Weltall

Neat idea, but we know that the Shard which Hoid was offered is among the unknown six.

Brandon has said that they could even on Sel but it would require some work.

Perhaps we have given your idea fair consideration and dismissed it because it would require us to ignore what the text plainly says and what Brandon has said outside it when it comes to communicating with the minds of the spiked. Did you think of that possibility before you brushed off our dismissal as some sort of failure on our part? Harmony says point blank that he can communicate with Paalm even though she has a single spike and it's a Trellium one. Brandon has said point blank that other Shards -who consequently have absolutely no connection to the magic system or the metals- can communicate with people who have hemalurgic spikes. It does not matter what the metal is, you have a hole into your soul and so long as it's there Harmony can speak to you whether you want it or not. Paalm having a single Trellium spike meant that he couldn't control her or locate her under most circumstances but he could definitely still communicate with her.

He didn't have to, he was already inside. Kaladin and Bridge Four were on duty to watch the entrance to Dalinar's quarters but they include his sons' rooms as well as his own. Whenever we get a Highstorm vision or the writings come up, somewhere nearby will be a mention that the brothers were in the vicinity.

A bond with a Seon would be treated similarly on Roshar to a Nahel bond but it wouldn't work exactly the same way. We also know that you don't need to be an Elantrian to form that kind of bond that could work on Roshar, it's just the hypothetical in that particular question. Brandon has also hinted that one could form a Nahel-like bond with other Splinters that might do funky things on Roshar but we have no idea exactly how they would manifest. A Seon bond would probabaly not grant broad AonDor powers or Elantrian-hood since the first of these is not directly associated with the latter two on Sel and the location issue would still be a factor. We know Seon can do something with the Aon at their core (and that doing so post-Reod and pre-restoration would have had undesirable results) but we don't know what the effect would be. I imagine the bond's powers would relate in some way to their specific Aon if manifested on Roshar. We also know that a Seon or Skaze could theoretically become something like a Shardblade if they could be pulled more into the Physical Realm, this might be easier to accomplish on Roshar where the separation between the Realms is a bit less than normal. Mind you, there's a lot we don't know about Selish magic in general and crossover applications of magic are an order of magnitude more unknowable than that. Even Khriss doesn't know how Initiation works on Sel as of whenever she wrote the Ars Arcanum so what hope do we mere mortals have? xD

There are indeed theories out there that Autonomy is doing something like that and will eventually upstage Odium as the biggest threat in the Cosmere. Or that one of her 'avatars' goes rogue and assumes that role. Certainly, she'd be an interesting antagonist with her belief that she's acting in the name of the greater good, while we know that Odium's motives are entirely selfish. There's definitely reason to suspect that Autonomy is Shard Behind The Curtain in Mistborn Era 2. Setting that aside, what we know for certain is that Bavadin is much more proactive about searching for Investiture associated with her Shard and generally expanding her influence.

The point is that Sazed says very clearly that he can't 'see' Paalm but he can still communicate with her. All he needs is a single spike, we see him do it all the time. The only thing that the number of spikes normally affects for Sazed is whether or not he can directly control you through the 'hole' that Ruin worked into hemalurgy. Metal piercing the soul, using one of Harmony's magic systems, that's enough to create a link for communication. And we know that other Shards could use that same channel to communicate with someone who's spiked though it wouldn't be as apparent, even without having a direct link to the magic system.

Under normal circumstances, nothing would happen because the Scadrian allomancer wouldn't have any Connection to Honor. A Shard could do things to make their godmetal work in the Metallic Arts but per the above, it won't work by default.

Yeah, he's said that it's not something he's talked about before on top of not being able to talk about it, so it can't be Alcatraz on both counts. xD Just checked on my own and I couldn't see the bars either but a search for text confirmed that they were still there, just not visible. With a bit of poking around I found that 'clicking' on the very top of the page will get the bars to drop down.

Like Calderis said, this is a question we're never going to get an official answer to. The closest we're likely to come is that Brandon has said there are some parallels between the God Beyond and some Gnostic beliefs and that Adonalsium could be mapped reasonably well to the idea of the demiurge. However, there's enough qualifiers there that we can't actually nail down what is the reality for the Cosmere from what might be the reality. For example, Brandon says that the idea of the God Beyond has Gnostic parallels, which doesn't actually tell us that the God Beyond exists or has any particular relationship to anything, just that the belief is similar. Likewise, the demiurge parallels with Adonalsium don't necessarily mean that there's a higher force beyond Adonalsium, just that he may not necessarily have created everything, without reference to what (if anything) 'created' the wider universe. You could of course interpret the statements the other way, but they're vague enough to go either direction. That said, I am on board with the idea that the Iriali are more Cosmere-aware (even if they don't remember the specifics any longer) and I kind of like the idea that Ym's story of the One is their explanation for why the Shattering happened. It's got some neat resonance with various strains of theology (particularly some schools of thought in Judaism) that God created the universe in order to understand Himself.

...seriously? This topic was dead for four years. But no, we know for a fact that a Rosharan year is not equivalent to a Scadrian or Nalthian year. Oh, and welcome to the Shard.

Yeah, there's no evidence that Darksiders can 'see in infrared'. We know the ultraviolet light does some pretty funky things to the look of Darkside per the Arcanum Unbounded essay and we know it takes them a while to adjust to the 'normal' sunlight of Dayside but they don't have different senses and we know people from both halves of the planet can live on the other (Eric/Aarik spending years on Darkside for example) with no issues once they've made that initial adjustment. Darksiders do have something called Skycolors (Shifting Colors in the graphic novel) which according to Baon have either inherent or developed associations; he mentions that violet is 'the color of nobility' and what Scythe has. However, the Darksiders don't see these because of their senses but because of how much UV light there is, just like in the real world if you go somewhere with blacklights.

Evidence suggests otherwise. He doesn't know where Paalm is throughout Shadows of Self but he's able to communicate with her, she's just not responding.

Sazed doesn't even need to be consciously aware that someone with access to his Investiture is somewhere for it to work. Case in point: Hoid using allomancy on Roshar. Still works just fine even without him needing a spike to tell Sazed 'Find Me Here'. There's no reason to assume that Sazed's ability to communicate with spikees works differently in terms of the Spiritual Realm not being location-dependant. Of course, for Kelsier specifically he has a spike so Sazed should always have at least a general idea where he is anyhow.

No doubt he would... Anyhow, in an instance that's very much Brandon being fuzzy on the whole 'soul' thing we have his explanation for why Returned count as Cognitive Shadows. Now, this gets fuzzy because is memory a Cognitive thing or is it a Spiritual one? If it's the latter, the fact that Kelsier doesn't notice any change memory-wise from the process of becoming saturated with the Investiture from the Well would suggest that it's the same soul, just with extra Investiture. Think of it as Kelsier's Soul Plus. Given how Cosmere healing works by essentially forcing your Spiritual ideal into your Cognitive/Physical aspects (with the former acting as a potential block at times, like Kaladin's brands) the appearance of Kelsier as the Sovereign also suggests that it's his original Spiritual template at work, with the associated scars and everything. In the thought exercise of having a soul saturated with different Investiture, I don't think it would make a huge difference. We know that it wasn't the Well itself that was important but the huge amount of Investiture it represented and another Perpendicularity could have been used in the same way, so if he'd somehow been able to take a dip in, say, Cultivation's Perpendicularity it shouldn't have changed Kelsier by that much. Given the issues he had serving as a temporary Vessel, it's clear that being saturated with Preservation-flavored Investiture to become a Cognitive Shadow didn't help him either Ascend (he needed the Ire Connection orb) or keep that power from fighting against him and his tendency towards Ruin-ness.

As mentioned, we already know that 'Trellium' is from a Shard we knew about at the time the metal first appeared. That probably rules out Ambition since we'd seen Threnody but had no idea it used to be associated with a Shard (and Brandon had actually said it wasn't for a while) which leaves us a strictly defined pool of suspects. The evidence points most strongly to Autonomy, with various reasons to suspect that it's not Odium (or if he's involved, it's only indirectly) with the other Shards all being different shades of unlikely or impossible. And yes, there are definitely sixteen Shards. Brandon has said it repeatedly, Khriss has said it in-universe as well and so has Hoid, who was there when the Shattering happened. I think they're in a position to know. xD PS. Double-posting is frowned upon. Next time just edit your most recent post.

Welcome to the Shard! I'm pretty sure the ultimate 'power couple' in the series historically was Honor/Cultivation. We know their relationship was romantic and it's hard to get more powerful than two Shards. xD

Well, if he did it would have been accounted-for back when he was sane since that's when he set everything in motion. But I don't think that it's really a factor since Brandon has said that Shardic Intent is not internally directed in that way.

Kelsier was strongly Connected to Ruin because he's a Scadrian, he's literally made of a mix of Preservation and Ruin's Investiture and he just happens to lean very heavily in the latter direction. Nightblood on the other hand is literally made of Endowment's Investiture (the Breaths that went into the Awakening) and thus has no connection to Ruin's Investiture. There may be a tiny bit of Connection due to Nightblood being very good at Ruining thing in same way that there's a little bit of Preservation everywhere in the Cosmere, but that's not something that would have a serious impact on anything. The Shards can't influence everything just because they embody universal forces.

Leras himself tells us that even Shards have a hard time distinguishing what will happen or is most likely to happen from the nearly infinite number of things that might happen. We have plenty of evidence that when two individuals with future-sight go up against one another they can interfere with each other's power to the point that it becomes effectively useless, as a general Cosmere mechanic. With Preservation being demonstrably better at seeing the future than Ruin, it's likely that the latter either never saw any version of the future in which he died or it was such an unlikely outcome that he dismissed it. Preservation for his part might well have foreseen the possibility (consider the twist in the wording of the Terris prophecies that pointed right to Sazed in the end) and accepted that outcome as the best possible result. It's just that by the time we see Leras directly, he's so far gone that he can't remember exactly what his plan was and is trusting that he set everything up properly while he was still lucid

While storing health it would definitely be easier to catch one of the illnesses that grant magic on Ashyn, since you've got an intentionally weakened immune system. I was going to say something about how I don't think that F-Nicrosil could necessarily store the resulting power because you get it from a bond with the disease vector (as part of their survival strategy) and we know that bond-based magics are trickier to mess with when it comes to things like hemalurgy. Then I saw this: Given that Surgebinding could hypothetically be stored with F-Nicrosil, it looks like it would indeed be possible to do the same for Ashyn's magic. So, kudos for coming up with a clever 'hack'.

You think maybe Yesteel was feeding Yarda information? We know he would have gotten involved on the side of Idris had war broken out and it would have ended very badly for everyone, so it's not impossible that he's already involved. And Yesteel was officially better at sneaking than Vasher, so maybe he fed a few tips to a potential asset. I think you might be the first person to wonder about this; a quick Arcanum check shows no questions asked about either of them and no Words of Brandon at all outside the annotations.

@Pagerunner Thanks for the info on the Liar situation and for clearing things up for me. I was mainly thinking of a current topic in Cosmere Discussion on the Shattering but thought it would be good to be sure for future reference as well.

That's not how magic in the Cosmere manifests. While the Shards have some control over how their magic works, they don't get to design their magic. Honor didn't decide which Surges got paired together, it was a natural part of Roshar when he arrived. The whole thing with spren forming symbiotic bonds, the Parsh and so on were there before the Shards existed. Magic on Roshar is all about these bonds, the Shards can't choose to make it form-based. Also, Odium would not try stuffing any other Shard's Investiture into the Cognitive Realm like he did D&D. Brandon has said that what resulted from that was something Odium did not want to happen, but he was inexperienced at the whole 'Shard murdering' thing so he didn't know better at the time, and what he's done since is 'better' from his perspective.

Breath does not have an associated feruchemical 'ability' because it's from a completely different magic system. Anyone can receive Breath and use it because it keys itself to your Identity. It's how you can give Breath away or receive it from others and it's how someone not from Nalthis like Hoid can have Breath. What you may be thinking of is stealing Identity via hemalurgy which could in theory allow you to retrieve Breaths from an Awakened object. Brandon has implied that if you could manipulate your Identity properly something like this could be possible but that would be difficult to do. He also discussed it in the context of a feruchemist messing with their Identity (and this was before Bands of Mourning gave us some ideas of how F-Aluminum works in practice) as opposed to a hemalurgist. Normally someone can access another person's powers via hemalurgy because they're stealling the ability to use those powers, which rips away the right bit of Identity as part of it. Whether you could spike enough Identity out of an Awakener to have their Breaths recognize you as their owner (as opposed to 'a stranger with a bit of their owner's Identity Frankenstein's Monster'd onto them') is another matter. And even if all of that could be done properly, you'd still need the spiked person to have Awakened objects and not retrieved the Breaths to get any possible benefit out of this.