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There is another WoB, from the current tour, in which in response to a question about Hoid's powers he says something like "I mentioned before that he has Allomancy". Until Peter corrects this to "I mentioned again that he has Freuchemy", I insist that it implies that Hoid has consumed the bead of lerasium.

Folks, didn't we just have a WoB that Hoid is, indeed, and Allomancer? If that's the case, and until Peter shows up and tells us this did not happen, I am going to assume that Hoid hasin fact eaten the bead of lerasium he picked up.

I keep trying to point out that there is absolutely no reason for Honor's solid form to be a metal, and there are all the reasons for Honor's solid form to be a stone or something similar. The question of whether one can burn a Shardblade is no different than the question of whether one can take a bite of Vasher's flesh and burn it (outside of the iron in Vasher's blood, that is). Or munch on any colored object from Nalthis - after all - it bears some Investiture.

Beautifully said. And at the end of the day, we get to discover that this is still vastly preferred to the situation when a useful tool releases the power of the well and frees up the eldritch God. As I said, the entire interplay between Leras (a formerly highly intelligent, if morally corrupt God, clinging to the last shreds of conscience trying to remember what it was that he set in motion eons ago) and Rashek is absolutely fascinating. Between Rashek and Kelsier, I feel like Rashek has significantly more reasons to punch Leras in the face.

Can you please name examples of these "minor Shards"? I am postulating this as a theory, and I am yet to see a "subIntent' form. If you are talking about splinters, then I suspect, this is not what I mean - each splinter of Devotion displays a tiny bit of the full Intent of Devotion.

This has been actually discussed on numerous occasions. There is a reference to Ati's pre-Shattering beliefs (Leras mentions it) in the Secret History that indeed suggests that Ati, while being a kind and gentle man, was a good Vessel for Ruin.

Agreed to a very large degree. The key is that I think there are significantly more individual "aspects" or "characteristics" than the 16 that showed up when Adonalsium shattered. There was a discussion a while ago about the nature of remaining Shards, and we have came up with dozens of different potential Intents, and also observed that a lot of the potentials Intents intersect: Love and Devotion, for example, or Autonomy and Freedom. So, my suspicion is that the "indivisible" pieces of Adonalsium's power are significantly smaller than a single Shard, and that a Shard is basically a collection of these indivisible pieces. It's kind of like the old nursery rhyme about what the boys and girls are made of.... only this time it is more like "What is Endowment made of" and "What is Dominion made of".... And if for one reason or another (related to Connection with these indivisible pieces) different people were taking up the power of Adonalsium, these indivisible pieces would align somewhat differently, and we could've gotten Love and Freedom instead of Devotion and Autonomy.

With the exception of the comment about the "powers of creation" "choosing" the Shard's Intent for each future Vessel, this is pretty much what I also think. Adonalsium's Vessel has just dropped the body. Some smoke is coming off. Sixteen people step up (well -based on the one example of power-taking from a dead Vessel, this is a possible scenario). The power is starting to split 16 ways. But I do not think there there is an outside controller. Rather - the power splits under the pressures from 16 incoming Vessels. Each forms a specific Connection with one part of the power... and Shards are born. If different people step up, or different number of people step up, the separation would happen differently. Which brings me to my theory. A very nice 17th Sharder (Paladin Brewer) has asked Brandon "my" question about what happens if two people step up to take up power from a dead Vessel. Brandon RAFOed. I believe that the Shards can be further subdivided. In fact: * I believe that the power of Adonalsium consisted of numerous atomic Intents. Each atomic Intent represents an aspect of power of Adonalsium that cannot be held by different people separately (i.e., an atomic Intent is always held by a single Vessel). * Upon shattering of Adonalsium, the following algorithmic process happened: for each atomic Intent AI : for each future Vessel FV: determine Connection(AI, FV) for each Atomic Intent AI: assign AI to arg Max (Connection(AI,FV)) over all FVs. for each future Vessel FV: Shard(FV) := {AI | AI is atomic Intent assigned to FV} * To put it in human terms: each atomic Intent got taken up by the Vessel who had the highest connection with that Intent. Each Shard is the collection of atomic Intents taken up by a single Vessel. * I do not know know how much more granular than the final Shards the atomic Intents are. That is, I do not know how many atomic Intents went into every single Shard. I suspect, some Shards got more, some - got fewer. But I do believe that most if not all Shards that are/were out there consist of multiple atomic Intents. * Ergo, it is possible to kill a Shard Vessel, and turn their power into a pair of Shards. PS. What might contradict the algorithm above is the assertion that Brandon I think have made at some point, that each Shard walked out of Shattering with the same amount of power. To achieve that, the distribution algorithm above needs to be altered. Instead of assigning the power to the most Connected Vessel we can take the nearest neighbor approach: each Shard gets Total Number of Atomic Intents/16 atomic Intents that are closest to them (with "ties" broken though amount of Connection).

Is there a WoB somewhere that I am missing that says that Hoid has "nothing in his soul"? Color me skeptical. Some of the OP premises are not correct: Hoid, as it has been pointed out, did use Yolish Lightweaving in Warbreaker, and in Stormlight Archive. One of his archetypes appears to be the Storyteller ("but there was a white haired man there who offered to tell me a story" - I am probably somewhat misquoting it....), and it seems like he combines storytelling with some amount of Yolish Lightweaving. My other concern is the usual pair of questions: what evidence supports this theory? and what will this theory, if true, explain about Cosmere/Hoid? Finally, some things contradict the theory. Leras in Secret History made an observation about Cephandrius that is not very consistent with Leras using Cephandrius as a weapon to shatter Adonalsium. (unless you think that what he really meant is "he did not want to be a a part of our cabal, so we turned him into our weapon of mass destruction).

For you to be able to burn a Shardblade or Shardplate, it must be made out of one of the 16 allomantic metals, must be one of the known Godmetals, or one of the Godmetal alloys. Shardblade is a solid form of a spren. I am not certain this qualifies as an allomantic metal. Shardplate - we don't know what it is made out of. We know that Honor should have a solid form, but given that nothing on Roshar revolves specifically around metals, it is not clear that Honor's solid form is a Godmetal. Can be a Godstone, or a Godtree (although the latter is more of a Cultivation thing). So I think burning the implements of Knights Radiant is not a thing. Shardplate can break because it is neither a dead former Nahel-bond-holding spren, nor it is it a live Nahel bond-holding spren. We have not yet seen what it actually is, but given that Shardplate shows other properties different than Shardblades - it does not disappear and reappear, it breaks and regrows, it adjusts its form to the body shape of the holder - it is made out of a different substance.

Here is what I suspect happened. You asked the question. Brandon's Intent was to say "no". For reasons related to the total number of hours he spent sleeping in the past week, what he actually said was "yes". But as we know, in Cosmere, what rules is the Intent.

No. Any children Rashek might have had pre- Final Empire would have been (given his past as a Terris nationalist) Terris. Since none of the kandra are his descendants (and presumably none of the mistwraiths), I suspect that he actually did not have children before he ascended. After he ascended, his children could have been results of various liaisons with both noble and skaa women, but clearly they would not have been South polers.

My exact point. I am totally fascinated by Rashek's life from the perspective of him being the Champion of Preservation. There are a lot of interesting nuggets in the Hero of Ages that show that he was very busy, and very rational in the face of a lot of adversity (apparently Ruin had a thick communication channel to him). I am not going to go out and blame Ruin for every single horrible thing Rashek did (that's unfair to everyone), but the fact that he got to live for 1000 years with a full understanding that every single thing he does can and will be observed by Ruin, and that every single thing he does may actually be influenced by Ruin, coupled with the fact that he was actually able to pull a very impressive con on Ruin - makes him a very impressive character indeed. On a grand scheme of things, the Intent of Preservation is not good or bad - the intent is status quo, keeping things static. There are situations, where this is a horrible thing to do, but in the context of Mistborn, Preservation was fighting with everything he had to prevent a world from being destroyed - and in that context, we perceived him as being the good guy.

I thought this was just was pure Investiture looks like in Cognitive Realm. But I can be convinced that this is something else.

Saw that too.... Buzzkill )-:

Or... you ask if Sel and Threnody are in the same system and Brandon, surprisingly, answers to the affirmative (-: Now, we can speculate. Are Threnody Shades = Svarkiss? Can an Elantrian draw a travel Aon and teleport to Threnody? Are Threnody inhabitants former dwellers of Sel who fled that planet at some point? Is Evil related to the events on Sel? Are the Simple Rules really the prohibitions against manipulation of Dor? When was Nazh born relative to the events of Elantris? Is it easier to worldhop to Threnody than it is to Sel? Are Aona and/or Skai buried on Threnody?

The question we are looking at is what is Evil and how is it connected to the events on Sel? There are also questions concerning the timelines. Specifically.... Event 1: Odium visited Sel, killed Aona and Skai. Event 2: Oathpact between Honor and Odium on Roshar. Presumably, Odium is bound to Roshar system after that. Event 3: Evil on Threnody Event 4: Events of Elantris. Event 5: The Last Desolation. Now, we know that Event 1 < Event 2 ("<" means "earlier"), Event 2 < Event 5 and Event 1 < Event 4. But what is the total ordering of these?

Threnody for Aona/Skai seems like the most straightforward theory at the moment. Perhaps this is the place where their actual deaths took place (and where their bodies were dropped)?

There is also a response from Brandon that the name Threnody is given to a planet because it is indeed a memorial to something/someone. To continue your and Zmann's line of thinking, and to highlight why this is an important observation: we can now build quite a lot of theories about Threnody and Sel having a shared history. Threnody's Evil may very well be an event that took place on Sel (good-bye Aona+Skai). The planet itself may be well within the reach of the travelling Aon. And a lot of other things....

My first RAFO (((-: Thank you for asking this question. I'd preferred to have an answer, but I treat this particular RAFO as "this is very relevant to the story I am trying to tell" RAFO, and so, this is also a good piece of info. All the other questions are great as well, and heck - Threnody being in the same system as Sel - as everyone is mentioning - is a big deal. EDIT: to continue this line of questioning I think a straightforward question of the form "Are subIntents of the Intents of existing Shards possible?", or "Is it possible to split a single Shard into two or more so that each subShard has a separate Intent that is part of the Intent of the original Shard?" can be asked.

Whether any of the Shards is "on the side of good" still remains to be seen. We might make arguments that Preservation, Devotion and Endowment appear to be less evil than, say Odium and Dominion (based on their actions, followers etc), but on a grand scheme of alignments, a lot of them are more like neutrals. They grant powers, and have people live with the consequences - good or bad.

There are some things that do not quite fit. 1. Hoid is genuinely horrified by Aona and Skai's deaths. If he is trying to reconstruct Adonalsium, taking the power from existing Vessels should be his first priority. He should cheer for team Rayse. But he appears to want the help of someone (Frost?) with his plan to presumably stop/neutralize Rayse. He is cheering on Dalinar and is last seen helping Jasnah. 2. Unless Hoid thinks that Sazed is the right person to take up all other powers, existence of Harmony should be a big problem for him. Now, I am yet to see "Hoid is Trell" theory out here. If we believe that Hoid wants to restore Adonalsium outside of Sazed, then Hoid being behind Trell is the most reasonable of the ideas. 3. Meta: Hoid wanting to restore Adonalsium is a somewhat obvious thing. Brandon said something to the tune of "Hoid's plans are super secret. You will like some of them and not like others". Based on 1 and 2 above it might fit the description, but somehow I am not convinced.

Hoid is waiting for Jasnah because, in words of Brandon, "Hoid has the ability to know where he needs to go". In this particular case he has provided Jasnah with some useful information, and it appears that her story of the travel through Shadesmar contains nuggets that Hoid would like to know. Jasnah's travel through Shadesmar throughout WoR is a very special case, as *she ran out of Investiture* while being completely physically pulled into Shadesmar. We have seen others in Secret History being in Cognitive Realm physically, but Hoid, Khriss and Nazh are the three Cosmere's most resourceful people, so I am sure they have come prepared (if Nazh felt it was fine to part with his knife, I am certain he has other lines of defense with him). I am also not certain that the location the Ire chose to build their fortress is the "outskirts of Sel". They are *not* monitoring Sel. They are monitoring Scadrial.

Did I miss Brandon answering the Threnody location question affirmatively? Can you point to the source?

I actually think that this is quite possible. The key argument against it is the second Letter identifying the position of non-interference on the part of .. .Frost? But then is Frost really the patron saint of the 17th Shard? The key arguments for are: (a) Hoid and the 17th Shard fencing on Roshar and ( the fact that we have actually observed Hoid collect various types of Investiture - although probably not in the amounts that can make him a god of anything.