robardin

So in Rhythm of War Ch. we finally see Tezim "on-screen", aka Crazy Ishar, and find that he's reclaimed the Bondsmith Honorblade. And with thousands of years of experience with the Surges thereof and Honor not around to hold him back he can now do crazy things, some of which are suggested he'd never been allowed to do before: "Ground" Surgebinders to the earth, draining them of Stormlight Open a perpendicularity into Shadesmar without the SF feeling it Forcibly take Dalinar's spren bond to the Stormfather Forcibly take Dalinar's Connection to Odium "as the one who will fight against him" (!!) Well, we think he can do the last one, because Tezim said he would, and he sure did or was doing the first two. He is insane, so who knows? Good thing Szeth was around to interrupt his bond-stealing with Nightblood. Which Tezim did NOT expect (nor that NB could chip his Honorblade!). So, if Tezim could "almost" do that but for Szeth's severing of the conduit with NB, doesn't that mean he COULD succeed at doing it another time, if Szeth were not there? Maybe Tezim is crazy, but crazy like a fox! That was a line of patter to get Szeth away from Dalinar! (And even if was Sane Ishar talking, can we actually believe his stated goal of resetting the Oathpact, when it was a most-recently-as-sane-as-you-can-restore-him-to Ishar who was a part of breaking that very Oathpact in the first place?) But anyway, I meant to pose this as a thought experiment: what could/would happen if Tezim DOES steal those bonds from Dalinar in SA5? With the bond to the SF reassigned to him, Tezim could have released or altered the terms of Odium's bondage to Roshar - but not any more, as the "contest of champions" thing has now been locked in. So at least we don't have to worry about Tezim just up and freeing Odium completely in order to challenge him to single combat or something. But, let's say he is able to steal the designation of "who gets to be or to name the Champion for the contest against Odium". Would he not name himself? And would that be such a bad thing (for Team Dalinar)? I mean, Tezim is crazy, but he does still view himself as fighting against Odium - it's not like Taravodium will be able to name Tezim as his Champion. Ironically, we might suspect Sane Ishar of being like Kalak and being desperate to escape Roshar and to give up being a Herald, which was kind of the cause of Aharietiam in the first place, but not Crazy Tezim who seeks to defeat the Champion of Odium!

Interesting point: Rashek's children - apparently conceived after his Ascension, for Brandon admitting they were "super-powerful Mistborn" - are also people who had "died nine hundred years ago" His persecutions of the latent potential for Feruchemy in the Terris people must have begun a generation after his Ascension, as it's stated that he hadn't realized that would happen (i.e., he thought turning all living Feruchemists into mistwraiths at the time of his Ascension would wipe the slate clean). And he was evidently careful not to father children since then, as well, as he hasn't had children who died more recently than 900 years ago. The implication is that originally, he (a) didn't realize Feruchemy could still arise in the Terris, and (b) may well not have realized that Allomancy would be hereditary as well (there not having been Mistborn at all until he made himself into one, and then also doled out some lerasium beads). I mean, what would he know about genetics and whatnot, he was a packman before all this! And the further implication would be... That at some point, he persecuted his own descendants as well? Or at the very least, took... Steps to ensure they themselves did not procreate? Because in addition to being powerful Mistborn, they'd have been at least latent Feruchemists (if not Twinborn). Killing his children might be tough even for Rashek (especially since it's a WoB that "Luthadel", the capital city of the Final Empire, was named after a person named "Lutha"... My head-canon being that that was the name of a woman, a pre-Ascension love interest, and thus likely mother to these first-generation, before-I-realized-that-was-problematic children) However, turning them into Inquisitors? Which would make them superior to other men - DOMINANT? That I could see. And while Inquisitors are not physically incapable of procreating, one might imagine that the possibility is... Greatly diminished?

Well at some level, there would have had to have been workers - either condemned skaa, ordinary skaa, or a rotation of junior Ministry people - sorting the atium and other metals, and hauling it off. TLR didn't allow for the development of any kind of factory automation, after all (nor was the technology level quite there yet even before his Ascension). So he'd have needed obligators to run the operation who knew What Was Really Going On, at least to the level of "mix some of the atium with other metals to ship to Luthadel, but send/put most of it here". Maybe a chute labeled "WARNING: Absolutely Not For Atium! Do NOT!!" (psst, silently read this metal plate that says YES THAT'S THE ONE)

Well, there are Soulcasters, and then there are SOULCASTERS. I mean, there’s Kaza, the Soulcaster with the fabrial in one of the Oathbringer interludes… She was a savant to the point of already unraveling into smoke herself, but she’s not going to be peering into the CR to see through illusions or the “true identity” of physical shapeshifters (whatever a kandra would exhibit there, beyond the typical glowing soul of a living being?), much less transforming the metal in a hemalurgic spike inside a body. And then there’s Perpendicular Jasnah, who Soulcast anything and everything she pleased with such ridiculous ease at Thaylen Fields that it has permanently made me regard that level of Surgebinding as having the most terrifying destructive potential of all. (Well, that was until I saw what a Bondsmith Unchained could do, in terms of Crazy Tezim stealing Nahel bonds and “grounding” Windrunners to the earth while outnumbered and in the middle of a Shardblade fight…) Still, what you say that “a” Soulcaster could do, is actually going to be an extremely rare combination of a high level (Fourth Ideal) Elsecaller wielding nigh-unlimited Stormlight for a period of time. In which case, a lot more than a kandra bystander should be terrified of getting in the way.

So basically, Quentin Tarantino takes over Stormlight? Eh. It could work! Reservoir Shards!

Sure, but my point was that (to me) it takes less to gloss over what a "cannon" might be, beyond "obviously dangerous for a soldier to walk towards", versus what a moon would be... I wouldn't go so far as to say I "dismiss" the idea the story being told on Scadrial, just that it feels (more) off to me than otherwise. We'll get more hints as we read more chapters, I suppose, as to who the person Hoid is telling this story to might be. We have only the suggestion that it's someone we'd recognize/know from an earlier Cosmere work ("You might be able to pick up some of the context of who he’s talking to–but it’s not meant to be explicitly obvious... meant to be him telling the story to someone in the cosmere listening."). While we've seen Hoid pop up or get mentioned in nearly every Cosmere work, he's only been shown in the act of storytelling a few times. Once when summoned by Lightsong to tell Siri of the origin of the God Kings (wherein he also informs Siri that the royal family of Idris, having formerly ruled Hallendren, were descended by blood from Vo the First Returned, among other tidbits); once when telling a story to a mostly oblivious crowd in Kholinar (the story of Mishim, the third moon, and why the people of Natanan have faintly blue skin - "a story about loss") - possibly meant for Shallan who heard him starting to tell it, if by the operation of Fortune - and a few times telling a story to Kaladin (the story of Fleet, of the Wandersail, and the dog who wanted to be a dragon). His stories tend to move the listener to action, or to a better understanding of themselves or their nature, or both. We haven't seen Hoid do any storytelling on Scadrial at all: in Era 1 he posed as a skaa informant, and in Era 2 as a beggar at a wedding (though one who claimed to be friends of the couple getting married!), where he threw an unsealed coppermind coin at Wax, and earlier as one of Wax's coachmen. So if he's telling it on Scadrial to someone we've seen, it's hard to think of who that'd be. Beldre in Urteau (moving her to go to try to talk to Spook)? Allriane, to leave Cett's camp to go to Breeze in Luthadel? That'd be something! But, based on just these first five chapters, my gut feeling is that it's Shai from The Emperor's Soul, or Dusk from Sixth of the Dusk.

Hoid is not above using references and analogies alien to his listener. He confused poor Kaladin more than once with a story leading him to wonder what a dog is, or a chick, or a bunny, etc., until Hoid told him to just imagine "some slimy, disgusting crab with seventeen legs" or something like that at some point, LOL. And from the words, one can get the sense that "cannons" are something only brave soldiers march towards even without knowing what they are, but not what a "moon" would be: it seems he expects the listener to know that moons are supposed to be in the sky, but not that there'd be twelve of them that are stationary in the sky. And Scadrial has no moon at all. My guess is that this is (part of) him interacting with Shai while getting her to help him steal the Moon Scepter, as alluded to having happened a short while before The Emperor's Soul. The Iriali disappearing from this in-story planet en masse about 300 years prior to this story's setting is interesting: this would be before they arrived to Roshar (see previous assumption), but they have been on Roshar for a long time. Iri was one of the Silver Kingdoms going back to before the Recreance, which was 2,000 years before Dalinar's time. Yet Ym says the Iri view Roshar as "the Fourth Land" in their Long Trail. Whether the Iri were on Tress' world as the First, Second, or Third Land is as yet unknown, of course. That said, if you take the casual reference to "cannons" to heart, a text search for "cannon" shows they are mentioned in-world in Sixth of the Dusk but not anywhere else in Arcanum Unbounded - nor in any of the works from Elantris, Mistborn, Warbreaker, or Stormlight. I guess Hoid could be talking to Dusk? It's very possible cannons exist in White Sand, I can't text search the graphic novels but I remember they certainly had firearms... But then, Hoid's analogy to his listener of oceans of water wouldn't make any sense.

So the "access" that was destroyed by Kelsier wasn't closing the Perpendicularity, but that some kind of passageway from it was now blocked up with collapsed tunnels? That would make a lot of sense. I still wonder how to reconcile the extreme secrecy about What Goes On At The Pits of Hathsin with an apparent regular flow of traffic to and from there... I guess the answer is, the true secret was not so much that atium production came from the Pits - while that WAS a secret, there were still people who would have to know about it. The obligators and the overseers who worked there but surely were allowed to go home from time to time, plus Straff and Elend Venture knew about it due to their House being given the commission to manage it, with the suggestion or overtone that that commission could be revoked and given to another House. But the people entrusted with THAT secret always had it hanging over their heads that no less than God Himself would be Very Put Out if the secret got out - like, Inquisitor level put out. So it was really, really well kept. (Which didn't keep Elend from blabbing about it to "Valette", poor rash boy in love that he was.) And finally, the big "secret within a secret" wasn't about atium coming from the Pits, nor even that there was a way off and back onto Scadrial located near/under there. It was that most of the atium mined at the Pits was disguised and never sent on to Luthadel at all, but squirreled away into the kandra Trustwarren: a sleight-of-hand operation managed over centuries by only the most trusted of obligators, "communicating only on metal plates". In fact, if I were TLR I wouldn't even have had human obligators in that role - they'd be kandra.

Are we talking in-world or “IRL” in context? And, it’s possible you wouldn’t mind “spending your life in fistfights” if you were a Pewterarm. LOL I think A-electrum is underrated. As originally described in Era 1, they discovered it very late (knowledge of it it was held back by TLR), and mainly used by Mistborn like Vin or Elend as “poor man’s atium” to confuse Inquisitors armed with atium by projecting shadows - it wouldn’t allow them to see the Inquisitor’s atium shadows, were they not burning it, but seeing the results of their own actions a bit into the future allowed them to change things enough to spring out shadows of their own. But by extension, any electrum burner could have atium-like expertise, as long as it was something they could do already and only needed to winnow down on what NOT to do, in order to do more effectively. For example, a baseball hitter would never strike out swinging if he could burn electrum - he could see into his own future by a second or two, and avoid swinging over a curveball, late on a fastball, etc., - making anybody a reasonable hitter, and making an actually elite hitter unstoppable. And you would clean up on something like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? where it’s a series of quickly scored multiple choice questions. Constantly burning electrum on a low burn should result in a kind of “spidey-sense” for impending threats or danger, too. We haven’t seen any electrum or nicrosil Mistings yet in Era 2, both of them should be quite powerful in a world without Mistborn. EDIT: I see there is a WoB addressing exactly this, except using tennis as a context instead of baseball!

As noted, Snapping has become easier since Harmony remade things, but I'd imagine some kinds of Mistings might go completely unknown or undetected - the "gnats" who burn aluminum or duralumin, in particular. The proverbial term in Era 2 for "wasting time or resources" is "burning gold" (as Miles, himself an Augur, reflects on in Alloy of Law), where you'd think burning a metal that literally has no purpose on its own - and in the case of aluminum, even has no purpose except to drain one's own metals/Investiture - would be a much better analogy. The obvious inference is: they don't know about (or rather, don't care to identify) such Mistings, as aluminum is rare and expensive. Who would waste aluminum just to test for a potential Allomantic power to burn it or its alloy? They know such Mistings must exist out there, but that's about it. Imagine if Steris somehow ingests part of a "translation medallion" that contain an unkeyed duraluminmind for Connection (along with the unsealed nicrosilmind for the ability to tap that duraluminmind), and discovers to her amazement that she now has a reserve within herself that she can burn. Burning the duraluminmind would give her a huge burst of Connection - what could that do for her? And with enough Connection-invested duraluminminds to burn, a "duraluminum gnat" maybe could even take over Marsh, then!

My unspoken question about the Pits of Hathsin is that evidently that was the standard portal "with any reasonable ease of access" for worldhoppers to get to and off of Scadrial. And that in turn was frequent/common enough for Hoid to refer to Kelsier's destruction of that portal as having "upended an entire mercantile ecosystem". Any offworlder would obviously know the Pits represented a gathering place for a Shard's Investiture, otherwise it couldn't serve as a perpendicularity, and that would have to imply atium, right? Not to mention showing up amid the skaa slaves and non-Allomancer overseers and obligators working there would be kind of noticeable. And that's for offworlders arriving - for there to be a "mercantile ecosystem" there has to be merchants on the Scadrian side as well, unless all of those contacts were some distance away from the Pits and ignorant of where these offworlders were coming from and how they got there. Which might work for a few years or decades, but come on, eventually the secret would have to get out, right? Seems like knowledge that Pits = special place with lots of Investiture = skaa slaves sent to work to death (not known doing exactly what, until you've been there and seen it) should have gotten around over hundreds of years. And how was there enough atium there to form a perpendicularity? Wasn't it constantly being harvested by those unfortunate skaa? Or was most of the atium geodes going undiscovered (too deep or hard to get to)?

Right, but if you could "keep" the power from the nicrosilmind after tapping it after relinquishing it, that would be pretty OP and also not what we see happening with the medallions (which appear to need constant contact). So I'm thinking the "you can permanently get back what you put in" aspect of a normal coppermind has to do with the metalmind "belonging to" the Feruchemist in question (via Identity keying), and that an unsealed (Identity-free) nicrosilmind would "pull back" the Investiture when contact was broken. Being Identity-less would mean anyone can draw in the Investiture from the nicrosilmind (to gain the Metalborn power) but that nobody could keep it, so to speak. Otherwise, it would seem that Wax dropping the coppermind coin at the end of BoM would either mean he had gained F-copper (until/unless putting that power back into the medallion), or that the coin's memory was now inaccessible except by an Archivist or someone with another unsealed medallion granting F-copper. But we don't really yet know how these things are made (and thus to function) - it's something we will find out in The Lost Metal.

Right, but if you tap (your own) coppermind, you don't have to be in constant contact with it to retain the memory, right? You're "getting it back". And a coppermind was the analogy given in that WoB as to the nature of an unsealed metalmind. Otherwise, once you "offloaded" a memory of something into a coppermind, you could ONLY access it while tapping that particular coppermind. Well maybe that is how it works, actually, I just never thought about it. I sort of assumed the "identity-free" aspect of the unsealed metalmind was the twist.

Or intentional... Why not tap 32 medallions for their Metalborn power? Allik mentioned they interfere with each other, but that was if someone wore them at the same time. If you could tap the medallion, gain the power, then toss the medallion but keep the power, would there be a reason you couldn't do that 32 times (sequentially)? I'm thinking it's a contact thing with an unsealed metalmind - once you lose physical contact with it, the (false) Connection is broken and the ability is lost. Or perhaps, the Identity-less aspect is lost, and you lose access to the power because it's no longer free anybody. In which case, what may also be lost is the ability to "put it back" into the medallion. Keep those things strapped on!

That's basically what I've always imagined, since an "excisor" (a fictional word) sounds a lot like "device or mechanism for performing an excision" (a real word, defined by Webster's as the act or procedure of removing by or as if by cutting out; especially : surgical removal or resection) Which sounds an awful lot like "spiking a Metalborn power out of someone, and retaining that boon for later use"

Bonus points: if I'm cosplaying as a Mistborn while carrying a metal vial that only has gold flakes in it, that's gonna be an in-joke right there. Mistborn v. Inquisitor cosplay throwdown! Inquisitor: I have three spare vials of base metals and plenty of atium. How are you doing, Kelsier? Me (in Charlie Brown "I got a rock" voice): I've got some gold!

Only the First Generation were originally human Feruchemists - mistwraiths are a separate species that "breed true". I have speculated elsewhere that one of my "personal crackpot theories" is that the sDNA of the First Generation are or were involved in creating the "Excisors" technology for medallions, or in enabling Kelsier The Sovereign to do Feruchemy (if that was not an illusion, as Kell is perfectly capable of doing and loves to do). After all, when Kelsier see dying koloss appearing in the CR in Mistborn: Secret History, they are human again (like the obligator who told him about the spikes). So it would stand to reason that another "modified" human might appear in the CR as human once again, with their original attributes like Feruchemy still intact. The rebuttal to that is that the power of Preservation is capable of twiddling sDNA as well - Rashek used it to "build himself" as a super powerful Mistborn as well as Feruchemist, and Sazed upgraded Spook to "late FE power level" Mistborn without having to form diluted lerasium for him, so perhaps the process of making the other living Feruchemists into mistwraiths would allow for excising that power from their sDNA, even if they were "cognitively" still human.

Does it, though? I mean, does it suggest to "contact The Survivor" (even as a Pathian he's probably not going to be on a first name basis, LOL)? If Kelsier had returned to the world physically after the Catacendre... Why did he go to the Southern Hemisphere and not the Basin? Wouldn't he at least have popped in to see his old crew? We know he did appear, literally, to Spook, but Wax doesn't. So to him, that should seem like a big red flag that whatever he was up to, he didn't want the people in the Basin to know about it. And what did Breeze, Ham, etc., know? Certainly that fact didn't creep into Survivorist doctrine, since saying "Kelsier will RETURN!" followed by "...and then he did, just 10-15 years after the Catacendre!" would be huge. And if Breeze did know, it must have been a very closely guarded secret not to be "in the family lore", as Wax doesn't know. (Or maybe it was, and Edwarn took steps to keep it to himself?)

Fair enough, it could literally be a mundane silver medallion - made of silver, which is not of the Metallic Arts - rather then just silver in color. Denoting some kind of honor from either the Basin or the Malwish for his actions, most likely. If it's a metalmind he got in BoM, though, it's the one from Hoid; I can't see him removing a Malwish one from the straps they come with and tossing it around like a lucky charm. And the nicrosil in it had been described as "silvery". Either way, I'm wondering what he's done with the information from that medallion in the past six years, that the Sovereign revered in the Southern Hemisphere, who traveled there after the Catacendre, was the Survivor Kelsier predominantly worshipped in the Basin... It's the sort of theological bombshell he might have to be careful with, especially as a Pathian.

Well, what the extremely organized Steris goes over with Wax in sequence as "proof one, two, and three" are presumably the three things he physically produces during his speech: the silvery medallion he flips in the air, the thick sheaf of papers that are the letters from the leaders of the Outer Cities showing willing to peacefully work out a new, more balanced political structure for the Basin, and the thinly folded two sheets of paper that are the incriminating payoff letters to the governor from Houses Hasting and Erikell. Which means yes, the medallion is meant as his leadoff cue, to reinforce the memory of his role in the events from six years earlier - that he personally acquired the freaking Bands of Mourning, and introduced a kind of first contact between the Malwish and the Basin, while averting open conflict between the outer cities and Elendel. His bona fides of having the best interest of the Basin in mind, given his Roughs lawman background as well as House Lord in Elendel, and not being in it for his own gain, are beyond question. The second is meant to persuade the senators that an invitation to work in common with the still unhappy outer cities is an open door, and a better way to achieve unity than a domination play... And the third is to show the corrupt rationale for the governor's pushing the "domination play" (spank them like a parent spanks a child!). Game, set, match. What the nature of the medallion is - is that the Hoid coppermind coin? One of the other two medallions given to him by Jordis, for heat and Connection? - is not specified, but I assume it's Hoid's coin because the other two came with straps. The coppermind coin was thrown at his head at Lady Kelesina's gates :D.

I get what you mean, but to me, Taravangian's exultant insight definitely smacked more of a "heads I win, tails you lose" angle rather than a "I can call heads and force it to come up heads" type of attitude. In particular, it was something that HE (Taravangian) as the Vessel of Odium saw, and Rayse did not. I mean, look at it this way: the Gavilar Gambit can only work against Dalinar, but everybody else on Team Radiant (Navani, Kaladin, etc.) had assumed he'd name Kaladin as his Champion. Why wouldn't Rayse have assumed so, too, even if he were hedging against his primary plan - getting Dalinar to fall to become his Champion - in case it fell through? And, even if Rayse had foreseen that Dalinar would name himself as Champion "if" he avoided that fate, if he had had Gavilar as his trump card, he'd have agreed immediately to have a Very Soon Contest (and not have delayed all that time, building up the Shardic stress, in trying to get Kaladin to fall to him). Instead, Taravangian is annoyed at Rayse for being so clumsy as to "let himself be maneuvered into this particular deal with Dalinar" - not picking up on some very deep play that Rayse left for him to use. What Taravangian sees is "so subtle" and something Rayse had "missed". Which sending Gavilar out against Dalinar is not, and would have needed Rayse to have intentionally prepared for (at the time that Gavilar died).

The thing is, crafty ol' Taravangian pretty quickly sees a hole in the terms Dalinar agreed to for the "contest of champions" such that he, the new Odium, "would be satisfied regardless of the outcome". Even if Gavilar - whose corpse was Soulcast into stone, so he didn't "disappear" - were somehow a Fused-like spirit that could be put back into play against Dalinar, how would Dalinar's victory result in a "satisfactory outcome" for Odium? It would be more of a "haha, no WAY could Dalinar find a way to kill his brother!" strategy, which is just not very crafty (plus would involve pulling an untelegraphed Deus Ex Machina type plot twist out of nowhere that Sanderson doesn't like to do).

There were sixteen at the Shattering and now six are down, Yo I didn't take a Shard, but look I'm still around And if you think you're ever gettin' off of Roshar, Rayse, I got this contract and a plan to keep you in yo' place So when you're stuck here goin' nowhere and be hatin' on me, You can't kick the a** that ain't there 'cause I'll still be free

Autocorrect strikes again, "Dollar", LOL! (We know what you mean) Here's a thought: since the the highstorms on Roshar and the Stormfather himself are all older than the Shattering, perhaps the Stormfather remembers (even if unconsciously) Tanavast the human (from before Ascending), and Kaladin's motivations are similar to Tanavast's in seeking Shardic power?

Yeah I was just digging for that in the Arcanum. It means "something" but I doubt it is that the SF thinks Kaladin will take up the Shard of Honor.