cometaryorbit

It may not work on the chemistry level quite that directly. It might be more of a Realmatic thing, where the magic has a goal it needs to get to and changes the Physical to be whatever it needs to be to get there. I think probably tapping breath just makes your lungs, blood chemistry, etc. stay at the same state they would be if you were breathing normally. And storing makes you need to breathe more than you normally would, but that extra breathing has no physiological effect- you don't get more oxygen, remove more CO2, etc.

Oh, I definitely don't think it would have made a lot of sense for TLR to make himself stronger using Hemalurgy. He knew about Ruin, and he was already a crazy strong Allomancer. But the WoB that began this thread does kind of sound like he did, so... But it could easily just be misunderstood/tricky. Creating the Kandra and koloss species could be the "dramatic effects" achieved through Hemalurgy, as @Duxreduxsuggested, not personal power enhancement.

I will have to check the annotations and Secret History. I thought there were way more koloss in the final HoA battle than TLR ever had. I see TLR as being way more arrogant than that. He set up the Inquisitors with weaknesses, and he set up the social classes to prevent another Fullborn, but after doing so, I don't think he feared anything (except, in saner moments, Ruin). He saw himself as immortal and invincible. When he's told that the skaa are rebelling, he's resigned and annoyed at their foolishness, not concerned - even when Marsh and Vin attack, he doesn't take them seriously at all (he could have killed Vin before she had a chance to draw on the Mists). He lets the Inquisitors plot against the Canton of Orthodoxy, and the noble houses fight one another.

Do we know that? The WoB you quote says that the highstorm predates the Shards, but not that the Stormfather does. Yes, the Stormfather changed when he absorbed/became Tanavast/Honor's Cognitive Shadow at Honor's death, but he was already a Bondsmith Spren before that (and thus a sapient Radiant spren). Did he have a *third* earlier state where he was non-sapient, before the arrival of the Shards, when there were no sapient Radiant spren?

Well, we know some kind of Elantrians/AonDor users existed before, to build the city. But the Shaod system could be an effect of the city- is there any Shaod equivalent for Forgery etc?

It's possible. But I see Urithiru as being more analogous to a spren manifesting in the Physical Realm as a Shardblade or Soulcaster or Regrowth fabrial, whereas the Highstorm is probably older than the Stormfather. Didn't the sapient spren come with the Shards, though at least some of the non-sapient spren (those used for "regular" singer forms, like lifespren, gravitationspren, painspren) are Adonalsium-era? Plus, isn't the Stormfather a Splinter of Honor, thus presumably post-dating Honor's presence on Roshar? Although I guess the Adonalsium-era presence of his Investiture could have drawn him to Roshar... but I thought the idea was the three Bondsmith spren were creations or offspring of Honor and Cultivation.

I think the Stormfather is just the spren of the Highstorm, I don't think he really literally is the storm - at least, not in the sense that a human would normally understand that statement; a spren might have a different view of identity. So i don't think throwing anti-Stormlight into a Highstorm would harm the Stormfather himself, though it might disrupt the storm locally. Putting out a fire doesn't kill flamespren nearby. Now the Highstorm is more unique than fire, but still...

I agree in general. (Though it's not clear how the Fused pre-Surges could effectively fight Heralds either. Especially if they all had Taln level reflexes.) This also makes it way more baffling that the Singers survived the periods between Desolations, though, since any of them can become a Fused. Maybe it was just the honor of the Radiants... but they all have different codes, and frankly one Skybreaker on a crusade might have a decent shot at killing the entire species if there were no Regals or Fused involved.

Wait, do we know that? We know they did in fact reuse spikes, but is that the *only* way they made new koloss? We see Ruin directing humans who don't know what they are doing to make Hemalurgic spikes (e.g. dude who stabbed Spook), I figured he did the same with koloss. Good point. I thought there was something in the annotations at least implying that's how it worked (Inquisitors controlling koloss) in the campaigns on the burnlands edge against bandits/rebels/etc. I will have to look for that. I think TLR had no fear of Inquisitor rebellion. There's no way an Inquisitor could expect that to work. TLR could instakill them from a distance (and they knew about their linchpin spike weakness).

Well, by "Vessel-style immortal" I meant the 'body kind of merges into Investiture' thing we see when people Ascend to a full Shard, not agelessness. Fifth Heightening people presumably still have regular biological needs (food, water, air etc.). Returned don't need to eat, I think, but they need more Investiture- a Breath a week. So I don't think 2000 Breaths is enough for no-further-input immortality.

Hmm, could be. I suppose I was kind of thinking that shades are probably suffering and wanting pain to end probably doesn't require more than an animal level of cognition. But on further thought there's no actual evidence they are suffering, especially if they are not cognizant enough to remember what they have lost. Thank you! If they are going to present Jaddeth as a monotheistic deity then svrakiss can't be empowered by a foreign God's power/Investiture. And they are seen as evil so they can't be his. So they have to be presented as "damned", I think.

I don't know, on two levels. I think the koloss increased their numbers by spiking people under Ruin's control after he escaped the Well, so the hundreds of thousands in the final battle in HoA are probably more than existed in TLR's time. (Though there must have been tens of thousands as Lekal's koloss army in WoA is about 20,000, and there must have been koloss elsewhere.) I'm also not sure TLR directly controlled all the koloss all the time. If they were stationed out in the middle of nowhere they might not have needed control, he kept them away from civilization for a reason (if he was 100% in control constantly would that have been needed)? And the Inquisitors probably controlled some, anyway. EDIT: also, I don't think we can assume it's linear, in the sense that 2x power = 2x the number of koloss controlled. Vin takes control with a duralumin burn, but then doesn't have to keep doing it... in fact she doesn't need to burn brass at all to keep control once established. I think this is a weird threshold thing hard to extrapolate from. That's why I'm not willing to say that Elend could necessarily Soothe 50,000 humans at once just because we see him control 50,000 koloss.

Based on very little, I'd say not as true Vessels, but something similar could probably happen. Endowment is a living (non-Splintered) Shard, but she has Splinters (Divine Breath) held by the Returned. Before Honor's death, he had Splinters (honorspren) bonded to Knights Radiant. And there's a WoB that Splinters of a living Shard are still part of that Shard. So if a Shard voluntarily made really huge Splinters, adding up to most of the Shard's total Investiture, and those were held or bonded by other people, maybe you could have a situation where there were multiple near equal powered holders, and all that power is still part of "the same Shard" in some sense. (I'd imagine there's a minimum threshold of Investiture for the original Vessel to stay Vessel-style immortal, but if you can be a Vessel of an Avatar, then it's probably a fairly small fraction of the whole Shard.) Perhaps there would be a way to do Connection things to reconnect the parts of Honor without "absorbing" the Honorspren, since they had individual minds/personalities even when they were still part of a living Honor.

Vin and Ati were even more Invested (Vessels for a full Shard) and they both passed on. Kelsier and Vin's conversation in Secret History makes it clear she could have stayed, but didn't- being super Invested lets you stay but doesn't force it. But people on Threnody who are killed by shade withering presumably don't usually want to become shades. So there is a way to involuntarily become a Cognitive Shadow... it just can't be based on how Invested you are at the time of death, since there's no way shade withering involves more than a full Shard worth of investiture. (Also, the "barred from heaven" thing could just be a myth - svrakiss could be voluntary Cognitive Shadows. That story might just have arisen to explain their existence in a Jaddeth-centered religion.)

I always took it as inspired by Adonai + Elysium (one of the ancient Greek paradises).

I don't know. Some of these things appear to be threshold based, not linear. Vin has less than double Seeking power but she can pierce copperclouds, which is considered flat out impossible. Kelsier at first can't even believe TLR could do it. Yet Vin just does it. Koloss control is also a threshold- no effect until you break through, then total control, and you can control tons of them. So Steelpushing on metals in people's bodies might be the same way - fairly easy if you reach the threshold, impossible otherwise. Also, Elend had way less practice than TLR, and we don't see him try some of these things so we can compare. I don't think we ever get a good picture of how large a human crowd he can Soothe (we do learn he controlled tens of thousands of koloss). So can we really rule out the possibility that TLR's Soothing is say 3x normal strength while Elend's is 2x, or even that if Elend became a Soothing Savant he could do as much as TLR did?

Oh that's quite possible too... just to me the most natural reading of "is there a metal that does X?" "Not yet" is an actual new metal. But WoBs can't necessarily be read that closely. I do think Metallic Arts machines will end up quite complex, but I would think they'd still be based on the same one power per metal per magic system rules. Now you can do stuff like store senses other than the normal five in a tinmind, if you have those senses, but treating "I need to go to the bathroom" as a form of "nutrition" or "breath" or other known Feruchemical powers seems a much more radical change in what the metal does. EDIT: plus, that seems like the kind of effect I'd expect a godmetal alloy of bendalloy to have, anyway. With maybe 48 godmetal alloys to explore, I'd expect them to be fairly logically based on the effect of the base metal.

Much of this might be character POV - Rosharan humans thinking they are less intelligent/capable than they are. They had come to think of parshmen as basically domestic animals. (People are totally shocked by the idea that they might become a threat, when that comes out. RL societies with slavery fear uprisings/revolts. The Rosharan humans don't act that way toward parshmen at all. It's much closer to the way RL humans would react to the idea of, say, horses becoming a threat.) That fooled me in WoK/WoR. I was actually really surprised in the early chapters of Oathbringer when the post-Everstorm Singers remembered how they were treated as parshmen, after WoR revealed that Shen/Rlain was actually a dullform Parshendi and Eshonai (IIRC) says something about how they have "no spren, no song, and no soul", I had thought the parshmen had literally lost their souls & become living zombies and the Everstorm had put in a new 'foreign' consciousness.

I think there is still some difference between the Intent of Harmony the (double-)Shard, and the goals/values of Sazed the Vessel. Harmony as an Intent I think is not about equality in a social/political sense, but it does imply room for change as well as persistence, so would probably be fairly favorable to social change movements that aren't too disruptive, so may *seem* the same. (A purely Preservation society would be completely static, no chance for any change; pure Ruin would mean collapse.) But I think for Harmony the Intent, the pace and mode of change (moderated, neither stasis nor collapse) is more relevant than the goal of the change. A steady and moderated transition to empire or plutocracy isn't necessarily less Harmonious than one toward a more equal democracy. Sazed the Vessel, given the historic oppression of the Terris and his long participation in the resistance against TLR, is going to be much more interested in rights for everyone, etc. But his ability to act is now super limited. EDIT: and he also clearly believes that holding godlike power doesn't give him the right to impose his will on everyone. That may actually be the way Harmony ends up shaping him, pushing more and more on his reluctance to act dramatically or impose his own will, until he becomes kind of unable to dislike anything but the most dramatic destruction or total stasis. (Ati was "once a kind and generous man". I think the way Ruin shaped him is that he eventually came to see the end of things as good. He talks to Vin and Kelsier about how the end of the world is natural and proper, don't fight against the inevitable & prolong the pain, etc. - I think he's been shaped to the point that he actually *believes* that.)

I think it's the "stapling in a power requires making a hole in the soul" thing. I see it as analogous to Allomancy's Snapping and similar things in other cosmere systems- foreign power needs a way to get in- but more damaging since it's Ruin's system. I don't think there is actual power from Ruin himself coming in - Hemalurgy is end-negative, the Investiture given to the spike recipient is the Investiture of the donor minus Hemalurgic decay. It's Ruin's magic system, but not really directly powered by him. (Although there's Ruin in everything/everyone on Scadrial, so technically there would be some Ruin Investiture there... but Ruin's not serving as a power source the way Preservation is for Allomancy or the Dor is for magic systems on Sel.)

It feels wrong to say Aluminum Ferrings can't tap, but Aluminum is weird, so who knows. I'm surprised this is an Era 3 thing, there's a WoB that if the process for making medallions isn't explained in Lost Metal he'd answer the question after it is out, and I'd think that would give more information on how Identity/f-Aluminum works. TLR's bracers were broken up and sold to fund Elend's new kingdom, but it wasn't actually all that much atium (stated in WoA). And Vin wouldn't have been able to burn it unless TLR made them unkeyed, which he wouldn't do since removing them would kill him.

"Not yet" doesn't necessarily mean they don't know how to use it that way yet, it could mean the metal itself doesn't yet exist - ie probably a god-metal alloy of bendalloy. But we really have no basis to speculate from there, since we don't know even malatium's Feruchemical effect...

Huh. I had not seen that "Augur Compounding health from identity-less metalmind" WoB before. That's a surprise to me, I always figured you needed both powers. But on further thought I guess it makes sense. IIRC it's been said that if Miles lost f-Gold to Hemalurgy he could try to heal it back via burning previously charged gold, though it would take a lot to get the ability back. At that point he would just be an Augur (Gold Misting), no Feruchemy, so... And the whole "Compounding works because it's treated as a different metal, the 'key' that tells Preservation's power what ability to give is changed" idea does suggest it should work with just Allomancy, Identity aside.

Those are all quite possible. As for benefit... well, that's another weird bit. Sazed/Harmony (who should know) says in the HoA Epigraphs that TLR's base Allomantic strength was shared by all the original nine Allomancers (and therefore Elend). If his base strength was Elend level, I think one spike for a specific metal would mean a notable improvement in power. But his displayed strength seems significantly greater, at least in Soothing and Steelpushing. I can see four explanations for that, but none are really satisfactory... 1. Canon was changed, his base strength is way higher since he got his Allomancy from the Well not lerasium - but would Brandon obsolete the epigraphs like that? 2. His base strength is Elend level, but "near savant" effects from a thousand years of practice (and he could actually be a full savant in Soothing at least) mean he's above that level. This is supported by a WoB, but it would be a pretty big boost. 3. Some kind of Feruchemy trick... also apparently supported by WoB, but by our current understanding that would need Nicrosil and I don't think that existed in the Final Empire 4. He had spikes for at least Soothing and Steelpushing (the two metals we see clearly crazy levels of power in*) *TLR can also pierce copperclouds (at least Kelsier/Vin-era reduced power ones) but Lerasium Mistborn strength would be enough for that.

I agree - but then what does the 'used Hemalurgy for his most dramatic effects' WoB mean? If his bracers were his spikes (as another WoB said) then they were already removed at the time of his death. Two bracers shouldn't require a linchpin spike. The Steel Ministry / Inquisitors only knew how to use atium spikes to steal Allomantic Temporal powers, but TLR could have known more, so they could be any power. I'd add controlling Koloss in huge numbers (from WoA it seems that it was considered a 'divine' power of TLR) and Steelpushing on metals inside the body. Both of those are just crazy Allomantic strength, though. (Changing the Feruchemists to Mistwraiths was also using the Well, btw) Hmm, that's a possibility. It's not really what that WoB seems to be implying, but there have been tricky WoBs before.