Weltall

One thing we can infer from the Gem Archive is that Renarin is not the first Truthwatcher fo have bonded a 'corrupted' spren. A 'particularly small emerald' had the following recording: Don't tell anyone. I can't say it. I must whisper. I foresaw this. Since this was contemporary with the other recordings, it must have been made at a time when there were lots of Radiants who would know what a Truthwatcher is supposed to be able to do. I suspect that they must have been able to pass for 'normal' which suggests an ability to use something close enough to typical Illumination to fake it. There's also the fact that Renarin's ability sounds like the Truthwatcher resonance of seeing 'what is' (per Ivory's comment and implications from the in-universe Words of Radiance) but with a spin on it that he sees the future. I kind of like @StrikerEZ's suggestion that Renarin's windows are the Truthwatcher Resonance, altered by his spren being touched by Odium. On the broader issue of Voidbinding, we have Kaladin's thoughts that the Fused aren't moving quite like he does but he's still able to understand how they're 'flying' and Szeth is able to use his own knowledge of all the Surges to anticipate and counter the actions of the Fused that are playing keep-away with the King's Drop. If what the Fused do is Voidbinding, it's clearly not too different from Surgebinding, just accessing the power via a different Shard. It's also possible that they're actually Surgebinding fueled with Voidlight as a 'hack' of sorts, with the differences being similar in nature to how Tension for a Stoneward works differently than it does for a Bondsmith. Brandon seems to have identified Renarin's visions as Voidbinding but he's been deliberately vague on specifics and a later WoB has him not answer the question of whether he was actually doing Voidbinding, both being answers to Argent. So it's up in the air right now and Brandon seems happy to keep it that way.

Brandon has been to Hawaii (he mentions this several times in the context of writing Warbreaker) so he may well have already seen lava flows under much safer conditions, or if he really needed to he could go again sometime when he's settled down to write The Silence Divine. Or he could watch any number of recordings of volcanic events including what's happening right now.

As mentioned, the Fused are Cognitive Shadows which means that Odium gave them a sufficient infusion of Investiture (either during life or immediately upon their first deaths) which prevents them from passing Beyond. The exact mechanics of their reincarnation and why it works the way it does are things we don't know, but it has some resonance with how the singers/Parsh bond with spren so it might be that the possession-based reincarnation is 'built in' due to their sDNA. Or it could be something Odium set up deliberately, like I said we don't know yet. It's unlikely that Odium is going to create new Fused since we know he doesn't like to Invest any more than he needs to (and he already has an army of Fused) and whatever Odium does, it's clearly something he can undo at will; he warns one Fused who's questioning him at Thaylen City that he can always withdraw that which gives him life, in order to make him back down.

Trying to give the sword a fan nickname would just confuse people since it will eventually have a proper name, Brandon just hasn't decided what it is yet.

The Ars Arcanum describes the Basic Lashing as twisting the user's Spiritual connection to the planet, so I suspect that it 'keys' itself to whatever world (or gravity-generating body) you're on. Aside from fitting the description of how it works, it's also more sensible from a storytelling persepective since you don't need Surgebinders to calculate the relative strength of gravity and mentally adjust their Lashings to compensate and you don't need to worry the reader about that sort of thing either. Now, where this breaks down is when you're in zero-gravity environments. We know that Kaladin could theoretically use his powers to travel through space (but as Brandon says, that would take a long time) so in that situation, maybe it defaults to whatever planet you were born on? It's explicitly a Spiritual thing so Physical separation isn't really an issue.

It took the armies about one (Earth) week to reach the ruins of Stormseat but they had to move very slowly for a host of reasons (dealing with the chasms each plateau, not outrunning the supply train etc) while Kaladin was not constrained by silly things like chasms and could go in a straight line at a much faster speed. I'm sure someone could take the various measurements we have and make an estimate of the radius of the Plains and thus how far Kaladin had to travel and then figure out what sort of speeds he could reach but I don't know if anyone's done so yet.

In general terms, Stormlight provides more than A-Pewter (including much better healing) but the allomantic effect is far more controllable. It's kind of hard to test which would be 'stronger' in absolute terms based on observations of the current books, since Rosharans are much larger than most humans in the Cosmere and their world has lower gravity which throws comparisons off. Shardplate is sort of in its own league but we can compare it to someone infused with Stormlight thanks to the very beginning of Way of Kings. Szeth gets backhanded by the Plate-wearing Gavilar and notes that he'd be very dead if he didn't have Stormlight. By contrast, we see in WoR that a Stormlight-boosted Kaladin using Gravitation to enhance his kick was only able to damage a section of Relis' Plate (already noted to have some cracks from Adolin) and he broke both of his legs doing it. So yeah, of the options you listed I'd say Shardplate provides the biggest boost to raw strength, then we're not sure about the relative strength buffs of Stormlight and A-Pewter but the former does more in addition to strength while the latter is more controllable. That one could go either way, I think.

Just for fun, I started plugging names in and seeeing what I got. Apparently, our favorite Windrunner and his spren are now part of a buddy comedy called Paladin and Sly, their adventure takes place on the planet Rosary and the Shattered Plains sequence is about avenging the death of King Gavel at the hands of the Parched, who killed him with extreme thirst and the terrifying assassin known as... Set.

The 'avatars' that we see Shards create sometimes are only projections that they can use to interact with people, they do not represent a vulnerability. We see Preservation making many such avatars (and we know Harmony does it too) in order to speak with the recently deceased before they go Beyond. While these avatars may be punched, you're not going to kill a Shard that way. Also, there is a Shard that's actually creating avatars (and using that specific word) although the proper technical term for it would be a Splinter. Autonomy is creating lots of them and it's clearly not putting the Shard as a whole at risk. As already noted, the Shard in question is not about survival and what Brandon has told us about this Shard is quite literally the opposite of Kelsier's style; The man does not do 'hiding'. Consider his stunt with the Bands of Mourning for example, he created a temple to house them, told his people about it and then ordered them not to go looking for it... so of course they're going to. And he hid the Bands in plain sight. And, y'know, setting yourself up as a (local) god isn't exactly hiding either. Also, there are Realmatic issues with Kelsier Ascending. He had to cheat in order to take up Preservation's power and even if he's got a proper body again that should take care of some of the problems he had, there's still the issue of Connection, both to Scadrial which makes it hard for him to leave the system and in the negative sense, that he doiesn't have any to the other Shards. What is there to correct? Brandon himself used the 'hide and survive' description first. This doesn't mean he intended to associate it with Kelsier; it's a generic word after all.

Yeah, there are hints dropped that the blade Taln carried at the end of WoK and the blade that Dalinar bonds in WoR are not the same sword, most obviously is that they don't look anything alike. Taln's blade is described as narrow and shaped like a spike, the one we see in WoR is wide and cleaver-like. Another clue is that the blade that Dalinar bonds screams in his mind, which makes sense for a dead Shardblade but not for an Honorblade. We don't know who switched the blades or when, but we know it wasn't Hoid.

The faces used are thematic and there's a method to Isaac picking which onesgo in each chapter. The masked face is not a Herald since we already can account for all ten of them. It may represent Hoid but it also shows up when he's not present Lurcher asked Peter about the icon symbolism, which taken with his response makes for a handy guide to what the selection can mean, and the WoR reread on Tor does a good job of analyzing them on a chapter-by-chapter basis as well. TLDR: The man with the mask can represent Hoid in SA but it doesn't always do so.

Yeah, we know that Yesteel has the knowledge of how to construct another Nightblood and it seems more likely for him to have made the sword than for Vasher to have done so, given what the latter did to prevent that sort of thing from happening centuries earlier. Plus, you need a huge amount of Breath to Awaken metal over and above the amount you intend to put into the object. Vasher and Vivenna between them might have had about two thousand Breaths at the point when each first acquired their stores (Vasher had enough for the Fourth Heightening, Vivenna the Third) which isn't even a fifth of what you'd need. It's far easier to imagine Yesteel not only having retained a sufficient amount of Breath needed to Awaken metal since the Manywar but to be willing to do use it for that purpose.

Given that the questioner and Brandon both refer explicitly to size rather than mass, given that Brandon is perfectly aware of the distinction and mentions mass when he means it such as in what Wax does with F-Iron, given that Brandon talks about Syl's shape and given that the 'default' form of all Shardblades fits the 'human-sized' idea while their mass is far lower, the natural assumption is that Brandon meant exactly what he said and the upper limit of a spren-as-Shardblade is human-sized, not human-weight.

@Hempknight Brandon has said that there's an upper limit to how big a spren can become. You can make an oversized weapon like a typical Shardblade but that's about as big as they can get.

Not new, almost certainly not a Shard.

Welcome to the Shard! Brandon has said that all magic systems in the Cosmere require that your soul be 'cracked' in some way in order to let the Investiture in. However, it doesn't always have to be as dramatic as what's happened with certain Surgebinders on Roshar, or the kind of snapping that people go through in Misborn Era 1. Brandon has also tried to be very careful in dealing with mental issues as a part of the person rather than as a flaw that needs to be 'fixed'. Here's a WoB on the subject if you're interested. Now, on the question of Szeth and his 'imperfect body', there's actually something else at work there. He's using an Honorblade to gain his Surgebinding powers and those are less efficient than the same powers granted by a Nahel Bond. Brandon has said that it has to do in part with the spren permeating more deeply into the soul, so you get more efficient use of Stormlight and more effective healing among other things. Also, because the Heralds used to be able to draw Investiture directly from Honor, so Stormlight didn't matter to them. Anyhow, Szeth is definitely 'cracked' enough that he can become a Radiant in his own right (see the end of WoR) but it doesn't have anything directly to do with his imperfect ability to hold Stormlight during the first two books.

In addition to the obvious storm-related curses on Roshar, the Vorin lands seem to like cursing by the Heralds, usually of the <Herald Name>'s <Body Part/Attribute> construction. Not sure where some of those arose, like 'Kelek's Breath'. Shadows of Self has TenSoon mention that he's rather annoyed at being included in the Words of Founding because now, drunk people are cursing by his name, so you can probably extrapolate that to other survivors of Era 1 as well. Given the expressions we see Nalthian worldhoppers use, they probably have some specific color-related curses but we don't see any, though we do see 'Colors!' used as a curse by itself and we also see Kalad('s Phantoms) as a curse in Hallandren specifically. Yolen we don't know much about, but it wouldn't be surprising if theirs (or at least the human curses) revolve around fainlife since Brandon has mentioned that Yolen's standout features include 'some strange geography' and its two competing ecologies.

To add to what @Chaos said about spren as a mixture of multiple Shards' Investiture, we have this WoB. So it's entirely possilbe that the Sibling is a 'superspren' of Honor and Cultivation, while the Stormfather and Nightwatcher are associated entirely with one of the two.

Brandon really really didn't like it. Even when the samples were available, Brandon discouraged people from reading them, not only because of how he hated the book but how reading the sample would give the wrong impression of at least one character (and probably more) The sample chapters didn't give us too much to work with vis a vis Aethers and Brandon has mentioned that it wasn't a cannibalization that worked out all that well. Since he's planning on rewriting Aether anyways, nothing much is lost there with the chapters being taken down.

For a somewhat more thorough timeline of all the stories, with unpublished but planned works in italics: - The Liar of Partinel/Dragonsteel (the earliest works planned, Hoid's origin story, the Shattering of Adonalsium and everything in between) - White Sand (the earliest published work on the timeline) - Elantris (the second-earliest, Brandon was at one point trying to decide if this or White Sand happened first) - Elantris sequels (planned to begin about a decade after Elantris' ending) - The Emperor's Soul (after Elantris, but within the lifetime of characters from the earlier work) - Mistborn Era 1 and Secret History (the books published through Way of Kings are in chronological order, placing MB Era 1 between Elantris and Warbreaker) - Warbreaker (see ahove) - Shadows for Silence in the Forest of Hell (happens before Stormlight Archive, exactly where it falls isn't clear) - Nightblood (the planned sequel to Warbreaker, intended to be the closest book in the timeline to the beginning of Stormlight Archive) - Stormlight Archive - First Half (see above, we know Way of Kings begins after all the above books) - Mistborn Era 2 (about three centuries after Era 1 and after the events of the first half of the Stormlight Archive) - Stormlight Archive - Second Half (see above) - Mistborn Era 3 (almost certainly takes place before Sixth of the Dusk but this hasn't been absolutely confirmed) - Sixth of of the Dusk (the latest published work on the timeline) - Mistborn Era 4 (the final planned work on the timeline, also the Big Crossover Story) In addition to those, Brandon has a couple of planned but unwritten stories that we can't place on a timeline yet, such as novellas taking place on Threnody and in Silverlight, The Silence Divine (set on Ashyn) and The Aether of Night (unnamed world).

It's not as simple as that. Also, we know for a fact that Autonomy has created Splinters and is acting on other worlds. In fact, Arcanum Unbounded's essay on the Taldain System says as much. Here's a (trimmed) WoB that makes both points clear. We also have WoB that the second letter in Oathbringer's epigraphs (the one that uses the pronouns 'we' and 'our') was written by Autonomy, who is explicitly creating avatars to act on other worlds such as Obrodai.

Technically he was the King of Alethkar. Kind of. Brandon has said that during the end of WoR he convinced Elhokar to abdicate for a short time (or that's how he sees it at least) as part of hiding him. But he isn't the King any more and even the claim that he was King for a time is... arguable. But one does not argue with The Lopen... Oh, and getting to the original observations about him, Brandon has said that Lopen wasn't planning to get into Bridge Four, it was basically an accident that he then made the best of

If adamantium can be pushed then 'being Wolverine' really doesn't make much difference. He's going to be impossible to hide from the 'sight' of A-Steel/Iron (so stealth is impossible) and he's going to be vulnerable to any Coinshot with a sufficiently solid anchor. His healing factor's nice and all but a gold Twinborn can do that too. Now if adamantium is like aluminum and is invisible to allomancy, then I'd agree that he's a lot more dangerous.

There are many many questions that would raise. For a start, how did two Returned manage to find a Shard and separate it from its Vessel? There are only so many of them and they aren't exactly lying around free for the taking. And there's no evidence that a Shard could be placed in a piece of metal like that; Shard are on a completely different level than Breath. And Vasher would know and have mentioned something about this, instead of remembering quite specifically that Nightblood was Awakened from steel using a thousand Breaths. And there are probably more things but those are the first to come to mind. But we also have some WoBs that make it quite clear that Nightblood, however powerful, is not on the level of the Shards and there are other things that are also weaker than Shards but on a similar level to him. Shards can corrupt or co-opt the Investiture of other Shards, which is what the color red signifies. The Shards did indeed start out at equal power but some have become relatively weaker due to Investing in a planet or planets. Odium for example was careful to not do this until he got stuck on Roshar and didn't have a choice, in order to have more available power compared to the Shards he was planning to kill. And there's a theory with a good bit of evidence behind it that Autonomy is creating avatars on various worlds in order to get access to more of 'her' Investiture.

Net guns to restrain most potential metalborn, ceramic in general as already noted (also works as armor), Shardblades because they don't have to worry about having them pushed/pulled and leg sweeps are good for disabling people while still leaving them alive for future spiking, and while it wouldn't at all be practical due to weight and all that metal I suspect that when dealing with targets they don't care to take alive, they would love chainsaws because of how messy they are. One thing I thought might be useful would be chaff grenades to distract Coinshots and Lurchers, then I realized that it would be almost as annoying for the Inquisitor since they rely on A-Steel/Iron to 'see'. Depends, is adamantium immune to being pushed/pulled as if it were aluminum? Because if not, there are a couple downsides to having a metal skeleton on Scadrial...