Weltall

Welcome to the Shard! We do know a little about Hoid, let's just say that when he tells Jasnah that Honor once bought him a drink and when he tells Shallan that he's not 'old', he's on an entirely different level of age, he's being completely honest. Spoilers since it involves non-Stormlight material If you're interested in Dustbringers, all we know about them for sure comes from the snippets found in the epigraphs in Words of Radiance and what we see of Malata in Oathbringer. We know that the Surge of Division splits molecular bonds rather than atoms and it can be used with a great deal of precision, to do things like create a decorative engraving. Brandon has said that we're not going to learn too much about the Dustbringers for a while; He wants to build up the different Orders slowly and they're later in line for development. He's also said there's going to be a Dustbringer POV character but it's 'complicated'. A fairly popular assumption based on her inclusion among Dalinar's ten characters at Thaylen City is that Ash is eventually going to become a Radiant of that order, which would explain why Brandon has RAFO'd questions about the Order and the character who's going to be representing them.

Mainly the way that Brandon describes the relative timeline. We know exactly when the Elantris sequels are planned to take place and Brandon's used the same description across several WoBs, here's one: Then we got this on The Emperor's Soul Now those are a bit vague but the fact that he brings up the possibility that characters might not be around suggests that it's after the sequels when we know the characters will still be around. Now, I hadn't previously seen the WoB @Slimy_Slider provided about Shai in future Elantris books, but as said it's not clear whether that would be a before or after situation either. So I guess it's a bit more vague where TES fits in the timeline; it would probably be better to say of that timeline that I think TES falls after the sequels but it's not completely certain.

As mentioned, for the same reason that aluminum resists being cut by shardblades: Its Investiture-resistant property means that the magical attempt to damage it is completely nullified and as a result you just get a sharp bit of metal striking against another bit of metal. With sufficient thickness, aluminum is sturdy enough to block such strikes, especially when you also factor in the logic behind the why the 'lastclap' works. With both typical shardblades and Nightblood, you have a magical sword that you don't need to swing at full strength, so most people simply aren't going to. Hence, the impact against the scabbard is also likely to be weaker unless the user has trained themselves out of the habit.

Assuming things don't change much in the canonical version, Dragons as seen in Dragonsteel Prime do indeed look a lot like traditional European dragons. Four legs, wings, serpentine neck, big teeth. They're also sapient and can shapeshift. He's called them the one standard fantasy race he wanted to include. No word yet on whether dragons don't require an atmosphere to breathe (and thus whether they can 'fly' in space) but we do know they're naturally immortal. Presumably they're affectable by hemalurgy in both ways, though getting a spike into them (when they're not in human form) is likely to be a bit of a challenge given that they're huge. I wonder how being spiked would work with their shapeshifting and whether their body would adjust around the spike. There's also the question of how the spiritweb would react to different species' sDNA getting spliced together. As for Awakening a metal statue, I suspect that it would work exactly the same as awakening anything metal. In other words, it would require a lot of Breath and for the Awakener to be at the Ninth Heightening since the metal was never 'alive'. Wood would be easier. That said, Brandon's mentioned that Awakening an actual statue would pretty much be a waste of Breath since statues aren't exactly limber so you'd be spending a lot of Breath to get a result that isn't very good at moving around. Which is why the D'Denir are skeletons encased in stone to resemble statues rather than being actual Awakened statues. We do know that in the hypothetical example of a corpse Soulcast to a statue, the statue would be easier to Awaken both because of a Spiritual connection to something that was once alive and because it's in the exact form of something that was alive. A dragon statue would presumably be similarly easier to Awaken, provided you have whatever perception is necessary to convince the magic that yes, this thing resembles a living creature and so the 'Law of BioChromatic Parallelism' applies. Nalthis has stories of dragons so...

They do. Brandon mentioned the Dysians when he talked about various types of immortality in the Cosmere. He mentioned that they maintain a persistent personality so long as enough of the 'hordelings' that make them up survive, even if individual ones are constantly dying and being replaced with new ones. Cognitively speaking they're the same individual, so very much in keeping with the paradox.

In terms of timeline, Shallan's bond would have begun earlier. Gavilar's death and that of Shallan's mother happened around the same time but Jasnah's bond was just starting to form on the night of the former's assassination while Shallan's had been growing for some time before that, given that it was strong enough at that point for Pattern to manifest as a blade. Jasnah might have had some incidents similar to what happened on that night beforehand but I don't think she's in the same boat as Shallan where she had a bond and then nearly destroyed it, more likely Ivory was starting to take an interest in her and the night in question is simply when things came to a head. Her childhood insanity is probably something else. And yeah, there's evidence that Jasnah does have Plate by the end of Oathbringer but she's keeping that fact a secret. Pcomes across her during the battle and notes that there was a strange glow fading from the air around her that looked like geometric shapes. Earlier she also asks Shallan about Plate in a way that makes it sound like she either has it herself or at least knows more about how a Radiant gets it. And on that subject, Shallan herself probably has access to it but has compartmentalized that fact so she's only able to use it as 'Radiant' while Shallan tries not to think about it. There's some evidence of that from her conversation with Adolin early in the book and the events of Thaylen City.

That's not quite how it works; Brandon has said that your Spiritual template is similar to your Platonic ideal. It's the idea of 'Dalinar in a state of perfect health and all his Connections' but it's not necessarily 'Dalinar as all-knowing' or 'Dalinar having overcome every bias his upbringing has given him' for example. There are limitations on this 'ideal' template as well. The WoB above is part of a question about aging and goes on to point out that how old you are is something your Spiritual aspect 'knows' even if you're using magic to stop the Physical effects of aging. So for example, the Platonic ideal of Dalinar is age-appropriate rather than, say, a single moment in the prime of Dalinar's youth or some point in the future where he's at his most enlightened or whatever. And as the WoB notes, your Spiritual self gets filtered by the Cognitive, point being that even if Dalinar was peeking into the Spiritual Realm he's not going to automatically be able to overcome everything he believes about the world and so make the jump that a listener could be a Radiant and the representative of the 'missing' tenth Order.

Don't worry about it too much, just wanted to point it out for the future. Welcome to the Shard!

Pssst, double-posting is bad form. Next time just edit your most recent post if you have anything to add. Venli's spren Timbre is a Willshaper spren, which we can deduce through a chain of conversations. Timbre conveys to Venli the idea that her grandfather was 'killed' in the Recreance. Ico mentions that his father is a Deadeye and his daughter left to 'go chase foolish dreams'. Ergo, Timbre is Ico's daughter. Ico is a lightspren and they're confirmed to be the ones who bond with Willshapers. Even if Brandon hadn't confirmed this, we could assume the lightspren are associated with the Willshapers since they match what we know of that Order (via the in-universe Words of Radiance) so well and like Pagerunner said in the WoB, it was pretty obvious.

If you wanted to do one here covering the entire Cosmere, the best place to put it would presumably be Cosmere Discussion since it would involve material from more than one series. There's lots of topics along the line of 'I noticed something on a reread and had a question...' but I didn't remember any dedicated topics. So I searched and at least one other member had the idea of doing a Stormlight reread with a specific goal in mind (there may be other topics with a similar idea, I didn't search too hard) so there's that.

1. It would make the Mahabarata look like a pamphlet by comparison 2. Sixteen? 3. I don't even know where to start with this one... time to skim the texts and look for various spins that Sanderson could put on things. 4. Undoubtedly. And various sub-sects of Judaism and early Christianity could be influenced by competing Shards to make things really chaotic. 5. MeLaan is Jesus now? Does this make Wayne the Bride of Christ? xD

Indeed

If so, none have evidently stood out for me such that I'd remember them offhand. But keep an eye out because at one point in the book there will be something that isn't there which stands out as a typo... presumably. xD

Without going into details that belong on the Aether board, given that it was confirmed that 'Decay' from Aether became Ruin I think it's pretty safe to assume that the 'Former' became Preservation. But yeah, the only thing we can say about the timeline is that as he conceives it now, Aether takes place before Nightblood since Darro from the former is intended to appear in the latter. As Brandon conceived things when he wrote the version of Aether that we currently have, we can't say. There's going to be so much that will inevitably change between the current draft and what gets canonized...

To add to what @Quantus said about how a hemalurgic spike already does store Investiture, feruchemy is a much better way to do it since that system is designed to do that and you can actually get the Investiture out again without a net loss. Brandon has also said that storing stormlight in metal is hard. You can however store Breath in metal (without Awakening it) pretty easily. However, we know that storing anything in an already-Invested hemalurgic spike is harder if not impossible because there's only so much 'space' in the metal in which you can store Investiture.

The Shards are a huge (technically infinite) mass of Investiture which is 'flavored' by the intent of that Shard. Preservation as the entity holding the Shard can't create but a human using Preservation's power is not the same thing. The End-ness of a magic system isn't strictly linked to the intent but is a measure of net energy. Allomancy is End-Positive because all the 'work' is being done by Preservation's Investiture, which the allomancer is acting as a conduit for, via the metal. Feruchemy is End-Neutral because there's no net change and hemalurgy is End-Negative because there's a net loss of Investiture involved in the creation of a spike.

...well then, I'll go to Damnation! xD Welcome to the Shard!

To add to what @RShara said, I was interested in this question so I asked Brandon at a signing. I didn't record it so I don't have his exact words but he was quite clear that 'Breath decay' stops becoming a factor once you have enough of them. By the time you hit the Fifth Heightening you're well past that point and thus you don't need to 'refill' on Breaths to maintain it.

Related WoB:

I don't think we've seen any hints of time dilation between worlds so far, in fact Brandon's said that it's not really a factor in Shadesmar travel. We have seen characters who can make use of time dilation to extend their lifespans; Brandon's said that Hoid does it to skip years and we've been told that Marasi could use her power as a form of relativistic travel. But yeah, there shouldn't be much 'unintentional' time dilation going on. In fact, the Five Scholars themselves kind of demonstrate the point, since if there was a difference in the passage of time then Vasher would have noticed it during the visit to Roshar where he and Shashara got the idea to create Nightblood, and people on Nalthis would probably have noticed if some of their resident Gods vanished for a long time.

Brandon explicitly singled out the case of the original Radiant as being easier than someone else trying to revive a deadeye. A Radiant and their Spren's souls are merging so whatever damage exists has a natural healing route. Also, Syl wasn't bonded as deeply since she wasn't yet able to manifest as a blade when Kaladin 'killed' her so she might have been less affected; contrast the trauma she experienced when her first Radiant died before the Recreance.

Leras did not violate the agreement though, he pulled a case of exact words on Ati and exploited a loophole the latter had missed. He says so himself in Secret History. Since Oathbringer reveals that all the Shards are bound by the promises they make and are similarly all bound by rules (coming from Tanavast himself) there's no reason to award Honor any special significance in this respect. Leras and Ati choosing to create a world rather than going to separate pre-existing ones can be explained quite easily without any recourse to a third Shard. They might have chosen to create a world together because they could and they wanted something made in the image of Yolen, which couldn't be found on any existing planet. It's also possible they wanted a world where they could exercise more control over things by virtue of their creating and permeating it, instead of having to co-opt whatever Adonalsium had already done, like the other Shards. They could have gone together rather than separately because Ati wanted Ruin's power contained and pairing up with Preservation was the obvious way to carry that out, even if he eventually lost sight of that goal. We already know that Ati was trying to channel his intent towards a less destructive option so.teaming up in a long-term plan is hardly a stretch.

The idea that Edgli was a dragon pre-Ascension comes from a combination of Nalthis having the word in their language (which Brandon has confirmed is not a translation quirk) and maybe some guessing based on the fact that her name sounds kinda exotic. But we've got other Vessels with similarly fanciful names (Tanavast for example) so we shouldn't read too much into that. It's entirely speculative at this point. It's quite likely that at least one of the Vessels was a dragon and thus part of the Shattering, since we know that Frost was involved in some way and we know there was at least one Sho Del Vessel in Uli Da. it's quite likely that at least one of the unknown Vessels (or one of the known ones who aren't confirmed as having been human) was also a dragon to give all three races some representation. Given Bavadin's avatars and Brandon's caution that we shouldn't put too much stock in gender or even human appearance where Autonomy's Vessel is concerned, she's my leading candidate for a dragon among the Vessels we currently know about. On the other point, we really don't know a thing about dragons other than that they're naturally immortal and can shapeshift, so we don't have grounds to speculate on what the prevailing opinions of that race are on the events of the last ten thousand or so years, or if they even have a prevailing opinion. Revise that same sentence to be 'I assume there's a decent amount of humans who are either 'evil' etc...' to see what I mean. The only confirmed dragon we have right now is Frost, unless you count a brief appearance by one in the released chapters of Dragonsteel Prime and one is not a useful sample size.

Welcome to the Shard! Kelsier was running around Scadrial's Physical Realm a decade or so after the Catacendre, which is to say close to three centuries before Lift was born. That alone knocks away a major bit of your theory. We also have Word of Brandon that the weirdness around Lift is due to her going to the Old Magic and asking it for something it wasn't sure how to interpret so it gave her something weird in return. Most of the rest is just a coincidence owing to two characters being in similar professions.