cometaryorbit

I think it's somewhere in between. It's not just the Vessel - the Vessel can influence the interpretation/behavior of the Shard, but within limits; its nature will ultimately shine through. ("Ati was a kind and generous man...") The Shards are people, but they are also cosmic forces whose nature is refined, but not ultimately defined, by the minds that hold them. However, none of the Shards appear to correlate to good and evil as such. Odium is probably the closest to evil as a concept, but he doesn't define the entirety of evil, and could probably be at least semi-positive if combined with the appropriate other Shard(s). I'd say that Devotion, Endowment, and perhaps Honor represent aspects of good, but none are entirely good in isolation from the rest, and certainly none embody the entirety of goodness.

I wonder how Duralumin Feruchemy (or Compounding) looks... it might be the kind of thing that makes you easily form a team with yourself at the center. I still bash my head against trying to figure out what the other atium alloys would do. I feel like there should be a system, since there's a definite connection between Malatium's and Gold's powers, and the lerasium alloys have a consistent pattern, creating Mistings of that metal. But I'm not sure what...

I agree he could determine that Nightblood was something special and, if he did, might take things more seriously. But I doubt he would have time to go through that thought process in the time it takes for Nightblood to hit him - he's gone a thousand years thinking that he's invincible. He's not going to be in a mindset that lends itself to quickly evaluating threats. Note that TLR was told about the skaa rebellion by the prelans, and dismissed it - even though he was expecting Ruin to make some kind of move as the time of the Well's refilling approached. (I don't think he even considered the possibility of losing his metalminds, or he would have implanted them internally with nothing visible sticking out - with Gold Compounding, plus maybe Electrum and/or Bronze to stay conscious, TLR could easily perform surgery on himself). I don't know... even if TLR knew how to Seek non-Allomancy Investiture (I don't think we can take that for granted, since the Inquisitors apparently couldn't Seek Feruchemy) I think it only detects active Kinetic Investiture. Szeth using Surges could be detected, but not Yelig-Nar just possessing Szeth. Certainly, TLR fighting at maximum capability could defeat almost anything. But Nightblood is one of the few things that could potentially actually kill him without knowing his metalmind weakness (the other things I can think of are an extreme application of Leeching, maybe by a Mistborn who somehow learned about both Chromium and Duralumin, or total dismemberment/incineration/vaporization through immense physical force, which would in the process separate his brain from his metalminds and/or destroy the metalminds).

Yeah this is very strange... It could just be some kind of Ruin/Preservation balance thing, where Sazed was only able to do so much (the Elendel Basin etc.) before Ruin's influence "kicked in" and kept him from helping anyone else at that time. But if it's that simple, why would Brandon RAFO that? I wonder if the Southern freezing wasn't a simple consequence of Sazed moving the planet back to the right place, but was something much weirder that wasn't predictable from what Sazed knew at the time. As I understand it, Sazed could see the history of what was previously done with the powers he now held, but otherwise his knowledge of the past was limited to what he already knew (his memory/copperminds). So he would know what TLR did with the Well, but wouldn't know anything about what happened in the intervening thousand years. And there is something very weird about the Southerners' non-tolerance for cold vs. the WOB that TLR didn't alter them genetically. If that's something that happened during that unknown thousand years, then Sazed might not have realized the new conditions would be deadly (maybe regular humans would have been fine). The South might not actually be that uninhabitable, by our modern Earth standards, or Sazed's (he calls Terris a tundra in the first book...)

Yeah ... there is an argument by some moral/ethical perspectives for killing Elhokar being defensible, at least given the situation as of Words of Radiance. One can argue the legitimacy of the Alethi monarchy in the first place; Elhokar just inherited it from Gavilar, who got it by conquest rather than any kind of consent of the governed. (Of course, if you go back far enough, every place was conquered from somebody...) But turning to Odium's side and killing Jezrien, that's clearly over the line into real evil. (And anyway, by the time Elhokar actually got killed, he'd realized his failings and took steps to resolve them, by giving higher authority to Dalinar... So even there...)

Yeah, I get the impression that there are not many at all post-Recreance. Originally, probably a few thousand; we see 300 KR in the Feverstone Keep vision, from two Orders. If that was all of those Orders, and if those numbers are representative for the nine non-Bondsmith Orders, there were probably somewhere around 1200-1500 KR total, so, if the majority were bonded... maybe 2000 or so Nahel spren?

IMO, this could go either way. Is TLR is in overconfident, I-know-I'm-immortal mode like he is in the actual book vs. Vin? Or is he fighting smart, recognizing a genuine threat and using his abilities to their fullest extent? Also, how much does each know about the other's powers? If neither is aware of the other's powers, TLR might well be overconfident enough to let Szeth hit him with Nightblood (he lets himself get run through twice in the book, and gloats for quite a while after he thinks he's defeated Vin and Marsh). That might actually work. (We know feruchemical gold healing can work against Shardblades, so I'm not convinced one hit from Nightblood would kill TLR; but it very well might, since Nightblood doesn't just cut but obliterates stuff, TLR might be dead before the healing could work.) I don't think most of the Surges are going to be much help in this fight, since it's going to come down to whether Nightblood can land a hit or not, and whether TLR can survive that.

Very good point, didn't think of that. Thanks! Hmmm, I wonder why Seons don't get fried. Do they not live primarily in the Cognitive Realm like Rosharan spren? Or is it that they're made of that Investiture so it doesn't harm them?

By the way, Kelsier says in book one that there are about 20 Inquisitors in the entire empire, about half of whom are in Luthadel.

Actually, it does; Vin can detect Clubs' copper Allomantic pulses when she's testing the Allomancer members of the crew to prove they're not kandra in Well of Ascension. (She comments that very few people have ever actually heard copper's pulse...)

It's notable, too, that Ruin in HOA comes across kind of somber, 'it is the world's time to die' kind of thing. He talks like he doesn't really understand why people don't just accept the end of the world and stop fighting it, it's just the natural way of things, and so on. I think that's the last remnant of what was good in him. Ultimately the pressure of the Shard would warp him into someone who will destroy, no matter what. But since Ati was inherently originally a good person, he ends up seeing destruction as 'good' or at least neutral/inevitable/natural.

That's stated in Well of Ascension, where Sazed is storing up attributes in preparation for the attack on Luthadel. (After they decide Straff is going to let the koloss attack first.) True, but at the level Steel Compounding can get you to, it wouldn't matter, if he knew about silver. Especially with the other powers TLR has. He could evade them (smashing through walls etc if he did get cornered) until he grabbed some silver object. Once he had that, he could easily destroy an arbitrarily large number of shades (just running/steeljumping around and using Allomantic iron/Steel to shoot the silver through all the shades). It would be really, really hard for them to hurt him meaningfully. Actually making contact with him would be incredibly hard, and a shade's touch isn't instantaneous death even to a normal human who isn't tapping gold. I'd imagine TLR could sit there forever with a shade withering him and never feel any effects, as long as he ate a few gold coins once in a while to fill up his goldminds. I think Nightblood eats its wielder's Investiture, but just does massive damage on all three realms to whatever it hits (like Shardblade cutting massively enhanced). Even if it did that, though, it wouldn't kill TLR until he ran out of metals to burn, and I think he'd end the fight much sooner than that.

Given how destructive the Desolations on Roshar are, why is Sel still habitable? Once Devotion and Dominion were splintered, there wouldn't have been any force opposing Odium. I used to think that Odium simply didn't have any interest in harming anybody below major Splinter/Herald/etc power level. But it seems from Oathbringer that I was wrong about the Desolations on Roshar in my old Recreance theory: But then, I was focusing only on Odium's goals: at that point, I was expecting the Voidbringer/Everstorm-influenced listeners to be pure puppets with no motivations of their own (like Ruin-controlled koloss/inquisitors in Mistborn). If the Desolations' threat to humanity in general comes from the listeners' own desire to get their planet back, Odium might still not care. But even so... Threnody is super messed up, and it doesn't seem like either Odium or Ambition Invested there. So why isn't Sel more damaged? It seems pretty Earthlike.

OK - that all makes sense. Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if someone got a significant part of a Shard's power while that Shard was still "fully awake and alive" (not half-dead like Leras in Era 1)? The Well didn't exist in that form before the imprisonment of Ruin (Preservation probably had a Perpendicularity, but not the "power for renewing Ruin's prison every thousand years" thing), but, say someone amassed millions or billions of Breaths, or Nightblood absorbed most of a Shard's worth of Investiture eventually through killing things... Can a Shard be "stolen" from its Vessel?

For things that would be useful in my actual life, F-zinc/A-tin. (Zinc - Store to speed through boring events, tap for super-thinking. Tin - better senses would help somewhat with a lot of things, though it's not flashy.) Since I don't get into fights, and 6 of the allomantic metals rely on interacting with other Allomancy, the choices for useful ones are actually pretty limited... For just incredible power, either double gold or double steel. Hmmm... random thought... I wonder if brass compounding would let you be Obliteration from the Reckoners series... Or even regular brass - I wonder what limits the heat storage rate? Could a Brass Ferring jump into a volcano and be OK as long as they were storing? Maybe it's limited by the melting point of brass?

I don't know. I wouldn't necessarily assume none of his powers would affect them - we just haven't seen those interactions, and don't know enough about either the nature of Shades (they're cognitive shadows, but seem to be more physical than, say, Kelsier-shadow) or some of the more esoteric allomantic/feruchemical powers used at really high levels. If he knew what they were, he'd just avoid them (with compounded speed) until he could grab some silver, then kill them (I have the mental image of TLR destroying shades with silverware...). Some of the other allomantic and feruchemical powers might conceivably affect cognitive shadows, especially used at really high levels; we just don't know. (Could emotional Allomancy do something - doesn't it work through the cognitive realm?) I also don't think we know which non-common-knowledge metals TLR had access to. (If TLR compounded ridiculous amounts of luck, would a silver object just coincidentally come to hand, even if TLR didn't know that was what he needed? What happens if you Leech a Shade - could you just erase the investiture making it up?) I wonder if that bit about duralumin + atium pulling you into the Spiritual Realm could help... probably not...

Actually... does TLR sleep at all? Can you Feruchemically tap while asleep? He might have been compounding bronze to stay awake continuously for the last 950 years or whatever... I imagine he figured out a way to tap his metalminds while asleep, like burning pewter when unconscious, but I don't know... Allomancy seems more "instinctive" than Feruchemy, so I'm not sure if that is possible. On the original question ...Depends what you mean by "most powerful". - In raw quantity of Investiture, Susebron and the Stormfather (and presumably the Nightwatcher) probably win. But these are very limited on what they can do with it (even after Susebron gets his tongue, Awakening is fairly limited compared to a Mistborn or Feruchemist's power-set, much less both combined). - In terms of 'who would win in a fight'... Without knowing his weakness, TLR pretty much automatically wins, since with his metalminds in he basically can't be hurt in any lasting way. Nightblood might kill him, if he didn't know it could kill him and just let himself get hit (like he did with a spear in the city square), or if the wielder was comparably fast (feruchemical steel). Maybe... I doubt Nightblood would be immediately lethal to him, since we know Feruchemical gold can heal Shardblade wounds. Nightblood's more powerful than a normal Shardblade, but I think it would probably be more "burns up his healing reserves much faster" rather than "one hit kill". Knowing his weakness, there are various things that could work (ripping them out physically with a huge surge of Feruchemical Speed, super-charged Steel or Iron Allomancy or Gravitation ... Vin with mist-burning, someone with the Bands of Mourning, the Windrunner or Skybreaker Heralds or maybe a really advanced Knight of those Orders - we haven't seen what kind of powers the Fifth Ideal gives you yet...) The wild card here, though, is total dismemberment. Even if someone doesn't know his weakness, if they know he's ridiculously hard to kill, a "massive overkill" approach seems pretty logical - and if TLR's metalminds are separated from him, he dies. So if his body was completely blown to bits, or both arms torn off (assuming the metalminds have to have a connection to the brain), he should die... though with Pewter Allomancy, possibly Duralumin-surged, that would be hard.

Maybe I'm just being obtuse/dumb, but I feel like there are two slightly different ideas here. Was the Well only able to grant "arbitrary" powers because Preservation specifically designed it to do that, or would that huge quantity of Investiture from any source have the same effect? For example, if (hypothetically) someone had a giant Unsealed Nicrosilmind containing the same amount of Investiture that the Well did, would tapping it give you the same powers? If someone was able to gather Breath adding up to, say, 90% of Endowment's total Investiture... The especially odd bit, IMO, is that at the end of Hero of Ages when Vin Mist-burns while fighting the Inquisitors, she has the regular Allomantic powers supercharged until she actually "dissolves" physically and becomes the actual Shard Preservation. But it seems like the Well doesn't do the body-dissolving bit... but I thought the fixed effects of the magic system were due to the Spiritual DNA/Investiture-physical body interaction...

Yeah, Kandra can use Feruchemy granted by a Hemalurgic spike, too (see Shadows of Self). I don't think there is any inherent "incompatibility" between Allomancy/Feruchemy and the kandra. Do we know whether a Kandra who ate Lerasium would become a Kandra-Mistborn? Since Hemalurgy can grant them Allomancy, I'd imagine so, since both basically modify your Spiritual DNA...

Something I was just wondering about, re-reading "The Well of Ascension". Rashek, using the Well, was able to do things outside his existing power-set of Feruchemy or his new Allomancy, like moving the planet, turning people into mistwraiths, and re-designing plants to handle ash. This is called an Ascension, but it seems that Rashek didn't truly hold Preservation - Mistborn: Secret History seems to make it clear that (even though mindless/dying) Leras still held the Shard up until the moment he actually finally died. So what is an Ascension, and why did Rashek get the "arbitrary, godlike" full-Shard-type powers, whereas Vin burning the mists or Elend being fed power by Vin (also drawing "directly" on Preservation's power) get extra power and the ability to use Allomancy without actual metal, but are still limited to the specific powers? On Roshar, it seems that the Heralds could pull Investiture straight from Honor, similar to Vin's Mist-burning, but they were known for their specific powers (that the Radiant Orders were based on). Is it just a matter of an Investiture threshold? Below, say, 1% of a Shard you are limited to specific powers but above that number you get arbitrary, godlike powers?

...but hair is live cells before it becomes dead ones. (Bones are more complex, since they have significant mineral components. But they're still ultimately grown by cells.) I don't think there is any workable "real world biology" explanation for Kandra limitations. What we see them do in Era 1 can mostly be explained by them just having really re-configurable muscles, plus the ability to alter surface color/texture very precisely (like super-cuttlefish). Although bleeding is an issue, you'd have to assume kandra blood was the same color and odor as human. But in Era 2, it's clear they have far more subtle control of cellular-level stuff (the Kandra "death switch" we learn about in Shadows of Self, for example). If they can do that, they really ought to be able to do anything that biology can do (potentially anything that chemistry can do, barring stuff requiring really high temperatures). Now, you could say that it takes so long to grow bones starting from stem cells that in practice they can't do it, though in theory they could. But hair really ought to be possible, given that TenSoon can eat and convert a horse in like an hour.

As SwordNimiForPresident points out, they need to rest a ton [HoA epigraphs talks about this being because their feruchemical storing of healing takes forever due to Hemalurgic decay]. Their available "on the job" time is probably quite limited. I suspect their activity is also probably intentionally limited to keep their mystique. If people learn too much about them, they could become vulnerable. Even if the "pull their spikes out" bit wasn't discovered, once people knew that their powers are just those of a Mistborn + healing, no special "divine" abilities, they could be defeated with numbers, the right equipment, and good planning. Their physical strength isn't that exceptional - less than the average Thug's, given Hemalurgic decay - and so they can be captured/restrained, after which even healing won't save them.

I wonder if Marsh has learned to use Feruchemy to avoid the pain of spikes. There are WOBs that Feruchemical tin can theoretically store stuff other than the standard five senses - could Marsh store his ability to feel pain? (For a normal human, that would be quite dangerous, due to not noticing cuts that then get infected, etc. - but Marsh has Gold Compounding, so that's not really an issue for him.)

I don't think there are really weird Realmatic things going on with the Physical Metals. I think that the discrepancies are because the force exerted varies based on anchor quality as well as Allomantic strength and distance. When an Allomancer Pushes a coin and the coin hits a wall, and then the Allomancer gets pushed backwards, the force has suddenly increased because coin+wall is a better anchor than the coin by itself. There's no violation of Newton's 3rd Law involved, simply an increase in "leverage" that allows the force applied to increase (dramatically). It seems like there is something limiting the amount of force applied to small, fast-moving objects ... coins really don't seem to move at hypersonic speeds or anything, even when pushed by Elend. But a normal strength Coinshot can hurl themselves through the air at significant speed. The Elend vs Inquisitor bit is odder, but it may simply be an anchoring issue. (Either Allomantic anchors on the battlefield, or just a matter of stance/bracing/friction with the ground). The Inquisitor knows how strong non-Inquisitor Allomancers can be (there's a range of strength yeah, but it seems pretty narrow) and is braced for that - but not for Elend's vastly greater strength. Whereas Elend knows how strong he is and is braced better. The important factor may be that the Inquisitor was taken by surprise rather than simply overwhelmed by greater strength. For Vin with mist-burning vs TLR, I don't think the issue is really in play, because Vin isn't pushing against TLR's full mass, just the little bit of flesh that the bracer pins have to go through to exit. The need for extreme strength there is to overcome Investiture interference, not mass/force issues.

"Slammer" is slang/an euphemism for "jail". So it probably references Cultivation keeping Odium imprisoned in Greater Roshar (somehow).