Weltall

Brandon has RAFO'd the specifics but we know that there are people who travel between worlds who can hand-carry at least some of the letters. We know that Nalthis is a worldhopper-friendly world and there's been a fair amount of travel to and from that world so I imagine getting a letter to Endowment is as easy as finding the next person heading in that direction and handing it off to them. Not too hard to get letters to Scadrial by Era 2 also I'd imagine. How the letters Hoid and Frost exchange get to each party on the other hand is anyone's guess since that requires knowing how to access Yolen and at least as late as MB Era 1 even Khriss didn't know how to do that.

Per a very new WoB, the odds of Hoid ever holding Nightblood at all are about the same as the odds of Rayse renouncing all further attempts at Shard-murdering and dedicating the rest of his immortal existence to performing charity work, spreading love and kindness and singing kumbaya.

Nightblood would probably look at Shardplate like an Investiture Buffet. As for a Blade, we have this: I suspect if you were holding the Shardblade you wouldn't want to swing too hard and you wouldn't want your blade to touch Nightblood any more than necessary. My guess is a Shardblade would be better equipped to resist Nightblade but it would still ultimately be destroyed with enough time. When Hoid is sufficiently terrified of Nightblood that he wouldn't want to be anywhere near it, I don't think a radiantspren is going to do terribly well. In the thought experiment of Nightblood striking a living Shardblade, my guess is that since the soul of the spren and Radiant are merging into one, it would do Very Bad Things to the Radiant, basically the other side of the coin to what happened to all the 'deadeye' spren.

A Perpendicularity literally is Investiture in liquid form. We have additional confirmation that there is an entity called Patji that's an avatar of Autonomy. Even if Autonomy had never 'visited' the world, what's going on there would still be a manifestation of Investiture, it's just not the kind of Investiture that a human can directly interact with in the way that they interact with something like allomancy or surgebinding.

@Palad <Looks at the date of the last post before yours> Oh, and welcome to the Shard. I promise we don't bite. Much.

I'm guessing he's reusing the term without the stories being linked, especially given how different galactic society is presented as being in HARRE. 'Atmospheric scoop' is a much more generic term than something super-specific like 'Cytonic Hyperdrive'. And to the original post, yeah.

All the facilities on the planet appear to have been built by humans. The apparatus and related machinery is human-scaled and Spensa notes that all the writing is in human languages. This is also true of the orbital shells, since M-Bot is able to recognize various components by types (such as identifying the shipyard as a 'C-137-KJM' and when flying through the falling shipyard Spensa notes that the design is similar to the underground facilities that she's already noted were made by humans. As to what exactly the planet was originally intended for... given the shipyards and the massive defense grids, I'm guessing that it was originally a fortress that humanity abandoned at some point during the war. Possibly it became isolated as the war turned against them and they couldn't hold onto it any longer, or maintaining it required more manpower and resources than the larger war effort could spare after a certain point.

One huge problem with the idea is that as Secret History makes clear, it is very difficult for a Cognitive Shadow to Ascend. Kelsier had to literally cheat in order to make it work and his effectiveness in using the power was limited by his lack of connection to the Physical. That the power was actively fighing against him because he was more aligned towards Ruin didn't help either. So it would be very difficult to imagine a Cognitive Shadow holding both halves of Harmony successfully and it's more likely that Bad Things would quickly happen, much like if Sazed hadn't been there to pick up the Shards in the first place and they began acting on their own. There's also the question of how you'd get this 'temporary Vessel' Cognitive Shadow in the first place. In order to get that you'd need someone to die under the right circumstances and then you run into all sorts of questions like: How do you ensure that they give the power up again after a day? If you were instead thinking of sapient Investiture that wasn't originally human (or some other species) then while it's easier for Sazed to create such an entity, there are questions of timescale and whether a Splinter can actually Ascend. Brandon has RAFO'd whether such a thing is possible and on another instance he was a bit more specific and said that 'it doesn't quite work that way'. On the timescale issue we've been told that there are ways to speed up the process of Investiture developing sapience but in at least some instances we're looking at something that takes thousands of years to occur. We know that Vessels can manifest a Physical body to interact with the world whenever they want to, though it wouldn't do what you're thinking and cut off Sazed from the Shards' influence. It would also probably take a lot longer than a day for a Vessel to stop being influenced by the intent of their Shard and even then, there would be permanent aftereffects. Neat idea and something I could very easily see Sazed doing if it were possible, but I'm not sure the mechanics work out.

Brandon has said that Rosharans could learn to soulcast better food but it would require Radiants and creating something like a soulcast energy bar would need a good understanding of how nutrition works (and food in general) in order to get something with the right nutritional properties that also doesn't taste like chull dung. But yeah, it should be entirely possible.

Used hemalurgic spikes, only slightly decayed and guaranteed to grant allomantic or feruchemical traits only! Kanda skeleton sales, organized by species with certifications of authenticity and history. And for the little kiddies, Soonie Cubs instead That mysterious chain from Celebrant, now only nine hundred and fifty broams... Wyndle's prized collection of chair souls And of course, copies of the famous cookbook: One Hundred Ways To Prepare Chouta

I suspect in that case we'd get something closer to Ati who was trying to resist the most negative aspects of his Shard. We know the intents of the Shards aren't self-directed so a Vessel who 'hates hate' wouldn't cause some kind of existential paradox but it would probably mean a Vessel who's filtering that intent very differently than Rayse.

Yep, Devotion could also have been called Love. Relatedly, Odium was originally going to be Hatred. Brandon has elsewhere said that when Odium calls himself Passion that 'part of him' believes it... and he doesn't think Odium is fully capable of being honest with himself.

Found a new WoB that seems to nix the idea of multiple timelines in the Cosmere

I avoided reading any of the Oathbringer chapters myself for that reason, except for the one Brandon read at a signing. Yeah, from the WoBs it seems the first explicit reference to Frost came from someone who had read Dragonsteel Prime and asked Brandon a question about him. Between the sample chapters Brandon recently made available (albeit redacted in places) and The Traveler there's just enough material to link the person Hoid's speaking with to dragons, once you know (via WoB) that they can take human form.

Ummm, Brandon says quite directly that Hoid is the second oldest being in the Cosmere after Frost. That means that yes, he's older than the Shards by definition. While neither Liar of Partinel nor Dragonsteel Prime are canon, we know that the former is Hoid's origin story and at one point he planned for it to take place around five hundred years before the start of Dragonsteel. That Adonalsium may have created life in the Cosmere (a fact that Brandon is careful to say is widely believed, not confirmed to be true) doesn't have any bearing on Hoid's relative age.

Oh, I am. But you gave me an opening to both quote TVTropes and make a Zero no Kiseki reference and I just had to take it.

A drakoloss? Hmmm, you're gonna need some storming huge spikes for that... No, unless you count Frost's letter as being 'onscreen', which Brandon technically does since he used it when someone asked if we've seen dragons yet. The same WoB leaves open the possibility that we have seen one or more dragons in human form but that if so we wouldn't recognize them. I suppose you could also say we have seen a dragon onscreen if you consider The Traveler to be canonical but I don't think that Brandon's actually stated it is..

Welcome to the Shard! Hoid is not a Returned though he has at least enough Breath to have reached the Second Heightening. His healing is something else entirely: As mentioned offhandedly in that WoB (and implied in his appearance in Mistborn Secret History) Hoid is physically incapable of harming people to the point that even contemplating inflicting physical harm will nauseate him to the point of incapacity. Additionally Brandon has said that Hoid's spiritweb is weird, moreso even than a savant. He was human once but now he's not, exactly. He's also really truly unfathomably old. Like, older than the Shards old. In short, Hoid is... Hoid.

None of those things are unique to either group when you boil it down that much. Just to hit those specific traits: The Cynic Funny Foregner Old Soldier Token Minority Royal Blood Took a Level in Badass Literally every story when a friend dies, ever To give another example, I could fit the Special Support Section from Falcom's Trails series into those boxes just as easily. Lloyd is the Kaladin/Vimes figure with less grumpiness but a similar background and his team become unexpected heroes of the city after starting out a joke, Elie is royalty (or as close as it gets in Crossbell), Randy is the old sergeant who's seen it all, Tio and later Wazy share funny outsider duty and... there's not really a good spot in there for Noel but in broad strokes she'd map well enough to Angua and Lyn. And that's just the first example that came to mind. I know Brandon likes Discworld but I wouldn't read anything into this vis a vis Bridge Four.

The link to the revised Chapter 1 now works, though the earlier draft containing the first six chapters is still dead. This wasn't intentional but apparently the result of an error when there was a server migration so at some point the other excerpt should be available again. One imagines it's not Team Dragonsteel's top priority though. As mentioned, it exists only in a physical copy. Or rather, four physical copies according to the website. Two are part of the regular bookshelves and one is part of the Honors Thesis collection, all of which can be checked out... and currently are checked out. And there's at least eleven people waiting in line. There's also a fourth copy which is available to read at the library but can't be checked out. That's what I gleaned from their catalogue (see here). It might be possible to get one of the circulating copies via an interlibrary loan but that would depend on whether BYU will lend it out (I understand they used to at least but I don't know if they still do) and if so whether you're able to access a library that they'll loan it to. Someone more familiar with the topic might be able to provide more helpful details here, I'm just guessing. So setting that possibility aside your options are to put your name on the waitlist and arrange to be in Provo when a copy becomes available or go there and find a comfy chair in which to read the non-circulating copy... and hope nobody else thought to do the same thing on that day.

When looking through Oathbringer for some exact words I noticed that when Szeth swears his Third Ideal, he notes that snow crystalizes in the air around him briefly and he gets a sense of approval from his spren. This is similar to but less dramatic than the explosion of light and frost that Kaladin and Lopen exhibit, which fits the idea that his order is relatively close to the Bondsmiths (though not to the point of sharing a Surge directly).and so has an accompanying visual effect even if it isn't as pronounced. You seem to be treating 'Squire' as a separate category independent of the Ideals but that's not how it's been seen to work for these Orders. Bridge Four had already said (or at least heard and internalized) the First Ideal before any of them started manifesting Surgebinding through their connection to Kaladin. In Oathbringer we see that anyone who tries to become a Squire says the First Ideal as a precondition. In other words, you say the First Ideal and then you become a Squire, at which point you may attract a spren of your own, form a Nahel Bond and then go on to say the remaining Ideals. Skybreaker initiates say the First Ideal, then impress a Skybreaker to be chosen as a Squire at which point they also say the Second Ideal and gain access to Surgebinding. The Third Ideal and one's own Nahel Bond then go together as well. Basically, the Skybreakers just move things down one step, though they still get Blade and (presumably) Plate at the same points as Windrunners. Skybreakers don't so much get 'promoted' to the Third Ideal instantly as it is that this point is when they start progressing more like the Windrunners. They've already sworn two Ideals by that point and it's the swearing of and acting in accordance with the Second that attracts the spren they'll eventually bond/ This happens before they swear the Third Ideal though, read when Szeth swears his and it's clear he'd already been bonded to a highspren before he says the words. That the Skybreakers seem to have more control over the process of people becoming Squires is likely a side effect of how they're focused on the concepts of law and legal authority.

Yep, we see it happen with Szeth at the beginning of his training when he needs Ki to Lash him. The latter. They're next door on the surgebinding chart because they share Adhesion, in the same way that Lightweavers and Elsecallers are 'close' because they share Transformation.

This is more likely to be the result of a Vessel gaining a vastly expanded mind capable of looking into the Spiritual Realm with much greater clarity and a longer-term view than an ordinary human. Thus, Sazed who is now one with all the Connections made by Preservation has an easier time seeing things related to Preservation. However, his knowledge is still limited. Sazed doesn't get anything like Leras' memories (or he'd actually know what Adonalsium is, as opposed to having a vague idea that his powers were once part of something with that name) and even his knowledge of the magic system's he's empowering are imperfect; for example he says that hemalurgy always results in death but we know from WoB that this isn't actually the case. Another example of this is that Sazed's writing claims that Preservation broke his agreement with Ruin. Sazed is careful to qualify other cases where his terminology isn't really precise (like how Ruin's 'prison' wasn't literally confining him spatially) but in this case he claims the agreement was actually broken. Leras himself tells Kelsier that he did not break the agreement, he just left a loophole that Ruin didn't notice.

I know he's clarified that more recently and I didn't mean it as an example of an actual discrepency, just a tongue in cheek joke that there was uncertainty out-of-universe for a while as to where those two stood in relation to one another. For an example of the uncertainty: And while finding that one on Arcanum I noticed that you were the one who got the chronology nailed down for us.

There was some discussion about this before.