Espella

Second point doesn't seem very likely to work to me, not sure how the Aons would know that the spike would work at a specific point or not without any prior knowledge of bind points, that feels like putting a black box in front of a program and asking it to predict the output without actually letting it put in any inputs to learn from. Maybe if you hook it up to some fortune shenanigans but I feel like creating an AonDor program that can activate outputs based on futuresight would either be very unreliable (like futuresight we've seen before int he cosmere) or would start to get into some serious causality shenanigans. Also I may be remembering wrong but I thought there fairly detailed bind point diagram or description in Spook's hemalurgy book that Wax memorized at some point, and clearly the Set had managed to work out bind points on their side of things enough to steal and grant various allomantic and feruchemical abilities, so enough knowledge is clearly out there for the standard uses of hemalurgy. Regarding the first point I do like the idea of the homing spike gun, though with I feel like "basic knowledge of anatomy and AonDor" is probably understating it a bit considering how much precision we've seen was required just to teleport people from one city to another and the fact that people aren't all the exact same shape and at a fixed distance from the user. Haven't seen a ton of applications yet though so maybe there is a way to make it more generalized.

Aside from the main limitation most people here have mentioned of needing a lot of knowledge and precision to get the intended result, I expect efficiency of investiture use might be a problem later down the line. Most uses of AonDor we've seen so far rely on being in the giant power amplifier that is Elantris, and we know the AonDor gets weaker the further you are from Elantris, so I expect it probably takes a lot of investiture to get it up and running compared to some of the other magic systems. Obviously we've seen people using it in other locations, but given that when we see if done in Lost Metal it required a huge supply of purified Dor (though I don't remember if it clarified how much of that was for the forging and how much was for AonDor usage after the fact) I expect you probably need a large source of investiture to pull from i general to make it work, which is all well and good if you're in Elantris but in other places you'd want to just hire out somebody or get a fabrial/medallion/etc. with the actual power you want rather than get an AonDor replication of it. The fact that our few glimpses of future era technology as far as I can remember have hit on pretty much every major magic system we know of except for the Selish ones (outside of using seons for communications) might support this, with AonDor-based tech being uncommon because they have way higher investiture requirements so people outside Sel don't usually want them. Though I suppose it could also just be that the Elantrians don't like sharing, haven't seen enough of what they're up to at that point to really say one way or another.

More recent comments from him have implied that the exact timeline for where Elantris takes place won't be locked in until he writes the sequels, just to avoid causing any issues for those books: He's also said that he wants the Elantris sequels and Era 3 Mistborn coming out around the same time, which could hint at some connection there but I'd expect that they just both give background information on shards or cosmere-wide organizations that complement each other well. I remember a few years ago there was a theory going around that all of the Dor swirling around in the cognitive realm around Sel was causing time dilation there which could lead to some weirdness on where it falls in the timeline, though I recall the main reason for those theories had been that he'd specifically mentioned large amounts of investiture causing time dilation a few times so it seemed important, but looking back that could have just been him already having the current Roshar situation in mind.

If the theory that he just through his bones at a mistwraith and then had Spook staple his shadow to it with a spike is correct you might be able to just get the kandra dissolver syringes they had in Shadows of Self and just melt him at long distance by having a coinshot fire it and push the syringe in to inject (or just design a better long-range injector) and then pick up the spike after, which would probably be the most funny option. Feel like we're not clear on the exact mechanics of his physical situation but once you've got the spike in hand you've probably got it covered, melt the thing down inside an aluminum box or something. Or jam some crystal spikes in your eyes Moash-style to see into the cognitive realm and bring some anti-investiture if you really want to be sure, though that's getting into territory that's a lot harder to actually pull off. Since he doesn't really have any powers at the moment I feel like the main issue is finding a way to get him isolated and avoid his notice. Based on what we've seen so far it seems like the best opportunity to go for him would be when he's traveling between North and South Scadrial or when he's telling people he's offworld (if he does) since he's still trying to keep up the charade with the Ghostbloods that he has his powers (unless that just because Marasi was there, don't remember if he was still implying he had Mistborn powers in the epilogue scenes where she wasn't there anymore) so that's the time where he'd be the least likely to have highly capable backup with him. Probably would want some kind of experienced coppercloud to hide from any detection devices he might have on hand, or just go for the classic method of a sniper way beyond detection range. Of course all this is based on a lot of information we have that the people on Scadrial wouldn't. Based on information they have the first pass plan I'd come up with would be try to get a plant in the Ghostbloods, wait for news of him traveling on an airship or a train or something, and then hit it with a big ettmetal bomb before he has time to use his Mistborn powers to escape/fight back (or an ettmetal/trellium bomb if you want to be really sure). Depends on how much collateral damage they're willing to deal with and how much knowledge of his condition the Ghostblood plant would be able to get.

Do we have any reason to believe that investiture diffuses through a metalmind instantly and not at speed of light? There's a WoB saying that most uses of investiture do follow speed of light, and implies that you need specific tricks to get around it: My assumption would be that any methods that bypass speed of light involve spiritual realm shenanigans in some way since we know time works different there, and feruchemy doesn't strike me as a method very likely to have avenues to do those sorts of shenanigans since it's very reliant on a physical user touching a physical object and transferring things between them.

Mistborn has always been my favorite of the Cosmere settings and I love the broadsheet stories in Era 2, so I've really been looking forward to that Nicki Savage book. Haven't seen anything mentioned about it in a while so hope it's still being worked on. I've also been waiting for the Warbreaker sequel for a long time and I suspect that it's going to keep getting pushed back further and further now that Brandon has signed on to write screenplays for adaptations, if we ever see it at all. Feels like it's in danger of getting cut for time entirely if he gets too busy since all the important characters have made their way to Stormlight at this point so he might not consider it essential to the overall story of the Cosmere but I still want to see more of Nalthis. Of the random side projects that have been mentioned the only one I have any interest in is Night Brigade since we've seen Threnody before, I'm sure the others could be good but I have no expectations for them at the moment given we basically just have titles and a loose concept pitch. The kite magic book he mentioned offhand a few times does sound kind of fun though.

The Set scientists in Lost Metal found out a way to spike people without killing them, didn't they? Seems to me that as more research goes into that spiking the same person multiple times should become possible. I think there's a WoB out there somewhere saying it's not thought to be possible to steal multiple attributes from the same target, but that was before it was known that you can keep the target alive which changes things.

We know Harmony was able to find Valor (or at least engage in conversation with her) since he tells Hoid in the RoW letter that she seems reasonable and wants to talk to Wit again. Endowment also seems to know where Valor is and implies that the two of them are the only ones who have stuck to the agreement of only one shard per planet, though she also says that Valor doesn't want to speak to Hoid which is the opposite of what Harmony said so who knows what's going on there. To me this implies that if Valor is on Roshar it's a very recent thing (as in it probably happened during the timeframe of the books) as there would need to be time for Valor to meet with Endowment and Harmony after Hoid sent his letters before going into hiding on Roshar. As far as Valor's relevance goes I definitely expect her to show up in the back half given that the end of Hoid's epilogue has him deciding it's probably time to go track her down once he's done in Scadrial. Given the fact that Taravangian couldn't find her, Endowment says she won't tell Hoid where she is, and Harmony mentioning that she seems reasonable and wants to talk again, there's two likely possibilities that come to my mind: Valor is indeed on Roshar in deep hiding, after talking to Harmony about Hoid's letter she decided she did want to get involved and found some way to conceal herself from Odium (and possibly the other shards on Roshar), and she either lied about her plans so that Endowment wouldn't get angry at her for breaking isolation or she convinced Endowment to support her and Endowment is keeping the fact that she's on Roshar secret (which is why she refuses to tell Hoid where she is). Once we get to the back half of the series we'll start to see signs of her influence building up to the reveal that she's on Roshar and has plans. Valor is not on Roshar and Hoid will be actively searching for her once he's done on Scadrial, and we'll get some interludes showing his search to set up for him finding her and bringing her in as an ally so that she doesn't just show up out of nowhere from another planet to save the day.

The book didn't explicitly state it but when I was reading I assumed this was the secondary goal Dalinar had when giving up Honor (the primary goal being to force all the shards to focus on dealing with Taravangian immediately). Obviously we haven't seen a huge difference in the short term but it did keep him from lashing out at Azir and Urithiru after the deal was broken and might help temper the hatred and rage that comes from Odium's power. The conversation Dalinar had with Honor's power before giving it up felt to me like he was setting it up to start changing from the rigid "keep your oaths" view of Honor, and I can see the power starting to object to Retribution's utilitarian methods down the line and start to give him the same types of problems that Harmony has been having with the powers contradicting each other. Odium and Honor work far better together than Ruin and Preservation do, but I would expect in general that any combination of two shards will be more limited than before because you are essentially bound to two Intents instead of one.

Rayse was trying to claim he was Passion rather than Odium when he was in charge so that might be a direction Taravangian could take, though that doesn't really seem to match his style. Based on his scene with Cultivation in Rhythm of War it seems like he's more calculating with his hatred, making plans and executing precision strikes against the other shards that he sees as failing their people (if he ever manages to get out of the Roshar system) in his goal to "save" everyone in the most brutal way possible, basically channeling that hatred into being extremely over-protective, dispensing a god's wrath on all enemies of his people. If he plays his cards right he can probably claim to be working for the good of Roshar and keep Cultivation on his side until he gets a chance to double-cross her. Basically Rayse seemed to have the interpretation of Odium as being full of passion and giving in to destructive urges, whereas Taravangian seems like at least at the beginning he'll be aiming for a more focused hatred, constantly plotting to take down his enemies but having the restraint to only show his hand when he knows he can win. I doubt there would be enough of a shift in focus there to change the word of the intent (despite Rayse's claims, nobody else is calling him Passion) but it's definitely a different approach to the same intent.

Been a while since I've read RoW so I guess I wasn't thinking about the Sibling having a ton of fabrials, mostly I remembered the disagreement between Navani and the Sibling about modern fabrials which is why Science seemed wrong to me. I suppose thinking back that was more of an ethical concern rather than an anti-science thing. Justice makes sense for a lot of the same reasons War does, both fundamentally are based around the idea of bringing wrath/hatred against only those who deserve it, i.e. dealing out Odium in an Honorable fashion. I feel like the theoretical combination could easily end up as either Justice or War depending on the mindset of whoever the new bearer was and how they viewed the combination.

Is there something I missed that makes the Honor+Cultivation = Science combo possibly canon? Wouldn't be my first thought for their combination and I don't remember seeing anything in the books or WoBs to support that.

For the Set, we don't know if they did or not, but looking from their perspective any Trellium spike they get is another potential hemalurgist they can shield from Harmony, which was probably more immediately appealing than using their limited amounts of it to work out its allomantic and feruchemical attributes. As far as I remember they never covered how exactly the Set gets the Trellium, but I assume Autonomy had to give it to them directly, and I would assume that Autonomy only gave it to members who had proven themselves with a specific use in mind. Admittedly their multiple test runs of the explosives and the fact that they worked that reaction out in the first place makes this theory a bit weaker, but you could say that they were experimenting with spikes they had recovered from fallen members (which wouldn't be able to be used for feruchemy or allomancy but could still be used to split harmonium just fine) or one of the scientists really impressed Autonomy and got a small amount to work with, then once they found it out and the whole bomb plan Telsin took charge and was rewarded with the resources they needed to execute the plan. Any efforts to do large scale research on the allomantic or feruchemical abilities of Trellium would likely be shut down by the Set as just not being a practical use of resources, given that they know how to use it for hemalurgy to access a set of powers that are already well understood. Consequently, if the power is something more esoteric than the normal allomantic abilities, getting a few one-off experiments approved probably wouldn't be enough to figure out how it works and not worth a mention, especially how feruchemists have had ~300 years to work on the spiritual metals and still don't know much about how those work. For the kandra and our protagonists, the simple answer is that nobody wanted to risk getting Trell's attention or doing something damaging to themselves by burning the metal. I'd be hesitant to burn it myself in their situation, given that they have no idea what the power would be (and they didn't even know what shard Trell was until Lost Metal, so no guessing based on intent). Also any Trellium they did have would be spikes they took from the Set and you can't burn those anyway.

I think what Wayne does is something any bendalloy misting could do with practice, the whole deal in Lost Metal is that he's so filthy rich he can afford to have tons of metal to mess around with which is not a luxury anyone else has. Marasi mentions at the start of the book that Wayne had been using his bendalloy to play pranks all the time before she caught him which probably gave him a lot of practice on shaping speed bubbles. Most people aren't going to spend a fortune on getting enough bendalloy to develop their skills, they'll just buy small amounts and use it only when they need it. By the time we get to Era 3 we might see more people able to do speed bubble tricks like Wayne if they've found ways to reduce the cost of the metal with new technology.

Still not entirely clear on the why he left it there, but the multiple layers of traps and secrets only to have it actually be the spearhead outside sure sounds like the kind of defense plan Kelsier would come up with. There's always another secret, after all. I'd be willing to believe Harmony talked him into putting it somewhere where nobody could misuse it back when they were on better terms and now that they've already been taken out he set up a plan to get his people in the South to get their hands on it, so that he can to work on using them while still not breaking whatever agreement he and Harmony had set up when he hid it in the first place. It would explain why he was hanging out in the South at the beginning of Lost Metal, he went down there to hatch the plan with Daal and whoever else he was working with, since he knew Autonomy was going to be an issue at some point soon (thus giving an opportunity for a crisis that would result in the Bands getting pulled out) but underestimated how quickly the Set was going to act. On the how of the stealing/draining my first guess when I read initially that they had an allomantic grenade with aluminum set up for Daal to use that would make it impossible to use investiture in range and thus would make it seem like the Bands were drained because nobody could use them in range, though thinking back I'm not actually sure if anything has confirmed exactly how the grenades work with aluminum. Chromium could probably do the trick as well but my thinking was it would be better to prevent people from drawing on the bands than to leech them once they had, both to make it less obvious and to preserve whatever is still stored in them.

Bands of Mourning has the most focus on Steris, ergo it is the best cosmere book. But in all seriousness it is my favorite of the Wax and Wayne books because I feel like it really is the climax of most of the character development, and Lost Metal has the cast mostly static in their character development outside of Wayne in my opinion. I do still like Lost Metal quite a bit but without all of the character development it feels less like a satisfying end and more like setup for Era 3 and Ghostbloods stuff. The scene with the bands in Lost Metal in particular feels like things are being moved out of the book because they need to be saved for the next trilogy. Maybe it will feel better once we can read the whole series straight though.

According to WoB Thaidakar doesn't actually have an avatar, he's stuck in Scadrial and just pretending to have an avatar using some method that hasn't been made canon yet (source: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/460/#e14641). Also of note is reading through the Kelsier WoBs on Arcanum he never explicitly says "Thaidakar is Kelsier" so I suppose there's room for some exact words shenanigans where the two are different, though all of the WoBs involving the two of them seem to pretty heavily imply that Thaidakar and Kelsier are the same (and there might be an explicit confirmation I missed somewhere), and along with the fact that Thaidakar calls himself the Lord of Scars and Hoid mentions he's hit him in the past, which isn't something he can do to most people, I would say we're pretty clearly supposed to make the connection that Thaidakar is Kelsier.

I've started to assume that most of the time when a metal is described as silvery but not given a name it's actually aluminum, so that's what I was thinking of when I read through this part, and it would make sense that aluminum is really expensive. Though it being a "Super-big RAFO" makes it seem like it might be more than that.

Seems to me that in a world that definitely has some sort of afterlife, there would be concerns over the fact that hemalurgy literally rips a piece of someone's soul out. I don't think we've really had any information on how much of the soul of a spiked person is left, aside from (SH spoilers) but donating organs (which are presumably no longer of any use once your soul is separated from the body and goes to the Beyond) is a lot different than ripping off a piece of your soul (which seems like it would impact you even in the Beyond). Even if it turns out it doesn't have an impact on the afterlife, I doubt the Scadrians would be able to figure that out without Harmony telling them (if he is even able to figure it out), and since he is not fond of hemalurgy I doubt he would do that.

Obviously we need to alloy ettmetal to all the current allomantic metals and go around spiking everyone to see what happens.

Why stop at Threnody when you can just hop over to Braize and toss Nightblood at Odium?

I've always thought it would be kind of cool to have some giant coppermind with no identity to save space in the library (though you'd have to find a way to make sure everyone put the archived memories back completely)

10 shows up in Nalthis with the number of Heightenings. Or at least the number of Heightenings we know of. Dang it, now I want Susebron to go around getting more Breath to see if he can hit something higher than that.

I was reading the original trilogy earlier and looked for some ideas when they talked about religions, the original Trelagism involved sort of a conflict between night and day (the followers didn't like the day and thought it was Trell's evil brother or something), which might be derived from the Darkside and Dayside on Taldain (sorry guys I haven't actually read White Sand yet). Of course that would mean that Bavadin had been hanging around on Scadrial way before the Final Empire if he was in a position to influence religions, or a whole bunch of Darkside worldhoppers decided to take residence on Scadrial and their teachings sort of evolved into it, neither of which seems very likely to me. Oh well. Nothing else really stood out to me, unless want to go crazy conspiracy mode and say it was actually founded by Darkside worldhoppers to get a whole bunch of people to chart the stars for them so they could figure out where Scadrial was relative to Taldain and the rest of the Cosmere in the physical realm.