robardin

Somewhere I've speculated that it's possible his reviving Maya might allow her to re-bond... With someone else. And that maybe Adolin ends up being a kind of Shardblade Whisperer, LOL. But it could also be the case that his being Edgedancer-y is a component of the mix of unique circumstances and factors that has enabled a dead spren to revive without the previous Nahel bond being restored.

No it's actually the opposite - I have seen semi- or fully conflicting WoBs on this and related topics. I won't go digging in the Arcanum, but I'm pretty sure you can find WoBs on both sides (yes and no) saying Wax's bubble thing is/is not a Twinborn resonance; or if it's a expression of being an A-steel savant; or even being a Crasher savant specifically; or something else special about Wax we may yet to find out (hey, being "Harmony's Ruin" in the world has to have some kind of perk, right?). That's because Sanderson has told his fans about his concept of there being such things as "resonances" and "perks" when two magic powers blend, and also such a thing as savantism from using a cosmere magic at a high flare for a long time (as we already saw with Spook), but not yet nailed down canon-wise exactly what things we've seen in the books are due to what factor, and to what degree. At least we can rule out the Twinborn or Wax Is Special angle after Bands of Mourning, because we saw another guy doing it. (Unless that guy from the Set was indeed a Crasher Twinborn like Wax, or hemalurgically enabled for the same resonance plus with enough practice time to have acheived it, which seems very unlikely.)

You misunderstand my points, I think. Using the atium compounding trick is an inefficient way to immortality; Rashek could have used the power of Preservation to become immortal after de-Ascending in a different way, and might have done so given another shot at Ascension when taking up the power a second time. Ruin whispered to Rashek and "directed him" to using hemalurgy, ultimately to create pawns for his own use after he got free. Rashek was a selfish and power-hungry guy; as Vin saw what he did with the power after Ascending, Rashek's priority #1 was to "cure all the world's ills" (to stop the Deepness), but a close second was to remake the world with himself on top forever. Rashek was a Feruchemist but didn't know anything about hemalurgy and allomancy, he had to be told they were A Thing. He could learn a lot about the Metallic Arts in a short amount of time while Ascended, but I don't see why he would have to be "directed" to hemalurgy, and Kelsier not have delved into its mechanics, unless it was a matter of realizing it was worth investing the effort to do so, even after Ascension. Kelsier of course knew about Allomancy already, but Rashek wouldn't have - so my thinking is, he would have needed nearly as much "direction" towards Allomancy as towards Hemalurgy. As you put it, he wouldnt just be sitting there like “AlLoManCy? aNd FeRuChemY? wHaTs ThAt?” as if it was ridiculous, but that' is actually exactly the point - he wouldn't even know Allomancy was a thing at all, any more than Ascended Kelsier knew hemalurgy was a thing. "Nearly" in that Allomancy being "of Preservation" may have been more natural for him to figure out while holding the power of Preservation... But my point is, it still stands to reason that Ruin would want him to be attracted to a form of immortality THAT INVOLVED GATHERING MORE AND MORE ATIUM over time. Because from Ruin's POV, even more important than having a bunch of Inquisitors and koloss (and eh, kandra - bleargh!) ready to use when he escaped, would be having all the world's atium production having been harvested and collected in a depot somewhere. Which TLR seemed to be spending hundreds of years doing, just like Ruin hoped he would. But WHERE DID RASHEK PUT IT? I'm not saying that Rashek would not have "figured out" Compounding once he learned about Allomancy - I'm saying Ruin may have "saved him the time" by giving him hints about that very early in his "Ascension Time", the better to leave Rashek time to then play with things that he would think were his own idea. Things like designing and creating hemalurgic races to use as troops / priests / spies, and to move the atium collection location to a spot where he knew where it was and could control it (the Pits of Hathsin) while physically rearranging the continents. EDIT: and one final note: I admit that this is my "head canon" - there is absolutely nothing in Mistborn that supports Rashek being pointed towards Allomancy by Ruin, as a subtle way to get him to use compounding of atium for immortality, as a long game towards Rashek becoming obsessed with gathering atium. I'm saying I like to picture it that way, because it's very much consistent with the way we saw that Ati/Ruin manipulated people and things. And there is nothing contradicting it either.

Holding the power meant he could gain understanding of all the Metallic Arts - including hemalurgy - but it wouldn't be automatic. It's not like, "Hey, I just Ascended, and now I KNOW IT ALL!" Kelsier held the power of Preservation for longer than Rashek did, as he was fully Ascended where Rashek only held it briefly; and yet Kelsier says to Spook at the end of Secret History that he regretted not delving into hemalurgy in that time. "My mind expanded, and I learned some things. My focus wasn't on these spikes; I think I could have worked it all out, if it had been. I still learned enough to be dangerous..." That's basically what happened with Rashek: he ran out of time to "work it all out". His primary focus while holding the power was to fix the problem with the Deepness, the mists that were choking all agriculture, and then to fix the fix, and then to fix the fix to his fix, and so on. When he got around to making sure he was DOMINANT, that's when Ruin would have nudged him to learn and to use certain aspects of the Metallic Arts, which would ultimately further his (Ruin's) purposes more than Rashek's. That required some "practice and experimentation", and sure while Ascended time had a lot less meaning, but not NO meaning. We know this because in Hero of Ages Ch. 76, after Vin has Ascended but finds that she and Ruin are almost exactly balanced and cancel each other out in terms of directly affecting the world, she realizes that the Inquisitors and koloss pawns Ruin could use were a result of Ruin's tricking Rashek long ago: Leading him on with an understanding of Compounding (gain Allomancy and make infinite Feruchemical metalminds, forever!) and the Feruchemical property of atium (and use that be forever young!), a metal that wasn't known/used pre-Final Empire, was what I imagine Ruin "whispered" to Rashek. And then of course, the idea of using lerasium beads to attract allies by making them Mistborn was a close second. In his nearly thousand year reign as a Sliver of Infinity Rashek continued to experiment with hemalurgy, but never figured out how to create any more servants than koloss, kandra, and Inquisitors, the understanding he gained while Ascended. Had he taken the power at the Well a second time, I'm sure he would have LEARNED IT ALL this time around. And probably to gain immortality in a way that didn't require an exponential spiritual debt. But he never got the chance.

It's also worth pointing out that it's not something you would necessarily even think to try to do as a Coinshot until there was so much metal around - specifically, high burst rate metal or metal-tipped projectile weapons being a common threat. TLR worked hard to suppress technology, particularly gunpowder and anything mechanically automated, specifically to keep Allomancy the only way to do incredible things, and its users (himself and the nobility) on top of the power structure.

Yep yep yep on all the bolded stuff.... And they raise further questions, of course. It seems likely that the coppermind coin's "big reveal" is Kelsier's "going down South" in physical form; but even if it wasn't, there's still the one-level-deeper question: if whatever is contained in that coppermind reveals something that Kelsier "didn't want to get out", why did he create the coppermind in the first place - and as an unsealed medallion, at that? It is a first person memory, so at some point he intentionally offloaded it to an unsealed coppermind. Oh, and then there was the comment from Devlin, the Ghostblood-sounding informant at Lady Kelesina's party in New Seraan with his talk of predator and prey, when Wax showed him that coppermind coin. Devlin said that "Though I've never seen the exact image on this one, coins like these have been moving with some regularity through black-market antiquities auctions. ... I've been baffled as to why. There is no reason to keep them secret, and it would not be illegal to sell them in the open. ... Gave bought a few, then immediately stopped, and the pieces he purchased are no longer on display in his home". These would not be "medallions" the Southerners had on their crashed airships and seized by the Set, so where did they come from? Also Hoid? Are they copies of the same coppermind as he threw at Wax? Coppermind coins at all? Did Gave get one of them to work? As for the double translation error thing, I think I commented in another thread about how the pun of "bands" as armbands and "ha ha, they're bands of interwoven metal (in the spearhead)!" was another sign to the Northerners, as that pun almost certainly wouldn't translate, haha. (Of course it could also just be Sanderson's pun to the IRL readers, like with the very names of Wax and Wayne, when it turns out Scadrial doesn't have a moon at all). Still, Allik saying the Sovereign told us "he was your king first, and your god" is pretty specific. Two separate words, one for "king" (ruler, leader) and one for "god". Also, this: (Of course, Kelsier had also died, so that wasn't a lie, technically. It just didn't take.) And to expand on my kandra suspicions, Jordis and the others seemed to recognize kandra as divine agents. When MeLaan turned transparent to show her shattered skeletal parts and then taking the Bands into her body, Allik had the right terms to convey something about MeLaan to them in their own language - Wax and the others couldn't follow his explanation because he'd removed the Connection medallion. So who knows what their Southerner lore has about kandra? (And... How would they have known?) MeLaan seemed to know to do that at just the right time - did she understand their language, or did she just follow a cue to "do the thing" when Allik gestured wildly in her direction?

A number of things about that Temple of the Sovereign don't add up, even after you realize a lot of it was complete misdirection from our old friend Kelsier. Or rather, ESPECIALLY after I realized that... I started to think of what else might have been being misdirected away from. It's been established that Kelsier was the Sovereign, and that he wished to make it seem like the actions he took in the Southern Hemisphere - imparting Metalborn among them in the Firefathers and Firemothers, teaching them medallion technology with the Excisors - were somehow done by The Lord Ruler. Part of this obfuscation involved repeating iconography known to the Northerners as the Bands of Mourning - the metalmind armband bracers worn by The Lord Ruler, and described as having folklore associated with them even before the Catacendre as granting "all his powers" to the wearer. Meanwhile to the Southerners, to who he presented as The Sovereign, he gave an origin story of being the former god-king of the Northern Hemisphere, and imparted understanding of the same object - with similar iconography, as arm bracers - that functioned as medallions for all the metals: something that only he could create. Then he left "with his priests" to make this Temple, where he took great care to construct an elaborate distraction play, with a series of complex booby traps and doors that could only be opened once in a lifetime if you got the code wrong, leading to an apse with a raised pedestal with a broken display case... And underneath this apse, catacombs with a set of arm bracers of different metals, that was a dummy (empty of attributes, if they ever held any at all), somewhat grimly surrounded by the dead bodies of his former Southerner priests. Meanwhile, the real "Bands" of sixteen unsealed metalminds were melded into the spearhead attached to the statue of the Sovereign outside the temple - a statue that to the Northerners, matched their expectations of what The Lord Ruler looked like. It took Hoid's coppermind coin thrown to Wax to reveal that the Sovereign was actually Kelsier, the Survivor of Hathsin - and a WoB to confirm that Hoid was doing so specifically to "blow Kelsier's cover story", that that coppermind was something Kelsier "did not want to get out". (Of course, he must have been the one to have created it in the first place, so, how's that?) That is all just a recap. What I wanted to bring up was a review of the murals described at that Temple, and what they were supposed to represent, to either a Northerner or Southerner viewing them. Seeing what Kelsier did, it's possible they were meant to suggest one thing to a Northern viewer (wrt lore pertaining to TLR), and another thing to a Southern viewer (wrt The Sovereign). ReLuur's evanotypes of the Temple, as shown to Wax, Wayne, and Marasi in Chapter 3, showed: A mural... depicted a room with a central dais in the shape of a truncated pyramid. Set upon a pedestal on the dais was a pair of bracers made of delicate, curling metal, shaped in spirals. [This was to create a visual misdirection of what the Bands were?] A large metal plate set into a wall and inscribed with a strange script. [This was the puzzle Suit got Wax and co. past, with info from Jordis.] A statue that resembled the Lord Ruler, bearing a long spear. [hahaha.] Another shot of the mural, more detailed, which depicted bracers with many different metals twining together... "bracers for a Full Feruchemist." A different mural... depicted a man standing atop a peak, hands raised above him and a glowing spear hovering there, just beyond his touch. A corpse slumped at his feet. ... The face of the man in the mosaic had eyes upturned and lips parted as if in awe at what he held. He wore the bracers on his arms. Since ReLuur didn't actually get past the plate set in the wall to the "real" dais, the mural depicting the room with the dais and the pedestal and the bracers on it must have been outside. 1 - What is the deal with the mural of The Sovereign and a floating glowing spear, with the corpse at his feet? That obviously made the Northerners think of corpse = Kelsier, awesome powa bracer-wearing dude = TLR, glowing spear = the holy Lance of the Fountains of Survivorist lore. What were the Southerners thinking it showed? 2 - Are the "fake bracers" actually fake, or just empty? They are described as "silvery" when Edwarn hands them over to Telsin, not made of bands of many metals. What if instead of being the Bands, they are "Excisors"? Wouldn't that be just like Kelsier! 3 - Why were those dead priests down there, surrounding the "fake Bands" in concentric circles? As I was just speculating, perhaps they weren't fake. But it still seems rather gruesome for Kelsier to demand that "his priests" kill themselves in building this secret temple, that's not like him (or not like how we remember him from Era 1). So... What if they weren't (human) priests? Some of the bodies were described as having "shattered" with the cave-in triggered by Suit. What if they were kandra, and what he saw as "shattered" were the ones wearing funky skeletons instead of ones of human bones? I've always wondered what happened to the First and non-traitorous Second Generation of kandra, and speculated on the First Generation potentially still having Spiritwebs allowing for Feruchemy if they ever regained humanity (since that's how they were originally born)... And being tired enough to want to pass on of their own choice, decided to do it this way? Plus, the Southerners evidently did have legends of divine kandra-like beings, despite them being creations of the Lord Ruler. How would that have happened? Hmmm. Is that speculating waaayyy too far? 4 - The aluminum belt around the statue of the Sovereign - Wax later checked it as having "no kind of charge", but he couldn't exactly determine that by using Steelsight or Pushing on it, yeah? In fact, being unable to Steelsee or Push on the spearhead is exactly what made him originally think it, too, was aluminum. Now that he can examine it closely he can probably see it really is composed of (or at least, plated with) aluminum and nothing else - but what if it's an unsealed aluminummind, and he just hadn't thought of that (which is why it didn't open up to work for him)? An aluminummind storing... Identity? Of Kelsier? (Maybe it's not unsealed or unkeyed but just a straight up aluminummind he'll need to get back someday!) 5 - Why create such a powerful artifact, and then abandon it? That really, really doesn't sound like Kelsier. He's very goal-oriented, and whatever his goal was in doing all these shenanigans, it's hard to imagine they wouldn't be easier to achieve with the Bands of Mourning. Was its creation part of a larger Plan, perhaps with Harmony's blessing or involvement, and doing what he did was part of the price of his returning to the Physical Realm in some way? 6 - Once you have the Bands, couldn't you simply make any number of more Bands (limited only by the ability to procure all the different metals)? Why didn't Kelsier do that, or why isn't Wax and co. looking to do that?

Yes, it would be great if Dai-gonarthis were the Void of Odium that is paired with the Passion, or The Thrill, that is (or was) Nergaoul. And since this is Roshar, where all birds are chickens, this Far Side cartoon couldn't help but come to my mind...

And I so want to see what Venli's up to now in the past year. Has she been coordinating with Dalinar at all? Is she a Radiant on Team Dalinar, or an independent operative? What happens when if or when she meets Rlain face-to-face?

Very, very well put (have an upvote for sure). And let's all realize that Dalinar at his worst was far worse of an unfeeling, stone-cold killer than Moash is now. Young Dalinar enjoyed it, needed it, felt frustrated if he wasn't able to fight, to hurt, to kill, to dominate for its own sake. And if what we (I and others who have posted) suspect is the underlying mechanism of what Renarin's vision is the case, it's not like Allomantically burning gold or malatium. Renarin's magic is likely similar to Regrowth healing, which is based on a template from the person him/herself. The filmy part of Moash that broke off and stepped into, instead of shying away from, that light, a Windrunner with a Shardspear, proud and protecting? That's a part of Moash's self-image that is still in there in him, of him. A Moash that was always in there. The part of him that was one of the first to agree with Kaladin to go back and save Dalinar's abandoned forces at the Shattered Plains, because it was right. A part that had a chance to reach forward and take Kaladin's hand in that hallway in the palace over an unconscious Elhokar, but was pushed aside as he chose to close the visor and punched Kaladin with Shardplate, and then summoned a Shardblade to finish the job. A part that was still in there afterwards, regretting and replaying that event, until he gave away that pain... That noticed and was bothered by the look of betrayal in Kaladin's eyes as he killed Elhokar in front of him... And a part that, like Amaram expressed while fighting Kaladin, can still flinch and feel that pain of regret, despite Odium. A part that, as we saw in a more mature Dalinar, and as that Dalinar said to Amaram, could still be pruned, embraced, refined, and accepted in order to grow past. Is Moash "too far gone" to ever be a Bridge Four Windrunner? To confront and to forgive himself, but not to excuse himself, from his regretted past actions? Who knows? We shall see. But is it important to the current narrative that he MAY not be too far gone? Definitely.

We know that Ruin whispered to him while he was Temporarily Ascended, "guiding him to an understanding of hemalurgy" and creating Inquisitors, koloss, and kandra (or blueprinting for their later creation - spikes not being handy just yet). Since part of creating Inquisitors meant understanding Allomancy (and How To Steal It). So, my head-canon is that Ruin also led him to understanding Compounding with his innate Feruchemy, and the Allomantic and Feruchemical use of atium (a metal that Rashek likely knew nothing at all about before). All you need to do is make yourself an Allomancer as well as Feruchemist, and you can prolong your youth indefiinitely... And you can get atium here. Well, as long as you collect atium, and an have/use increasing amount of it. Heh heh heh. Ultimately, that's what Ruin would have wanted the most, right? To make the Lord Ruler of the World someone obsessed with gathering and caching atium, for the day he eventually escaped the Well? Too bad for him Rashek didn't fall for that completely. He did obsess over collecting and caching as much of the world's atium supply as possible, but to hide it from Ruin.

I dare you to add, "NO MATING"

Oh no, you've done quite the opposite of missing something. Well done. And you'll have yet more questions soon enough, I wager. There's always another secret.

You know, that had never really even crossed my mind, but it is a very valid point. "Mayalaran" might have been partially revived during the Time of Unity at Thaylen Fields from being near the giant Perpendicularity, but only temporarily - the way that Taln was restored to sanity to talk to Ash, but which later passed. In which case - did that happen to other Shardbearers bonded to Shardblades at that battle? After all, Adolin has treated and felt about his Blade differently than other Shardbearers do.

Whoa, that's dark. That even her cherished happy memories of her mother, from before she "inexplicably" turned against her in a murderous rage, were ones she'd fabricated for herself. That surely would qualify as a "deeper secret" than what we've seen from her already, and follow suit in terms of her suppressing bad memories of What Really Happened in her childhood... But oh, the poor girl. :(. Say, what if Shallan isn't her father and mother's daughter? That is, what if Shallan is Lin's daughter by another woman (out of wedlock)? That would explain why he was so protective of her while her "mother" might want to kill her... And puts the "she's one of THEM!" comment in a different light. After all, what revelation of the THEM subgroup could turn a mother against her own child all of a sudden, unless she had already felt like this girl wasn't really her own child? Skybreaker Acolyte vs. Lightweaver notwithstanding? Or even by a parshwoman slave, so Shallan's actually half-listener?! NAHHHHH....

Not sure why this is in the RoW Thoughts forum... Did I miss something in the first eight chapters? Besides, doesn't Nightblood suck up Investiture when wielded (held by hand), through the conduit of the person holding him?

I was going to say "GAZ" for the first one, mostly as a joke, but your second one actually made me think for real that it. Could. Actually. Work! As well as Sja-anat and Glys' transformation. Why else would the Day of the Diagram make mention of Renarin Kholin in especial?

Hey! Just because Glys was "enlightened" by Sja-anat doesn't make him "a step below!" He can still form a Nahel Bond, can't he?

Ohh, the "Voidbinding chart". I forgot all about that. Khriss says that it is a "cousin to the Old Magic" which is of Cultivation, is it not?

There's also the fact that the bright white light going on at the time was described as warming. Like Dalinar's seen/felt a few times in his life, that even the Stormfather didn't see. That many readers associate with Cultivation doing some... Cultivating. And the fact that Renarin didn't seem to notice it as something he was doing, or anything unusual. So either he has been doing this for a while now, or even more incredibly, it's something he does unconsciously? Or that only others can see, the opposite of his future visions? Until we find out more in later chapters, I'm not sure which of those possibilities blows my mind more.

I like this take, it is hot

Yes, but that was while directly healing Adolin - the first time, in fact, while hugging him. I don't think Renarin was healing Moash, or touching him - and it wasn't just Moash who saw his "perfected" self, and the warm white light (that Moash shielded his eyes against), but Kaladin as well. Remarkably, Renarin himself didn't seem to act like anything extraordinary had happened. Maybe we'll find of why in the next few chapters. Could it be that he... Didn't... Even... Know? Oh, totally agree it was very Truthwatcher-y. But as for it possibly being (as I suspect) a Renarin-specific version of it, due to Glys' "special touch", we had mention already that other Truthwatchers "of the standard type" could do illusions like Shallan could, right? But not Renarin. No, maybe he does that ball of light trick... And this. And I wonder if Renarin's apparent obliviousness to its effect was part of it, or just Renarin being Renarin?

As well as Jezrien-as-Ahu suggesting it as the first reason for Dalinar to be seeking solace with him in alcohol in one of the Oathbringer flashbacks. "I like the pain in your eyes. Friendly pain. Companionable pain. ... Which one got to you, little child? The Black Fisher? The Spawning Mother, the Faceless?"

It surely was. Now the question is .... Did he do it on purpose, or even know what it is he did, with the Moash-as-Windrunner shadow and all? (And why didn't he stop Moash pushing past?) In a word: yes. https://coppermind.net/wiki/Roshar#Wines They don't ferment grapes for wine except in Shinvar, because grapes don't grow on Roshar except in Shinovar. Instead, they are fermenting and distilling lavis and other rockbud based "grains" to alcohols of different strengths.

Wow, you moved me, man. Plus, I think you're right. Moash says, "The sole victory left to us is to choose to end it. I found my way. There is one open to you." His (Moash's) way to end his suffering (of feelings of guilt) was to surrender to Odium; but he doesn't say or imply that that is the way he is suggesting for Kaladin (to end his feelings of failure). No, I think you're right on second reading, he's urging Kaladin to finish what he almost started back at the honor chasm. What a cremstain.