cometaryorbit

Yeah it fits really well - and a Kaladin vs Moash contest would close out the first arc very fittingly, calling back to all the Bridge 4 focus in WoK. But I have two problems with it: - it seems way too obvious; Moash is the most obvious champion-of-Odium choice so probably not the right one - it seems like we're being set up for 3 major plot lines in book 5; Dalinar dealing with the contest of champions; Shallan and Adolin dealing with Ba-Ado-Mishram, Maya and the deadeyes generally, and Ghostblood stuff; Kaladin and Szeth dealing with Shinovar (the Unmade there, the Stone Shamans, the remaining Honorblades).

No, but this could still be an issue as we are told that the Intent is important here. I think there's no issue as long as both sides are trying/Intending to participate in a duel to the death. But if Dalinar clearly wins and still refuses to kill the other champion that could be construed as an Intent to back out of the contest in the middle, which could be trouble. (I don't think Adolin will be Odium's champion though, I'd expect either Nale, Ishar, or Moash with a last minute switch out of Kaladin for Dalinar.)

I take that as more a comment about the Shard being incomplete individually, especially without a Vessel. Especially since Leras always intended the Shards to combine - the Terris Prophecies said so, the Hero of Ages needed both the power to save and to destroy the world, and "that which has been sundered must begin to find its whole" - and realized that Preservation alone was insufficient, that he needed someone able to destroy in order to protect. And he somehow programmed the power of Preservation to follow his plan (snapping Mistings in the right ratio at the right time, choosing Vin) before sacrificing his mind. So the power did understand it needed more -- because it was following Leras' plan toward combining. But the Intent of Preservation meant Leras couldn't do that himself - he couldn't kill Ruin, he couldn't even stab Elend to save the world although the means to prevent Elend from actually dying was right there. So Preservation as an Intent, separated from Leras and his plan, is still stasis, non-change.

I agree that ettmetal is probably a reference to its being Harmony's metal, yeah. Allik also says that the Jaggenmire were 'always one, and always apart' and Sazed/Harmony comments on how holding both Ruin and Preservation limits his actions and influences his perspective, so I think the theme of (potentially unstable) unity of opposites is intended.

I think there were actual mechanical limitations imposed (in RoW the Stormfather comments that the 'seeing Connection' power is new since Honor's decline, and the Ars Arcanum talks about Honor preventing Stoneshaping from being as destructive as Yolen's microkinesis - implicitly limiting it to manipulating interatomic or intermolecular bonds rather than splitting atoms). The moral limitations seem to be more Ishar setting up the orders than Honor: Nohadon in Dalinar's visions complains about unwise people getting Surgebinding due to not all spren being "as discerning as honorspren", and Honor was alive then, so it seems that convincing a spren was all you needed then too.

I tend to think that Adonalsium probably didn't have a Vessel, though my only real basis for that is the HoA Epigraphs where Sazed/Harmony seems to imply that the power needing a mind to control it is somehow odd... which makes me think it's due to the incomplete state of each Shard in isolation. But Khriss says Adonalsium was "killed" which implies it was in some sense alive (though she also says she doesn't know whether it was "a force or a being"). So possibly the implication is that Adonalsium was more like a spren in that the power and the being/personality are essentially the same thing, vs. the power being held by an originally separate and still in some sense distinct (and separable) mind as Shards and Returned. -- I personally doubt Unity is a title of Adonalsium. There are two possibilities I prefer: - (based on the similarity of Dalinar's temporary Ascension to Vin's and Rashek's, also involving a Perpendicularity) Unity is what Honor would be if held/reunited by Dalinar, and Dalinar held a large part of it momentarily (or perhaps even the entire to-be-reunited Shard, through the timelessness of the Spiritual) - Unity is the (holder of the) "Dawnshard, known to bind" and Dalinar is accessing his most likely future self holding that Dawnshard through the timelessness of the Spiritual. Even though the first idea is a closer parallel to what we've seen before, I kind of prefer this since Odium looked small to him and I can totally see (Given that the Dawnshards destroyed Adonalsium) a Dawnshard held by the Unchained Bondsmith of the post Recreance boosted Stormfather being even more powerful/dangerous than a Shard. Apparently an Unchained Bondsmith and a Dawnshard held by a regular Radiant are both potentially world scale threats. Combining the two...

Yeah but the Bright Sea seems to be surrounded by land so it's probably Mediterranean scale at most. I don't see any equivalent of travel to the Americas etc. --- Hmmm. That WoB is interesting but not as helpful as it could be since we have no idea what the Southern Scadrian population is like. They have five nations, and though they went through a big disaster 340 years ago too it probably wasn't *as* lethal as what the North had, so they probably outnumber the North... Still that might actually support a *relatively* recent (thousand years or so) human arrival on Nalthis since it seems to be very Earthlike & habitable without the difficulties of Roshar or Ashworld-era Scadrial.

The Coppermind article describes the Manywar as a "global conflict", but I really don't get the impression from the book that this is really a society with world-wide communication/travel. It seems maybe Renaissance ish, and there's no magical transportation. The Bright Sea/Inner Sea doesn't seem to be a full on ocean either. The implied scale seems more Europe like than planetary (assuming Nalthis is roughly Earth sized.) So is there another 80% or 90% of the planet we're not seeing? Or is humanity fairly localized on Nalthis, perhaps a fairly recent arrival? It seems like known history may only go back 600 years or so.

There's a WoB that the kandra don't get anything Cognitive or Spiritual from the bones, it's just physical. I think kandra shape-shifting is purely Physical and biological. Kandra Identity may well be weird due to having bits of other people's souls stabbed into them + living as imitators for ages, but I don't think that's part of the mechanism of their shape-shifting. I think TenSoon's loyalty is a more natural psychological thing. Vin didn't have the normal noble mindset, she wasn't comfortable having a servant/slave, so she treated TenSoon as a person rather than a tool - which is probably really unusual.

And has something like this already been done for Dakhor? Shai talks like Forgery is pretty much just a skill/art, if a complex and demanding one (and it seems like the Empire's "Rememberers" are a fairly generic thing, not treated mystically/religiously like Elantrians or Dakhor monks). Maybe all the Selish magics were like that once?

Hmm. But the visions say " without the Dawnshards" implying they are unavailable. So unless Dalinar got it in some way Honor doesn't foresee, I don't think he has one yet. Rysn's was likely the first "made available" n thousands of years imo.

If the Night Brigade are kind of a homage to the Black Company (mercenaries), they might be looking for the Dawnshards just because they're potentially incredibly powerful weapons.

We're told that TLR/the Inquisitors experimented for a thousand years and never developed any new Hemalurgic constructs. Yet adding new spikes to an existing one seems trivial. Ruin presumably is super expert at Hemalurgy, so HoA Ruin-controlled Inquisitors might be a special case, but TenSoon can swap in and out OreSeur's Blessing of Potency without any trouble, and Ruin's not helping him. So what's the line between modifying an existing construct (easy) and making a new one (incredibly hard)? In BOM it's suggested that while you can add new Blessings to a kandra that already has its own (like TenSoon) trying to mix-and-match (as was attempted with ReLuur) is trouble. So maybe it's just that there has to be a "base set" of spikes defining each Hemalurgic construct "species" (one Blessing for a kandra, 4 iron spikes for a koloss)? But Inquisitors don't seem to have a standardized set of spikes. (The original ones all had F-Gold, but not all later ones did.) Unless there really is a standard set (steel/iron for sight, bronze for finding skaa Mistings, pewter, etc) it's just that no Inquisitors have *only* the standard set and nothing else? Yet apparently it's really hard to give kandra Allomancy or Feruchemy, so I guess they can't just pick up Inquisitor spikes the way TenSoon picked up OreSeur's Blessing?

Is there evidence of that? He changed Snapping, but that's strictly Allomancy. I think Hemalurgy is just mostly unknown - kandra blessings, koloss iron spikes, and Marsh's Inquisitor spikes created pre Catacendre still continue to work, and the Set in BoM can use it to grant powers. I think the only difference we've seen is that now its Harmony rather than Ruin that can talk to or control spiked people.

What about spikes in non-vital areas such as the ear? I agree hemalurgy fixes things to prevent death from the spike itself, but I don't think there is necessarily a physical change if the spiking wouldn't be dangerous on a mundane level.

Yeah I don't think Odium by itself is well suited for that. Odium is rage and hate in a very raw form - in RoW we see that the power likes conflict even when the Vessel doesn't want to be questioned, that "conflict for its own sake" thing doesn't bode well for channeling it into building a more just society. Also we see that the Fused have lost their original purpose for war - they now prey upon the Singers they once wanted to protect, literally evicting them from their own bodies fatally. Moash seems to be going the same route... his original grievances are largely resolved, with Elhokar dead and Jasnah committing to ending slavery and working toward weakening the arbitrary power of the monarchy. I think there's a lot of "conflict for its own sake" in Odium. Now *maybe* that was influenced by Rayse... but we also see the power wanting conflict even when Rayse doesn't, and Taravangian getting impulses to destroy wildly when he really wants to plan and plot coolly. Odium + Honor with a particular interpretation by its Vessel, though, could imo easily become wrath against the unjust in the sense you suggest. But doing that with Odium alone seems beyond what a Vessel can do to change a Shard.

Hmm, are the Heralds tortured in physical bodies on Braize, or is it the actual Cognitive Shadow?

If I'm not completely off base (which admittedly I probably am - I said it was crazy) the bond itself isn't necessarily different, but the effects are since he's bonded to an Odium infused spren. The future sight might be more of a side-effect / resonance type thing than one of his actual Surges. Future sight is supposedly characteristic of Voidbinding, so that's why I was thinking it might be a "side effect" result of a bond to an Odium infused spren rather than the effect of one specific surge... maybe something to do with being 'open' to the Spiritual... there's a WoB about Odium spren having a hole in the soul. The Diagram also says all the Unmade have some relevance to precognition, not just Moelach. Yet the base effects we see from Nergaoul and Ashertmarn aren't anything future ish... maybe they need to bond with a human for that?

Absolutely, I just meant that it's interesting (to me) that if Ruin eventually really "won" then that would mean stasis and further change couldn't happen, which is a bit more Preservation - ie Ruin in isolation (without opposition) would be ultimately self-defeating. Oh yeah, Shards are broader than that basic concept - especially once interpreted through a Vessel. (Although, to nitpick, Alendi never held the power: Rashek/TLR failed to kill Kwaan using the Well. But perhaps limits on the Well are different than the limits of a new Vessel of the actual Shard of Preservation?) Yeah, I think that might be part of how Harmony works.

That was what I figured.

I think Hoid has grand scale goals and is very ancient, has seen a lot and has become hardened - he's willing to accept huge costs to see those grand scale goals achieved. But he is by WoB "genuinely sympathetic to the individual". The way we see him cheering up Kaladin - "you will be warm again" is real, not just because Kaladins important to his plans. There might also be a difference between letting Roshar burn and causing it. IE Hoid won't save Roshar at the cost of longer term problems for the greater cosmere, but would he (hypothetically given Shard level power) actually be able to make the decision to destroy it himself? Not sure.

The wounding of Ambition was very ancient, probably 8000+ years ago, maybe shortly after the Shattering (Desolations on Roshar are 7000 years old - probably Rosharan years so ~7700 Earth years). But the flight to the Forests of Hell from the Homeland was quite recent, Silence's grandparents were among the first. So quite possibly post Mistborn Era 1. For some reason the Evil didn't become a civilization destroying threat for a very long time. Perhaps it was on a different continent than the Homeland and either took a long time to expand that far, or humans finally got ships good enough to reach there and accidentally brought it, or some fragment of it, back to the Homeland? Or maybe worldhoppers or some other external meddling made it worse? Or... well, why did Returned only start showing up on Nalthis like 500 years before Warbreaker?

Yes, and they're also a feature of Rosharan myth. I think the Rosharan System, at least, has or once had multiple Dawnshards (one or more might be on Ashyn, a Dawnshard was likely involved in its destruction). -- I think Dalinar might be very likely to become the Unite Dawnshard ('known to bind') in the future, so through the timelessness of the Spiritual he *is* that Dawnshard while the Perpendicularity is open (but not otherwise, while he's in the Physical Realm's linear time). -- EDIT: forgot that thus was Secret Project forum, not Stormlight. Sigzil apparently got Hoid's Dawnshard which is probably neither Change nor Unite/binding - the nonviolence/no meat aftereffect makes me think it's something like Protect or Persist or Remain - so I think at least 3 of the Dawnshards have been in the Rosharan System at some point.

Even if that wasn't the Stormfather, that still doesn't explain the Taln finally broke/didn't break contradiction. It's possible the Stormfather doesn't know exactly what happened on Braize and simply assumed Taln broke, because historically Desolations started because a Herald broke. But maybe he did lie... which would lean toward Gavilar's SF being the real one. The Stormfather is weird in general. At the end of WOR he's all 'everyone is doomed' but in OB he's like 'of course a contest of champions would work, it was Honor's idea!'. So why did he assume there was no hope in WOR?

What if Voidbinding is a magic system defined by a way to gain powers, rather than by a set of powers? In that case, Renarin and anyone hosting Yelig-nar would be both a Voidbinder and a Surgebinder - they would gain Surgebinding through Voidbinding, in the same way that (Mistborn Hero of Ages spoilers) Voidbinding is historically known, there are legends about it, yet Sja-anat never corrupted/Enlightened Radiant spren before. So past Voidbinders couldn't have worked like Renarin, by bonding with a corrupted/Enlightened Radiant spren. Perhaps they bonded with the Unmade directly, Yelig-nar style? Maybe Death Rattles are a form of Voidbinding? Ten "levels" of Voidbinding might not mean ten specific powers -- Perhaps the nine Unmade plus the tenth level being based on lesser voidspren or Enlightened spren?