Lewis Nethur

Well...just like stories in real life, there is usually one man, woman, or child who lives them to completion before they are shared, iterated, and retold. The most powerful stories have a single literal origin, which is so oft' repeated throughtout time and refined throughout centuries or millenia, that scholars and historians argue and, in extremely extreme cases, encourage others to fight wars, trying to specifically identify, label, and confirm consensus regarding what said origin was... And if that doesn't make everyone laugh beyond all capacity for reason, then nothing shall. lol.

Well let's remember what we know about the story: 1. The tale is specifically about a jealous dog, one who covets powers that they themselves can never have but strive to simulate and reproduce anyway. 2. The dog is ridiculed persistently by its peers despite massive strides in innovation. This actually doesn't sound much to me like Kaladin (who is famously popular) or Hoid (who is famously thick-skinned) 3. The dog saves a child in danger with no hesitation or thought of reward by putting itself in danger. 4. The "dog" can write, but specifically cannot speak and be heard. 5. The dog still apparently regards himself as a failure, and his reward for thoughtlessly saving others is unending peace, comfort, and love rather than the indomitable power that he wished to obtain. This almost sounds to me like an ascension story. Like...a person who worked their life away to hold a Shard and, upon doing so, realized that they could only affect positive outcomes with the most minor uses of their infinite power, and everything else brings only greater pain...I'm not sure what the literal in-world origin of the folktale is still though...

He would have ended up blind, deaf, and dumb, if he didn't die first, period full-stop. There are ways to achieve extra sensory awareness, but what spooks were doing is equivalent to rampant drug abuse.

I mean...that's a massive RAFO for certain but it almost certainly must be a highly distilled and concentrated source of Investiture that Pulses in time with the frequency of the highstorms like the beating heart of the entire planet if I had to wager a guess. I suppose that probably means that it's some form of perpendicularity, though I suspect that it's periodic nature means that it's only accessible a tiny fraction of the time.

I see a problem with this one. Destiny is what one is going to do and where one is going to be in the future. That...just does not metaphorically jive with being meaningfully equivalent to Fortune, which metaphorically refers to luck or large amounts of money in standard language. Destiny can be tragic, or ironic, heroic, arbitrary, grandiose, or totally bare ass stupid and poor. It is not fundamentally fortuitous in any sense of the word. It should not, therefore, be nudging anyone, because it’s fundamentally unreliable when considered that way. While l...expect...that it is technically possible to murder a person and steal their Investiture to make oneself more powerful in a general sense, i don't belive that you can steal their Fortune, then divorce that Fortune from the connections and identifying features that give it meaning, and drink it as some form of concentrated wealth potion...to be frank, I would expect one to be poisoned and die horribly before something like that worked.

I think this is honestly the "correct" take to hold. Next-gen nightbloods already actively exist and are being manufactured by nalthians who do not have to bow to the vow requirements of naturally evolved rosharn spren. They used and abused nightblood in order to create them though, so it's nice to think that the cosmere might be forgiving of the horrible flaws that made him so ungodly min-maxed.

The big hurdle I see here is that evil is a concept which people generally find extremely difficult to align on identifying and classifying. For a spren to evolve into a bestower of the abilities of an evil-killer they would have to be persistently believed in and personified in the hearts and minds of the majority of rosharns for a sustained and meaningful period of time. If Szeth and nightblood come out of wind and truth as paragons of justice and are raised to positions of honor among all other radiants this could be "theoretically" possible. They probably wouldn't receive 5 oaths unless they were formalized and structured for them by Dalinar however since they would fundamentally exist outside the oathpact and existing magical governance framework of their respective world. This means that, if they evolved naturally and were not incorporated as a new radiant order, they might function without oaths similar to how the earliest and most primitive (but also least restricted and arguably most powerful) super early radiants functioned, IE: people who personify the feelings of a given species of spren attract the attention of one of those spren, receive and accept its blessing and friendship, and gain access to its powers without any formal swearing of loyalty or restriction. That would be...extremely dangerous, but that would sort of be the point for anyone or anything trying to emulate szeth and nightblood. Situations get weird quickly in real life when people try to emulate artificially intelligent systems in real life, but it...it can be done...

I suspect that there will have to be some manner of reconciliation with the other 9 orders, but it could get pretty ugly before it gets better given how many protoradiants they hunted down and murdered. I could easily see them being reorganized under Szeth but, more likely, they'll simply need to return to service coordinating under the leadership of their bondsmiths. They seem to have pretty bad morality and leadership problems at present, it wouldn't shock me if many or all of those at or above the 3rd ideal end up breaking their oaths and returning to civilian roles or have to be killed for (temporary) peace to be restored.

My suspicion for tin+atium is that it should allow for some form of remote-sensing, as in being able to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell sensory inputs somewhere other than where one's physical body is located. I'm still trying to shake out in my own head whether that should actuate as a type of clairvoyance, IE: picking up the senses of a targeted person via spiritual realm magic, or as a type of astral projection, IE: casting one's senses to any distant location through the cognitive realm.

I believe it was implied, possibly in the annotations, during era1 that, prior to Rashek's ascension and possibly before Preservation betrayed Ruin, the people of ancient Scadrial (for whom access to the metallic arts was just about as rare as current day southern-scadrians) utilized simple, precise, low-impact hemalurgy as a way of achieving enlightenment and communicating with their Gods. I don't believe that one can create constructs (giant mutants who's souls are unrecognizable from that of a human) without dipping into the levels of hemalurgic extremism that Rashek first unleashed...I think it's more-or-less confirmed, however, that even a relatively primitive understanding of Hemalurgy is sufficient for the purpose of making minor targeted changes to a human soul or opening one's mind to communicating telepathically with Scadrial's shards. I'm hoping that someone eventually figures out a hack for completing the process without killing people someday though; I wouldn't even call that cheating at this point if it actually worked.

This makes pretty good sense overall, and...I can admit that I just find the concept of Destiny being transferable in any way between human bodies extremely distasteful on an ideological level, be the universe deterministic or probabilistic, or a combination of the two. The close relationship between a person's spiritual Identity and their future Destiny just...I just really strongly suspect that surgically tampering with those parts of a character's soul (except in the finest and tiniest of ways) should be so unbelievably damaging as to be essentially as bad as death. Buuuuut...I can't prove it with an in-world example...yet.

Edit: had some confusing references, hopefully this edit helps clarify. I respectfully have to disagree when it comes to Destiny specifically, though i agree that you're generally correct with that metaphor. Cosmeric Destiny seems to be very closely related to the real world concept of destiny. An individual person can't have two independent destinies. If someone "stole" someone's destiny to become a Shard's champion, would not any intelligent Shard simply select and groom a new champion rather than blindly accept a probably hostile actor being crammed down their throat? What about the destiny to become king or sovereign of a nation? Sure, you can hammer a railroad spike through a politician's chest and into your own, but that most assuredly is not going to convince anyone that you are fit to govern, no matter what magical identity theft you claim to have performed. Lol. I think Fortune is very simply something that can be Ruined by Ruin's magic, but I don't believe the concept of a transplant makes sense from a basic 3-realms perspective. No one ever promised that hemalurgy always grants power; the power it grants is a side effect. It's main purpose is to change and destroy. What better manifestation of this could their be than a spike that tears destinies out of the future and leaves only an extremely hyper-poisonous suicide spike in their place?

Agreed, there's a possibility that the mind would simply partition itself like if multiple people store into a single shared metalmind with no Identity shenanigans. My supposition that all of the Investiture would get rekeyed to whoever stored their Identity in it is simply based on the observation that partitioning appears to be the result of, IE: the natural outcome of, clashes of Identity in containers. My thought is that the Investiture should difuse uniformly throughout the metalmind and, since there is no Identity clashing to force partitioning, there would still only be a single partition and this partition would, by its very nature, be inaccessible to anyone except whoever polluted it. (I'm as confident as I can be that scadrians will eventually figure out how to alter and repair the contents of their minds eventually though, so I wouldn't classify any of them as truly permanently locked or ruined)

My understanding of the process is that what we call an unkeyed metalmind is, strictly speaking, simply a completely ordinary metalmind which has been filled with Investiture that is not Identity-keyed. This means that, yes, anyone wishing to refill the metalmind would have to do so in a way that doesn't contaminate it with their Identity, as this would poison the device from being used by anyone else. It's likely that if Wayne had stored into that unkeyed metalmind that he picked up for as little as a few seconds he may have been able to key all its Investiture to himself.

This is totally speculative and based on my own observation, so don't take it as gospel for at least a few years, but I don't believe H-chromium "steals" Destiny, so much as "Ruins" it. I say this because I can't imagine or thought-experiment myself through "how" one could metaphysically implant and overwrite another person's Destiny over the top of their own without killing themself or, at the very least corrupting and locking virtually every node in their spiritweb immediately (because they would no longer make sense and be able to function as a network). I do suspect that you could kill a person in a way that severs their Fortune from reality however and, as a simple matter of conservation, cosmere metaphysics require that that Investure (Fortune being an Investiture-object, be containered somewhere. That's what I think H-chromium spikes do. This would make them extremely powerful as a weapon of assassination against any magic users who are favored by any particular Shard, essentially worthless against 99.9% of any given population in general, and probably a very cruel and painful method of torturing and killing hemalurgists and any would-be inquisitors of the future...giving them a spike that they cannot metaphysically process without a complete destruction of self. Could Ishi have torn the stormfather's bond away from dalinar to himself? Honestly, I don't believe so, not without killing all 3 of them or, at the very least, permanently damaging them to the point of it making little difference. The fact that he even tried is chilling enough in and of itself.

Honestly, from what I've observed, leaning into the occasional half-insane savant's barely discernable explanations is how humanity "discovers" a statistically significant (very disproportionately large) portion of its real life novel scientific, technological, and artistic principles. It absolutely makes sense that the capabilities and nuances of savantism run far deeper than has been revealed on page in the cosmere, yes. If you believe that the person who designed the trap-hallway to protect the FAKE bands of mourning was just some regular dude who was definitely all the way there cognitively and emotionally, then you're as bonkers as they were. Heck...I'd bet a month's pay that 80% of Khriss' ars arcanum is copied verbatim from sources that most magic users and worldhoppers would consider clinically insane if they were asked in public.

This is an oft-repeated fan theory that I think is essentially correct, but the actual details of why it works are still up for debate. The best on-page evidence that exists for it that I'm aware of is Rashek's perfect-recall: he seems to legitimately be able to immediately recognize the face and deeds of anyone that he has ever laid eyes on, and thus far noone has been able to trace any of his other powers, skills, abilities back to something that would facilitate this. The simplest and easiest explanation: he was literally just walking around smoking throw-away copperminds (with nothing important in them, maybe just a few randomly generated numbers even) on a slow-burn for his entire 1,024 years as a Sliver and, for metaphysical reasons, having essentially empty F:copper allomantically smoked into one's brain every second of every day very simply reinforces memory creation to the point that it meaningfully approaches perfect-recollection. The more complicated and less useful, but also less obviously broken explanation: burning copperminds only reinforces the memories stored in those minds in the user's brain, and Rashek simply practiced an evening ritual of smoking a mind filled with the faces of any new people that he wanted dead and why. Always interesting to hear folks argue and advocate for how they think our Lord Sociopath managed to keep all those nobles sorted and ordered between his naughty and nice lists without ever having to look up a single record.

My understanding is that Investiture doesn't "have" Identity. It can be Keyed to the Identity of a "person" (which, for cosmere purposes, also includes artificial sapient beings/constructs) that it flows through. I'm not aware of any good reason that kinetic Investiture would/should be keyed with Identity except for the sole purpose of countering your theory because, quite simply put, kinetic Investiture gets expelled and sent back to the spiritual realm immediately after being used up anyway, so in all other cases except the one you describe it wouldn't actively benefit anyone for it to be keyed that way. With passive Investiture like Breath, the extra security makes pragmatic functional sense from a security perspective. Edit: honestly, thinking about it a little more...doing what you're suggesting would, I expect, probably trick the Investiture into being keyed to the Leecher's Identity if anything, letting them use other people's powers for brief periods but not allow them to share said powers with others. This might be a security problem...lol

One interesting point that we can glean from the Sunlit Man is that space age Scadrians are actively searching for Investiture-rich worlds, embedding themselves into them (sometimes by trade and sometimes by force), and performing society-wide experimentation trials on them. With sixth of dusk, we had evidence that at least one band of rogue traders was engaging in such activities, but after Sunlit Man, it's clear that the behavior is systemic and very likely endorsed, funded, and contracted out by Scadrial's government(s) and militaries. A second point worth noting is that Scadrians still appear to be fractured and tribalistic deep into the space age. This probably shouldn't be too surprising considering how actual humans work in real life, but it is worth noting. The female scientist who the Sunlit one meets in the vault seems totally divorced and dissociated from the horror of the experiments that they are conducting on innocent people, because she is; they do not seem to regard outsiders as "people." Historically, groups who practice that sort of belief externally also practice it at home. I would take this to imply that era 4 scadrial might have a functionally-unified military for defense and warfighting, but almost certainly won't have a truly unified government (Meaning that, tragically, the stratification, concentration of power, exploitation of vulnerable tribes, and deepseeded resentments leftover from Harmony's ascension may never fully heal within the entire arc of the Cosmere. And he was the extra-good, super-nice, double-Shard trying to fix the sins of the past leftover from the explicitly genocidal racist emperor who came before him!!! ) Lastly, (and much more speculatively) the great lengths that the scadrians go to in order to remain hidden, as well as how legitimately successful they are at avoiding detection while conducting globe-spanning experiments that could make nazis blush in embarrassment, is further evidence that they have done this before, on numerous other worlds both in series and in parallel. This means to me that either 1) Harmony (or maybe Discord) has completely lost control of traffic in and out of Scadrial and late-stage Scadrians are invading the rest of the cosmere with impunity for the purpose of rampant Investiture-exploitation (because...that is what they are used to having done to them and karma is an insane counter-intuitive b**ch like that...) or 2) Scadrial's scientists, engineers, and soldiers are responding and reacting against off world threats which are so grave and targeted that Harmony (or maybe Discord), the kindest and seemingly most well-intentioned of all the Shards, has given them his blessing and chosen to not take action to halt their coming and going (which he could presumably do at anytime like Autonomy).

I think is very much a key mechanic in how A:electrum functions. In order to glean new information from the shadows that one doesn't currently hold in their brain (a safe password) and also utilize it by following said shadows in real-time, then the Oracle either needs to artificially extend the magnitude of their futuresight (via duralumin, nicrobursting, hemalurgic power stacking, new medallions that don't exist yet, burning inside a speed-bubble, ect.) So that they can perceive the shadows more clearly, or else they need a massive cognitive processing acceleration via something like era1 atium or F:zinc. Basically, they need to create exotic situations where there's a 100%probability that at least one shadow SHALL be successful by trial and error, and WILL also be observed intelligibly, within the duration of their futuresight perception.

In a "fair" duel to the death, I would say skybreakers all day every day, but...I cannot imagine a scenario where a windrunner would both want and need to fight a skybreaker 1-on-1 with no capacity for retreat and, historically, it seems like there has almost always been more windrunners and squires than any other order can shake a stick at. So...I'm voting Windrunners because, if it came to a fight to the death, they would definitely either retreat and regroup, or else bring everything they have and, except during the first 5 stormlight books, that should always be far more in aggregate distributed total than the skybreakers, even if (big if) someone managed to marshal them all together perfectly.

That is an interesting question...I've heard people speculate offline that this could potentially lead to a partial or total loss of one's free-will and self-determination on the basis that following the shadows alters how the shadows manifest, theoretically leading to one's actions being effectively controlled and set by the actions of others. I think this is why Determination being the Feruchemical element stored in electrum is a particularly poetic counterpart to it's allomantic use. Its hemalurgic usage is also very powerful since it can steal access to duralumin. An electrum twinborn with one electrum spike for duralumin would, I think be an extremely powerful ally (or extremely dangerous enemy) to have. If an electrum user's Determination is TOTALLY unwavering and not being actively and persistenly countered by other real-time futuresight magic, then I would expect them to only perceive a single electrum shadow that only splits into multiple when one is about to die or suffer irreparable harm, because nothing else would change their course of action. Imagine: a pinnacle-oracle who can see into the spiritual realm on demand. Would they be any good in a fight? I'm not sure; a human brain might simply not be a fast enough processor to make use of that kind of perception and sensory explosion in real-time very effectively to influence one's performance in a conflict; it might even make things more difficult, especially if one had literally even the tiniest shred of an innate desire to avoid or prevent harming others, as no amount of Determination would prevent feedback loops in that case and they could easily be driven insane. However, outside of an intense stress or combat environment, I imagine that they would be like the Delphic Oracle out of ancient history: able to perceive the infinite cascading effects of the infinite potential future actions and choices of themselves and everyone Connected to them in massive uncontrollable bursts of clarity. A valuable friend or advisor to have maybe, but probably not very good at fighting unless they somehow found a way to suppress any and all empathy too.

Ha! That's an interesting bit of rules-lawyering, but I think that interpretation also technically works. When Szeth was targeted and overwhelmed by the other skybreakers during initiation, they all essentially cast him down as a cheater for simply washing the dust off that showed how many times he had been hit. Nale didn't let him off the hook until Szeth expressed awareness of the rule that he had "exploited," by the others' view, but he ultimately relented and judged that, if one has acted honorably, then sometimes being technically correct is all that the law requires. In the view you describe, Szeth may not have the level of awareness necessary to advocate for himself or his soul effectively (and he's done enough horrible things in life that he might be unlikely to make up a bs excuse if challenged, and just admit that he wanted to kill that evil man), but his spren probably would, and that...that should count since they're supposed to be a team and working together. Love it.

Well...the process of getting there would probably be pretty dark, buuuut...in theory, everyone would be much happier than they had ever been afterwards. What else would a super intelligence do with a billion bodies except treat it like a real world game of Sid Meier's civilization on peaceful mode speed running towards infinite culture and science victories? That could actually be a pretty neat concept for a limited "bad guys win" scenario for the Cosmere, which otherwise doesn't really seem compatible with those: Scadrians conquer a primitive planet, introduce them to Identity magic (but literally only teach them to share it in pure aggregate, not to compound or abuse it) and medallions, trade them for whatever interesting local magical relics, flora, or fauna that they have (there's almost always something if you hunt hard enough), then basically install a computer simulation of their collective consciousness and make it their virtual Telepathic-God-King and set them to work producing works of art, conducting research, and answering worldhopper's questions and caring for them.

Yeah, I think that wouldn't quite work. It feels mechanically similar to me to trying to store at 100% speed into two steelminds simultaneously. What might work in the distant future though is having a self aware space age machine (imagine Nightblood, only an Empath instead of a Sociopath) which identifies with everyone equally well store it's Investiture into an aluminummind. Storing your own Identity and tapping that one's might theoretically allow anyone to tap anyone's metalminds (think super quantum computing revolution where encryption no longer works) Edit: I could also imagine that going horribly wrong and all the sapient beings on an entire planet being essentially aggregated into an Identity-less mass of drones that are controlled by a computer hivemind though, so buyer beware.