Weltall

Duralumin+Bendalloy/Cadmium would probably do the same thing we see with the Physical/Mental metals: All that power in a compressed timespan. Hypothetically, let's say that Marasi and Wayne get access A-Duralumin through some unsealed metalminds and try to do their thing, and let's assume they both have enough to compress ten minutes of time. When Marasi tries, she'd likely compress time so that those ten minutes pass in the blink of an eye, instead of taking some number of seconds of relative time. When Wayne tries to do the same thing, it would be wierd because the enhanced burn speed would generally take away the advantage of A-Bendalloy, that you have time to react to the slowing down of time outside the bubble, and he would experience those ten minutes of compressed time in an instant. On an individual basis, it seems the most obvious use of Duralumin+Bendalloy would be to age faster, which doesn't seem that helpful. However, Brandon's said that mechanical applications of the Metallic Arts will be able to do very complex things, so it's quite possible that 'mechanical bendalloy' is indeed involved in FTL, with or without duralumin. Of course, Brandon's been asked this on occasion and RAFOd it every time. xD Duralumin+Electrum would probably work the same way as with atium, letting you push the shadows out a little further until you eventually break through and peek into the Spiritual Realm. And then your brain might break since A-Electrum doesn't provide the same enhanced mental processing speed. But Brandon's said that it's definitely possible.

Adding to what @The One Who Connects said about why we can be fairly confident that Devotion or Dominion was the first Shard to be killed, we have a recent WoB that the reason why those Shards' power was stuffed into the Cognitive Realm is because Odium was inexperienced at the whole Shard Murdering thing when he went after them.

We're assuming he forms a Nahel Bond since that's certainly what he looks like he's doing. But yes, making that reasonable assumption Hoid would be bound to the system until either the bond is broken or he figures out how to get the spren offworld. Given that Hoid clearly knows way more about the underpinnings of the Cosmere than we do, he probably knows exactly what he needs to do, if he intends to do it. We know he leaves Roshar for Scadrial during the events of Mistborn Era 2, so by then he's either gotten his spren offworld or he's no longer bonded to it. @The Harlem Worldhoppers I'm not sure it's that easy because all Splinters are fundamentally connected to the Physical/Cognitive 'zone' where they originate and all of them are noted to have trouble leaving. This includes the Returned who are fundamentally bonded to the Divine Breath that's tied down to Nalthis to the point that they'll die (again) if it's removed. Brandon has explicitly pointed out Vasher as an example of someone who's learned the trick to get around this issue but the fact that he needs to do whatever it is at all indicates that a Radiant and their spren shoud also have to do this trick. And Brandon has said that it's hard for a Radiant to get offworld, not just 'a Radiant who hasn't sworn all their Ideals' so I doubt that he intends the trick to be that easy.

Nope, Hoid won't get any resonance perks. Brandon has likened the effect to constructive interference in physics where the 'waves' of each magic system combine and the effect is your special perk. However, if you have too many magic systems, they overpower the subtle effect that leads to the resonances and you don't get any. Given this, there's no possible way that Hoid gets any resonance effects. I suspect that you'd get a resonance even if the magic systems come from different Shards. There's not necessarily an obvious relationship between the powers and the perks from the examples we've seen; Kaladin's powers to alter gravity and atmospheric pressure... make his squires stronger than normal and let him have more of them. So if you had something like a Coinshot with a few Breaths (possibly even a Radiant with a single allomantic or feruchemical power, if three aren't 'too many') I imagine they'd get a resonance of some kind, but we'd be hard-pressed to guess what it might be. That these resonances wouldn't be 'natural' shouldn't be an issue, since we already know that can be made to happen with hemalurgy and Khriss' comments about it in the Ars Arcanum.

Ha! Nice first post, welcome to the Shard! Now, don't go telling Kelsier this observation, he's already got enough self-importance for ten ordinary men.

She may liken a city to a living thing but that's not the same as a city being a living thing. Urithiru was not an independently living city, it was a city that 'lived' when it was powered by a big honking whack of sapient Investiture called the Sibling. In other words, an entity separate from the city which existed before it was created and which continues to exist in some form independent of Urithiru. The Shards did not 'land' anywhere per se, they traveled to their current locations independently. Roshar was created directly by Adonalsium which is why the supercontinent looks the way it does. Given what Oathbringer revealed, it's likely that any Dawncities also predated the arrival of the Shards. The idea that Adonalsium was a sort of super-pattern and all the Shards are lesser examples stops making a lot of sense when you broaden your scope to those worlds that do not have form-based magic or anything resembling Roshar and its love for symmetry. Nalthis doesn't have anything similar, Scadrial doesn't have anything similar and if Taldain or Threnody does, we haven't seen any evidence of it yet. Brandon has also said that Selish magic doesn't interact well with other worlds in the context of whether you could make something similar to Aons based on cymatics, though it's not obvious whether he was just thinking of the usual problem of Selish Investiture's range limitation or if he was broadening it to other applications. But if he was thinking of the latter, it would be a point against your super-pattern theory. Brandon uses all sorts of other metaphysical constructs in his writing. There's a lot of Shinto in the nature of the spren on Roshar for example, and Sel has a lot of dualist elements derived from Chinese metaphysics, the idea of the God Beyond is explicity drawn from Gnosticism and so on. While this is an interesting look at LDS metaphysics and we know that Brandon weaves some of that into his writing, I'm not entirely sure how or why you think this supports your idea that Adonalsium was a city.

Given that atium (and other visually-oriented metals like A-Gold) can be used by the blind, I don't think that being unable to see the atium shadow because it's showing something behind you is actually a limitation. This is a valid theory and fits with the examples we've seen in Mistborn where two people burning atium (or one burning electrum as a counter) will confuse the future-sight because they're both seeing the future, reacting to it and creating so many potential paths that reading what actually will happen becomes impossible.

FYI, double (or triple) posting is frowned upon. You can edit your posts to add additional content. Yes, the speech pattern is meant to be a hint, as is the fact that the writer is clearly unaware of certain things that the authors of the other two letters are familiar with. And Harmony knows that Kelsier is still around and he's aware of the current state of the Southern Scadrians (he mentions them to Wax in Shadows of Self before they finally appeared in Bands of Mourning) so yeah, he knows at least something of what Kel has been up to. EDIT: Ninja'd while typing by RSHara saying everyhing I did, more concisely. xD

Brandon has said that Hoid trying to reassemble Adonalsium is a valid theory and what the books make it look like he's up to. Which is not the same as saying that it actually is what Hoid is up to. Given that Hoid's background isn't going to be explored until Liar of Partinel/Dragonsteel and that's the very last major project Brandon plans to write, we're not going to get answers for a long time.

I've got to agree with Brandon's own assessment (and in-universe, Hoid's) and say Scadrial Era 2, or even further in the future if I could because I imagine that in between 2 and 3 you'd get a 'Jazzpunk' kind of setting and that would be awesome to live in. And I figure the further ahead in Scadrial's timeline I can push it, the more likely it is that unsealed metalminds become widely enough available to get access to magic through them. And that I could get instant noodles.

Nope! Brandon has said that if you were to ask Khriss in-universe even she wouldn't know and he hasn't divulged it to us out of universe of course. The Watsonian explanation has to do with Brandon wanting a metal for Mistborn that would have been rare, which explains why it's aluminum that's the Investiture-eater and not something else, but why aluminum has this property across the Cosmere is a mystery..

Yeah, Brandon has said that elemental magic is such a common trope that it would be hard to make it fresh. He's done this sort of thing in Reckoners where he can bend reality a lot more and he doesn't have to worry about the users being overpowered; they're Epics so they're supposed to be overpowered relative to normal humans and they're antagonists so it's less of a challenge to write them. I could envision some water-manipulating magic in the Cosmere under the right circumstances but we haven't seen any examples of it so far. Well, unless you count the potions that Forton makes in Elantris which Brandon has confirmed are Invested. It's not water manipulation per se but it's Invested liquid so... kinda similar.

Or perhaps you could give a capsule summary since it's your argument? Okay, granting the idea of a city as a living thing, how does a city hate? How does a city have an independent will to bind things with oaths? How does a city have ambition? And why does everyone refer to Adonalsium as 'him' if it was a city? I know people anthropomorphize ships among other things but you don't hear people calling cities that way. Nazh in Secret History even says that the only real qualification the Vessels had to become gods was that they were "conniving enough to murder the guy who had the job before". If Adonalsium was a place, that would make no sense and Khriss would surely have mentioned something about it, if only as a rumor she'd heard. Going to the whole New Jerusalem parallel, even there a distinction is drawn between the city that is the place of God on Earth and the God itself. Adonalsium may well have had some significant location on Yolen (we don't know nearly enough about the planet to say of course) but that doesn't mean that he was the location.

Lots more here and a nifty spreadsheet collecting them:

On the question of why beads and if it's that way everywhere, the answers are 'We don't know for sure' and 'No'. There is a connection between the Physical world and how that world appears in the Cognitive Realm but Brandon has said that at times it works in odd ways and he RAFO'd a question about why Roshar's Cognitive zone manifests as the glass beads. We've also seen what Scadrial looks like in the Cognitive and while it has the same inversion of solid land/water that Roshar does, instead of beads you see mists. Brandon has also implied that the solid/fluid inversion is not a universal thing and there are places where it may not happen. So yeah, there's a lot we don't understand about the Cognitive Realm. No doubt it will all make sense to us in, oh... about twenty years or so. xD For humans who have entered the Cognitive Realm, time apparently passes normally. There's a city that exists entirely in the Cognitive Realm called Silverlight (we've never seen it and almost everything we know comes from things Brandon has told us outside the books) and that people are born, can live their whole lives and die there. So clearly, people still age. We do know there are ways to extend your lifespan and a lot of people who are known to live (or at least spend a lot of time in) Silverlight use it, but we don't know exactly how they do it yet. Spren are normally unkillable in the conventional sense (Syl remarks at one point that to her, humans are weird because of how they die).though this isn't because they're so connected to the Cognitive Realm per se but because they're Investiture (the technical term for all the 'magic' in the Cosmere) that has become sapient and that's eternal by definition. Spren and other forms of sapient Investiture can have their personalities destroyed in certain ways but they're very hard to truly kill. That said, we have evidence that it's possible, just very difficult and not something that most people are going to be able to do.

@Wandering Investor Yeah, I think that's basically the idea. Saying multiple Intents could cancel out is definitely imprecise but having some other Intent along with Odium could channel that hatred towards a potentially more constructive use. This is pretty much what Frost says when he remarks that Odium is God's hatred, separated from the virtues that once gave it context.

FYI, the in-universe term among the Cosmere-aware for the overarching mechanism is Initiation, which Khriss uses in the 10th Anniversary edition of Elantris' Ars Arcanum.

Wyndle mentions spren that became bows in Edgedancer and his recollection is that they became the bow and the Radiant had to carry string and arrows separately. We also have evidence that they can indeed take the form of hammers (and if they can do that, a mace shouldn't be a problem either) so they should be able to take the form of just about any weapon the Radiant can envision, within certain size limitations and the understanding that the weapon can't contain multiple parts. Brandon has said that a spren could transform into two weapons, or a weapon with two conected pieces, but this would require splitting the soul of the spren and they wouldn't like that at all. As RShara mentioned, Shardblades are heavily Invested to the point that the can be thought of as 'full' and you can't stuff any more Investiture into them, so using them as hemalurgic spikes is a non-starter. Not to mention that since they cut the soul, you'd have issues actually ripping off the bit of soul you're trying to spike intact rather than damaging it. And the metal of a Shardblade can't be burned by an allomancer normally, the same as any non-Scadrian godmetal. To make them viable, the allomancer would have to either create the necessary Connection to the foreign Shard or the Shard itself would have to do something to make it work.

Assuming no partial Lashings and thus no gravity pulling him 'down' then in theory he could reach orbit that way (provided he angles it so his path doesn't intersect a highstorm or any mountains or the like) but it would be far less efficient than simply going straight up. Though it's also possible there's a perception filter in place and a surgebinder will actually circle the planet because they think they should, unless they make a conscious effort.

@ScarletSabre I found two WoBs on Arcanum, there may be some not there yet which I'm unaware of. But what I found was a RAFO when asked if people would call his knife a Shardblade and another RAFO where someone asked about a hypothetical test that could be performed on it which I assume is a reference to the unpublished Dragonsteel Prime and my guess is it would indicate the presence of the titular metal. RAFOs being what they are though, it's entirely possible that there's nothing 'special' about the knife and Leras is just sentimentially attached to it for personal reasons. We're probably going to have to wait until Dragonsteel gets published to find out what significance it had to him.

We don't know exactly what Adonalsium was, whether a force, a being or perhaps a force that became sapient (which Investiture will do if left alone, and Adonalsium was the source of all the Investiture in the Cosmere) but we do know that Adonalsium was something capable of being murdered. Khriss and Nazh explain the Shattering in those terms and Brandon has said quite clearly that Adonlsium was Shattered because he was killed. You can't 'kill' a city. We also know that the sixteen Shards each represent not just a sixteenth of Adonalsium's power but an aspect of his personality. It's a neat idea but I think it's a lot simpler to go with the Doylist explanation that Brandon just likes writing about cities for why they're so prominent in all his works, not just the Cosmere ones.

I don't think that anyone is suggesting that it's impossible for Harmony to fight Odium if he had to (he's clearly working against whatever 'Trell' is doing in BoM) but that the outcome of the fight would not be nearly as certain as the raw power of the parties might suggest, per the WoB above. Also worth remembering in general is that the Intents are not self-directed, so 'Harmony acting to Preserve himself' is not really an argument. Harmony acting to preserve Scadrial if it were attacked would be a different matter.

Given that Leras is something like ten thousand years old, he's had a lot of time to work up sentimental attachments to things. Just because the knife is special to him in some way says nothing about Investiture tending towards manifesting in the form of weapons. For all we know, he loves that knife because some friend or family member gave it to him long long ago, or he made it himself and it's consequently significant to him. You could even combine that with another theory and speculate that the knife (or the blade at least) was made by Leras' will out of dragonsteel and so doubly significant to him. Also, consider how much godmetal we've seen and how all of that only represents a tiny fraction of the power of the associated Shard(s). Adonalsium was all the Investiture everywhere in the Cosmere. That would be a very big sword indeed. Hmm, there's a philosophical connundrum for you: Can Adonalsium make a sword so large that He can't lift it?

Very weird, I would imagine. We know that any pair of Shards could theoretically combine but that some of them would place a lot of pressure on the Vessel. A combination of three Shards would be even moreso, unless some of those Intents synergized well. For example, we know that Ruin and Cultivation are more closely related than a lot of possible combinations (both focus on 'change') and so would probably place a lot less pressure on the Vessel, but the combination of Honor (binding things together), Cultivation (change over time) and Odium ('God's divine hatred' per Frost) would probably not be pleasant for the Vessel. The combination of Honor and Odium alone might well be a safer duo, as the hatred that Odium represents could potentially be given direction by the former Intent.

You can take multiple Shards but that's got nothing to do with the mechanic of Compounding. We have WoB that any Shards can theoretically combine but also that some combinations would place a great deal of pressure on the Vessel. Brandon has of course RAFO'd exactly what would happen if one person were to Ascend to all sixteen Shards or whether it's even possible to do so.