robardin

I think the example of Rhys is more a difference between an external application of the Surge of Regrowth, and the internal application of Stormlight healing. Bisig and Hobber from Bridge Four survived Szeth's attack on Dalinar in the hallway of the "palace" at the warcamps, but with Shardblade wounds that left them with useless limbs and legs. Renarin wasn't able to heal them either - it's mentioned that he tried to do so - but once they squired up to the point of drawing in Stormlight, they healed themselves. Renarin and "the Stump" are able to heal injuries they don't understand or know about in detail, so I don't think it's that they're healing someone else based on their own image of what they should be; it must be that Regrowth and Stormlight healing works much better when it's activated by someone for who it's own Spiritual image. And we see that Renarin is able to use Regrowth, especially when supercharged with Stormlight at Thaylen Fields, to be able to cut with his Blade while actively being smushed by a Thunderclast. So it's way more powerful when he uses it on himself than when he heals another person. That said, one morbid thing I've been wondering is, how much of a severed body part could be regenerated with Stormlight? I was reading an account of survival cannibalism (the airplane crash in the Andes with the soccer team on it from the 1970s), and I started to wonder how many calories were in a human body part, and if Lift could have a net gain of Investiture by cutting a fleshy chunk of herself, eating it, and healing it. (I really, really wish I hadn't thought of that, but there you are, and now it's in your head too.) Or on a less morbid note, what if a KR lost 1/3 of their body three times, regenerating from it each time, then Vasher or Vivenna stitched up the three parts and made a Lifeless out of it (only requires a single Breath!). Wouldn't that be like a really effective Doppelganger body double? Even better than Shallan's "ghost army" of Lightweaving - rush Moash with a dozen Kaladin Lifeless "clones" each wielding a large Sylspear lookalike, only one of which is the REAL Kaladin. (I guess the real Sylspear would be glowing in a telltale way, maybe use Lightweaving to duplicate that bit.)

"The arms race that follows will challenge the very core of the Radiant ideals" sounds like a weapon will be (re)discovered or developed that leads to a conflict of conscience with the Immortal Words. Navani is deeply interested in developing new fabrials, which as Taravangian explained to Dalinar in Oathbringer (Ch. 100) regarding the "half-Shard" fabrials that could block Shardblades, And of course, this tidbit of info is what leads Dalinar to capture Nergoul, The Thrill, in the King's Drop at Thaylen Fields. And now what? ... Is it possible that Navani will figure out a way to weaponize that Unmade spren captured in the King's Drop? Because while heatrials "enslave" flamespren, Taravangian implies that the half-Shards are made with sentient spren that could form a Nahel Bond - so, more than simply a gravityspren or a bindspren of the kind that Kaladin manipulates to do Lashings. An Unmade would be like that, leveled up. And evidently a fabrial is made AFTER a spren is captured in a gem, not at the moment of capturing. Would such a weapon be in conflict with the Immortal Words?

You mean the avatars are... Autonomous?

They could be carried, by a windspren. It could grip it by the hilt!

I would agree with all these points, though I would hasten to add, it's not like I didn't enjoy reading Starsight. I did like the way it portrayed the multi-species interaction, and the way the Superiority's patronizing philosophy was basically policing thoughtcrime. At least it turned out that Vapor, the "figment", had cottoned to Spensa's true nature early on, as befits the fact that the advanced hologram tech she was using to disguise herself with was of figment origin. And Winzik the varvax using a willing human cytonic in Brade to make a power play over Cuna and the dione-controlled Superiority was an interesting turn at the end. Especially when I went back and finally read Defending Elysium. And the Doomslug-is-a-cytonic-hyperdrive reveal had been pretty clearly telegraphed even back in Skyward. All in all, it felt more like Skyward could be a self-contained novel after which you could sit back and imagine lots of things where things would go next, while Starsight was very much a bridge novel to a bigger conclusion. Most of Sanderson's works have endeavored to make each book satisfying on its own; this one was less so in that regard than most. I wonder if I'd have felt the same way had I read The Well of Ascension as it came out, instead of reading the entire Mistborn Era 1 trilogy in one pass?

The fan consensus (I don't think there's an explicit "WoB" about it) seems to be that: Brandon changed his mind at some point about TLR having hemalurgic spikes or not. At one point he had said he did; now, he says not, the metalmind "piercings" were just that, not hemalurgic in nature. He has wiggle room in the published text, anyway, so he's just twiddling his own side comments. He's also flip-flopped on why TLR was super-strong in Allomancy He didn't ingest a lerasium bead or use hemalurgy (he'd said or hinted at both at one time or another); he modified his own Spiritweb while Ascended Since strength in Allomancy is a function of one's spiritual Connection to Preservation, this makes sense Even without hemalurgic spikes, Ruin would be able to communicate with TLR directly due to his having Ascended and thus "stretched his spirit" If you read Mistborn: Secret History, you'll learn more about who Ruin/Preservation can talk to and why, and that Ascension has aftereffects on a spirit even after de-Ascending

Besides which, why would you want to stamp a single molecule instead of the entire object? And even if you could, depending on what you were trying to achieve, it'd actually make it less plausible to end up the object you wanted by changing a property that fundamental, instead of the backstory. For example, it'd probably be much easier to Forge an iron fireplace poker into a steel sword than by rewriting its history to make that the smith's goal in the first place, than to Forge it at a molecular level to turn iron into steel, trying to get a stainless steel fireplace poker. Instead of "the apprentice sat there making a bunch simple iron pokers, one per iron ingot, from a pile in front of him", now the story goes "...but then the master smith ran in, grabbed the ingot from the top of the apprentice's pile, and tossed it into the furnace with some coal to immediately start making that steel sword Lord Whatsisface had commissioned for the ceremony tommorrow morning, that he'd completely forgotten about. Days and Nights!". But who would bother to want to make a stainless steel fireplace poker in smithy days? You'd have to come up with something much less plausible and further from the object's actual history. Even if you managed it, the stamp wouldn't "stick" very well.

Tcha. Did you think a cultured and refined man like Mraize would walk about his home barefoot?

This is the crux of it, really. Ultimately, to call him "a good man" boils down to not only that Rashek managed to stonewall Ruin for a thousand years, a difficult feat, but that he bothered to try to do so at all, as the only reason to do that would be to hedge against the scenario where Ruin managed to kill him before the Well refilled for him to renew the prison, and not having any way to know what he was doing would work. But he did it anyway. Rashek could easily have done all the same brutal social engineering he did while intending to repeat the cycles of renewal only so long as he was on top as a god-ruler, with no plan for a scenario where he did not rule. "I am the Final Sliver of Preservation; if I fall, so falls the world to Ruin." Instead, he made defeating or resisting Ruin the focus of his nigh-immortal existence. All the power trappings of his "Final Empire" were done to create and to maintain a stable society according to his domineering, cruel, and resentful nature. To make a hierarchy of dominance, with himself at the pinnacle, created and enforced with Allomantic (and hemalurgic) brutality. But in the end, he still remained faithful to the primary tenet of the Terris religion: Preservation vs. Ruin. We are of Preservation. SURVIVE! Another person, especially a non-Terris person, who temporarily Ascended at the Well may well have been kinder and gentler than Rashek with the social engineering, but likely would not have had the focus and the will to hide 90% of the atium in the world so well over a thousand year period, or thought to create Ruin-hidden shelters stocked with supplies. And that's what actually allowed humanity to survive long enough for Sazed to remake the world anew. You don't know what it is I do for mankind, he said while dying. And at the end, Vin realized: And we didn't. Thank you.

Storms, i was hoping for The Music of the Knight

Well Brandon says he should “stand out more” on Roshar, but it’s not like he’s a kandra or a Returned who’s modifying his body. Dalinar’s POV description of him in Ch. 114 of Oathbringer goes: I think it’s his natural use of Alethi that stands out as unusually local. Other than Hoid, most other confirmed worldhoppers have vocabulary tics that strike locals as odd that give them away even if their appearance doesn’t particularly stand out (Vasher, Vivenna, the trio at the Purelake), and even Hoid will slip sometimes and mention bunnies on Roshar or something. Felt only cryptically comments on how he’s more foreign to the Nightwatcher than Dalinar is.

Two comments, I guess: 1) As a matter of fact, in the reworked ending (the only one I've ever read, as it's both my hardbound and Kindle version of WoR), Kaladin changes Syl from a spear into a sword to draw Szeth out of his attack pattern. (I'd be curious to read the "original" if it's available anywhere, though... Is it?) 2) I kind of believe Kaladin's personality would find it hard to kill, more or less in cold blood, someone who's admitted to having murdered while "only following orders" under conditions he evidently now realizes were false. ("It is true. The Knights Radiant have returned. I was never Truthless... My orders... I could have stopped the murders at any time...") and then raised his blade to surrender to a mortal blow. The specific phrase "pity, perhaps?" line echoed just a bit too much of Bilbo Baggins v. Gollum to me, though no doubt that was an intentional reference by Brandon. But yeah, if he'd decided he wouldn't be the agent of dealing death to Szeth, how come he didn't save his life? I guess that comes down to Syl being so very insistent that "that Blade" not be lost. And from the way Szeth was falling, with all the Light having left him, perhaps it appeared he was already dead?

So really it's question of which comes first: the metal spike taking on the hemalurgical charge (and thereby stealing whatever it was stealing from the Mistborn - perhaps the very ability to burn the metal the spike is made of?!), or the Allomancer's ability to burn metals "inside" their body, right? Maybe the timing would have to be so very precise and immediate that it would only be possible to pull off the stunt while (already) burning atium, which is Ruin's body, to counter Ruin's power in hemalurgy. Ha! How do you like that! I Ruined your hemalurgy! Ah, rusts.

Actually very possible! Every SA novel title so far has been the name of an in-world work as well. "Stones Unhallowed" being the working title of Szeth's book sounds like it could be the Shin holy writ, and whatever name will be used for Eshonai/Venli's book will likely be the name of a song of the Listeners...

So if Bondsmiths can "boost" another Radiant's Surgebinding, and since there can be up to three Bondsmiths at a time, would two Bondsmiths working together achieve a kind of duralumin-level Surgeboost?

You got me good. And hey. Combine this with the other theory about the End of Roshar, and maybe Ash literally falls from the sky in Era 3!

Oh, why did you use that word? Now I have Jim Morrison's voice in my head on loop, intoning: When I was back in seminary school, there was a wanderer who put forth the proposition that you can petitition the Shards with letters. Petition the Shards. with letters. Petition the Shards, with letters. .... YOU CANNOT PETITION THE SHARDS, WITH LETTERS!!! Can you give me sanctuary, I must find a place to hide, a place for me to hide Can you find me soft asylum, I can't make it any more The Man is at the door.

With all the WoBs about Felt, I'd pay close attention to what he says/does and think about what is going on off-screen in his head or in his life.

I'm rooting for a little of both. That he heals away the slave brands, ... but retains the "shash".

The right kind of thermal body suit could convert that heat into electrical power. With the right tech, you could be like Iron Man without a reactor in your chest!

I didn't quite see the betrays and twists coming a mile away (I was somewhat surprised by the Denth twist, figured Bluefingers was up to something, but did suspect the priests of the Court of Gods of being a mastermindy cadre of power-behind-the-throne guys right up to the end). And the blithe naivete of Siri and Vivenna (the latter of who thought she was so very capable at first) was irritating, but they both grew out of it. But yeah. Lightsong's priest Llarimar being revealed as his brother in life, and his account of the day he died and Returned before his eyes, really hit me in a memorable way. Plus, the Lifeless squirrel given the Command to "Make noise, run around, bite people who are not me" was a winner. Indeed, a few moments later he heard cries coming from the doorway. Clangs and screams followed. Lifeless could be difficult to stop, particularly a fresh one with orders to bite.

Probably, like if the "master steel pusher" is using or fully dependent on steelsight for vision, like a Steel Inquisitor would be Where Vin once blinded them by throwing pewter dust in the air between them in Kredik Shaw I always wondered why they didn't use that trick more often when fighting post-Ruin super-Inquisitors like Marsh

I once speculated that in Era 3, a double-brass Twinborn could wear a kind of "dynamo suit" to convert excess body heat into thermoelectrical energy. And then maybe that infinite electricity could power the suit to do crazy power stuff, like Iron Man. Except that Iron Man would be kind of vulnerable to Allomancy, and Aluminum Man would be kind of fragile.

I didn't mean to suggest that, actually. In fact, I think that question has been directly put to Brandon, and he replied that Nightblood was never more than an ordinary steel sword before being Awakened by Shashara (a casual search was unable to find it near the top in the WoB Arcanum, but maybe I'll search with more keywords later). Awakening, in general, does not consume the Breath/Investiture over time the way Stormlight infused effects do (Lashings, Lightweavings, etc.). A rope Awakened at the cost of 20 Breaths does not eventually wind down and use up the Breath, the Awakener can retrieve all 20 Breath from it no matter how much activity the rope has done while Awakened. The only exceptions are creations where the Breaths "stick" in the Awakened target, like a Lifeless, and even then, a Lifeless never needs more Breath to keep on going whether it exists for a day or for a century, just maintenance of its physical body. I then observed that a Returned person is kind of like a Lifeless, a dead body reanimated, but one directly created by Endowment instead of by a mortal using Endowment's Investiture (Breath), and with a Spiritual/Cognitive tie restored from the original occupant of the body. And that for some reason, unlike Awakening in general, that Returned mechanism requires constant input of Investiture to continue to function. Something is consuming Investiture there, which seems unnecessary, given how other forms of Awakening don't, and in fact, how other one-shot forms of "restoring life to the newly deceased" magic in the Cosmere don't, either. And then there's Nightblood, an Awakened sword that also consumes Investiture, in a big way. I don't know if Nightblood needs to do that to continue to exist, the way a Returned does, or if it's something else (it's implied to be "something else" - and in Oathbringer, we have another strong hint that Vivenna's sword is a more properly Awakened sword that is "Investiture locked" like a normal Awakened object would be). But it is still noteworthy that they're the only two cases we've seen of an Awakened thing requiring more and more Investiture over time.

Not to mention that the Divine Breath resulting in a mega-healing if given to another person with "My life to yours, my Breath become yours" is far from the only thing it's doing or capable of doing. Aside from being enough Investiture to grant the Fifth Heightening all on its own, the Divine Breath it's constantly maintaining a link between a CR ghost and its reanimated dead body, while enforcing that person's cognitive image onto the body. And unlike a Lifeless, which is also a kind of reanimated dead body based on Endowment's Investiture, it requires continued input of more Investiture to operate - one Breath a week or its equivalent. A Lifeless never needs more Breath put into it, but a Returned does, or it's kaputsville. And it's not like magic doesn't exist to reattach a newly deceased person back into their body. Both tapping a sufficiently large goldmind, or the Surge of Regrowth, can accomplish that. I'd guess there is some purely non-Divine Breath way for an Awakener to achieve that, with the right Command. It's like a Returned is Endowment Awakening a dead human with a Command in such a way that requires a constant magical draw. The only other example of that we've seen is Nightblood. Hey?