robardin

I am saying what you are giving as "50,000 tons" of weight from an ironmind, or being able to do "10,000,000 pounds" (did you mean foot-pounds as a unit of energy?) with a pewtermind, exceed what is actually shown as possible to gain in one go from a metalmind, using my "endless pasta at Olive Garden" analogy. While you have access to a never-ending amount of it, the pasta just don't come in that size.

I am honored to accept your invitation to Lake Laogai.

I see you added this part after I started replying Yes, we can assume it took more than one Surgebinder, even an Unchecked one, to destroy Ashyn. My point still stands, though: while a Fullborn could probably achieve the same effect as the Shattered Plains or whatever happened on Ashyn, it would take so long to do, essentially "by hand" because there's no external magical effect to destroy matter, I can't see one bothering. Even with infinite an steelmind, an infinite bronzemind to stay awake, and an infinite electrummind to stay on task and not get bored with the whole thing. Also, that while we have some theoretical basis on which to posit what a Fullborn could do because we've seen Max-Tapped Feruchemy (MTF) in action, or close to it, we do NOT know what Max Surgebinding would look like, especially if given the ominous warnings about "unchecked" use now that Honor is gone. Two Fullborns would halve the eon of time required to only a half-eon. And since the only two Fullborns we know or suspect to have ever existed were Rashek and Kelsier, I don't see them agreeing to work with each other on this, plus even Rashek was not looking to destroy Scadrial but to save it :). ...I just realized it'd probably more practical to use regular Allomancy in steel and iron plus the infinite ironminds to sling around massive hammers.

The main OP-ness of being a Fullborn is the ability to max-tap a metalmind for just about forever, as long as you have enough of the metal on hand. That doesn't change the fact that max-tapping itself has an upper limit of effect. You just get to do it for an indefinite amount of time. Think of it like the endless pasta option at Olive Garden. You can eat all the pasta you want, sure, ranging from tiny little orzo to gargantuan ravioli, but that doesn't mean there's the option of a single ravioli that's so big it would explode the building. For example tapping a pewtermind causes the Feruchemist to physically enlarge, and at some point you max out at literally the maximum "strength" that a physical body can actually embody. An infinite steelmind would only grant speed - not useful in planet-crushing... And an infinite ironmind, that's more interesting, but I believe that there's a WoB you cannot gain so much "weight" (which is not actually gaining mass, but more like "gaining the effect of having gained mass") that you bend light or something, and to "crack a planet" would probably require something approaching that. Interestingly, there's a semi-related WoB about who would win in a footrace, a steel/steel Compounder (infinite steelmind for speed!) or an F-steel/A-pewter Twinborn who could burn pewter Allomantically, gaining stamina and recovery for free. You might say, "duh, how can you beat infinite speed in a foot race?", but Brandon thinks otherwise. He wasn't 100% sure but he felt that it'd be the latter, because the steel Compounder is still limited by wind resistance and would be physically wprn down by it (imagine wind erosion levels of discomfort) that the pewter burner could literally push through. I think the specification of "a short race" being there in the question is to ensure the Compounder can't just run the non-compounding Twinborn dry in the steelmind department over time.

How about this angle: We don't know how it happened, but Rosharan Surgebinding of the Nahel Bond variety we see used by Radiants, is dangerous enough that Honor and Sane Ishar imposed the oaths and Ideals shortly after the spren started bonding humans as a means of enforcing a check. For all we know, perhaps the fact that the Fifth Ideal is the "final" one is part of that checking (why aren't there Ten Ideals? Was that capping at Five something enforced by the now-gone Honor?). This is because unchecked Surgebinding is dangerous enough for the dying Honor to "rave" about his passing likely leading to a Dawnshards-like effect and the destruction of Roshar. That interpretation is not 100% clear from what the Stormfather said to Dalinar about Honor's last moments; but Notum, the honorspren ship's captain in Shadesmar, says this more directly to Kaladin in Oathbringer: "your bond is dangerous, without Honor. There will not be enough checks upon your power—you risk disaster.” And say what you will about infinite metalminds via Compounding, but I can't see even Rashek, The Lord Ruler and only Fullborn we know to have existed so far, "destroying" Scadrial with his power. That's because what makes Compounding amazing is its giving of sixteen flavors of nigh-infinite Feruchemical metalminds, and most of them are internal effects to the user rather than external to the world. There is no Feruchemical (or Allomantic) equvalent for the Surge of Division, or even of Progression in the context of healing another person, only tapping a goldmind to heal oneself. I mean sure, I suppose with Compounding he could tap infinite metalminds for bronze, pewter, and steel (and atium, of course) and just sledgehammer the planet into rubble over a very, very, very long time. But what created the Shattered Plains? I don't think even a Fullborn could manage that with just infinite metalminds. In other words: in TLR, we see the "ultimate power level" attainable in an individual with the Metallic Arts. But in SA, we have yet to see what the "ultimate power level" attainable for a Surgebinder might be, except for hints and comments from Honor (via the SF's recollection) and from Notum that it'd be potentially planet-threatening. So even if a Super-Surgebinder couldn't defeat Rashek one-on-one, they could certainly threaten the Nuclear Option and say, stand down or I take this planet with me as I go.

Nitpick: burning duralumin doesn't force you to burn "all your metals at once"; rather, whatever metal(s) you were already burning when you burned the duralumin, those metals get used up and provide all their power in one mega-flash. We see Vin using duralumin strategically by first extinguishing all her metals other than what she wanted to enhance before burning the duralumin. For example, when she scared Straff Venture with a Soothing Bomb through the tent while he was busy taunting Elend at their meeting in WoA: So I would imagine a nicroburst Misting would have the same effect, but on another Allomancer burning their metal(s). I do remember wondering if a nicroburst Misting would have a similar "burnout" effect on a Feruchemist. We haven't seen any yet in-world, only Leechers, and while we do have WoBs that a Leecher could/would affect other Cosmere Investiture users such as Awakeners (Warbreaker) or Surgebinders (Stormlight), how they would interact with Feruchemy is still a RAFO as of BoM: Whatever would happen would probably occur if the Leecher/Nicroburst touched a Feruchemist was actively tapping a metalmind. I do see nicrobursting being a potentially useful disruptor to one's opponents as well as an aid to one's ally. Imagine catching Wax just before he Pushed off a coin to fly off, and making him burn all his steel at once - not only is he now cannonized (not canonized) in whatever direction he'd been jumping in, he now has no steel left to Push himself to slow down and land on the other end. Unless he's flying so high/far that he has time to dig out a backup vial of steel. He'd better hope he was out in the open, then, and not about to crack his head on some kind of ceiling.

Another frequently used term in the FTL domain is "ansible" - some form of faster than light speed communication (not travel), like what we see with seons and spanreeds so far in the Cosmere. Where two-way communication is perceived as instantaneous on both sides, regardless of the physical distance between them. The term was invented in a fictional SF work by Ursula K. Le Guin in the 1960s, later "borrowed" or used in tribute in other authors' SF or fantasy works (notably by Orson Scott Card in his massively popular novel Ender's Game from the mid-1980s, and an even earlier shorter form of that story in the 1970s), and has been used by Brandon in various WoBs as well without explanation. It's a commonly used term in F/SF writer/fandom space. I don't think he's used the term directly in the Skyward series, but as a concept it exists there too. In fact, someone recently asked Brandon how he'd feel if his own invented terms "fabrial" to mean "magically powered technology", and "artifabrian" as a "magical engineer", were to catch on the way "ansible" has, to become a core term in fantasy writing. He'd love it, of course! It'd be like having a unit named after you as a physicist or chemist :).

So, yeah - the "voice" that demanded a Truth from Shallan in order to Soulcast in Kharbranth, or the Lightweaving she performed with Hoid when he came to deliver a message from Heleran to the Davar household, the Shardblade she summoned to kill Tyn (and possibly, to work the Oathgate or to lend to Kaladin to deal with the chasmfiend?!) - these must have been due to her suppressed bond with Testament. However, we see in Shadesmar that Testament appears about as deadeyed as other deadeyes - the "still living and even Nahel-bond-using Radiant" aspect doesn't seem to affect that. On the other hand, Syl explained to Kaladin, I was only as dead as your oaths. Once Kaladin reached the Third Ideal, his abrogation of the Second Ideal was superceded. So it would seem that Shallan needs to get past whatever Ideal she had been at with Testament to revive that bond? Is that why her Radiant persona was seen in glowing garnet Shardplate at Thaylen Fields (but not since)?

It's obvious that he meant that after perma-killing The Defeated One, "El" (no relation to Elend Venture) climbed up into a cage suspended from the ceiling, put on some 1960's era music and a pencil dress, and got down to gyrating.

Tinfoil hat theory: Long ago, Moash visited the Nightwatcher after his grandparents died in prison, and asked for some way to get revenge. And like Dalinar and Taravangian, Cultivation herself took a special interest. We don't know what his boon/bane might be, but this is Cultivation's true long game: to get Moash into position as Odium's key pawn (hey, he got an Honorblade!), to get him to hate himself... Taravangian thinks Cultivation "has no idea what she's done" in engineering his Ascension to Odium? Oh, you wonderful creature, you were just a steppingstone to use to kill Rayse in a way he wouldn't expect - elimination at the hand of a dying old man who'd sworn allegiance to him. The true end game for Culti is to get MOASH to Ascend to Odium, after he's in such a state hating himself so much that instead of wanting to go out and take over the Cosmere, whether out of megalomania (Rayse) or an inflamed sense of righting injustice (Taravangian), his version of Odium will be a navel-gazing kind of impotent self-loathing. Because Odium can't "take his pain" if he IS Odium, right? HAHAHAHA!

Well then, so much for the singers "turning away" from Odium then, eh? What could be more of a reason for "feeling justified in outrage at betrayal and injustice done" than taking in off-world refugees out of kindness, only to see them break out of their reservation to seize control of your entire world, eventually stealing your identities and minds to commoditize your people as chattel slaves for millennia? What I find interesting is that the two Fused who we saw firsthand in RoW decide, if not to reject Odium at least to break away from being fully committed to victory under his banner, Raboniel and Leshwi - they both remember from before the original outbreak of the conflict (I'm not sure all of the Fused do, though many or most of them must). I suspect that version of What Happened To Start It All, as recorded on the Eila Stele (and essentially what I paraphrased earlier), is a kind of propaganda angle created by Team Odium to get generations of singers to await their return between Desolations, and to surrender their bodies and to fight for them again when they came back. In which case, Leshwi's immediate reaction to seeing that Venli had bonded a spren should be pretty telling as to Maybe What Really Happened. Not "how can you forget what was done to us after Honor and the spren betrayed us to go for the humans", but that the spren had finally forgiven them (the singers).

See the thing about Odium is he really HATES to lose. Herdaz is bordered by Alethkar and Jah Keved, both of which are under his dominion. Having Herdaz be independent... Especially after defying him with unexpected resilience after he'd assumed he could just roll over it... Is not something he would tolerate.

We only know that from the two examples of Lightsong and Calmseer - and even Calmseer's Gift was not a POV or first-person POV witnessing, it was something Lightsong remembered and related, which could be interpreted as Lightsong (consciously or not) viewing Calmseer's choice as the kind of choice a Returned ought to do (and ultimately, the kind of choice he himself chose to do). So what else do we know about the reasons the Returned give up their Divine Breath? Not much. We can infer that all of the Returned in the Court of Gods have eventually given up their Breath, because none of them remember "Peacegiver" establishing his Treasure, and Susebron is the fifth God-King since then. We don't know to whom or for what reason those other Returned have done so. Lightsong imagined that the weekly Parade of Petitions from Pitifully Pleading People eventually wore down Calmseer, and that that is reason all Returned eventually give up their Breath: [NOTE: separately, we have a WoB that this is not actually the case.] But in contrast, we have also see Returned like the Five Scholars who seem to have just gone on and on for hundreds of guilt-free years (until killed by Vasher the Scholarcide). So it's hardly some built-in drive to all Returned to be giving. Let's try to figure out what the average "lifespan" is of a Returned (between Returning and passing on their Divine Breath). Lightsong reflects that "there were some two dozen deities in the Court of Gods", and that Allmother was "the oldest of the gods" at Court. This may or may not include Susebron, the God King, who is annotated as having been Returned as an infant "fifty years before" the Pahn Kahl rebellion in Warbreaker. I'm thinking not, because in this context Lightsong was thinking about "deities in the Court of Gods" in the context of visiting her at her pavilion while she was receiving Petitions to pass along their Divine Breath, neither of which applies to the God King. (Allmother's prophetic dreams, interestingly, foretold Lightsong coming to her about Lifeless - possibly one reason she hated him so much - which is why she gave him her password. Does that mean her "purpose" is fulfilled? But she didn't pass her Breath on! But, we have no other clue as to how long ago she Returned.) Lightsong is among the youngest Gods at court as one who Returned five years earlier. Hopefinder the Just mentions feeling "old" like it was "time for me to go" as the "fifth most aged" Returned in the Court of Gods, which in Ch. three was described as having "some two dozen deities" - and he had been a Returned who had died as a "young child" and has aged to being a teenager: So if Hopefinder Returned as a 2-year-old and is now aged to, say, 17 years old, that means lasting fifteen years as a Returned makes him the fifth oldest (including Susebron and Allmother) of about 25 Returned, where #2 is Susebron at 50 years old and Allmother is at least somewhat older than that... Upon visiting the Court of Gods, Vivenna noted that there were enough pavilions "for some fifty gods", while the (current) Court had only "a couple dozen - twenty-five, was it?". Conclusions: There are 25 Returned in the Court of Gods during Warbreaker. Between 15-20 of them are between 5 and 15 years old as Returned: Lightsong is in the "bottom five" as a Returned of five years ago Hopefinder is "fifth oldest" at 15, maybe 20 years old, tops. Susebron is 50 years old, and no Returned mentions remembering the prior God-King Caveat: there would only be a small number who possibly could, and maybe we don't see them "on screen". Moreover, despite the rate of adding 15-20 Gods per 15 years - which is at least one a year - the Court is designed to hold about fifty, suggesting that as a kind of ceiling value (i.e., if they ever approached the upper limit, the priests would just build another few more pavilions, so 50-ish is a kind of high water mark). Let's assume the head count of 25 is a relatively stable average value over time - that 20 years ago, when Hopefinder Returned, there were also about 25 Returned in the Court of Gods. That would mean 20 Returned gave up their Breath in 20 years, yeah? And if he's younger, like 15 years old, then it happened even more frequently! So when Calmseer was referred to by Lightsong as "the last honorable Returned this city has known", I don't think that meant she was the last Returned before Lightsong to give up her Breath; he just didn't think as highly of the other Returned who had (such as one named "Brighthue" he also remembers as having done so). That, or there is some kind of peer pressure like pattern where cohorts of Returned give up their Breaths in clusters.

Actually this may be even more delicious in the end, because at this point I also had thought it was possible Sazed was the HoA because (a) he was Terris, and (b) how the mist spirit acted. But after Vin released Ruin, and we learned more about the original prophecies about Ruin and the true nature of the Well being a prison for him throughout the book actually titled "The Hero of Ages", wherein Sazed himself finds many good reasons to assess Vin as the HoA... Including the fact that Vin alone had been able to "draw upon the mists"... And then she actually Ascended... Why would I doubt that? Though if she's doing the audiobook thing, a bigger tell would be if the voice of the chapter epigraphs in HoA are read in Sazed's voice ("I am, unfortunately, the Hero of Ages"). That'd almost be too bad.

Ah, that is a good point, too... It's in Ch. 2 of RoW, when Kaladin first encounters the Mink: So it's true that this man, at least, had not seen a Radiant in action (glowing from Stormlight), despite being in what amounted to the personal guard of their nation's top general. (I say "amounted to" because "he sneaks away... He likes to see if he can do it without us noticing.")

You definitely have a good question... It's not just that the spren are "clustering" around Urithiru, which is likely true about the intial set of honorspren who would have been most inspired to follow Syl as a "breakaway contingent", but not all; Lift, the Stump, Ym, Malata in Kharbranth, the Reshi King, and others from many other lands have turned up with Radiants. Shallan formed her bond before just about anybody else, all the way out in Jah Keved. So, why not Herdaz? Or at least not in Herdaz proper, in the midst of their struggles? We do have Herdazian Radiants, after all: Lopen and Huio, at a minimum. Well, I'll turn this question around: how do we know they haven't had people form Nahel bonds in Herdaz? The country is kind of cut off now from the rest of the world, after (finally) being conquered by Team Odium. The further flung Radiants we know of in RoW (like some of the ones I listed) are ones that have "reported for duty" to Dalinar in Urithiru in some way, because the story is largely told from Team Dalinar's POV. By definition, any other Radiants are unknown to us as readers of the narrative - the exception being Venli, of course, who is a POV character, and oh yeah, was not only unknown to Dalinar but actively hiding her bond from everybody else until recently. It's not like we've had POVs or in-world updates about the struggle against Odium in Herdaz, only a summary that Dalinar has had periodic field reports for over a year amounting to "Herdaz: still not fallen. OMG!" For all we know, one of the reasons they have held out so long is not just the tactical brilliance of The Mink but Surgebinders, Radiants or proto-Radiants who are not reporting to Dalinar. Put another way: the only Radiants we've seen in SA are either POV characters, or ones that a POV character has encountered. Other than Venli, that means someone Dalinar has met. As we can see from how The Mink acts around him, there's kind of a history there (to put it mildly) between them and the Alethi as exemplified by Dalinar's past that makes the Herdazians... Hesitant to throw in with him. So if there have been Radiants emerging in Herdaz, it could well be that their first loyalty has been to Herdaz' immediate struggle against Team Odium, and not (yet) to show themselves to the larger "Team Roshar" that Dalinar is trying to form (because of all that murdering he's done to them) so as to coordinate their efforts. And why should they, when Team Dalinar has focused attention elsewhere and ignored Herdaz in return?

Something just occurred to me while making a recent post involving ancient beings dealing with language drift on Scadrial: shouldn't the kandra's native language be Old Terris? I mean, sure, kandra who go out "on assignment" would have to learn whatever the current dominant language of the Final Empire was (to speak like whoever it was they were meant to mimic), which was apparently mostly based on Khlenni (?); but since each generation of kandra is raised in the Homeland, and there have only been eleven or twelve generations since the First Generation who were Rashek's Terrisman packman buddies in origin (wakka wakka!), what else would they have spoken to the Second Generation while raising/instructing them, and wouldn't it have been natural for them to then speak that language to a newly conscious Third Generation, and so on? Maybe all kandra have "kept up" with the changed language of the Final Empire (based on kandra returning from assignment) to use as a lingua franca so that it's easy for kandra who are sent out on assignment to be up to date after a gap time of resting in the Homeland. But even the First Generation? At the very least, it feels like there should be a "cradle language" for kandra that amounts to a close variant of Old Terris, a mamaloshen if you will. And perhaps it was close enough still to "modern" Terris that Sazed could speak and understand freely in the kandra Homeland in HoA.

It's also possible that Endowment has a specific purpose in mind for only a select few of the Returned, and that other ones - maybe even the majority of them - are decoys of sorts, to provide cover for the ones with a purpose. Random people, including infants, are Returned for no obvious reason exactly because there was no reason except to obscure ones like Lightsong (perhaps) who were given a vision of something specific to prevent, that he'd be put into a position to recognize and do something about at The Right Time. I mean, if every Returned were seen to be Doing Something Dramatic eventually with their Divine Breath, it'd be possible to piece together an idea of what Endowment was going after, right? Maybe not for a human what with a mortal lifespan, but for another Shard that was paying attention to such things. Or Hoid. Or scholars in Silverlight. This way, while some Returned eventually do something interesting with their Divine Breath, only some of what is interesting was commissioned by Endowment; others die without ever using it at all, and still others like Vasher just keep rolling along like Old Man River, destination unknown, and nobody can say for sure what it's all about from her perspective.

I also like to imagine somebody trying to impress Death with their knowledge of High Imperial, figuring this ancient mode of speech from the days of the Lord Mistborn would surely be a familiar comfort to an ancient being such as he. "Death! The Last Inquisitor! Umm.... Notting wasing the expecting of the meeting! Wasing I the doing of nothing! Is that right? Notting wasing I the doing of anything? PLEASE!" "*deep sigh* Not again."

I don't mean from his hemalurgic spikes, I mean just from having lived for over 350 years among humans, while slowly building up irritation from everybody starting to talk so badly! Not to mention elevating Spook's Eastern Street Slang into High Imperial! Never notting wasing the thinking! Per a WoB, Marsh has extended his lifetime on Scadrial so that he's still around to interact with Marasi at the end of Alloy of Law by using the Rashek Maneuver: compounding atium, which he has because he seized KanPaar's bag as Ruin's chief pawn right before the Catacendre. For reasons as yet unexplained, Ruin had also given him a spike for F-atium, and so we have Marsh the Indefinitely Prolonged Inquisitor! In Bands of Mourning, Marasi comments that Marsh ("Death") had an unusual accent, one unlike anything she'd heard before: no doubt a reference to the fact that Marsh's native accent is hundreds of years out of date, and nobody else would have it except maybe Harmony, if He ever wanted to put it on (Wax doesn't notice anything unusual when having his Talking With God moments in SoS and BoM). This got me thinking about Rashek having lived for over a thousand years. As we can see from Alendi's logbook and other relics, the languages that Rashek grew up with, both Terris and Khlenni, had changed significantly so that only a Keeper could decipher them. Yet Rashek speaks perfectly understandably, though with what Vin considered an "accented voice" the first time she heard him talking. What's that? You think someone would naturally and happily adapt to accept whatever the changes in speech patterns and vocabulary were around him? How old are you? Ha ha, I'm only serious! Now of course, one aspect of living through hundreds upon hundreds of years - versus skipping forward as from a time capsule, or returning from a trip traveling at near-light speed - would mean that you'd continue to understand familiar languages as they changed over time. Imagine if someone from Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time were pulled forward into our era: they'd likely have a lot of trouble (at least at first), but someone who'd actually lived in England continuously for the past 600 years due to some supernatural effect would have been able to communicate continuously. ...Except for the irritation of noticing the changes in the language! I recently turned 50 years old and have children now aged 17-21, and few things make me feel older than hearing the way they talk and the slang they use or decry as outdated ("nobody says THAT to mean THAT any more!"). And despite growing up and going to schools in the exact same city and even the same neighborhood as I did at their age, there are pronunciation shifts in "regional dialect" by generation that I've noticed. And this is something that's noticeable to me just from having lived for fifty years. What would I notice, and likely be irritated by, over 150, 350, or a thousand years? Like, right around the time of Shakespeare was what is called The Great Vowel Shift in English, when from between 1450 and 1650, vowel sounds in all dialects of English changed dramatically. Nobody really knows why. But imagine someone from 1400 (Chaucer's time) living through that, end to end. How annoying would that be? And that's just in terms of pronunciation: there's also changes in language use. For example, the words "awful" and "terrible" used to be much more dramatic, literally meaning "that which inspires awe/terror". You can find people complaining 150 years ago about this "new slang" to use them simply to mean "rather bad", or even as intensifiers ("how does the phrase it's not terribly good even make any SENSE?"). Heck, in the past 15-20 years I've seen that word "literally" get abused so much that it became commonly sarcastic or ironic, and finally just an intensifier. Whereas 30 years ago one might have said "it was literally freezing in my house last night!" specifically to mean that water in a cup or a pipe actually froze solid (I am not kidding!), by 15 years ago it would be understood as likely being an ironic exaggeration, and by now we've gotten to the point where the Merriam-Webster dictionary entry for "literally" literally has the meaning "virtually" as the second definition. (Like, literally literally!) Now Rashek, he was kind of a rageaholic. It's surprising he didn't try to "freeze" the language the way he had done advances in technology and societal changes. Who knows, maybe he did to some degree, but gave up the effort of being a one man language cop after two or three lifetimes. Even possessing infinite bronzeminds and electrumminds can only go so far before you figure, I have better things to do with infinity. (Like canning food in his basement.) My head-canon is that he knew of and used duralumin to compound Connection to help him deal with this. A man adrift in time, even a Fullborn Sliver of Infinity, would be grateful for that, right? I'm sure it's what Hoid has been doing? And he would have had access to duralumin, since Vin was able to get some made for her in WoA shortly after TLR had fallen. But Marsh, ah, Marsh! He's no Fullborn. While he's far from a "common Inquisitor", other than being the only one left in the world, all of his powers beyond being a Seeker are indeed "endowed fabrications", as The Lord Ruler put it, via hemalurgic enhancement. And while we don't know why Ruin gave him a spike for F-atium, considering it would have required sacrificing one of a very small number of Keepers captured for that purpose, there's no way Ruin would have created a spike for F-duralumin when it was all but impossible to also create a spike for A-duralumin from a Misting gnat (it would require sacrificing a Mistborn as well!). And so, poor Marsh has to just deal with all the people around him slowly talking funnier and funnier and using words more and more wrong to his ears. Someone like Wayne would have fun in "going with the flow", language-wise; we see him intentionally adopt the regional/class accent "of a generation ago" to seem more paternal to the gravedigger in BoM, and he was keenly interested in "absorbing" whatever archaic accent Marsh spoke with. But Marsh seems like a more stern and stiff type of person. He's gonna hate it after a while. Maybe he can get TenSoon or other kandra to "talk proper" to him for old time's sake from time to time!

I think it's mentioned in Wabreaker that he killed Shashara with Nightblood. Which is even more interesting given how often Nightblood seems to forget Shashara is dead. Ah, here it is: in the same scene where Nightblood recognizes VaraTreladees (Denth), in Chapter 29: Of course, saying "we killed Shashara" to NB may not imply that Vasher used NB to do the deed, as in pretty much the same sentence he states how "we" killed Arsteel. But he later reveals to Denth that he'd done so via the same "Ecstasy of Breath" trick he'd just pulled on him, to immobilize him for a killing blow, yet Arsteel's body was used to make Clod the Lifeless, and thus couldn't have been done with Nightblood.

Well, we've seen examples of both. Yomen was an the Seer, and Miles "Hundredlives" Dagouter a gold compounder. Which of the two would you want to face down? Or, if they had a simultaneous mutual desire to murder one another, who would walk away? Obviously you'd not want to face either one, but atium is rare, expensive, and burns quickly. If you have any way of simply forcing Yomen to burn all his atium with jab or ranged attacks, you'd reduce the problem to just "can I take down Yomen?" And he himself noted he didn't find his ability all that useful. "How often does one have both atium and the desire to use it up in a few heartbeats?" Now, it proved far more useful at Elend's Last Stand with his Band of Seers burning up the entire kandra Trust - there, we saw that even unpracticed Seers could take down koloss. With enough atium. Which they had lots and lots of. So I guess it's also a question of how much atium the Seer in question has access to: somewhere in between the normal "a few minutes at most" accessible to Allomancers of the Final Empire (versus "none at all" to Allomancers after the Catacendre, unless you begged some off of Marsh?), or "bags and bags of beads that you have to choke down they're so many!" Miles Hundredlives, now... That's a guy who can blow up dynamite held in his hands, and routinely carried it around for just that purpose. By extension, he could simply blow up enough explosives, a large shrapnel bomb, to take out everyone in a hundred foot radius, and walk away in some shredded clothing. So unless Yomen "saw that coming" by burning atium early enough, I don't see him being able to escape the blast radius.

That is what I would have thought, but I could swear that I'd read a WoB reference somewhere that the memory coin/medallion would still be usable by someone else after that scene... Will have to look for that.

Did he remember "the memory" or simply now remembers the memory? I mean, once you've watched a rented movie and returned it, it's in your head too, right? There are multiple reasons that was a cliffhanger ending!

This is the scariest part about the BoM, and for unsealed F-power granting metalminds in general, that is part of the mystery of the creation and the use of nicrosilminds. And feels like it could be seriously OP in the wider Cosmere, because of how it opens the door to anybody Compounding any metal, practically at will. On first reading The Bands of Mourning, when we are introduced to the idea (and then the effect) that one can store "the ability to do X" (be it an Allomantic or Feruchemical ability) in an unsealed nicrosilmind usable by anybody who realizes what it is, I assumed that that Investiture - what encapsulated "storage of ability to do X" - was an attribute that would get used up when tapped. The same way that tapping speed, weight, health, age, etc., from a steelmind, ironmind, atiummind, or goldmind would do. But we have a WoB that says nicrosilminds instead work like copperminds, which do not "use up" the Investiture but are simply "something stored and later restored/borrowed" in nature: So for a "classical" Feruchemist (e.g., Era 1 Sazed, where we see the most POV use of Feruchemy), he could not tap a coppermind at a "multiplier" the same way that could be done with a steelmind, where he could draw upon a bit of speed over a long period of time, or mega-tap for a burst of incredible speed. The memories are what they are, and maybe he could tap "harder" to read them faster, but there's no way to gain more memories than were stored there in the end, or to lose some of them due to tapping harder (as would happen with "attribute" type metalminds). In other words, the Investiture as "the ability to do X" can be put back into the metalmind with essentially no loss. It's a "borrowing". After Wax viewed the Survivor's memory in the unsealed coppermind coin at the end of BoM, both the memory in the coppermind and the ability to access that memory were "put back" into the coin's metalminds when he released them, and anybody else could do the same later (it wouldn't get "used up"). Though to me that seems like it would also require yet another unsealed nicrosilmind that granted the ability to store unkeyed Investiture back into the nicrosilmind that represented something like "you can use F-copper", but the details of this are still RAFO and implied to be a kind of Connection hack (which maybe means that simply using an unsealed metalmind of any kind will always allow you to put the unkeyed Investiture back into the metalmind from whence it came): So the "Excisors", whatever they are, maybe involve or impart Connection twiddling? -- Feels kind of like some flavor of Selish magic, doesn't it, except of course how would that work on Scadrial or anywhere other than the appropriate region of Sel? And of course, we still don't know what it would mean to Compound a coppermind; or in this case, a nicrosilmind. Argh!