robardin

Huh? He'd already met - and obviously bonded with - Syl by that point. The entire point of TWoK, as the "Windrunner" book, is to go in depth into What Makes A Windrunner Tick with POVs (plus the added burden of introducing Roshar and its flora, fauna, and societies). And that's what makes a Windrunner tick. The desire to save not himself, but others. And he was doing this unconsciously - his instinctive use of Surgebinding was not to fly, or to stick Lopen to the wall, but to use Reverse Lashings to shield his men. When you also realize that the Windrunner powers were literally the first Surges we see described in SA - from Szeth's POV as he goes a-killing with The Three Lashings - you see how it's not the powerset that defines the Radiant, but the nature of the person who attracts the spren that grants the powerset. Jezrien's Honorblade grants the same powers, but did we ever see Szeth save people by drawing fire towards himself? Or (LOL) Moash? (Who, ironically, initially exhibits Windrunner-like characteristics in saving Sah and Khen and other former parshmen from abuse by singers as a human slave, before going Full Odium.) And, as far as his leadership and ingenuity goes, those ARE what created Bridge Four as a unit. The Surgebinding kept them alive on bridge runs, yes, but getting them to open up to each other, to give their names, to learn discipline, to trust him and each other? That's all Kal. In fact what made any of that possible was his saving the lives of Dabbid and Hobber, who were still nameless, left-to-die bridgemen to everybody else. Nothing to do with Surges. Seeing someone else value human life moved Rock out of his inhumanity. And then Teft. Which led to Kal being able to form a small knobweed gathering crew with them, and then to the stew pot, and so on.

OK, so Hinston (Edwarn's son) did indeed die of an unexpected sickness - but what about Edwarn's unnamed wife? That WoB actually makes things MORE confusing to me about her; I wonder what the LB text addition or correction would be. Three people in a carriage which has some kind of fatal accident - one not described, but for it to be a cover for faking someone's death, it'd have to be pre-planned and not something of opportunity. With three people inside a carriage, having two "survive" such a planned accident and not the third is should be either intentional or incompetence? And whatever could be said of Edwarn and Telsin, not to mention the Set themselves (which pre-existed for them to join), when it comes to subtle and fatal plots, they are not incompetent. And so, one would naturally assume that Edwarn's wife should be exactly as dead as Telsin proved to be (i.e., that Edwarn hadn't coldly killed two more members of his own family, to set the path for Wax to return into his sphere of influence in Elendel). One way it could play out is that Edwarn and Telsin tried to stage it so that his wife would come out alive but still in the dark about the Set both before and after (while arranging their own disappearances), and instead she innocently ran back to the carriage that had stalled on a railroad track to fetch a treasured memento of Hinston, and then died in the crash. Like in one of those 1950s Teen Tragedy songs, LOL.

Ye-e-e-sss... "Akin" to the Fused....

Yeah, the way Edwarn recognizes the one that comes to him in jail was by the glowing red eyes and the quick, purposeful stride. As for the outward form, he sees that of a “male this time, with a ragged beard and wild hair. A beggar stolen off the street, Suit guessed.” I think his calling them “Faceless Immortals” was more in the sense of “immortal servants of Trell who move among us as His agents and can take on human form at need/will”. Here it seems more like possession, likely of a dead or unwilling host (“stolen off the street”).

Whether or not VenDell or another kandra would have thoughts about this (or realized they should have thoughts about this), Cosmere readers have posed that to Brandon, and gotten an explicit acknowledgement and RAFO about "that extra bit of Ruin" that Harmony has been doing something with:

The further you get from the "basic" metals, the harder the metal was to obtain or refine in TFE and I suppose the same was true of pre-TLR Scadrial (where the Terris were a pastoral mountain-dwelling folk, not industrially oriented like the Khlenni appear to have been). So you have iron/steel, copper/bronze, zinc/brass, tin/pewter, gold/electrum as the likely metals the original Feruchemists would have known about. Well, it would take some time to realize that A-electrum would cause shadows to confuse an atium burner. In fact, as of TWoA, in theory it should require both someone to burn electrum (a Mistborn, as it being one of TLR's "secret metals" they wouldn't know of any electrum Mistings), AND someone else burning atium at the same time (another Mistborn, as far as they knew). Otherwise how would they know? Sure, Vin burning electrum would see her own "future action shadows", and with practice that should be pretty useful in a fight, but to think "hey, maybe this would confuse someone else burning a different metal" would not necessarily be obvious - certainly not without testing it, and that would be hard to do. I think they only realized its potential use as a "defense against A-atium" because TLR specifically mentioned it on the engraving at the Steel Ministry cache in Urteau. Elend even mentally "thanked the Lord Ruler" (not as a general saying, but Rashek specifically) in HoA Ch. 5, while using it as "poor man's atium".

I agree that Miles was a special case of "always healing" and so was healing almost as quickly as the damage was done to him; but burning a goldmind would give him a burst of healing power, not "continual" healing. He stored the "excess" healing into one of his several goldminds, that were also spiked into his body (or even completely internal). He was "always healing" by dint of always tapping gold, similar to how Rashek was continually tapping a Compounding-filled atiummind to stay alive for hundreds of years beyond his natural span. A bullet to the head would not "have time" to settle in to disrupt the mental process of Miles' tapping a metalmind because he was already tapping it, but a normal Bloodmaker, if killed "instantly" or rendered immediately unconscious, would be unable to tap gold quickly enough as a reaction, and thus would die.

Even with a LOT of atium, I doubt Kelsier would have been able to kill every nobleman or soldier within ten miles... Not in the physical shape he would have been in, as a skaa slave kept on the brink of death for weeks on end. Every one he came across, maybe. That's plausible. En route to Luthadel to find the only skaa Mistborn he knew about, from his time in the underworld. He does speak of "fencing atium" to procure funds in Eleventh Metal, so he probably took as much as he could carry with him from the Pits. But used it all up by the start of the events of TFE, where he is breaking into Keep Venture to steal some while defeating a slew of Mistings and Hazekillers.

Well the sticker pack isn't about GBs (none of the other main characters shown there from Era 2 are, after all); if we assume this new face is a new character who comes to the foreground in TLM, well, Khriss is as good as guess as any! (And no, Khriss almost certainly is not a Ghostblood, and no, Iyatil ain't showing her face)

I can: the idea that Rashek augmented himself with hemalurgy, i.e., that the bracers piercing his arms were actually hemalurgic in nature. Annotation 193 [June 2, 2007]: Marsh's plan to kill the Lord Ruler is a good one too. Unfortunately, the Lord Ruler's power doesn't come only from Hemalurgy, but from other things as well. If he'd pulled off the bracelets instead. . . . Originally, it seems that TLR was supposed to be super-strong in Allomancy because he'd spiked himself for those powers on top of his being a Lerasium Mistborn on top of being a Natural Born Feruchemist. Later (though still in WoB-space so who knows what counts as "canon" at this moment), he backtracked and said Rashek did not partake of the lerasium bead stash, and had instead done a "binary level edit" of his Spiritweb while Ascended to make himself an even stronger Mistborn than lerasium would produce. And no hemalurgic spikes in him, the bracers piercing his skin were to hide their highly Invested nature from any Allomancers who saw them and might think to wonder why there weren't any blue lines leading to them.

It's actually Iyatil who's been watching Marasi and left her the little GB "statement of interest" note, and now that you've seen her face without the mask on, you better sleep with one eye open every night. (I think it's Khriss, too)

Regarding "what haven't the Southerners let on about their technology": not only must there be medallions for Feruchemy... The technology allows for it, inasmuch as the nicrosil ring is already a metalmind, and stores unsealed Investiture granting a power and there's no reason to think it'd be limited to Allomancy... ...but the "primer cubes", or as Marasi and Wax continue to think of them even in the early chapters of TLM, "Allomantic grenades", must also be able to replicate Feruchemy, even if the Basinfolk haven't figured out how to do that yet (i.e., even though Wax in partcular has handled it numerous times). Either the same primer cubes can be used similarly - like if Wax were to fill an ironmind while touching the cube - or there are separate cubes for Feruchemy. Why? Because in BoM, when Edwarn tries to take off in the recovered (and fully functional) airship left by the Hunters at the Temple of the Sovereign, before Wax stops them from doing so, he (Suit) is told that unlike the Malwish ship they'd been studying, So not only are there medallions for F-iron for crew and passengers to store their weight while onboard an airship, the ship itself has a primer-driven (cube-and-ettmetal-powered and sustained amplification) mechanism for doing the same to the ship as a whole. I suspect it's a separate kind of primer, because knowing Wax, he surely would have tried to "replicate" Feruchemy with the cube they've already got in the intervening years, and they still call it an "Allomantic grenade".

LOL, I wonder if this was drawn at least partly from personal experience on Brandon’s part with his relatively sudden thrust into the big time, first by being tapped to complete TWoT and then with becoming the poster boy for Biggest Kickstarter Evah Poor people get chased by debt collectors… So it stands to reason that suddenly rich people with publicly known names and faces and contact info get chased by people with “investment plans”

How canonical are the Annotations? Because this one is from March 12, 2007: There are a number of questions raised by the Annotation/WoB based on what we subsequently read in published works, and the easiest answer is "Brandon changed his mind a little bit and this is dramatization". For example, we see in Arcanum Unbounded how unpracticed Kelsier is when he seeks out Gemmel for training. We also see how even Vin, one of the most instinctive Allomancers ever to live, needed at least a week of practice with the physical metals (steel and iron) before becoming reliably proficient with them. In fact, in re-reading The Eleventh Metal, Kelsier still had to be prodded to the idea of using his Allomancy for brutal vengeance (his first instinct being to use disguises and emontional Allomancy). Gemmel says to him, "when I'm done with you, you'll be able to kill a hundred men with a single coin... Waste your time with emotional Allomancy when I'm finished. For now, you kill." The implication is that Kelsier found Gemmel soon after Snapping and trained before he became a real killing machine. If he'd "slaughtered every soldier or nobleman within ten miles of the Pits" immediately after "bursting out of his hut", he'd have had a pretty good rebuttal to Gemmel, eh?

I would say that "adonalsium" is the metal of Adonalsium; there is no fundamental distinction except in a mortal mind's context. Paraphrasing something some of you may be familiar with: "In the beginning was the metal, and the metal was with God, and the metal was God." Which would make sense if you consider the name/term for God in our world "Adonai" (my Lord) - His metal would be "Adonai-sium" or more smoothly, "adonalsium", no?

In addition to the "more spikes = more control of the Inquisitor" thing, it could also just be that Ruin's purpose - consciously or unconsciously, and bottled up for so long in the Well of Ascension - drove him to maximize spike production over efficiency of power gained. I mean, that's kind of the whole "theme" of hemalurgy as an expression of Ruin, right? Efficiency is lost - the strength of a Metalborn power is lesser to the spike's recipient than it was for the donor, with further decay while out of a body/not encased in blood - while power is gained (to the recipicent - net power is lost). In that sense, having an Inquisitor with all the (useful) powers with 22 spikes in him (Marsh), each spike representing a Ruined donor, could be more valued, more beautiful to Ruin than some kind of Swiss Masterpiece Edition Inquisitor with minimal spikes for maximum power, like if he'd somehow managed to get Rashek to make himself into an Inquisitor.

More spikes = more control is the most plausible... As for"why run up the score", well, why make all those koloss? That was certainly overkill. But fun. Inquisitors would have been the perfect off-world minions, though, and Ruin did indicate he already was forming plans for after Scadrial was destroyed as promised. Like the Ire, and possibly other planets, we'll never know now. And those plans must have included leveraging Compounding, else why give Marsh spikes for both A- and F-atium? Not to mention A-duralumin, which required killing a Mistborn to harvest, as duralumin gnats would have been basically impossible to find.

I also posed this question, quite a few years back... And @Oversleep pointed out that there was, in fact, a ready source of Allomantic metal for a newly-snapped Mistborn to burn at the Pits of Hathsin, the ban on Allomancy among the guards and obligators notwithstanding. Atium. And perhaps burning atium doesn't shatter the geode crystals the way that burning normal Allomantic metals would do. Yeeeah, I guess that should have been obvious, on second thought. "Why is this emaciated skaa slave charging a group of 20 armed guards, brandishing a wooden spoon? What's he gonna do, scoop us to death?" scoop dodge twirl scoop scoop scoop OH LORD RULER WHAT IS HAPPENING

After all these years, I figured someone would have brought this up or asked Brandon this question, but a casual search in the archives didn't turn anything up... ...but if Feruchemists were so rare at the end of the The Final Empire, thanks to Rashek's breeding (out) programs, and Allomancers comparatively far more common, why did Ruin kill all the Keepers in his Inquisitor Raid on the Synod of Terris to make spikes for Inquisitors he'd already made, instead of making Inquisitors out of the Keepers with Allomancers he could capture? Especially as the mists of Preservation began Snapping more Allomancers into existence! Each Keeper could only be harvested for one Feruchemical power, and in some cases (like Marsh) a single Inquisitor was endowed with multiple spikes for Feruchemy. Seems obvious that it would be a lot more economical to give a full Feruchemist spikes for Allomancy. I mean, a guy like Marsh started out as a Seeker Misting anyway - not a full Mistborn - so instead of giving him spikes for most of the FE era Allomantic powers PLUS quite a few spikes for Feruchemy (he exhibits F-steel, F-gold, F-atium, F-pewter), he could have given the same Allomantic / Inquisitor spikes to four Keepers and gotten the same result, but four times over. Yes, he'd lose the doubled-up A-bronze for enhanced Seeking that came from giving a spike for that to Marsh, but other than that, way more OP of a minion and more of them, right? I get that he already had a whole host of Inquisitors at his command, but making Inquisikeepers in addition to that first set (instead of personally augmenting them) would have been terrifying. Even if they hadn't had time to learn about Compounding yet. I like to think that somewhere in Ruin, the Vessel of Ati who had originally been a "kind and generous man" was, in some small Marsh-like way, holding back his full intelligence while reveling in Ruining things. Making Marsh his primary pawn had to be more of a "twist the knife in Kelsier's Crew and the leaders of the human resistance" act than a strategic one.

It seems pretty unlikely for someone like Wayne to live to 30+ years old and never realize he had 15 more Feruchemical abilities than just F-gold. I mean, it's not like he's not constantly handling base metals like iron and steel, especially around Wax. He even implied at one point that he innately knew he had Metalborn powers for F-gold and A-bendalloy before he could make use of either, being as both were expensive and rare, especially in the Roughs. It was in Alloy of Law, when he spoke about meeting Wax to Marasi: He implies (by my reading) that despite having little to no access to metals like bendalloy and gold he knew he could make use of them and how, albeit unpracticed, and Marasi doesn't question it. At any rate, if he "had an idea" he was a Feruchemist but had no access to gold, he would at least have had relatively easy access to iron, tin, and copper in a mining town.

Fortune doesn't give Futurevision, it's more of a "let the Force guide you" Spiritual type thing; along with the appropriate hook of what you want, I suppose? This WoB wasn't originally about Fortune, but the answer is very illuminating as to how Brandon conceives of it: Note that the "two equally valid theories" refers to the question of the vision Kaladin had of Tien absolving him while also explaining that Kaladin never needed that absolution, helping him to reach the Fourth Ideal. Dalinar could have reached the Beyond to connect Kaladin with the actual-soul-of-departed-Tien, versus some kind of Cognitive/Spiritual Cosmere-model-of-Tien (but where "reaching the Beyond" is something even a double-Shard like Harmony cannot do)... ...but almost certainly, the way Kaladin ended up finding that horse in the junk dealer's stash was through Fortune. How either Tien-Beyond or Cosmere-Model-of-Tien could effectuate that burst of Fortune to Kaladin through the vision is just another secret. Basically, Fortune is like following a trail of crumbs, laid down by crumbling a cookie. (If you see what I'm getting at. LOL.) In that light, I suppose Vin pulling off her atium workaround in The Well of Ascension could have been Fortune-based as well. Having that critical insight or intuitive leap, at just the right time. I do wonder what Compounding Fortune would be like, though. If there is any Intent involved in what Fortune results in, what if you tapped Fortune while burning Allomantic gold to see a very different version of yourself? Haha.

Kandra subjected themselves to what they considered slavery, under the terms of Contract, in order to escape the fate of being destroyed or made puppets by human Allomancers. If they could have just disappeared off-planet and blend in somewhere else, or even find an uninhabited planet or area of a planet to take up residence in, don’t you think they would have done it? Well, except for the salmon-like need to return to Scadrial once every century to get the spikes from TLR to make the next Generation, I suppose. There was nothing in the First Contract, AFAIK, that linked getting generational spikes to serving mankind as spies for payment in atium. I guess there’s that part of the First Contract - they were supposed to be of Preservation and to guard the body of Ruin, the great cache of the Trustwarren, with their secrecy and their very lives - hard to do that from a base in Silverlight or Nalthis or something like that, I suppose.

Heh. At the same time (or at least, in the same book) as Marasi reflecting that Wayne was "wealthier now than most of Elendel", Wayne also justifies taking the apparently solid aluminum spearhead off of the statue of The Sovereign by thinking to himself that "little Sophie Tarcsel needs funds". But then he just swaps it into Marasi's bag in exchange for ReLuur's missing spike, for no obvious reason. What would Sophie Tarcsel have done with that? LOL. Feels like that might have been one of those "a little help" nudges from Harmony in directing human events. Wayne already wanted to do things like fiddle off the huge metal spearhead, and to swap things with Marasi without her noticing... Why not arrange it so that Marasi would have the true Bands of Mourning in her possession, at just the time and place that it could be useful?

Lerasium certainly qualifies as a "lost metal", too. Despite the empty display of atium as "the lost metal" at the Originators Tomb. Heh heh. I like how Wax waves away the idea that he's been pursuing this secretly with the aim of becoming Mistborn. "I'm not trying to isolate lerasium to become Mistborn, just trying to see if it could be done!" "And just how would you test if it was lerasium, since the legendary godmetal has only one known property, that of making a powerful Mistborn like the Last Emperor?" "...Well, you see, the thing about that is, it was never for me... If I were going to make a Lerasium Mistborn in this day and age, intentionally, it should be power given to someone who has no innate desire to power, no inclination to casual domination of others, and would be very calculating as to when it'd be appropriate to use it..." *Everyone looks at Steris* "If you must know," Steris said into the lengthening silence, "I have estimated that me becoming the most powerful Allomancer in centuries is somewhere down in the low 40s on my list of things that could result from our research here, in order of likelihood. Slightly behind our little Max becoming a full Feruchemist." BTW, ever since MeLaan made the comment that Wayne "was wasted as a human" and would be like the perfect kandra, ... Can Harmony not eventually make Wayne a kandra? LOL.

This was also the first thing I noticed in reading these preview chapters! While Harmony uses the kandra as "His agents", He also wants them to have free will (even if more "directed" by him than the humans of Scadrial). For example, ReLuur had to "discover" the temple of the Bands of Mourning (and lose a spike in the process to the Set), and VenDell mentions that Harmony has "let slip" about moving pictures in the future while holding back even from the kandra about things they needed to discover on their own (in His view). And technically, what MeLaan said does not contradict the statement that we've already seen a kandra on Roshar in Oathbringer, SA4, which predates the Wax and Wayne MB Era 2 books that occur between SA5 and SA5: "I’ll be the first kandra to go out there long-term, with an official mission... I get to explore the cosmere, Wayne. I get to go and see everything there is—worlds we can only imagine." She's actually being sent by Harmony's express command, with a parameterized mission. She may or may not know that there have already been kandra "out there". The kandra already known to be on Roshar earlier? Well, that could be an "advance scout", as you say. After all, how else would Harmony know where to send her? Or perhaps a "rogue kandra"? Harmony is capable of taking direct control of them, but that's even more true of the super-spiked Marsh - but as we saw from him giving Spook's notebook on hemalurgy to Marasi at the end of Alloy of Law, the nature of the Shard of Harmony requires that He allow even his agents to view things differently than He himself does. And to act accordingly. Another possibility is that it's one of "Trell's" Faceless Immortals, i.e., a kandra made with a trellium spike somewhere in the mix. I think that'd be "less satisfying" because I'd rather learn about the possibility or existence of such beings in the Mistborn series first, but then again, technically we would have, as the mention of a kandra on Roshar before that is only a WoB and not published canon. Finally, as you say, the "Cosmere Timeline" as we know it is not fully canon until published works are published, WoBs notwithstanding, but there have been so many WoBs referring to MB Era 2 as happening between SA5 and SA6 (plus tidbits like that comment about kandra being in other Cosmere works already, specifically on Roshar) that it's hard to see all of that getting retconned all of a sudden. But yeah, it's certainly possible (expect a WoB shortly after the release of TLM owning up to that, if that turns out to be the case).