robardin

So in another thread somewhere, I commented on how Taravangian was able to do what Hoid had assumed Rayse would or could not do as Odium, and that was reach out and touch him with the power after being bound by the agreement with Dalinar not to harm him. And Taravangian thinks to himself, "I don't believe this would count as harming you..." as he searches for and removes the Breaths that contain the memories of Hoid's previous ten minutes or so. Coupled with Rayse, who is not exactly a good guy, saying stuff like "when you have an agreement with me, I will keep it in spirit and not only in word" - which is clearly NOT what Taravangian is like as Odium - it suggests that attitude maybe had been forced on Rayse, the way that Hoid cannot harm another person? Something from his human past, perhaps even something he took on as part of being able to participate in the Shattering of Adonalsium before Ascending, and something that therefore does not bind Taravangian as a Vessel.

Maybe. There are now such things as unsealed coppermind medallions, as we saw at the end of Bands of Mourning... The nature of coppermind sharing is still a WoB/RAFO, but imagine if it became possible to "learn" things by tapping an already-filled coppermind, kind of like that scene in The Matrix where Neo learns kung-fu by staying neurally hooked up for ten hours straight (apparently a crazy thing to do)?

WHOA, I didn't realize that a nicrosilmind worked like a coppermind in that, used properly, it wouldn't "leak". So medallions, once created, don't need to be "recharged" with the identity-less Investiture that grants a (Feruchemical) power? When you're done using the mumblemind in the medallion, the user naturally returns the "ability to use that mumblemind" back into the nicrosilmind? But wait. That would imply that the user could simply walk away and not refill the nicrosilmind, and have... gained the Feruchemical ability? That doesn't quite make sense, either, if it didn't "wear off" or have a way to require being "put back" into the medallion. Like, with all the nicrosilminds in the Bands of Mourning that granted Allomantic powers, someone could just... Not put them back into the Bands and become Lerasium Mistborn?

Right, that fits in with what I thought was implied when I first read it, which was not one of the three options in the OP: that Odium could read the memory contents of his Breath store, and could act to destroy them (that surprised me a bit) but not to "edit" them (to insert false memories) as we've seen another Shard do with another Investiture based memory storage technique. And Hoid had used enough Breath to store them that he wobbled a bit under the Second Heightening, or maybe just felt "unbalanced" wrt his Breath store, after the excision. How destroying Hoid's Breath store doesn't fall under "harming" him is pretty questionable, and highlights one of the tremendous implications of having squidgy-dodgy semantics-threading Taravangian now be the holder of Odium's Shardic oaths and debts. Whatever else Rayse was, he appeared to have taken seriously the idea of holding to the spirit, not the letter of a promise. And hey. Perhaps this was something he personally took on as an oath or a binding measure prior to Ascending, perhaps as part of whatever happened to Shatter Adonalsium, similar to how Hoid's inability to harm another person is tied to something he did back in those days as well? Something that doesn't apply to Taravangian.

I think it was a reference to what we see at the end of WoR, when Amaram is saved by Taln from not one but two darts from a blowgun shot at him by Iyatil

Wow. That is an awesome prologue / deleted scene, and for Cosmere aficionados the interaction with Hoid is wonderful... But the way the TES works with Mary's feedback definitely makes it more elegant as a standalone story, and what moves it from A Great Cosmere Novella to Hugo Award Winning Novella.

Baldurdash!

Not in Era 1 - we see that people who had been "mistsnapped" didn't realize they were Allomancers now at all, much less cognizant of what kind of Misting, until they were provided with metal vials to test with. But in Era 2, not only has Harmony changed how Snapping works to be less brutal (with a possible side effect of making Allomancy less strong, though dilution over time distance from a lerasium ingesting ancestor also has that effect), but apparently has changed it so a Metalborn "knows" their affinity. This is because Wayne describes his history to Marasi as having come out to the Roughs when he was 16 years old (hmmm.... Sixteen?) "kinda" because he knew he was an Allomancer, and that he had "had an idea" about his Feruchemy because he father was also a Feruchemist (not known of what type), but that "bismuth and cadmium aren't the kind of metals you find in your corner store" and "storing health, it takes gold". The implication being that neither had been accessible to him where he'd come from, and he'd come out to the Roughs to try to gain access to them (stealing them directly, or enough money to gain access to them)... Yet he'd been aware of his ability to make use of them, if not practiced in the art.

Well problem #2 would be that Ghost Kelsier would have to become a (Full) Feruchemist somewhere along the way... Maybe with The Lost Metal we'll finally see how the Excisors and the Bands were created. (I had this crazy theory, which I wrote up at one point with details but don't remember any more, is that he and Spook gained access to spikes for Feruchemy - or even a host with full Feruchemy built into it - via the First Generation of kandra, who were originally human Feruchemists like Rashek had been, and perhaps still were on a Spiritual or Cognitive level the way we see former koloss appearing as human again in Secret History)

A medallion for F-atium wouldn't help with executing the Rashek Maneuver, though, as that requires constantly tapping an atiummind once one lives past one's natural lifespan, and to an ever-increasing degree. So relying on the medalion for the Feruchemical ability would mean running out of being able to use the atiummind at all once the medallion ran out, regardless of Compounding, unless you could also compound the (presumed) nicrosilmind that stored the Feruchemical ability, which would require being a Feruchemist (or something like the Bands). A Feruchemist who could naturally use the atiummind, though - whether being a full Feruchemist, or if there were such a thing as an atium Ferring, which it doesn't seem like there ought to be any more after the Catacendre - could use a medallion for A-atium to access the Allomantic ability every now and then to burn atium to Compound, and create or add to some highly Invested atiummind (keyed to themself).

ahahaha, indeed. I had read it as suggesting to "remove 300-400 words", i.e., "could have been three our four hundred words [shorter]", which I see is not the actual quote

This is the curious bit to me. Odium becoming far more subtle and crafty (due to the new Vessel), including thinking of messing with his Breath-stored memories, clearly caught Hoid by complete surprise; but then, what did Hoid intend to happen, "exactly as planned", in his encounter with Odium? Just a little beard-pulling of Rayse, "Ha ha you can't touch me now, nyah nyah?" For someone as long-lived and Shard-aware as Hoid is, that seems quite rash. Quite a risk for a bit of gloating. But apparently so. I don't think Hoid intended Odium to look into his Breath memories - he never imagined Rayse coming up with that idea, of working around the definition of "cannot harm you" to exclude memory editing in an external store of Investiture, or perhaps indeed even to realize that "because you've lived longer than a mortal should, you need to put the excess memories somewhere".

It's easier to write than to edit... I agree the Shadesmar Expedition felt off-paced, that the Formless bit was a bit melodramatic, and that Kaladin Fight Scenes start to blend into each other a bit. But, I would rebut that we did need to see 1) Kaladin v. Leshwi, with a sense of them already having a history of mutual dueling respect 2) Kaladin v. Lezian, because it's a climactic type thing, and of course Lezian's M.O. would have him go after Kaladin, with unfortunate results (for him) 3) Kaladin nearly falling to Odium (the red/yellow eyes bit when he goes HAM) ... which Moash predicted might happen if Lezian messed with him before he fully fell, so that is really on the Pursuer 4) Kaladin going nutso in that state is probably supposed to indicate something about what the red/yellow eyes thing was about... 5) ...except for the recurring exhibition of unusual (beyond Stormlight) speed from Kaladin, which we have RAFO WoBs about, so it's not just "oh, how can I build up Kaladin even further as Super Duper Man", it's actually a planned element of his character. ...Well, clearly planned to be Super Duper Man. But still, it's not Sanderson being forced to constantly one-up his own history with Kaladin to continue to make him seem awesome to the reader. (And no, much as I enjoy his fiction, I don't mean to put Sanderson on a pedestal with W. A. Mozart in the Western Canon... But "too many words", or "too many notes", is just such an easy thing to say!)

Did Ruin create more Inquisitors from scratch, though, or simply augmented the Inquisitors that already existed with spikes they hadn't been allowed before (mainly ones for various Feruchemical powers, other than the recycled spikes for F-gold)? I've always assumed it was the latter. Yes, Marsh killed all the other Inquisitors that were in Luthadel and "sleeping" in their resting chambers near TLR in Kredik Shaw by removing their linchpin spikes, but he admitted that there were an unknown number of Inquisitors out of Luthadel. It could well be a reason for there being no more Mistborn after the Catacendre other than Spook, though, if Ruin had made a point of finding and Inquisitor-ing every Mistborn he could track down, male or female.

Wow. On re-reads I often find myself skimming to the Lightsong POVs. Even when he was being "irresponsible", the very fact that he thought to himself that he was being irresponsible showed he had a sense of responsibility, and his sudden passion for investigating a mystery that intrigued him as to what he had been when alive was fun, too. Even more so when his high priest, whom he had nicknamed "Scooter" specifically to annoy him, finally blows up and tells him he had been a "Colors-cursed scribe", which depresses him into thinking he was a complete fraud as a god. "An idiot, a silly little scribe who was allowed to play god for a few years, a coward." Only for Llarimar to softly bring him back by telling him not just how he lived but how he died, saving another person, and who he was to him personally. "You were a scribe, and one of the best men I'd ever known. You were my brother. ... A man who had died to save another. ...You are a god, to me, at least. ... It has to do with who you are, and what you mean." That's the best scene in the entire book to me, despite Vasher's dropping arcane knowledge or the awesomeness of Nightblood finally unsheathed. A close second: Vasher creating a Lifeless squirrel with the Command, "Run around and bite people who aren't me."

But does it only work on the specific sand on Taldain? That's the most limiting thing about Sand Mastery, not its versatility, though even there it's limited to direct, physical effects that can you make the sand do - unless there are ways to use it to do things like alter memories, heal oneself or another person, form Connection to another person for language translation or other purposes, etc. Add on top of that the likely limitation that you have to be on Taldain or carry around its sand with you off-world to do stuff, and it is a very circumscribed form of Cosmere magic. The "out" for Sand Mastery not being the weakest form of magic we've seen so far - the Selish magics seem to be limited by being bound to physical regions of Sel, but multiple WoBs indicate that that can be worked around with the right techniques - would be if its fundamental mechanics were more universal, like being able to manipulate Invested things in a way that is difficult or impossible for other magics. Or perhaps the uses of Sand Mastery we've seen are simply reflective of how the Sand Masters of Taldain have needed to use it in their history. Being on a planet (side) covered in white sand, maybe they've never done any kind of research of any subtle use of it to do other, non-physical things, or to maximize what can be done with small amounts of sand versus rather than small amounts of raw ability. For that matter, Realmatically speaking what does it mean for one Sand Master to be able to "command more ribbons" than another, or for Kenton was able to level up so much (which apparently had never happened before)? Hmm! The only other Cosmere magic we've seen where being innately or naturally "stronger" than another, rather than more skilled in its use or having a bigger stockpile of Investiture (Breath, Stormlight, metalminds), is with Allomancy - where the natural and maximum levels of strength of one's Pushes and Pulls depends on some level of sDNA based Connection with Preservation. That, and the advancing in Ideals by a Radiant, of course. Is that an analogy for what happened to Kenton?

I have been initially surprised and annoyed that certain "obvious" words were not accepted as playable in Words With Friends. Most recently, it was OBLIGATOR (as an extension of my opponent's word, GATOR). "Oh, so a slangy abbreviation of ALLIGATOR is acceptable, but not.. Oh, right, fictional." On the other hand, I recently won a prize in a competitive word game because I came up with a word within 60 seconds that fit the category of "a gemstone" that was alphabetically closest (in ascending order) to the previous word, GERANIUM. Literally everybody else in the room (of about 20 well-read and knowledgeable people) came up with JADE. (Well, someone tried "INDIA, STAR OF", which was laughed away.) I came up with HELIODOR, a term that nobody else even recognized. The dictionary was consulted, and I was validated. When asked how I knew this word, I just replied that "I'd read it in a book somewhere" and not with, "You know, it's the one you need to Soulcast meat for flangria, and apparently to power a healing fabrial for Regrowth!"

I was thinking about White Sand earlier today, and I realized that of all the Cosmere magic systems we see, Sand Mastery is the one I have never imagined myself using. Well, except when making sand castles at the beach, but that's not very often. A large part of that is because to be at all useful, a Sand Master needs sand. Lots and lots of sand. And not just any sand, like the sand on an Earth beach, but the particular white sand of Taldain, white because it has absorbed Investiture from the Taldain sun. Ha ha, I thought; For all the endless arguments about Prepared Mistborn vs. Knight Radiant of the Nth Ideal, on a battlefield or in an arena or in a city, nobody ever mentally matches someone off-world up with Kenton, because unless it happens on Dayside Taldain he'd soon just be a guy holding the largest size bag of now-black sand he could carry with him. WEAK! ...or is that true? We have a WoB that that sand turns white not just from the sun of Taldain, but because tiny organisms in it react to Kinetic Investiture. Consider what the sand is doing in the White Sand works: absorbing Investiture from the sun of Taldain, the radiated Light of Autonomy. The "seeker organisms" are reacting to that act of storage by changing color, as they evidently do with any act of Investiture moving from one place to another, so the sand being "white" is due to that, but where the magic actually comes from is the power of Autonomy now resident in the sand. The color is an indicator, a reflection of its availability, not its cause. Effectively, that means the sand of Taldain (ex-organisms) are like tiny little solar battery cells for Investiture. And per this WoB, any Investiture would charge the sand and make it masterable: What else are "battery cells for Investiture"? Metalminds and Shardblades. If what is special about the sand of Taldain is that they're "tiny generic Investiture batteries with micro-organisms in them that act as indicators of Kinetic Investiture", then who's to say the ability of Sand Mastery is only called such because it occurs on Taldain, where the only Investiture is from their sun and the only repository for it is in that sand? In other words... Could Kenton "master" Shardblades and metalminds???? EVEN NIGHTBLOOD? ETA: I'm mostly joking here, because I read that last WoB where a highstorm would "recharge" the sand "but not be Stormlight" to mean it wouldn't be like Stormlight being captured in a gemstone such that a Radiant could use it, but that it would make the sand white and be masterable (convert the Investiture to something Kenton could leverage to manipulate the particle of sand). Implying that there is still something intrinsic about the sand particles that are entwined with Sand Mastery in the mechanism. Still, as far as I can read it, the door is technically still open to say that Sand Mastery is actually Investiture Battery Mastery, which would make Kenton a LOT more powerful off-world than anybody gives him credit for. Shardblade? Shardplate? Compounding-filled metalminds on a Fullborn? Nightblood? HAHAHA! I Master You All!

So, you just happened to "randomly" read the Gathas of Zoroaster. Or at least, an article (presumably in Wikipedia) on Zoroastrianism. ...ALL RIGHT! You're my kind of person! Let's do Pub Trivia together sometime! We'll still need someone who can name more than one Kardashian, or songs/music artists from the past ten years, though.

Well, I am a graphics novel person and I found the work uneven... The art style changes like twice in books 1 and 2, including halfway through the second volume. The effects of Sand Mastery (as in, how it would look to an observer versus how it would seem/feel to the magic-user) is already kind of hard to picture if it's described in text, having it inconsistently depicted in the drawings derailed my enjoyment significantly. I believe Brandon mentioned "cleaning up some details" in the omnibus edition, so I guess I'll double-dip and get that when it's available and see what the differences are. In pure storytelling terms, I am also left wondering how Sand Mastery fits in with the other magic systems we see in the Cosmere in terms of "power level". We've seen unexplained "easter egg" appearances of the use of Taldain Dayside sand in the Stormlight Archive as a kind of Investiture Detector (that isn't really a spoiler in the White Sand forum as if you've read White Sand but not SA, if/when you did read it you would certainly pick up on it), but that's not what I mean. We've seen other Cosmere magics do incredible things, but Sand Mastery pretty much always requires sand, that particular Taldain sand, and LOTS of it, to be useful. It's almost like the sand itself is the most portably useful thing about Sand Mastery. In other words, while reading pretty much any other Cosmere work that shows magic being used, I as a reader often consider what it'd be like to have/use such powers or abilities (and their costs) in my own life. Except for Sand Mastery. I have never imagined myself as a Sand Master. Well fine, except for those times making sand castles at the beach. But come on. Nobody ever puts Kenton into a Cosmere Arena against Kelsier, Kaladin, or Susebron in one of those "what if" scenarios. Unless that arena were on Dayside Taldain, what would be the point? Kenton would have to carry a truckloads of Invested Sand with him from Taldain to do anything interesting at all.

Yeah, well, do you imagine that a Shard like Cultivation somehow didn't know what Taravangian was like? I mean, her entire plan to set up Taravangian to off Rayse and replace him as Odium - which she was prepared for as an outcome, where Mr. T himself was not at all - suggests maybe we're all underselling her here... To recap: Taravangian had planned "two steps ahead" of Rayse, and also of us as readers until partway through Oathbringer, in that he had requested "enlightened" spren from Sja-anat to attract Odium's wrath at the right time when Szeth would be stoked to kill him, so as to be able to use Nightblood against Odium. But he had not imagined that that meant he would be Connected in such a way as to Ascend to Odium himself, which was a side effect of Cultivation's "curse" on his "boon". Whose "random" fluctuations between cold intelligence and weepy, passionate stupidity saw him at his stupidest and most emotional point ever, at exactly the right time where that would be optimal for him to Ascend. So we're talking about a being - a Shard of Adonalisum with as much or more subtle use of Futurevision as any we've seen, at that - who can see and plan at least THREE moves ahead, and we dare to presume she is blindsided by what is now possibly transpiring? Sure, Vargodium is thinking to himself about his Ascension, "you have no idea what you've done". Doesn't mean Vargodium's right. Both Vessels of Odium are/were prone to overconfidence in their superiority and underestimation of others. And perhaps a dose of condescension is simply built into the nature of the Shard of Hatred. By the way, I just realized how fulfilling this must feel to Cultivation - not in the sense of achieving a specific desired outcome, but of fulfilling the Shardic Intent. "All things must grow and change." Well, twiddling a old man into an bipolar cold genius/emotional wretch such that he goes from death's door to Ascending to Godhood, that's the ultimate in growing and changing, now isn't it?

Yes but not at the time of the end of Secret History. It's only a few years since the Catacendre, and it'll take a generation for new Feruchemists to be born, and by Era 2 legend anyway, they will all be Ferrings... Where F-atium Ferrings, like Seer Mistings, will no longer be a thing after Harmony restored the Allomantic table, replacing atium/malatium with cadmium/bendalloy (I think). So it would seem the only way for Spook to gain a spike for F-atium would be to identify one and to get it from a dead Inquisitor, or to spike a very rare at best full Feruchemist.

Right, but until that scene with Ishar and Szeth, I'd been thinking that Nalan went back and "reclaimed" his Blade as a Herald's right to do so. Or that the Blades were left unattended or unbonded somewhere in Shin, perhaps stuck in the ground where the Heralds had originally abandoned them, until one of them was given to a Truthless who had been Especially Bad for some reason, and Nale just kind of popped in and snatched it (since as a Skybreaker himself of the Fifth Ideal, he could fly in even without his old Honorblade, which they probably wouldn't be expecting). In those few passages, it now seems that Szeth and his whole family had been Honorblade guardians, and that Szeth had been the bearer of the Windrunner Blade before being made Truthless rather than as a consequence of it. And that they were specifically charged not to yield up their Blade to the Herald who once wielded it. So when Szeth recalls "one of them" (Nalan's) being "stolen" (or was it "gone missing"), how did that happen? Did he have to kill or force the previous bearer to yield it up, or did it happen long enough ago that the Shin practice of "giving a family to the Honorblades" only began after Nale took his Blade back?

Not only that, and not only had Szeth trained with all the Honorblades that they had (thus, "all ten Surges"), but it was somehow a penalty levied on his entire family. Watching Gavinor play with Dalinar, How large was Szeth's family? Were all eight of the Honorblades remaining to them assigned to someone in Szeth's family? And if so, was that an honor (ha), or some kind of penalty? If it was a penalty, as Szeth doesn't seem to consider it as a good thing that happened, it doesn't appear to be the case that that burden being laid on his family was related to Szeth's being named Truthless, per a WoB: So if an individual being named Truthless did not endow them with an Honorblade (much less training in "all ten Surges" with all eight Blades, as Szeth had done), what did? Apparently, Szeth's family were designated Honorblade guardians, who then trained to use all of them while being the specific guardian of one of them, and that burden was retained by Szeth even after being named Truthless. Meaning, he was already the bearer of Jezrien's Blade when he "raised the alarm" about the Voidbringers and the oncoming (True) Desolation and was deemed to have been wrong. Later in RoW, Szeth goes (even more) off the mentals rails when he sees that Ishar has possession of the Bondsmith Honorblade, who then taunts him with the story (true or not) that his father had yielded up the Blade willingly to him whille "thanking me for letting him die". Quite possibly a complete lie, as the Shin's keeping of the Honorblades did NOT include "surrendering" them back to the Heralds on demand: All right; but that also then raises the question of how/when did Nale get his back, and from who?

Maybe he just stands out in the highstorm and absorbs it like an Investiture rod. It's also worth considering that however he "ingests" the Stormlight, it's possible he could subsist on Voidlight from the Everstorm just as easily with the same technique.