Weltall

I don't think you'd need Steris to have a lot of knowledge of the Metallic Arts to contribute to working out the Set's plans. Most of what they're doing seems to involve research into hemalurgy, which she wouldn't have any information on and which has been revealed to Marasi and Wax through the book Marsh hands over. But her knowledge of finance could be huge, as she could help Wax follow the money and track down its members and their bases of operation. My guess is we'll be seeing the two working together like that in The Lost Metal.

Not necessarily. We know that Vasher and Nightblood were separated after arriving on Roshar but we don't know how that happened. It could be that Vasher lost Nightblood in some other way and it found its way to the Nightwatcher without his direct involvement. We see people take the sword from him on several occasions in Warbreaker so it's not unprecedented. Brandon was asked about this and the answer was, of course, RAFO.

The Stormfather explains what Tanavast meant in the vision where he urged Dalinar to get Odium to appoint a champion. The Shards can be hurt and the wounds they receive don't fade with time. This has happened before, when he went after other Shards. By appointing a champion, Odium does not have to open himself up to the possibility of confronting the kind of force (ie Cultivation) that could hurt him in that way again. Which suggests that whatever Honor and Cultivation have done to keep Odium imprisoned, it's also binding Cultivation in some what so that she can't metaphorically stab Odium in the back while he's chatting with Dalinar, or at any point after Odium agreed to the contest. As the Stormfather says, if Odium loses the challenge the only thing he gives up is time (which he has a literally infinite supply of) so agreeing to Dalinar's proposal means less risk for him. Given the unusual circumstances of this Desolation where humanity is fragmented and there aren't many Surgebinders but they do have much more advanced technology than the last times around, a little prudence is understandable. Oh, and he seems to be taking steps to circumvent the Oathpact so even if he loses, it's unlikely he'd have to wait nearly as long to try again next time. As for why he agreed to the challenge right then, he appears to have been utterly convinced that he was going to have Dalinar as his champion, which might well have worked as an 'Instant Win' condition for him, since Dalinar as the Bondsmith bonded to Tanavast's Cognitive Shadow/the Stormfather, he might have been able to release Odium right then and there. Given Renarin's vision of the future where Dalinar did fall, it wouldn't be surprising if that's the exact same thing that Odium saw coming. What Odium did not expect was the subtle involvement of Cultivation, giving Dalinar the means to face his past and not break at the moment Odium expected him to.

@Eluvianii Following that line of thinking, Ruin would simultaneously be the worst and best shoulder devil ever. Because you know the only thing he'd be whispering in your ear is 'Kill them' over and over and over. Which wouldn't at all be nice, but at the same time unless you're already a complete monster it would also probably be a lot easier to tune out, so you could just listen to your shoulder angel and not have to worry about being tempted by a more subtle form of shoulder devil. Hmmm...

Since we're talking godmetal names, might as well mention 'Trellium' which is the mystery metal that appears in Shadows of Self. Brandon has said we can use that name for the time being and it is from a Shard that we know. And it's very likely to be Bavadin's godmetal, but not confirmed ad such.

Welcome to the Shard! Yeah, the One in the Iriali beliefs could be a Shard that sent them on their Long Trail (whether Autonomy or one of the unknown six) but it's also possible that it's another take on the God Beyond/Unknown God that we've seen mention of on Scadrial, Threnody and Sel. Or it could even be a reference to Adonalsium, assuming it and the God Beyond aren't one and the same by different names, but that's one big mass of RAFO that's unlikely to ever be answered) There's some nice resonance between what Ym has to say about the One and particular interpretations of Judaism where God created the universe in order to understand himself, and how everything within it will eventually return to God and a state of perfect understandiing. Babylon 5 borrowed the idea for Minbari religious philosophy too.

Welcome to the Shard! You can bond with Splinters, that much is well established. On Sel you have people bonding Splinters of Devotion (it's what the seon are) and rather more obviously on Roshar you have Nahel Bonds between humans and spren which are Splinters of Honor and/or Cultivation. However, it's not a question of willpower but whether or not the local magic system allows for it and whether the Splinter itself is open to such a bond. It's a formalized process on Roshar for example; you don't bond a spren until and unless that spren chooses you. Brandon has pointed this out as being a magic system you can't cheat your way into via things like hemalurgy and Forgery. Nalthis has another form of human/Splinter bond, since the Returned are essentially humans whose souls are stapled back into their bodies with a Splinter of Endowment aka the Divine Breath. You have to accept Endowment's offer to Return, but she's the one deciding to make the offer in the first place. Ascension is the process of taking up so much Investiture that your body sublimates. The most obvious example of this is the Shards (which is why Sazed's body vanishes when he takes up Preservation and Ruin, and why Ati and Leras' bodies reappear when they die) but we also see it happen with Preservation's Perpendicularity, which is designed to temporarily grant someone a large chunk of that Shard's power. However, even with that power it's still only a fraction of what the Shard has at its disposal and so you can't take the Shard that way. Anyhow, the thing with taking up a Shard is less to do with personal willpower and more whether or not you have Connection to the Shard in question. Secret History gives us some ideas how this works. That's sort of the required first step. At this point the only time we've seen someone take a Shard, it's been intact so there was a single representation of all that power that the future Vessel(s) could grab. With a splintered Shard like Honor or the Selish duo, we don't really have a frame of reference for how you'd go about Ascending, especially in the latter case as the power is currently hanging out in the Cognitive Realm and making things especially weird. There might be a 'critical mass' factor or it might work out some other way, we don't really know. In what may be relevant, Brandon was asked once what the result would be if someone were able to absorb the entire Do. He said they would be equal in power to Harmony but he clearly paused after he started talking about taking up that power and then decided not to say any more.

We don't know that Patji the island is necessarily the same thing as Patji the avatar of Autonomy; it could be a case of the former being named for the latter. The first thing that springs to mind is the island Maui being named for the god, even though the island itself isn't the god. Something similar could be at work here. Heck, with Bavadin literally creating entire pantheons, it's possible that every single island had an avatar associated with it, but Patji was the most powerful of them. Not sure why Autonomy would do that but it's an option. xD Brandon has called Patji 'a being' but that's obviously open to all sorts of interpretation. So this one's up in the air for now.

Don't forget that Hoid had just gotten to beat someone senseless, which he's physically incapable of doing normally. He even admits he found the experience quite satisfying. There's no particular reason to think that his eyes were glowing because of a Nahel Bond and Stormlight when it already works as a figure of speech and fits what Hoid said immediately after Kelsier made that observation. Also, Hoid hardly needed any kind of Investiture to smack Kelsier around and Stormlight isn't the only thing to cause glowing eyes anyhow. And we know he had some other (definitely non-Rosharan) form of Investiture he was using to traverse the Cognitive 'mists'.

Arcanum Unbounded's essay on the Threnodite System (where Shadows for Silence takes place) was where we first learned about Ambition and how she and Odium fought. Oathbringer mentions this when the first of the letters in the epigraphs mentions that Uli Da was always going to be a problem and they're better off without her, in the context of Odium's actions. This was confirmed to be the name of Ambition's Vessel via WoB. Relatedly, another WoB reveals that she was a Sho Del, the third sapient race of Yolen with the others being humans and dragons.

Here's where Brandon said that Ambition was on the top of the list (but actually the third killed): We don't actually know that Odium is currently doing anything about Harmony, but he would almost certainly be on the top of the revised post-Roshar list due to his power. Also, while Harmony has far more raw power than Odium, we have multiple WoBs that this isn't going to deter Odium. Rayse has held his Shard for something on the order of ten thousand years based on what Brandon's said about the timeline while Sazed has only held his power for three hundred. He's more knowledgable, he's more skilled and he's far more willing and able to use his power.

Yeah, a Koloss at the Fifth Heightening would presumably cease to age and thus grow, so they'd be immortal as long as their body wasn't already in the process of failing due to their biology. Endowment, FYI. And assuming such a thing could happen (very tricky to become a Returned if you're not from Nalthis) they would probably be whatever size they were pre-Return. Your appearance as a returned is based on how you think you should look, so a Koloss would likely envision themselves the way they were pre-death and Return. The reason the Returned are larger than life is because they unconsciously expect their gods to be 'like us, but bigger' and so that's how they appear when they Return.

Brandon has said that while this is what the singers assumed, it may not actually be the case, He arrived on Roshar after humans did and they gave him more of an ear than the singers, so it was assumed he was their god. He may have been indirectly involved on Ashyn without being actively worshipped by the humans living there before they caused a cataclysm. Brandon had something very interesting to say on this point. While he hasn't canonized it yet, his current idea is that they did not use the Cognitive Realm or Physical space travel but something similar to how Oathgates work, involving travel via the Spiritual Realm. Make of that what you will. xD It's less that Odium wants power on the planet and more that he wants Honor and Cultivation dead, but the general idea checks out. Brandon has said that Odium ordered his hit list by personal danger and by Shards he could claim were violating whatever agreement the Vessels made. Hence, Ambition was on the top of the list because he felt she was the biggest threat and he likely would have gone after Scadrial next because of the presence of two Shards had he not gotten stuck on Roshar, unless there's some other Shard he considered personally dangerous that was higher up the list. As mentioned, his spren is 'of Honor/Cultivation' but has been corrupted by Sja-anat. We have evidence from the Gem Archive that at least one other Truthwatcher had something similar happen, at a time when it would have been even harder to hide this since there were many Radiants back then and they'd all know what a Truthwatcher and their spren are supposed to be like. Somehow, this unknown Radiant managed it. Anyhow, it's very likely (if not yet canonized by Brandon) that the focus for the entire Rosharan System is bonds. We know they predated the arrival of the Shards (long-ish WoB here) and are responsible for things like chasmfiends being able to exist at all, they're responsible for the singer/listener forms and eventually they became responsible for human Surgebinding via the Nahel Bond. You can extend this to Ashyn too, with humans forming a symbiotic bond where the bacteria get a host that will pass it on and the human gets magic and an incentive to stay sick. Gems aren't really a focus of magic, they're just a convenient way of containing stormlight and spren. We know the Heralds had no need for gems because they could draw power directly from Honor for example, and Lift is definitely a weird case but she doesn't even need Stormlight directly. Yet she still has Surgebinding, because it's the bond that's important. Aesudan was very definitely overestimating her control over Yelig-nar. Odium even tells Amaram when handing him the gemstone that the queen was unable to control the power and it consumed her. In other words, she's dead and Yelig-nar is looking for a new host by the time the battle at Thaylen City happens. Planets all have Cognitive Representations as long as they're inhabited by any form of life, or they're being thought about. Brandon has said that there are 'souls' to planets but that doesn't mean that humans could necessarily affect them in a meaningful way. Khriss has some comments on this in the essay on the Selish System vis a vis that planet being unusual. Given what we've seen of Ashyn (not strictly canonical but the relevant bits are supported by Arcanum Unbounded) it sounds like humans destroyed the ecosystem with some form of the Surges, which is why most fled and others now live on floating cities above the uninhabitable surface. Sounds a lot like they're using Gravitation, both in the 'how could you mess things up that badly?' sense and in the 'how could you make these cities work?' sense.

Odi-yummy-yum. Bah, airsick lowlanders and their silly names.

Bearing in mind that Nale has a Nahel Bond and thus can use Stormlight at whatever its peak efficiency is (given that he's sworn the Fifth Ideal) he's not a very good example for the Heralds using their Honorblades in the present day. We know from Szeth's example that an ordinary person using an Honorblade definitely requires Stormlight and is less efficient than even a Radiant who hasn't finished swearing their Ideals. There's currently no reason to believe that even if Moash could absorb the relevant bit of Jezrien's spiritweb that it would give him unlimited Surgebinding; we see that he still needs to take Stormlight from a sphere when he Lashes himself at the end of the book. But yeah, I'm sure that there's going to be some interesting interplay at work in the next book, one way or another.

I think that the only time the word was used was in one of the epigraphs. Here's what it looks like in English: I sense shards of something from long ago, a fractured presence, something spanning the void. I have delved and searched, and have only been able to come up with a single name: Adonalsium. Who, or what, it was, I do not yet know. So depending on how that was translated, you might not have noticed it. I have Japanese copies of the books that I should probably take a look at, because I'm willing to bet that the epigraph there uses a different word for 'shards' than the way it translates the capital-s Shards in other books. Anyhow, the two Shards in Mistborn Era 1 are Preservation and Ruin. The former was held by Leras, for whom the metal lerasium is named. The latter was held by Ati, same relationship to the metal atium. But you probably didn't miss anything since as mentioned, the term Shards didn't really start being used until later.

We have the epigraph in HoA that tells us how most people die before becoming pewter savants due to ignoring pain and pushing their bodies past the breaking point. Sazed comments that the benefits aren't worth the cost in his opinion, so the downside post-savantism is probably an extension of that. Similarly, it's mentioned that most Seekers become savants without realizing it, which suggests that if there is a consequence it's not particularly noticeable, at least not as it's currently represented. Just throwing an idea out there, since we know that piercing Copperclouds is something a bronze savant can do, maybe their consequence is that it's easier for them to be detected by other Seekers, or that their own allomancy can't be hidden by a Copperclould? Anyhow, going down the other metals: - Iron/Steel: See below - Zinc/Brass: Having these powers be 'always on' when you have the metal inside you could be an option, though it's kind of tricky since we know a Soother/Rioter can control the emotions they're affecting. Maybe a low-level effect on all emotions that you'd never notice because it's hitting everything at once could work, but you'd think the allomancer would notice they're burning through their metal without meaning to. - Copper: No clue, honestly. - Duralumin/Aluminum: Given how hard it is to become an aluminum savant, I don't think it really needs a consequence; the hit to your pocketbook from all that burned aluminum should be enough. With duralumin, probably the same thing since you'd have to burn so much of it to hit savanthood, maybe having difficulty controlling its effects, so that it tries to burn everything you have inside you when you start to burn duralumin, instead of just the metal you're actively burning at the time? - Cadmium/Nicrosil: For these, I'm partial to the idea that they would be 'always on' in the sense that for a savant, as long as you have the metal inside you, it will try to activate whenever you touch another allomancer whether you're burning the metal or not. Think of it as the Midas Touch, Allomancy Edition. That would be a reasonable extension of how the power already works, plus a consequence that they'd have to work around by either avoiding contact or by only ingesting the metal at the moment they need it. - Cadmium/Bendalloy: Brandon's mentioned a potential savantism benefit to the former in the context of using lots of cadmium to time capsule yourself, so my first instinct that it could mess with your Spiritual sense of age might not work. If using lots of these metals could trick your soul into thinking it's older/younger than it 'should' be, that might get in the way of Brandon's hypothetical application. Hmmmm, - Electrum: Not sure, I'll have to think about this one some more. - Gold: I'm not sure exactly how this one would work and I doubt many people would ever hit the point of becoming a gold savant (even Miles isn't comfortable with A-Gold and he's found a way to make it work for him and burns it with some regularity) but since it can show you people you might have become, I imagine it would do some wonky if low-grade things to your Identity, with potential consequences for other magic systems having an easier time affecting you, or potentially causing hiccups if you also have feruchemical powers. Brandon has mentioned that he wants there to me significant consequences for an allomantic savant, which is why he's not entirely happy with how Wax is working. Long WoB here for reference. Something like 'metal blindness' could be an interesting extrapolation of what they already have, but it might be problematic since we've got Inquisitors who spend so much time burning the metals that they become savants more or less by default, and they need their allomancy to 'see'. Might be going too far down the consequence side. Maybe something along the lines of pushing/pulling all metals in range and having trouble isolating it to just the metal they want to affect?

@Barbarian AL Yeah, it does directly relate to Shardplate. It's also technically an OB spoiler so you probably want to remove it.

We don't know the origin of Shardplate and Brandon has RAFO'd questions about it, but he's said that we've gotten hints and there may be some characters who already have it, or could have it. Mind you, this involves material from Oathbringer which we aren't allowed to talk about in the regular SA board. One thing that we've been speculating on since Words of Radiance is that Shardplate is formed from 'lesser' spren which are associated with a given Order. For example, windspren for the Windrunners. This one got started when people noticed the way that windspren would surround Kaladin when he was being especially Windrunner-y in that book.

@RShara This might be some sort of record. Maybe we could submit it to Guinness.

Their default form is 'big sword' because the spren were patterning themselves off the Honorblades, which are swords. When they were killed by the breaking of the oaths, they reverted to sword form regardless of any other forms they may have taken. Think of their Physical incarnations as shapeshifters with a default form. As mentioned, we've seen Syl default to sword form even though she and Kaladin both know that he's more comfortable with a spear.

Nope.

Welcome to the Shard! Umm, is there a theory here or did you just want to discuss the Stonewards generally? Because there's some stuff that we've learned about them in Oathbringer that's interesting but it can't be discussed in the general SA board.

This probably should go in Cosmere Theories, or maybe General Brandon. Anyhow, I'd probably want Hoid if I had to pick a single 'shoulder angel' but in terms of 'good angel/bad angel' pairings I'd probably want Jasnah and Wayne.

The Heralds don't have unlimited Stormlight, what they had was drawing Investiture directly from Honor without needing Stormlight itself. Kind of like in Mistborn, how Preservation/Harmony can give somone power through the mists. Since Honor is splintered, there's no way for the Heralds or anyone using the Honorblades to draw on this source of Investiture any more. Some philosophers in-universe would apparently say so but Brandon says no, the dagger is using similar fundamentals as hemalurgy but the dagger isn't a spike per se. My guess is that the dagger can steal things similar to hemalurgy but isn't meant to grant them to a recipient; in this case either stealing all of Jezrien's soul or just the bit that's relevant to the Oathpact. And yeah, while it's not been confirmed it seems extremely likely that the dagger was made from Odium's godmetal. It's an unfamiliar metal to Moash, it doesn't look like anything immediately identifiable to us, it's obviously got special properites and it's a color that's already been associated with Odium in the book so... it's almost certainly meant to be 'Raysium' or whatever it ends up being called.