Lewis Nethur

Well...it may not be the easiest method, but we know Ruin could alter the contents of copperminds so it stands to reason that Harmony can as well. A little discussed implication of this power is that it suggests that Harmony can read the contents of any coppermind without draining it and should therefore be able to upload its contents to other copperminds; keyed or unkeyed shouldn't matter. If a person (or Avatar?) with a more liberal attitude toward divine intervention were to replace Sazed they could potentially be persuaded to assist in the greatest and most efficient method of information dissemination ever conceived...I've always felt that the spread of information was key to giving people Autonomy AND maximizing their number of options (which Sazed claims is his responsibility as Harmony IIRC)...

In some circumstances, for some metals, yes, something like this should work, but it's worth pointing out that it would probably be faster, safer, easier, and more effective to centrifuge the molten material to separate it into cylindrical layers based on atomic mass rather than try to uniformly push it into layers using a bunch of allomancers.

This is spot on. For matter moving at speeds approaching the speed of light the concept of air resistance doesn't make sense because the air would be pressurized to the point of fusion before it could be shoved out of the way. The steel runner would die in the first few nanoseconds and the resulting burst of high energy gamma rays and the line of fusion explosions left in their wake would eclipse any man-made explosion made to date.

If feruchemists cant tap heat or breath while sleeping that's a huge weakness that should've been mentioned before now...

Honestly, I think Marsh would be extremely sensitive to the fact that he is open to control by a shard, even a generally benevolent one like Harmony, after his traumatizing experience with Ruin. He also found out experimentally that he could reduce Ruin's control over him through spikes in his already unusually gifted Determination. I would therefore posit that he's probably taken steps to allow himself to compound Determination. Not only would that make him extremely difficult to influence, it would probably make him almost irresponsibly certain in the rightness of his actions. Whether he is sane or not is an excellent question, because he's definitely up to something. Could be good or bad or some super position of both.

Darn! I really wanted to jump in with an "obviously it's one of the seals on the Dark One's prison" and score some easy Memory of Light points, but this seems pretty open-and-shut...

Recall the mist-sickness and how Preservation forcibly "snapped" a bunch of people who, under normal circumstances, never would have become allomancers. He was able to do this because many Scadrians are born with an affinity for the metallic arts (IE: they have the theoretical ability to manifest access to a specific allomantic and/or feruchemic power) while lacking the necessary Connection/Investiture to be able to ever bridge the gap to gain access without external influence. Basically: Metallic arts powers are assigned at birth Some (and maybe most or even all) Scadrians are born with theoretical access to a power but, for reasons that are not totally clear, they can't snap without additional Connection/Investiture being supplied to them from an external source Fine details are largely ROF'd at this point; it is generally expected that many details will become clear with the next book

Liquid metals can be burned yes. Wayne demonstrates this trick by melting a lump of bendalloy in hot tea to make swallowing it easier. Bendalloy has a melting point of approximately 70C and tea is generally served at approximately 72C. This trick is useful because bendalloy burns so quickly that a relatively large amount is required for any kind of sustained use to be possible. (IE: Wayne needs to consume something like 10-100x the volume of metal that Wax does when preparing for a fight).

I've been off the forums for a while, but my general recollection was that the prevailing theory was that "pushing" past "mistpoint" would gradually result in increasingly greater damage to the allomancer's spiritweb unless Sazed decided to relinquish control of Harmony to them (which probably wouldn't happen). This would essentially cap any allomantic expression of power, either human or mechanized, by causing the conduit channeling the power to dematerialize once the threads of its spiritweb were shredded/consumed/separated/vaporized/ect. In a nutshell: allomancy can't be broken to create infinite or insane power loops because doing so would vaporize the user, be it man or machine. (Caveat: except if Harmony is dropped) Has any of that been canonized or fallen out of favor?

The powers should absolutely stack, however, this might not be as crazy powerful as could be expected. For example, duralumin causes the user to very rapidly metabolize the other metals they are burning, much like flaring but on an extreme scale. Flaring is much less efficient than normal burning, IE: the user get more Investiture flowing through them per second when flaring, but the ratio between the Investiture flowing through them and the rate at which they burn metal decreases. Flaring duralumin should obey this principle like any other metal, and having duralumin nicrobursted should be roughly equivalent to super flaring it. Basically, this is going to lead to cascading waste with every additional iteration of nicrobursting and/or duralumining the end metal. It's mathematically possible that combining multiple augmentations could result in an equal or even weaker final display of power, with the caveat that much more metal would be consumed in the process. Further, even if the end user has many pounds of metal beads swallowed, it is entirely possible that they could have a maximum effective rate of Investiture output that is independent of the amount of augmentations on them; ie: they can be forced to burn pewter faster and faster, but they might be capped at 10x power no matter how fast they burn it.

Why is no one picking Ambition? I don't know what kind of magic system he/she would've come up with, but a planet of Ambition is bound to be loaded with opportunities for advancement and a mass producer of worldhoppers to carry their lord's will to the far reaches of the Cosmere. Being a worldhopper gives one the best chance of accumulating access to multiple magic systems and frankly I think Ambition would have created the most had it not been for the untimely death...if I'm hedging my bets, that's the way I'd have to go, Harmony just doesnt create enough metallic arts users or I'd go with him.

I think this raises an interesting conceptual solution for what may eventually be a real social problem for Scadrians: the detection and regulation of hemalurgy. If people with abnormally significant Connection to Ruin naturally repulse, or affect by proximity, people with abnormally great Connection to Preservation, that implies to me that people, or constructs like Kandra, with hidden spikes should theoretically be able to be picked out of a crowd if the right technique or technology were utilized. It sort of points to the potential existence of a natural visceral response to Investiture by Scadrians, particularly in unbalanced or unnatural cases like Inquisitors or Mistborn who enjoy murdering the innocent, which should be able to be manipulated or augmented. Maybe I'm grasping at straws but that's my two cents. Have an upvote for a solid set of scene analyses.

@Calderis While I don't like to admit it, that makes a certain kind of sense and is consistent with other innate magic systems in the Cosmere like Awakening in which the user needs no special training, preparation, or severe emotional trauma... I am biased. I want feruchemy to require snapping for symmetry with allomancy and for what I perceive as more elegant alignment with the greater mechanics of hemalurgy and the medallions (which I think we both agree lean on hemalurgy to an extent). I grudgingly agree that your explanation is technically satisfactory with the caveat that, stylistically, I find it less appealing than the alternative. Touche and well played, you're probably right.

I would argue that in the absence of clearly canonized information, feruchemy and allomancy should be assumed to obey parallel spiritual mechanics, after all, they appear to interact with hemalurgy and medallions in equivalent ways. I posit that snapping must be a fundamental aspect of feruchemy unless explicitly countermanded by a WoB on the basis that both allomancy and hemalurgy necessarily require the cracking of one's spiritweb to facilitate participation in the corresponding magic system. Note however that the way this is achieved differs between allomancy and hemalurgy, the former requiring a calibratable level of physical or emotional trauma and the latter simply requiring a forced foreign injection of Investiture into one's spiritweb. How does a feruchemist snap? Well, I would speculate that it parallels allomancy in both era 1 and 2. A full feruchemist is, by my reckoning, a roughly equally efficient killing machine compared to a mistborn but on a slightly more limited time-scale. Perhaps they snap slightly more easily then, but, given the abuses and castration of the Terris, it isn't difficult to imagine that they easily maintained a 100% snapping rate under the lord ruler...

Functionally, the aons seem to act like a programming language, with the order they are drawn being analogous to their line number in a script (which generally corresponds to order of execution for simple code). To the best of my knowledge that list is all we have so if you're going for an art project you're going to probably need to go non-canon. If you want a friendly suggestion: Aon Rao looks to me like it could be drawn with smaller aons inside each circle and used as a comparison statement or mathematical modifier. You might consider picking a handful of Aons to represent the classic logic circuit functions (and, or, not, nand, ect.) And/or mathematical symbols and translate a simple javascript program into them.

I'm inclined to agree with this, and the analogy to hemalurgy seems apt. Expanding on the specific process flow as I understand it: The spren exists mostly in the Cognitive Realm, the listener pulls it more into the Physical Realm by bonding it to their gem heart, and the bond they establish with each other in those two realms tweaks the listener's spirit web (aka how the listener manifests in the Spiritual Realm) which then prompts a bulk change to how the listener manifests in the Physical Realm.

It just looks like a bunch of mirrored P's to me (d's/b's/q's as well I guess). Shard of Reflection? Shard of Purity (or any other P-word) that has been splintered into 6 pieces? Shard of DQ? Shard of Dairy Queen? Shard of the Blizzard? Oh my God, it's Frost, the Dragon!!! Wow, 700 posts, who knew?

Let's just list our observations to start: They had a permanent fortified outpost with a relatively small garrison on the outskirts of Scadrial. They were prepared and actively planning to steal the Shard of Preservation should the opportunity arise but they didn't commit that many resources to doing so, assuming their number of members is meaningfully larger than the half dozen or so people we've seen, which might be a big "if." Stealing a Shard is a big freaking deal, unless you literally don't care which one you get, and you're just waiting for one to die, which over the last 3 millennia in the Cosmere, is really just a short matter of time for anyone with immortality. I posit then that the Ire have outposts on the outskirts of most or all shard worlds, fueled by conduits to the Dor, and are attempting to position themselves to steal Shards as Odium and/or Autonomy attack them. They don't care which they get or in what order, so I have to assume they intend to do something that isn't influenced by Intent. The first thing that immediately pops into mind is recombination of the Shards; save for Autonomy, I don't think any of the Intents we have seen preclude recombination if the bearer(s) were so inclined. The second is the destruction of the other Shard bearers; Odium and Autonomy are super dangerous to everyone, and when they run out of peers to murder, it's reasonable to assume they won't just stop and be happy, so a proactive strategy to garner and consolidate resources against them is quite prudent in my opinion, as they are too powerful to face head on for most groups/forces. Enjoy and discuss!

By the end of FE, the lord ruler was extremely weary of the skaa. He hated their interbreeding with the nobles, how unhappy they were with his rule, how they kept rebelling and pushing for change, pretty much everything that made them free-thinking human beings. He seemed pretty chill toward the nobles, with the exception of those who interbred with the skaa. My speculation is that he would have deepened the divide between skaa and noble even further, reducing skaa capacity for intelligence and communication skills as far as he could without crippling their ability to work the field as slaves, and possibly forcibly making them unable to cross-breed with "nobles." I doubt he would have restored the nobles allomantic powers to early-ascention levels as that would be a big change, which he disliked, and he only gave them the powers to get them to join his empire in the first place. Needless to say, he would hunt down all the feruchemists again and change them to be unable to pass down their power like before. He seemed pretty confident in his breeding program and he didn't want to extinct the Terris, so I'm reluctant to think he would go much further than that. As far as climate changes, he would probably do his best, which would be better than the previous attempt, but still probably garbage compared to what Sazed did eventually. He was oddly into hemalurgy, so he would probably come up with a new monster or two for funsies...

Allick uses a grain of etmetal to power mechanisms that, to me, sounded a lot like fluorescent tubes, to light up the temple of the Sovereign. Not conclusive, but my impression is that the Southern Scadrians are probably (among other things) using Imvestiture to create a potential difference and thereby induce current flow by mechanizing feruchemy and/or allomancy.

I would speculate that a skilled soulcaster should be able to command ferromagnetic objects to realign their atoms to create exceptionally powerful magnets. For steel and iron I would think this could be done with relatively little technical knowledge; if they have Maxwell's laws and a semester of thermodynamics they should be good to go. On the plus side, just off the cuff this should probably require 1-3 orders of magnitude less Investiture than a complete material change, as long as they weren't trying to make a magnet so strong that it exceeded the theoretical limits of the material.

My understanding is that, physiologically, the gemhearts don't directly do anything. That is, they facilitate a symbiotic bond with lesser non-sapient creatures (spren). Without getting into magic systems and Investiture, this is kind of a weird thing to describe. My advice: discuss how they have 4 genders or how they can re-pupate into various specialized roles at will based on the need of their hive instead.

Regarding malatium, they could have just added powdered atium to molten gold with no technical need to literally melt the atium. Also, the lead ball could have been made by pounding a bead of atium into a thin foil and then hammering it around the lead until it appeared smooth and seamless (at a glance anyway). I'm not sure that godmetals should have phases considering they are "solidified" Investiture rather than traditional matter. If mist can be condensed into atium/lerasium/harmonium, then I would think that stormlight and Breath could also be condensed into crazy godmetal-like substances. If Investiture from a shardpool can be boiled into its gaseous equivalent, then Endowment is in for serious problems if awakeners ever find the Shardpool on Nalthis...

I would speculate he has at least 1000 for fourth heightening and perfect life sense since he recognized Shallan as a protoradiant at a glance when she was a child. This is totally speculative though, he could also have been burning bronze or just manipulating Fortune. When he awakens he does so through physical touch, so we can at least say we don't have any evidence that he has the 9th or 10th heightening. Command breaking and instinctive awakening definitely sound like powers Hoid would be interested in, so of he was going to go out of his way to gain access to Awakening, I'd propose those are the ones he would be after. I suggest he probably has the 8th just based on personality and past actions.

What's peculiar here to me is the appearance of the word "ghost" in the name. Much like the "hound" in axehound, ghost isn't really a word that makes sense on Roshar; if offworlders weren't involved the word "spren" would probably make a lot more sense given local convention and understanding. My instinct would be that the term has roots on a Cosmere planet that doesn't have a firmly established and agreed upon path to life-after-death or undeath in the collective minds of its inhabitants as I think the existence of such a framework sort of precludes the cultural development of the "ghost" concept; if a civilization had firm agreement of what happened after death, they would be unlikely to speculate and invent words to describe souls that persist after death IMO. I would speculate then that Threnody would be unlikely to have a concept of "ghosts" given that they already have Shades. Whether ghost is being used metaphorically, ie: referencing something or someone that is "ghostlike" vs. Referencing a soul or spirit that exists independent of a physical body is totally beyond me. The usage of the word blood sounds like an awesome candidate for being a red herring reference to hemalurgy and Scadrians as the origin so I'm going to just ignore it for now. I propose that "blood" is probably being used in the metaphorical sense, ie: ghostbloods = "children/followers/siblings of the ghosts," rather than, "those with the literal blood of ghosts" or "those whose blood was taken from the dead." Taken together, my speculation is that the Ghostbloods are essentially the Rosharan Chapter of a greater Cosmere organization that was itself assembled by the followers of one or more powerful worldhoppers originating from a world with the religious diversity and lack of widespread access to the CR and SR to have "ghosts" develop organically as a part of its peoples' general cultural heritage. I really want it to have originated with hemalurgy on Scadrial but it feels too obvious...