cometaryorbit

Yeah, he might be safe to wield... briefly, until he gets hungry again. Definitely not safe to be hit by, he's still a super Shardblade.

In late era Cosmere they will probably be less of a thing everyone fights over. Once Southern Scadrian medallion technology gets off planet, and fabrial science advances, etc., items granting Invested powers will probably become pretty common, thus the Honorblades will be far less special. I agree that nine of the Honorblades, at least when used by a non Herald, are less powerful overall than a Radiant. Also, for off-Roshar/Cosmere-wide implications, Stormlight is hard to get so Scadrian medallion powers are probably more valuable than Roshar's Surges. Ishar's Honorblade specifically might be an issue, but I kind of expect that situation to be resolved by the end of SA book 10 (whether by someone else becoming Honor, or a multi Shard merger, or...). So the "Bondsmith Unchained" thing might not exist in late era Cosmere.

I disagree on his reputation keeping him alive. Pre Vin no one on Scadrial was able to kill him. As far as I can tell, there would be four ways to kill him: 1. Separating him from his metalminds - but this would probably require either a mist (Shard) powered Push / Pull, or another multi physical metal Compounder to overcome him physically. (Maybe an Honor era Herald could do it with basically infinite Stormlight?) 2. Massive Spiritual damage, beyond his ability to heal (running out of gold in his stomach). There are no Shardblades on Scadrial; I don't know if Aluminum Hemalurgy was known to anyone else on Scadrial; if anyone did, it was an Inquisitor, whom he could control (and he would presumably see an aluminum weapon coming via iron/steel Allomancy, anyway) Still, Ruin knew Hemalurgy, so letting Kelsier stab him was a bad move imo. (Unless he was good enough with a-Iron/Steel to identify metals, and knew the spearhead was not a Hemalurgically dangerous metal.) 3. Massive Investiture drain - not available on Scadrial. Chromium wasn't available, and Leeching is probably too slow anyway. 4. Annihilation by a Shard not countered by an equal, as Ruin and Preservation were, or bound by oath like Odium.

I thought "Iridescent Tones" meant color and sound, the whole perfect pitch/perfect color correspondence thing? Is dawnsinging an actual magic thing? I thought Dawnsingers was just a term for the pre-Odium/pre-Desolations original singers.

TLR was I think not all that mentally stable at the end. He seemed to alternate between seeing himself as a genuine god and being deeply concerned about Ruin (e.g. building the storage caverns), and when he died he was more in the "I am a god" mode. He talks about how utterly pointless the skaa rebellion is - "God cannot be defeated" - and I don't think he was just boasting there; I read that as him being genuinely annoyed at the stupidity of people deciding to fight him when there is no possible outcome other than their losing and dying. He was definitely overconfident, but OTOH he genuinely was taken down by something he had no way to predict - even post Ascension Sazed doesn't fully understand why Vin could do that in the final HOA epigraph. Not really, at TLRs power level. Any other Mistborn in the world (e.g. Kelsier) would have been zero danger to him. It's only mist burning that made Vin a threat. Even Leeching would take too long to threaten him - as soon as he felt his metals decreasing he'd compound Speed. His really dumb move, IMO, was letting Kelsier stab him. If it had been the right kind of Hemalurgic spike... probably would not have been fatal, but having to eat his jewelry to get his healing back would be a huge giveaway.

Huh. Wow... Yeah that seems pretty solid. And in BoM Harmony showed Wax the existence of off-planet threats (the red wave thing).

Well, Spensa was originally imagined as a space-travel-era Cosmere character before Skyward was written, so the correspondence between the belt/outer nowhere and the Cognitive Realm, and the lightburst/inner nowhere and the Spiritual Realm, might be relics of that.

Defending Elysium is set in our solar system. In the story, Elysium isn't the name of a planet; Jason uses it as a reference to the state of peace that the aliens have. (Or, well, that he believes they have...) And this is a re-publication of the story/re-branding as part of the Cytoverse, the story itself is significantly older than Skyward.

I definitely think the analogy to field theories is totally intentional and not a coincidence, the waveforms ideas were hinted at way back in the early cosmere (harmonics of colors & perfect color recognition as analogous to perfect pitch in Warbreaker, Bronze Allomancy in Mistborn Era 1 - I think "pulse length" is their term for "wavelength" Yep. SF and fantasy always have muddy edges, and with this sort of book they blur even more. Arguably RoW is science fiction in a fantasy setting, while Skyward is fantasy in a SF setting.

Is the Spiritual Realm entirely made of Connection, though? Investiture at least seems to be its own thing. And from the evidence of Feruchemy, Spiritual Aspects may also include Identity and possibly Fortune. (The Spiritual quadrant of metals is apparently an in-world designation, so not sure about Fortune. But there seems to be enough evidence elsewhere in the cosmere that Spiritual Identity is genuinely a thing.)

Sorry, poorly phrased - I meant that "not having the normal harmful effects of a piece of metal in the body part" is probably a 'default' feature of Hemalurgy, even for non-constructs. Hmm, I wonder if the few who didn't get F-gold were the ones who were originally Mistborn? A-gold is sufficiently useless that no Inquisitor would get that spike except post-TLR, specifically for the purpose of Compounding. -- Most Inquisitors, but not all, definitely had Gold Feruchemy. It was not a post-Lord Ruler innovation: (From the HOA Ch. 36 Epigraph) So per Sazed/Harmony, their need to rest is a Feruchemy thing not a feature of the Inquisitor "species". -- I think there must be since they are considered constructs, but what? Most of what they do seems to be explained via their existing powers; the ability to see via iron/steel-lines is theoretically possible for anyone with Iron/Steel Allomancy, the need to rest is due to Gold Feruchemy, etc. Improved physical and Allomantic strength seems likely, yeah. It's hard to judge since we don't know what it "should" be as we never know both the original power(s) and spikes for any Inquisitor (Marsh started as a Seeker, but we don't know all his spikes; Vin and Elend list out spikes at the beginning of HOA, but not the specific power granted by all of them, and we don't know the starting power either). But the Iron/Steelsight being very quickly developed in Inquisitors, vs a theoretical thing for other Allomancers, does suggest some Allomantic strength and/or precision boost. Not sure about lifespan, that could just be the effect of Pewter + Gold Allomancy. It does say "slightly" longer, so not necessarily beyond natural human maximum of 120 or so.

So, I've read basically everything by Brandon Sanderson except this series. I definitely enjoyed Rithmatist, Reckoners, and Skyward (especially Skyward), but Alcatraz is supposed to be for a younger age group than those books - is it worth reading for an adult who generally doesn't read middle-grade books?

Where is this story available now? It was on the WOTC website years ago when it first came out, and the bookmark I had from then no longer works.

I think this WOB suggests that's how it works, yes... ... at least for the "physical perfection" effects of Breath/Heightenings, like agelessness and disease immunity (moving the Breath holder closer to their ideal form). I am not sure if the color perception/sound perception effects are because they are seeing the Spiritual forms of the color/sound or if their vision/hearing is itself moved closer to its ideal.

Hmm so under that theory it's the spikes being in normally-vital locations, not the number of spikes? I had thought the "not dying due to spike in brain" aspect was just how the magic worked, similar to Iron Feruchemy not crushing the Feruchemist to death at 100x weight, but that's quite possible. Kandra only have 2... but they don't start as default humans...

That might just be because he has had so many Investiture abilities for so long, plus he's also held a Dawnshard, which probably makes him something between a Sliver and Savant by itself...

What makes a Steel Inquisitor a "Hemalurgic construct" as opposed to just "a person with spikes"? We see people with Allomancy/Feruchemy granting spikes in both HoA and BoM without their being Inquisitors. Is it just an in-world classification to distance the Inquisitors from regular humans? Is the dividing line between "person with spikes" and "Steel Inquisitor" having a linchpin spike, and if so, what determines the need for a linchpin? And what changes do Inquisitors get/suffer other than their actual given powers, if they are genuinely Hemalurgic constructs?

It seems that there are a lot of supernatural injuries/transformations due to messed up Connections. Most overtly, on Roshar, the imprisonment of Ba-Ado-Mishram while she was Connected to the singers turned them into parshmen, removing their spren-bonding/form-changing ability and part of their mentality/will/whatever. This imprisonment also caused Radiant spren whose knights break their Oaths to turn into deadeyes/Shardblades. Details are still very unclear, but given that it has to do with breaking bonds, it's likely a Connection thing in some form. Given the close parallel between Radiant spren and seons, it's likely the messed-up Seons of Reod Elantrians are in the same situation. More speculatively... The Reod Elantrians themselves were so messed up because their Shaod altered Spiritwebs rely on a Connection to the Dor that was no longer there? Mistwraiths have per WoB a "blockage" between the Physical and Cognitive Realms, which the spikes that form a Kandra Blessing fix or bypass. Is this a Connection issue also? (I'm assuming that the three Realmatic aspects of one being require Connection to work together properly, because both Ruin taunting Kelsier in M:SH and Kalak in the RoW Epigraphs refer to Cognitive Shadows lacking Connection to the Physical Realm.) Koloss' lack of intelligence might be like mistwraiths in reverse, as their Cognitive aspects appear as normal-intelligence humans after death in M:SH. And to get extremely speculative indeed... Some Lifeless (like Clod) are more aware/humanlike than others, and holding more Breath at the moment of death helps with that. Perhaps this is due to Connection between the Physical Lifeless corpse and the persisting Spiritual Aspect of the former person, enhanced by the Spiritual nature of Breaths, though the Cognitive aspect of the person is gone (Beyond)?

I am not sure we can necessarily assume that this WoBs referring to soul scars and another WoB referring to Radiant healing "making a patch on the soul" to restore things like Shardblade wounds means that Radiant healing can't restore Hemalurgized powers. Heavy Investiture use transforms the soul/spiritweb anyway*, so it being not-quite the original soul (a "patch") might not really have a lot of implications beyond those of being super-Invested in the first place. Not all Cosmere healing can cure Shardblade wounds either; Szeth says Honorblade Stormlight can't. Radiants are pretty special/powerful IMO. *in HoA Epigraphs, Harmony comments that an Allomantic savant is arguably no longer human. Elantrians are transformed, to the point of being horribly messed up when they lose the Dor connection. etc.

I tend to think it has to be at least remotely possible, else TLR wouldn't have worried about it. A one in a billion chance would be meaningful, as TLR apparently expected (at least sometimes - he wasn't always the sanest) to live and rule forever. But if it was flat out "physically" impossible (well, magic-physics) not so much, as TLR had a very good understanding of the Metallic Arts. Now maybe he feared a double gold Twinborn would reveal too much about his immortality ... OTOH he kept a lot of other powers that existed & were used secret*, why not that one? Gold Mistings were already not supposed to exist (presumably to cover up the existence of Atium Mistings). We know that Inquisitors knew & used Aluminum from book 1, and that was also secret.

I always get Kaladin turning into Paladin, but that is kind of appropriate really. Kandra = Sandra Kandra names turn into weird things too (and right now it tried to turn "Kandra" into "Sandra", and then "Panera"): TenSoon = Tension VenDell = Ferrell Paalm = Psalm OreSeur = Present

Well, Vin did (though TLR was overconfident then), via using Preservation's power directly. Of course TLR was overconfident then - he could have killed Vin before she started burning Mists- but once she started tapping Shard power directly... I'd assume a Shard (absent Intent limitations or being exactly countered by another Shard like Preservation vs Ruin), or someone using really high levels of a Shard's Investiture (like the Well of Ascension, burning mists, or maybe a sufficiently advanced Bondsmith "unchained"), could defeat Rashek. He's also dependent on continual tapping to stay alive, so Investiture absorbing things like a Larkin or Nightblood could get him. Or Aluminum Hemalurgy? Or anti-Investiture? Physically removing his bracers would also work, but compounded speed and strength would make that a non-option. Maybe a Herald in Honor's time, with near-infinite Stormlight physical enhancement, could manage it?

1) the summer /winter differences should be pretty significant, but its not being emphasized isn't all that weird, IMO. It's not emphasized in every RL book set in Britain, for example. I do agree the lack of mention means the FE isn't in true arctic latitudes, there is definitely not polar night in WOA. 2) Given that the apparently large Southern civilization isn't known before BOM, Basin knowledge of the larger globe must be quite limited. Which isn't surprising - Harmony even complains that the benign environment of the Basin has limited their development.

I think a FE Twinborn would just get spiked by Inquisitors. Miles didn't have superhuman strength or speed, so an Inquisitor could just use Pewter Allomancy to grab him and spike him (sure, maybe he could heal at first with gold inside the body, but just keep spiking). Also, apparently Compounding is tricky to learn effectively (thus why the HoA Inquisitors aren't all compounding speed) so a FE Twinborn, with knowledge of the Metallic Arts being limited, probably wouldn't know what they were doing.

Thank you!!! I do not have a better date, sorry. It was several years ago but I do not know what year exactly.