surprised at all if something similar is at work here. It would be a very Brandon thing to do. I could also see humanity as having genuinely started the war, if only to continue Spensa's more or less unbroken streak of being wrong about her initial beliefs and to give her one more thing to work through. Either way, I expect the ultimate resolution to the conflict is going to have to involve getting the aliens to own up to the fact that whatever started the fighting, continuing to attack the Defiants who just wanted to be left alone only made things worse.

Brandon is the true Seventeenth Shard named Shenanigans, representing Adonalsium's Divine Trollery.

In the hypothetical example of a Forger bonding a dead blade, someone else subsequently bonding it and the Forger then stamping themselves to still have the blade, Brandon has said that this could happen but it would do weird things if either tried summoning the blade while the other was using it, because it would think it was bonded to two people. That said, a dead blade has some pretty important Realmatic differences so what's possible for a deadeye may not be possible for a living spren.

The 'little bit more' is probably related to how the present-day Heralds with their various insanities are twisting or subverting the divine attributes they were originally associated with. Maybe there's some specific focus to the madness rather than just thousands of years of accumulated guilt plus everything they had to deal with before Aharietiam, given how they're all nuttier than pecan pie, but in very specific ways.

Welcome to the Shard! As mentioned, the entire temple was a ruse with multiple fake chambers that were supposed to hold the Bands (including fake Bands) while the real thing was right in the open the whole time. I think that another title Kelsier must have accumulated over the years is Dungeon Master.

@Ookla the Dominion Well played on the Ookla name, well played... Anyhow, I think RShara's right here and even if you could un-shatter the Plains, it's not going to happen. It took Dalinar a ton of effort to fix one temple when all the original bits of it were still right there, imagine how much time it would take to reconstruct an entire city, plus the surrounding land. Throw in that so many of the original pieces have been covered in crem or eroded away and the fact that it's been so long the place almost certainly now sees itself as shattered (reflecting both time and how everyone currently thinks of it) and I don't see it being possible. As for the shattering in the first place, I don't think there's going to be a deep reason behind it. We're given to believe that it was the Knights Radiants who shattered it since the Listener songs say it wasn't their gods who did it. My guess is that it was some sort of last-ditch effort to deny the city/its Oathgate to Odium's forces during Aharietiam, an accident or a mix of the two.

Welcome to the Shard! Two issues with trying to Nicroburst reserves away: First, it only works on allomancy and requires the target to be actively burning metals so that the effect knows which metals to enhance. A gold compounder who's only tapping stored health isn't going to trigger the effect and you're not going to do anything to their metalminds. Also, we know that a Leecher can run out of their metal before their target runs out of theirs so this should hold true with the opposite case where someone trying to Nicroburst an allomancer into running out of metal runs out of duralumin before the other party runs out of their metal. Second, even if you Nicrobursted someone actively using A-Gold, it's not an 'ultimate' version of you, you're just seeing the entire effect much faster. Given how nobody seems to use a lot of gold at once it's probably not going to be that different from an ordinary use of A-Gold and would only be uncomfortable if the person actually tried touching their gold shadow.

Brandon's said that blunt shardweapons can still do the same Spiritual damage, it just takes more effort for it to actually get at the soul than something sharp or pointy. That same WoB also makes it clear that (setting aside weight) they'll have the expected properties of a normal Physical object of the relevant size and shape, so even if you could get a spren to imitate piano wire properly, it wouldn't cut just by swinging it in the general direction of a target; you'd need to apply the same sort of force that you'd apply to ordinary wire. I don't believe we've ever seen this happen, once the blade transects your spine, you're dead. The burning eyes are a side-effect but by that point you're already too dead to feel it yourself. Ym's interlude shows death by Shardblade from the victim's perspective and it was instantaneous.

Yeah, I'm with @Calderis on this. A perfect gemstone would probably be much better at resisting cracking but I certainly wouldn't want to be the one putting Honor's Drop into a fabrial to test the theory. If you crack a perfect gemstone you can't just pop down to the store for a replacement and you've ruined a potential Unmade prison or emergency stormlight battery.