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I am with both of you on this one. Threnodian Shades are dangerous, *and* there are a lot of them, because unlike other places, on Threnody they linger in the Cognitive Realm. A good question to Brandon is whether this is due to natural way Investiture works on Threnody, or whether this is an influence of a passing Shard (Odium? Someone else?).

I am actually assuming that this is exactly the chain of events that transpired. Except for the shardpool part. Cannot remember where the SoS broadsheet said that shardpool was... Was it near New Seran?

Marasi is holding *his* Bands of Mourning though. If that isn't a Connection... I wrote elsewhere that assuming that Kelsier is doing his Cognitive Shadow behind-the-scenes snooping in Wax and Wayne books, the pattern is likely going to be like this: the viewpoint character ponders something, has multiple options, then suddenly chooses one. To me, Wax's staring matches with the earring fit the pattern, but I totally forgot Marasi deciding to give the Bands to Wax. Also, and this is *does* have Kelsier's style written all over it, Wayne and the shotgun now looks suspicious. Thoughts?

He was unhappy about Aona and Skai's Splintering. The entire exchange in the two Letters makes it sound like his plans are more complex than becoming new Adonalsium. The plans *may* include the study of all existing magic systems. But I am not sure he is doing it to become the new Adonalsium.

I am not certain "vigilante" is the right word. We have not seen Hoid actively "vigilante" against anyone. We had glimpses of him providing information to others, and with the exception of one specific recent glimpse, it was not clear that what he was doing at that moment advanced his plans significantly. Maybe not not vigilante, maybe "atonement"? iBambam: excellent question, and great answers. Lots to ponder.

The opposite of "god's divine hatered" is not "god's divine honor" and probably also not "god's divine devotion", but "god's divine love". Now, Love and Devotion may be too close to each other to have warranted two different Shards at splintering. So, I can go either way here: either a perfect pairing of Odium/Love, or a somewhat skewed pairing of Odium/Devotion. For the remaining seven Shards, rather than trying to find counterparts to existing ones, it might be worth thinking about the missing major Intents. On the list of known Shards/Intents we are lacking the following: * Wisdom and/or Intelligence. None of the Shards address the knowledge/intellect aspect of the divinity. * a trickster god. Deception could be a counterpart to Honor, for example. (now, Hoid might be a trickster in the traditional sense of the trope, but if we look a the Shards as a pantheon of gods, a trickster god is sorely missing). Another possible Intent is something like Negotiation, which, again, is a decent counterpart to Honor (honor is absolute, negotiation makes everything relative). * Justice/Law. I do not see an Intent like this as being the opposite of Honor, but neither do I think Honor covers this aspect completely (despite Skybreakers). * god's divine selfishness. Autonomy *might* be the Ayn Rand Shard of Cosmere, in which case this point is moot. But if Autonomy is not it, we are missing the "me first" Intent. * Humor. I would give *a lot*, if one of the Shards turned out to be Humor or Laughter, or even Sarcasm. The key problem is while I cannot imagine the world without these qualities, your typical gods very rarely have an aspect like this as their part. The other issue with this theory is that Hoid refused to pick up any Shards. He would be very well connected to Sarcasm.

Last time we checked on Sel, the Shards were splintered, but Aona's shardpool appeared to be operational.

Yes. As I said, this is how I took the WoB. Wouldn't be surprised. It does not have to be Wax and it does not have to be that specific selection of scenes, but in my mind the backstage would operate roughly similarly to Kel's period between the return from the trip to the Ire and Vin's Ascension. Whether Sazed is trying to chase him away from specific people remains to be seen.

It appears that "whatever opposed Adonalsium" were the 16 original Shardholders. As for God Beyond - well, this very well may be the force responsible for literally Beyond. My suspicion is that the Cosmere is drawn in a way where Adonalsium (originally) and the Shards (now) have control over "this side", and the God Beyond controls the Beyond, but they have no ability to step into each other's domains.

We actually do not know where Spook is right now. He "stepped down" or "retired" around year 100 after the Catacendre. *Nothing* has been mentioned about his death. Being the last Mistborn he also may have had a chance to hang around and join Kelsier's Cognitive Shadow crew, because Hemalurgic experiments, even if he died.

Or, if Brandon really wanted to troll us with Chrsitianity-inspired parallels: Peter (rock) and Andrew - who, if I remember correctly, were brothers.

I actually think that you may be onto something. Hoid clearly collects different types of Investiture. He acquires some for himself, but he might also be stashing others (and things like Breaths are transferrable anyway). What I doubt is that he is the head (or the brains behind) an Adonalsium restoration project.

I am fairly certain that the 16 original Shardholders are the force that opposed Adonalsium. The weapon they used - heck - *of course* they know what it is. Whether it is applicable to individual Shards is a different story. I have also reread "The Letter", and I am now not as convinced that Hoid is actively or passively seeking the end of all Shards as before. He directly calls the splintering of Aona and Skai a "disaster". He seems to be very concerned about the Shards and Rayse's plans towards them. There is something Hoid is doing though, something very specific. The recepient of his letter appears to be aware of at least the general gist of what Hoid wants to achieve and thinks it unreasonable and dangerous meddling. This exchange looks as if both are thinking of themselves as, in some sense, overseers of Cosmere and the Shards.

We are going to run out of secret societies for Kelsier to found *very* *very* soon. There are already parallel threads with "Keliser is the founder of 17th Shard" theories. Granted, we know much less about the Ghostbloods than we do about the 17th Shard (as little as we know about the latter, it has been mentioned by Hoid in a context that allows us to discount Kelsier as the founder), and granted the Ghostbloods might sound like more of a Kelsier-style organization, *there is very little actual evidence* to support it. In fact, there is no evidence in support of this suggestion. Ghostbloods appear to be very entrenched in Roshar politics, appear to take a very specific position concerning the topic of surgbinding vs. desolations (something that appears to split the various Roshar secret societies), and appear to have worldhoppers on their staff. Their object of interest appears to be whatever is going on on Roshar. Kelsier last we have seen him was very much about Scadrial. There is a recently released Word of Brandon that at the time of Wax and Wayne he is essentially doing some backstage influencing of things around the main characters. This is just after the first five books of Stormlight Archive. We, of course, have no idea what happens to Ghostbloods by the end of volume 5 (maybe they meet Nightblood, maybe they take over Odium, maybe they invade Aimia), but even accounting for that - if Kelsier had access to a wide range of worldhoppers, what the heck is he doing whispering in Wax's ears?

Now that air travel is a thing we might get a full map of Scadrial, complete with the South Pole maps. But I do not think that the Malwish and other people of the South live next to the equator. From what Allik said during his conversation with Marasi, it appeared that during the years of the Final Empire, the South Pole was warm and pleasant. Now, given their perception of temperature, I am willing to shift it to "extremely hot, but survivable for humans and plants". I do not have as an elaborate explanation as skaa does (and I am not certain that ettmetal, whatever it was, was known to them before Sovereign), but I think that the conditions on South Pole was more tolerable than on North Pole due to planetary movement cycles. It must have been cooler there than it would've been on North Pole w/o the ashmounts. When Sazed shifted Scadrial to a more temperate zone for North Pole, South Pole cooled off by the appropriate number of degrees as well. But w/o ashmounts, this change wound up being more drastic. I see their climate as now being around -10 - -20 Celcius. First and foremost, this is an ecological catastrophe - edible plants won't grow at those temperatures, and you can only survive so far on pine nuts. Their only other source of food would've been animals, but animals would also be affected by a sudden shift in climate by 30 or so degrees Celcius. What Sazed was thinking about them at the moment is not clear. I suspect that when Southerners find out about the Catacendre, they are not going to be happy with Lord Harmony.

Yes. The location of the Basin can be spotted on the Final Empire map. There is a distinctive peninsula south of Luthadel on the edge of the ocean. Sazed did not do any terraforming.

This, together with the Khriss appearance I consider to be gentle fandom trolling.

Khriss is looking for rare Twinborn in Bands of Mourning wanting them to run experiments on your behalf. Someone touching metal and feeling like they are being spoken to may be Ferrings or Twinborn of a specific type. Connection and Soothing? Something and Investiture? After all, Nightblood who everyone but me seems to think of when reading an add about *tools* is a heavily Invested piece of metal. Can a Ferring unknowingly Invest a tool they are using as part of their job every day to a point where it starts going "Would you like to build something nice today?"

Let us not forget that Sazed holds Ruin and possesses Ruin's knowledge. If Ruin ever created this "Rust", Sazed would know. We have two books worth of evidence that Sazed is clueless. To me this rules out any "Rust is a part of Ruin" theory. In my opinion, the *original* Trell religion appears to have originated from Taldain. Don't want to go off on spoiling White Sand, but the structure of the world (Dayside and Darkside) should by now not be a spoiler. There is a somewhat more spoilery observation about the Darksiders that correlates with "they are good at math and can build maps of the sky" piece of knowledge we get from the original trilogy. As for the current Trell - I feel like the name has been coopted by something. There is no evidence of the "good brother night, bad brother sun", mapmaking, etc... in any of the Trell references in Wax and Wayne books. The only thing that may look similar is the desire for advanced technology.

Some meta-thinking: given the Wax & Wayne books were not in the original plan, I don't think that something of truly high cosmeric value will be resolved in the last book of this series. What I think will happen instead is the revelation of who Trell is, what the heck is going on with red haze, and what the Set is up to. Dealing with it and picking up the pieces will be left to the next three books. I like the idea that svarkiss are a memory of what Odium used to splinter Dominion and Devotion. This is consistent with Roshar. A question I have is this. On Roshar, Odium appears to fight the war of attrition: won't stop until full Desolation (destruction of the world). On Sel, Odium beat two Shards to a pulp and left. Why not genocide?

Can we figure out based on the maps how far New Seran is from "old" Seran?

Except for Wax's parents, of course.

I have a nit-picky question. Why name all other god metals by the vessel names: atium, lerasium, (and putative, tanavastium, raysium, etc...), but then use Harmonium and not Sazedium? PS. As for the metal, I am in the alkali metal camp: potassium or sodium sound right to me.

A person with a spike in the eye and scars on his hands behaves like Kelsier would and saves a whole people (in fact, five peoples). Let's assume for a moment this is Kelsier, because all signs point to it. It is not unreasonable to think that his ability to get back to Physical Realm has to do with Hemalurgy. After all, he *really wanted* Spook to run some experiments for him. The experiments appear to have succeeded (or scared Sazed into granting Kelsier his wish). Two questions are: (a) what is the mechanism for getting Kelsier's soul back into a physical body, and ( why does the body look like Kelsier. (a) I suspect multiple spikes are involved. At first sight I'd say we need to transfer Identity (the body acquiring Kelsier's soul). That's one. We also know that this may be impossible without Connection. That's two. Possibly, we need Investiture as well to power the Frankenstein's monster we construct this way. That's three. ( The body looking like Kelsier is probably the result of it having Kelsier's soul and therefore deciding that it must look like Kelsier. See: Peacful, Warbreaker The, and Stormblessed, Kaladin... (Lopen, too for that matter).

Agreed. We probably will learn more about the mechanics of Cosmere as applied to Roshar directly: the Oathpact, the origins and current whereabouts of Heralds, Cultivation and her role in all of this, Shadesmar travel and so on. We might get a glimpse of what Hoid is working on - I hope the tradition of Letters continues. But it seems that the Cosmere infodump books are going to be in the Mistborn series. There was a mention of a possibility of the Secret Histories for each of the Mistborn series. That may be how we learn things. As for The Lost Metal - what makes me think that we will find out some more Cosmere-related information in that book is that we need some sort of closure with Trell and the red whatever that is surrounding Scadrial. Since Wax and Wayne books were not originally on the 36-book Cosmere plan, I suspect that no Cosmere-level resolutions will be forthcoming in the fourth W&W book. But we may *learn* what Scadrial is up against, while the real fight against it will be pushed into the "80ies series".