Weltall

Just in case you haven't seen it, Brandon has cautioned us against reading too much into his old statement about something that opposed Adonalsium and is still around. It's entirely possible that this 'force' was nothing more than the sixteen Vessels and anyone else who may have assisted them. Coppermind apparently hasn't yet been updated accordingly. In addition the various statements Brandon has made about the 'anti-Adonalsium weapon' when viewed in the light of the above WoB seem to support the idea that the opposing force was indeed the Vessels and nothing else. It doesn't mean that there isn't/wasn't some possible external threat that might have been a motivation for the Shattering but we can't use the older statement to assume that there was an external threat and that it was on Adonalsium's power level.

I was wondering if I could get some clarity on what's considered acceptable for discussing the material from the Liar of Partinel excerpts that were available for a time but seem to have been taken down. Specifically, the background worldbuilding related to fainlife and what was described about it. I know it's noncanonical and I'd be using the appropriate caveats but I wanted to know if it's okay to discuss any specifics and if so, whether it would be acceptable in a Cosmere Discussion topic or would need to go in the Unpublished Works board. Thanks.

It's a second ecosystem that apparently has taken over parts of Yolen and which isn't compatible with the original ecology. There's a WoB where Brandon discussed his intentions for the project that became Liar of Partinel which give some information. At the time Brandon wrote that, his intention was that humanity was beset by the appearance of fainlife but eventually found a way to confine it to an extent, and he wrote Liar in part to show what things were like when fainlife appeared. By the time of Dragonsteel Prime, fainlife isn't a pressing threat the way it once was. At least, that's how it appears in that WoB and the Shattered Plains excerpts we have but of course it's subject to change. I'm not sure exactly how much is kosher to talk about, given that the sample chapters from Liar are the only place we've had fainlife described in any sort of detail and they're gone so it's no longer 'publicly available' on top of the whole thing being noncanonical. EDIT: Pagerunner clarified this and said the chapters weren't taken down, they're just temporarily unavailable due to some behind the scenes server work. And also that it's okay to discuss what's in them here. Spoil-tagged on the grounds of it not being strictly canonical and subject to change.

Yeah, the only canonical mention of it is in Arcanum Unbounded where Khriss mentions it in the essay on Scadrial (noting that its ecosystem was copied from the 'non-fain parts' of Yolen. We have some ideas what it's like from the (now vanished) Liar of Partinel excerpts, the Shattered Plains excerpts from Dragonsteel Prime and the recent 'Traveler' snippet Brandon read, but none of it is definitely canonical. It's basically a second ecosystem that competes with the 'normal' environment of Yolen.

There's actual debate in-universe on what actually constitutes a Dawncity so they're clearly not obvious. Also, Elantris works as it does because the magic of Sel is form-based. Rosharan magic appears to be bond-based so the alleged symmetry of a Dawncity, or of the glyphs, or of 'holy' names do not serve as a conduit to power on Roshar in the same way than an Aon or a properly carved Soulstamp do on Sel.

Given that the Investiture that makes his Lashings possible flows from the Spiritual Realm where causality is wonky, it's entirely possible that his continuing perception does affect things that he's already done.

All good options. We've got an implication from Brandon that the Shards can be seen as supercharged versions of Splinters, at least for purposes of how Cosmere immortality can work, so it's possible they share the restriction that Splinters have a hard time leaving the Physical/Cognitive 'zone' where they're Invested. That would mainly combine ideas 2 and 4 with a bit of 3, so maybe it's possible for them to leave but they don't know how or it would entail some sacrifice they're unwilling to make. I suspect that like many questions, this one could hinge on why the Shattering happened in the first place. If for example there was something outside the Cosmere that looks for Investiture and Adonalsium was Shattered to disperse that power and make the Cosmere less noticeable (kind of a spin on the Bondsmagi rationale from the Gentleman Bastard stories) then you might have some fear at work. Not sure this is at all where Brandon's going since the most obvious candidate for some 'threat' right now is fainlife and it's possible that one or more of the Vesses is fain. Actually, if the Sho Del as a race are considered fainlife (not confirmed but it kinda sounds that way from the Dragonsteel Prime excerpts if that much is still canon) then we know Ambition at least was held by a fain Vessel. Anyhow, might be a factor but I'm not so sure. One other thought that sort of stems from ideas 1 and 7 is that the Shards can leave with no difficulty but there's so much they can do within the Cosmere that none of them have exhausted the possibilities there yet, so they haven't wanted to take that step. We know Adonalsium has been tinkering on some if not all of the worlds (Roshar and Taldain especially) so it's possible that the Shards are so fascinated by what Uncle Andy was doing that they're staying in his old neighborhood and trying to figure out what his Master Plan might have been. Frost at least seems to think that such a plan existed so some of the Vessels might share that belief.

@Ixthos@RShara Not only has Brandon already 'done that' with Wheel of Time (for a given value, given that he was working within Jordan's universe) but even more to the point, that's exactly how the Reckoners works and by extension, its wider multiverse. Brandon's not going to repeat his own ending that blatantly. Welcome to the Shard! Like RShara said, Adonalsium is very definitely dead. People have asked Brandon what would happen if someone were to hold all sixteen Shards at once and he's variously said 'who knows if that's possible', that there are people in universe who believe it is possible and others who believe that it isn't and people shouldn't try, and even if someone did it the end result would not be the same as Adonalsium.

Investiture seeks sapience so it probably would be impossible for a non-sapient creature to Ascend in the first place, or if you could somehow force the pairing the Shard would develop sapience of its own and eventually ditch the Vessel that can't do anything for it. We know Shards can fight against their Vessel (see: Secret History) so something similar would probably happen here.

Aside from Brandon not having all the dates nailed down as he's writing the books (it took him a while to nail down whether White Sand or Elantris happened first and for a while he had Mistborn Era 2 happening before Stormlight Archive rather than in between the two halves of it) another thing to keep in mind is that Brandon's intention with the books is that they be readable by people with no knowledge of the big picture, as self-standing works. There's increasing amounts of crossover but it's still possible so far to read, say, Stormlight Archive without needing to know who Zahel really is, or what all the letters in the epigraphs are talking about in order to appreciate the main plot. Putting some kind of absolute date at the start of each book would break that. Here's a WoB where he talks about this. Take a look at how he describes Awakening to Vivenna, he's clearly applying the scientific method to his local magic system, uses precise terminology and knows far more about how the magic works and what you can do with it than almost every other character. His knowledge of other worlds is effectively invisible in Warbreaker; you need Words of Brandon for example to confirm that he and Shashara made Nightblood in imitation of a Shardblade after wordlhopping to Roshar. But even confined to just the one book, it's obvious that he understands how and why Awakening works the way it does on a deeper level than other characters.

Well, the entire first half at least. We know he leaves at some point before the series ends because he's been hanging around Scadrial during the events of Mistborn Era 2 which happens between the halves of Stormlight Archive.

So... Peter is actually the God Beyond and Brandon is merely the mouthpiece He uses to communicate with us? It all makes sense!

Aluminum is a Cosmere-wide Investiture sink, a fact that is easy to discover for a worldhopper and Hoid of course knows almost everything. Given that he's the best part of ten thousand years old (he's literally the second-oldest individual in the series) it really shouldn't surprise you that he knows a few tricks. As mentioned... why is this surprising to you? Worldhoppers by definition know more about Realmatics and the 'big picture' of the Cosmere than almost anyone born and raised on a single planet. Scadrial during Era 1? Repressive theocracy whose entire system was designed to reinforce that the Lord Ruler was God and there was nothing above him. Nobody is going to be learning about the inner workings of the Cosmere under that system and as a bonus, both Perpendicularities are in regions he controls. There was some interstellar traffic through Pits and Rashek knew about it and allowed it, but it didn't interfere with his rule so it was okay. But for most people, there was never a chance to learn more. Roshar? It used to be more Cosmere-aware but the Desolations did a very good job of destroying whatever knowledge they had, and we've evidence that Odium has taken steps to ensure that as much knowledge is lost as possible. Taldain? Literally interdicted from the rest of the Cosmere by Autonomy. Nalthis actually was pretty close to greater Realmatic awareness during the time of the Five Scholars (who did worldhop) which explains why Vasher knows as much as he does. To get specific here: - The Ghostbloods are a worldhopping group and have actually been to multiple worlds (Mraize has a trophy from Yolen for crying out loud) and we know for a fact that she was born in Silverlight and used to be part of the Seventeenth Shard, so she's an obvious candidate for knowing lots of things (mind you, she's not the leader of the organization either). - Vasher was a scholar and helped create his own Shardblade out of a completely different magic system so of course he's going to know a few things. And he's about six hundred years old and a Returned so he's got massive advantages when it comes to speed, strength and how much time he's had to learn how to fight. - Khriss is from the chronologically earliest story so far (White Sand) which going by Brandon's timeline makes her at least a thousand years old and her job is researching magic systems. Ergo, she's had time to work out the underpinnings of Cosmere magics and talk to people who know more than she does on any particular aspects of it, so of course she's well informed. We even see her grilling Wax in Bands of Mourning to increase her knowledge of how A-Steel/F-Iron interact. - Rosharan scholars probably did know more about their magic than Khriss... at some point before the Recreance happened and there were no more Surgebinders for thousands of years. As mentioned, Odium seems to have standing orders to his forces to destroy sources of knowledge. They're only just now starting to rediscover what they lost long ago and they're having to do it all by trial and error. In the modern world, we take having ready access to knowledge for granted. We've got the internet that can be accessed from almost anywhere and you can look up just about everything on it. For anything that's not digitized we have huge libraries and with the exception of individual manuscripts and books we have redundant copies of everything. Try to envision a world where that's not the case and books had to be copied by hand. If you only have one copy and it's lost, that knowledge is gone forever. It's happened on Earth with any number of works that we know existed but no copy has survived, so we only know about it from other writers talking about the work, or excerpts that someone else included in their work which we can study. For example, we know that Aristotle wrote a second volume of his Poetics which hasn't survived. Sophocles wrote over a hundred plays and we only have seven intact. Most of Zoroastrianism's Avesta texts are lost, there's a Confucian treatise on music that scholars have been bemoaning the loss of for two thousand years, only a few Maya codices survive etc. etc. That's not even scratching the surface of how many works have been lost to us. Loss of knowlege can happen and it's only exacerbated in the Cosmere with everything that's going on. Worldhoppers have the massive advantage of being able to go from world to world (and being around long enough to do so at multiple points in any planet's history) and bring back knowledge to a safe location where it can be preserved, so they aren't subject to the same risk of losing everything. For the most part, the characters are using some form of Connection manipulation to speak the local languages. Whenever you see 'Zahel' making a weird color metaphor for example, it's him trying to say something that doesn't have an equivalent in Alethi so the magic is translating it literally. Hoid using the word 'Coin' is another example of this. Brandon discusses the workings of this system here and mentions that worldhoppers who actually learn the local language(s) are far less likely to exhibit this sort of thing. Galladon's speech pattern in the Purelake interlude is another example. That said, you're right that a lot of worldhoppers (and especially members of the Seventeenth Shard) do have access to knowledge and training that most people do not.

As mentioned, the ending of the entire series is hidden somewhere in WoK or WoR, so it's highly unlikely to be something we learned at the end of the very first book.

They're well aware he changes his appearance and while they don't necessarily have the power to restrain Hoid for very long if he really doesn't want to be restrained (but bear in mind, two of the people actively looking for him were professional soldiers beforehand) there's also a slight issue on Hoid's part: He is incapable of even thinking about causing physical harm without being potentially incapacitated. On the general recruitment question, pretty much the only things we know for certain are that they do have specific criteria for membership but being Invested isn't one of them.

As noted, a spren can't change into anything requiring multiple parts without getting their soul split into pieces and they wouldn't like that very much, so things like guns are right out. Even bows require at least two parts (three once you include the arrow) and we know that historical Radiants who were archers carried separate bowstrings and arrows. However, a 'Fabrial Gun' seems like it's the sort of thing that could be developed eventually. We know that all of the Surges can be replicated mechanically So, imagine a fabrial shaped like a hollow tube that can carefully manipulate Gravitation to perform a Basic Lashing on an object placed within it, launching that object really really fast out the open end of the tube. What do you have? Magical railgun.

Yeah, I don't think that the shape-changing has anything to do with the godmetal alloy ratios, it's because a 'normal' Shardblade is a bit of sapient Investiture that can assume Physical form while an Honorblade was created to be a sword, doesn't have a mind of its own and is thus stuck in the shape it was initially created in.

Welcome to the Shard! Please watch out for anyone offering you Hemalurgic Cookies or requesting you give them your Breath. Also... next time you miiiiight want to check how long a topic has been dead before posting in it. Just sayin'. xD

Yeah, Star Wars takes place in a properly large galaxy and while the 'they could be on other side of the galaxy by now' thing might have been a slight exaggeration, their ships clearly travel at mind-boggling speeds. I did some quick guesstimates of travel time based on figures from Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha to get those numbers but I probably underestimated the Star Wars figure just a bit. So yeah, my figure was merely ridiculously fast, as opposed to ludicrously fast. xD

As mentioned, magic was still available and while we have no idea how the Shattering actually happened we can safely assume that equal power is not required. Consider that all the Shards began equal in power but Odium has managed to kill four of them (including instances where he had two Shards to contend with and we know Cultivation wasn't sitting idle while Odium went after Honor) and Brandon has said that he would beat Harmony in a fight despite the latter being literally twice as powerful as him. So as long as the Vessels had enough power and Adonalsium had some vulnerability, there's no contradiction in the Vessels being able to kill him. As for why Adonalsium would have granted this power, he probably didn't have a choice. Brandon has said that a Shard can't refuse to fuel someone's magic once they have it. They can interfere in certain ways but they can't just say 'No, I'm not going to let you use this power at all'. Adonalsium would probably have the exact same restriction. In other words, this isn't like magic in Slayers where one character found out the hard way that you literally can't use offensive magic against the entity that empowers a given spell and expect it to work. Interesting idea but we know from Word of Brandon that all of the Vessels were from Yolen and the planet was technologically inferior to all of the worlds we've seen so far. Brandon has described Yolen during the time of Dragonsteel Prime as being essentially Bronze Age in its development and the sample chapters we've seen support this, with humans largely using bronze and only elite troops having access to steel, though the Sho Del make more use of it. Given that the Cosmere is a dwarf galaxy (star cluster might be a more precise term given the apparent size, but the former's what Brandon uses) any expansion centered around Yolen wouldn't have noticeable effects on the rest of the universe within anything remotely approaching the timeframe of the series. And this is your random astronomy throught for the day. xD

The idea that Hoid might be trying to reassemble Adonalsium is a fairly common one and Brandon has said that it certainly looks like that's what's going on (which doesn't mean that it actually is what he's doing) but we also have some Words of Brandon that even if you could put all sixteen Shards back together with a single Vessel, what you ended up with would not necessarily be whatever Adonalsium was before the Shattering and certainly wouldn't be the original entity reborn. Interesting idea about Adonalsium possibly having been split before but it doesn't fit with what we've been told of the big picture so far (especially pre-Shattering magic) and there's a WoB about how combined Shards would be almost impossible to split apart into anything other than the original ones, which taken with Brandon's statements that Adonalsium could have Shattered in other ways seems to indicate that it hasn't happened before, or else what we saw would likely be the only possible way that the power could have split.

Brandon's gone back and forth on whether a kandra and a human could have a baby and if so, how that would work (largely it seems because he's playing around with ideas involving DNA testing) and hasn't canonized that, but for that to be possible you'd need the kandra to imitate the relevant set of human reproductive organs. Since kandra are not a naturally reproducing species (all new ones were 'made' by giving blessings to mistwraiths which do reproduce... somehow) for a pair of them to reproduce they'd probably have to do the same thing and replicate human organs. The end result might be a human child with some really weird sDNA or it might not be possible at all.

It does indeed appear to be in some way special to Leras (possibly it's 'special' in some broader sense, possibly it's just sentimental attachment on his part) but all questions Brandon has been asked about it have ended in a RAFO. As for the mechanics of the stabbing, Shards are able to manifest 'bodies' which can interact directly with the Physical Realm owing to their power to influence all three Realms. Here's a WoB discussing it, warning that it contains an Oathbringer spoiler.

The simple answer is 'We don't know' and we probably won't until Brandon writes Dragonsteel. What we do know is that the Intents were aspects of Adonalsium that were taken from him, that who got what Shard was not random and that it's plausible that there could have been different Intents but any questions about that are met with a RAFO. Also, we know that Hoid was offered a Shard which was ultimately taken by someone else and it is not the Shard that he might be tempted by in the present day under the right circumstances. It's possible that the Shard which Hoid was offered is the same mystery Shard that Brandon would be tempted by. The way that Hoid could be offered a Shard of a specific Intent and refuse suggests that there's more to how Adonalsium was divided than the personalities of the sixteen Vessels. And we have Frost's implication that Rayse was in some way driven to take Odium by the others.

Yeah, the best we can hope for in the way of clues is that maybe Hoid will sneak something into one of his seemingly random digressions about art or language (whether we'd recognize it as significant is another story, even with our penchant for sifting everything he says with a fine sieve and looking at it backwards, forwards, upside-down and widdershins) through which we can glean some kernel of understanding. Frost's not likely to tell us anything and the Vessels are going to drop minor hints at best. OB spoiler For some reason I'd got it into my head that Brandon was going to write Mistborn Era 4, then Dragonsteel but it appears I was wrong. Not sure where that came from, weird. Anyways, we're probably going to get very little by way of solid information on the reason(s) for the Shattering until Brandon settles down to actually write the story of the event and everything leading up to it.