cometaryorbit

So we now know the names/Intents of 14 Shards, and have hints that the 15th is something like "Wisdom". Which leaves us with only one total unknown. The mural in Dawnshard suggests the 16 Shards divide into four groups of four, each connected to one of the four Dawnshards. And each Dawnshard seems to be some kind of fundamental Command or Intent. One is "Change"; and the epigraph about the Dawnshard known to bind all creatures voidish or mortal suggests that another is "Bind" or an equivalent. Cultivation and Ruin are clearly "Change" associated. Honor, Devotion, and Dominion would be "Bind" associated. Preservation and Autonomy suggest that one of the others would be something like "Be" or "Be Yourself" or "Remain". I would suggest something like this scheme: Change Cultivation - Ruin (controlled growth vs entropic decay) Odium - Endowment (hatred and division and turning others against each other vs. giving freely of oneself, "without strings" - both are kind of "unbinding" but in very different ways) Be Preservation - Autonomy Mercy - Ambition (opposed in a sense, allowing others to heal and flourish vs becoming the most important thing in the universe) Bind Honor - Valor (oaths and bonds, putting yourself in harm's way to protect others) Devotion - Dominion Think Whimsy - Invention Wisdom - Judgment (understanding what is / making decisions and classifying the universe*) Judgment as the last Shard, and my interpretation of Valor's intent**, are probably the most likely to be wrong (well, I really doubt "Think" is the correct name for the fourth Dawnshard, but the concept might be valid). *I don't necessarily mean "Judgment" as just being guilty vs innocent in a "Skybreaker" sense, but also about analysis, classifying things, and understanding them individually rather than as a whole (Wisdom) **Valor could just be courage for its own sake, not necessarily have a positive connotation

Ah, ok. Was not clear on when Shadows for Silence was relative to Mistborn Era 1. It's a very interesting suggestion that there were regular "sane" Cognitive Shadows on the other continent. Why is Threnody realmatically different between continents, if the damage is due to a Shardic battle out in space? Is the "wound on the Spiritual Realm" localized, like a Shardblade wound that can affect one limb of a person but leave the rest of them untouched? Given that Threnody's problems seem to originate from Realmatic damage, and Threnody has no stable perpendicularity, I wonder if something relating to how worldhoppers arrived contributed to the problem. (Like they accidentally gave the proto-Evil more access to the Cognitive Realm, which gave it more power or let it eat people's Cognitive aspects/souls or...)

True, but I'm basically arguing a high combat Radiant* by 3rd ideal is at least as deadly as a Mistborn with Duralumin. *But that combat focused Radiant has much less ability in other areas. Kaladin, for example, is much better at flight than any Mistborn, but his powers are basically all about Lashing things ... well, plus Stormlight's basic physical enhancement, and Blade and Plate... but they are all very physical things. No emotional powers, no magic-sensing like a Mistborn gets from bronze, etc. Similarly a Skybreaker or Dustbringer has none of that, but really awesome physical combat powers. Atium, of course, is crazy powerful. But I actually think a KR would have a decent chance against most Mistborn with atium. The Mistborn would dodge the KR's Shardblade or Surge attacks and inflict normally-lethal wounds -- but I think KR would be likely to have Stormlight healing that would last longer than the Mistborn's atium. (Barring really unusually large quantities of atium, or very limited Stormlight.) Couldn't the Radiant just wear jewelry? (For that matter, do we actually know swallowing gems wouldn't work? Maybe just no one on-screen has thought of it.) Oh, that's absolutely a possibility, but, the possibility of bad strategy/tactics on the Radiant's part doesn't mean their power set isn't stronger in combat than the Mistborn's.

OK, fine, but Skybreakers have Division, and we haven't seen that really used on-screen, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't as or more effective as shooting coins. Even without that, though, being basically invulnerable to normal soldiers means they can take more risks, and are way harder to stop.

That might explain why one of the Stormlight Archive epigraphs refers to (probably) Odium as "the broken one" - which always puzzled me since Odium isn't Splintered. That's an interesting thought. Another possibility that occurs to me is that whatever the Evil originally was existed in kind of a "dormant" state, or wasn't yet especially dangerous, but became something civilization-ending after being combined with/exposed to (or consuming) some off-world Investiture. Nazh's comment on becoming a Cognitive Shadow being a "rite" implies he's from an era of Threnody when people didn't live in the Forests of Hell, so perhaps when Khriss and other worldhoppers showed up something bad happened? (Maybe that's why the Seventeenth Shard has the non-intervention thing? Because they messed it up big time in the past?)

Yes, it's possible to flare metals (and finer control is possible if you are really good at it) but there is a definite limit which is fixed based on how strong an Allomancer you are (well, besides Duralumin or Nicrosil). Vin's maximum Push strength is greater than a normal Coinshot/Mistborn, and Elend's is greater still. This is discussed as a major difference between Feruchemy and Allomancy - Feruchemy has unlimited "rate" but you have to store the energy first, while Allomancy has a fixed maximum "rate" but you can get more energy from more metal. I think the weight effect is more like leverage - the heavier you are relative to the other object, the more it moves (because you move less). And mass is also related to anchor quality (there's a WoB about this when someone asked if a gold [denser] coin would be a better anchor than a copper [less dense] one) so that may also be relevant. Yeah, this is my largest objection to the idea that magical strength is directly related to Connection to the relevant Shard. I suppose it's possible that Kelsier was not so much weakly Connected to Preservation as he was ultra strongly Connected to Ruin, but still... I think it's likelier that many magic systems require some kind of Connection for accessing the magic (Sel systems require Connection to the relevant area, [human-style] Surgebinding requires a bond to a spren or Honorblade [not sure what Fused do to access it]) but systems that you're born with access to (Allomancy, Feruchemy, and I guess BioChroma) can bypass that.

I took the contagious nature of the Shades and the expanding, maybe soul-eating (corrupting?) nature of the Evil to be the result of Ambition/Odium combined - Ambition's Intent might be something like increasing one's own importance/significance/power; combined with hatred, that could result in contagious, corrupting growth trying to transform all of the world into more of oneself.

Isn't everything immortal until it dies?

I don't see the numbers of Radiants or the fact that the majority were basically noncombatants as being that relevant, because I don't think numbers would let "normal" form singers (including warform, but not Forms of Power*) win against combat-heavy Radiants (like Skybreakers) as long as they had Stormlight. Given (Mistborn spoilers) and that the more combative Radiant orders, by 3rd Ideal, are almost certainly deadlier than Mistborn... *The False Desolation was an exception, when Ba-Ado-Mishram did weird Connection things; I don't think Forms of Power were available between Desolations otherwise. But the rest of the points are valid.

Oh, I get that part. It's more that if we accept that (Era 2 Mistborn spoilers) I would expect Autonomy to create loose structures with charismatic, voluntary leadership, and to be firmly opposed to hierarchy. I'd see an Autonomy ideal society to be one where every level of social organization has 'independence' of higher levels and voluntarily composes larger groups.

I agree spiritual aspects of everything are made out of Investiture (plus Connection and probably Identity), but I think Innate Investiture is something more specific. And I don't think Innate Investiture gets altered without a magic system specifically set up to do that. But I don't think I have enough text or WoB evidence, so eh.

I don't know about that. The scale of Soulcasting is pretty crazy, we see buildings made out of air in moments and Jasnah turning a huge boulder to smoke- if she'd turned it to meat instead that's probably dozens of cows worth of beef. But I am not talking about necessarily supplying the entire human population. The issue is that knowledge generally gets lost when it's not generally used, stuff like metalsmithing should be in continuous use even during a total war and thus shouldn't get lost unless either *literally every metalsmith dies* or people are driven to be completely nomadic so access to ores is lost. But with the "build and feed a town on the spot" ability of soulcasting, it basically should never get to that point. It might actually be the opposite problem. Maybe during the Desolations humanity was on a total war footing and "inefficient" normal metalsmithing was abandoned in favor of just Soulcasting everything, so the knowledge was *not* in continuous use.

Hmm. I guess my issue with Autonomy was that to me Autonomy is not really freedom of choice but specifically independence of external control/constraint/structure. Yet Autonomy apparently builds organizations and religions to meddle.

I disagree... or at least I'm not sure we are talking about the same things. Matter, energy, and infrastructure are inter-convertible in the cosmere, like matter and energy in RL physics. So in a certain sense you could say a human body (or a rock) is "made out of Investiture" - but I don't think that ordinary life functions really qualify as "using Investiture". It's all still 'stuck as' matter and energy, nothing Investiture-y (nothing outside real world physics) is happening. Anyway. I think Innate Investiture is not just "anything can be converted into Investiture" but refers to the 'spark of life' Investiture that people/sapient beings have... and I think messing with that is fairly specific to Awakening (voluntarily) and Hemalurgy (involuntarily).

Again, perhaps; we don't know enough. In general I agree with you but in a stone age situation there would not be a lot of infrastructure/fixed settlements to defend, so one would expect the Radiants' strategy to be immediately seeking out the Fused & those with Forms of Power and attack immediately, to give them as little time as possible to hunt down non-Radiant humans. Yet we know some of the Desolations started at stone age, yet were still super destructive, so... yeah we don't know enough. Maybe there's some thunderclast style threats we haven't seen yet that would make immediately attacking all Odium's forces less of an easy win. EDIT: another "we don't know enough" point- how did civilization slide back so far if even a few Radiants able to Soulcast survived? The logistical power of Soulcasting is incredibly impressive - the Alethi warcamps in WOK are insanely huge by RL pre-modern standards, and in a super barren landscape. But Soulcasting can just make stone buildings out of air and food out of rocks. You almost don't need infrastructure or logistics any more.

Ok, I guess nicrosil Feruchemy. But regular Feruchemy I think converts "attribute X" to Investiture and stores it in a metalmind when you store, then turns it back to "attribute X" when you tap - rather than storing Investiture you already have.

Eh, maybe. I kind of disagree ...if both sides are stone age it's a direct magic vs magic conflict where the Radiants have the advantage, and there is less chance to disadvantage the Radiants by forcing them to try to protect fixed targets e.g. cities, towns & farmlands... but the more we discuss this the more I think we don't know enough about how things worked during the era of Desolations. Maybe we'll learn more in book 5. If we find out how the whole Ba-ado-Mishram/False Desolation thing worked, maybe that will tell us more. (Do we know if the Listeners split off from the other singers during the real Desolations or the False Desolation?)

We know it's theoretically possible to be a Radiant of two Orders, if the Spren are willing. There are hints that Kaladin is in some way uniquely linked to Tanavast (him being called "Child of Tanavast" vs other Radiants "Child of Honor"). The Stormfather is (among other things) Tanavast's Cognitive Shadow. What if Dalinar dies in book 5 and Kaladin becomes the Stormfather's new Bondsmith as well as a Windrunner?

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was talking about re: instinctively doing stuff that should be hard/unknown/not possible. It's described in the annotations as the trauma bringing the innate Preservation out past the resistance of the innate Ruin, like a supersaturated solution crystallizing. I don't think anything is used up - or added, except in the case of (major era 1 Mistborn spoilers) I'm unconvinced Kaladin - or anyone except a Nalthian giving away their initial Breath - is actually using up/expending their Innate Investiture. Yeah. Given the Spiritual Realm connection, I think "feedback from his likely future" works well with the "Connection to Tanavast-as-he-was" idea. Syl says she knew Kaladin before they met, or was 'always going to have known him', or something to that effect. I think this is the same thing happening.

That doesn't strike me as Jasnah level cold logic. Those things are not really going to threaten the survival of the species (especially in a world like Roshar where infectious disease is *not* a major threat). Cause lots of death, yes, but food isn't going to go away completely to the point the species won't survive. The cycle of Desolations *is* a survival of the species threat.

Didn't Jasnah suggest killing all the parshmen? I do feel like this should be against "Life before death", but the Oaths are interpreted by each individual human+spren pair. Ivory and Jasnah seem to be ok with several things that would strike me as violating the First Ideal. But then, so do the Skybreakers - they seem a bit too ready to kill for things that don't really require death to remove the threat; I'd read that as questionable for "Life before death" too. I think we may be being heavily influenced by what Kaladin and Dalinar see the First Ideal as meaning, especially since that understanding is more sympathetic to the majority of readers than the Skybreakers' perspective or Jasnah's perspective. --- If there were really millions of Singers post-Desolation, though, yeah then maybe. I would have assumed much less, since humans got knocked back to the stone age repeatedly, and they *won*. That level of knowledge loss implies something really devastating, especially if the culture's starting tech level is pretty limited so the infrastructure is not complex. Europe didn't lose knowledge during the Black Death, for example. I'd expect 90%+ population loss to get that kind of collapse. So if singers were *worse off*... (But that whole thing is weird. The late Desolations when civilization was really collapsing were not that far apart; knowledge loss shouldn't have been that easy, since some individuals would have lived through the whole cycle. And how was there enough continuity to preserve kingdom names like Alethela if stuff like bronze making was lost? I don't know... the whole thing is super weird.)

Ruin is definitely involved. The magic system exists because he Invested Scadrial. But I don't think new Investiture is being input *from* Ruin. Ruin's Investiture is present in everything Scadrian anyway... but I don't think any Investiture is *added* to the spike + victim/donor + recipient system in the process of Hemalurgy.

I don't know if it's confirmed that they are actually Radiant spren, but the idea seems to be that they did it by choice (Raboniel says the Fused can't use those kinds of fabrials since voidspren aren't self-sacrificing). That kind of choice seems to require sapience. The Oathgate spren, I think, are exactly this - sapient spren manifesting willingly in the Physical as a Transportation Surge fabrial; we just didn't know how that worked in Oathbringer (and neither did the characters that met the Oathgate spren). Since the Oathgate spren don't seem to be the same as Timbre or Ivory, ancient-fabrial spren aren't necessarily Radiant spren, but they do seem to be sapient spren.

I think it is relevant, but not to *power* per se. A Shard has the same colossal amount of Investiture whether anyone acts out its Intent or not. But there are some things that seem to be impossible regardless of power without Connection or some kind of access, like directly influencing people's minds. Shards seem to need some kind of Connection (or another way in, like a "broken soul" or "open" mind) to get into people's minds. So I think lots of people acting highly in accordance with a Shard's Intent gives it more options since more people are Connected to it, but doesn't give it more actual power in the sense of "quantity of Investiture". That's totally possible, but I still think the Intent of Ambition would be more like "increase power/importance/significance" not just "seek goals". Not necessarily the Shard's own power, but its influence would push people to act that way. (For example, if Ambition had Invested a planet and produced a magic system instead of dying, people there might get access to magic by winning some kind of competition or by being rulers or something.) Although ... I kind of wonder if a few Intents (Autonomy and Ambition at least) might be inherently self directed. Autonomy seems to be a meddler. If we view the Shards as broken aspects of an universal deity, Autonomy and Ambition might have originally (as parts of a whole) represented self-causation/independence of anything external and being the central end and goal of the universe, respectively.

Where is that stated, though? I don't think that's universally true. If Investiture is already present (end-neutral or end-negative systems), I don't think using or transferring it necessarily requires an input of more Investiture. It may require some kind of fuel (color in Awakening) but that's not really more Investiture - and Feruchemy doesn't use any fuel at all, you just store and then take back what you stored. I think Hemalurgy is like that, you start with X Investiture, steal it, and give X-Y Investiture to the victim (because hemalurgic decay). There's no fuel and no external input. Even in end-positive systems that need some kind of catalyst ("focus") to shape the effect of the Investiture, like metals in Allomancy or Aons in AonDor - well,, Aons aren't Investiture themselves, they're just symbols. (And I don't think people on Roshar use any catalyst to inhale Stormlight ...)