robardin

One way it counts as "Preservation" is based on the fact that mistwraiths are functionally immortal. (I assume they are, just like kandra are, being as they're physically the same, the Blessings functioning as cognitive unblockers). And you can't get more "Preservation" than that.

I don't know that he made kandra "often" - once every 100 years, wasn't it? That's why the 11th generation were "babies" TenSoon returned to the Homeland in The Hero of Ages. Mistwraiths were not created from humans via hemalurgy, though; mistwraiths were originally created by the Ascendant Rashek with the power of Preservation, as he transformed all living Feruchemists. I've wondered how he was able to do this, as it seems to be "Ruining" them, and he wasn't able to destroy Kwaan when he refused his offer of immortal kandra-ness like his friends accepted, because it was opposite to the intent of the power - though a WoB states he could have "turned him into a mistwraith anyway", his failed attempt to destroy him left Kwaan as a human, forcing him to hunt him down and kill him the old fashioned away after he de-Ascended. The hemalurgic "Blessings" restore the missing Connection "blockage" that keep mistwraiths insensate, which is similar to the blockage that kept parshmen in a zombie-like state for generations in Stormlight Archive. (And like those zombie parshmen, mistwraiths were a true-breeding species.) One Blessing gives sentience, and the second one gives one of the four Blessings. (Though in rare cases, a kandra could "stack" another Blessing from another kandra, as TenSoon did with OreSeur's.) I think the kandra Blessings must need to be created with special Intent to "awaken" a mistwraith, as normally the key to hemalurgy is the knowledge of where to place the spikes at bind points on the target, and what "bind points" are there on a blobby mistwraith? It can't be that any old invested metal counts for hemalurgy, and it can't even be that any old hemalurgic spike could count as a Blessing, otherwise the kandra could re-use old Inquisitor spikes (which they must have a number of) to create new kandra. That is, if mistwraiths survived the Catacendre. (Though I guess if mistwraiths "bred true" that means so would kandra, except their offspring would be mindless mistwraiths without additional Blessings, which probably seems pretty horrible to them.)

Brandon is contrarian, though. When you think zig, he's gonna zag. So I'm gonna go with the opposite: not only will it end up being clear who started the war, but it's going to be like one person who machinated it all!

Actually, why should the symbols that nobody recognized, Northerner or Southerner, mean anything at all? Perhaps the whole "you have to press the right three symbols, or it will lock and reset only after ten years" legend was a complete blind. I mean, the entire complex of the temple, the series of traps within it leading to a broken case with an empty pedestal, the secret second pedestal underneath it with metal armbands that were empty of any Investiture, was one giant act of misdirection from where the Bands really were kept - right out in front, as the spearhead on the statue of the Sovereign. After all, as we saw in Secret History, Kelsier was proud of being able to make people "pick the card I wanted them to pick," and his motto is "there is always another secret." I suspect the "aluminum belt" that was on the statue with the Bands-as-spearhead is more than it seems. Wax already initially mistook the spearhead as being aluminum, based on its being invisible to his Steelsight, when in fact it was simply extraordinarily Invested. Afterward, he examined the belt more closely, and concluded it really was made of aluminum... but it could still be Invested aluminum, a metalmind storing Identity. The "false Bands" that were arm bracers on a pedestal underneath the temple were still venerated enough for people to have died constructing a trap ceiling for, as their last living act. They were later described as "two silvery bracers, each as long as a forearm" when Edwarn shows them to Telsin. They weren't nicrosilminds granting Feruchemical or Allomantic powers, as the Bands were supposed to be, but that doesn't mean they're nothing. I can't really see Kelsier letting faithful followers commit an act of communal self-destruction just to make a ruse. What if they really were atiumminds, like the bracers the Lord Ruler had actually worn? Or even more interesting, if they were indeed "bands" of all powers like the spearhead, but instead of being unsealed, they are keyed to an identity - the identity that is stored in the aluminum belt, which is unkeyed. So one needs to be a Soulbearer Ferring to tap the belt, or to have a medallion granting F-aluminum, which then gives you the proper Identity to then use the "false" Bands, with whatever it is that they have got in them.

Colors, you beat me to it, I was going to mention the Lifeless Squirrel in the Court of Gods in Hallendren. First, let me set the record straight: leaving aside human cuteness, nothing can be cute that is native to Roshar. Nothing. Except maybe Ryshadium foals, which we haven't seen. To paraphrase Wit/Hoid, who would know, most of the fauna on that world can be best described as "a piece of wet slime" or "a disgusting crab thing with seventeen legs." I don't care if it's tiny and eats Investiture, I am still going to shriek like a little girl if it scurried out from behind a bookshelf all of a sudden. Second, I would like to remind you all that cats exist on Scadrial, and did so even in the World of Ash that was the Final Empire. Therefore, kittens exist on Scadrial, as do plush "Soonie Pups" in Era 2. So the odds are very good that the Cutest Thing in the Cosmere is on Scadrial. A little kitten asleep while curled up against a Soonie Pup. Or, pouncing on one, that then flips over and pins it to the ground.

He may call himself "Passion" and walk around with a golden scepter, but when One Who Ought To Know like Frost calls him "God's divine hatred", I always picture him like this:

Interesting, I hadn't given this much thought in the past, but this thread made me go back and re-read that part. It is a three key sequence, so VIN or DOX would fit if it was a simple letter cypher. "Apparently these symbols spell out something the Lord Ruler would have understood." Well, The Sovereign, anyway, who we now know was Kelsier. So, what three key sequence would be meaningful to him, that he could also pass down through his priests? We're told the door is made of stone, as the walls were, with circles carved into it, and symbols inlaid in silver inside of the circles. The symbols are not recognized by Wax as any script familiar to him, nor does Allik. We aren't told how many circles there are, or what pattern they're in, or if any of them repeat. The entire place was presumably built by the priests of the Sovereign, and the passcode sequence, as correctly remembered by Edwarn, was passed down from the lips of a dying priest, to a "doomed Hunter", to Allik's ship's captain when drunk, and then to him. Allik and his captain may or may not know the Hunters' language or script, but Edwarn certainly does not. So I doubt it's an alphabetic cypher to spell out a 3-letter name. What three symbol thing would be meaningful to Kelsier, yet communicable not just to his priests but three times removed, passed through a tavern story, forced out by torture, and Connection medallion based translation? The only symbol described is the second one, when Edwarn tells Wax, while pointing, "the one with the triangular shape." The first and third buttons he only indicates by pointing, and we as readers are not privy to even a similarly vague description of the indicated symbols. That simple description suggests that shape was important to the mnemonic description, perhaps the only one. If there were lots of triangles in the door, how easily would that information have been accurately passed "from the lips of a dying priest" to a Hunter with drunkenly loose lips and then to an airship captain forced to reveal it under torture, when she'd probably still try to give as little detail as possible? The description would have to have been something like, "and then the triangle shaped one in the upper right", and that is harder to remember. And yet, they can't be simple geometric shapes - square, circle, triangle, etc. - like they use for testing pre-literate children IRL, or Wax wouldn't think of them as "symbols". He'd call them "shapes". As for the idea that they could be Aons, I looked at the list of them on the Coppermind, and none of them are what I would describe as "the one with the triangular shape." They're all too complex to describe in terms of a simple shape, but none of them are at all triangular in layout (some are as close as being "diamond shaped", but more than one).

I suppose it's possible, but it could also simply be that Pattern was confused as usual about sarcasm/exaggeration from Shallan, and was going to object that Paloma was the opposite of divine (a normal mortal). The only thing unusual about her (which may be somewhat noteworthy itself, I suppose) is that she's the Herdazian non-wife consort of an Alethi Highprince,

I have imagined the potential for hemalurgically combining four chasmfiends into a kolossfiend (or would that be a chasmoloss?). Brr.

I like this statement; it would explain why a thousand years of hemalurgical research by TLR never succeeded in making any new hemalurgic constructs than those he saw how to make while Ascended.

If I were an Epic... I would have one long staircase just going up, and one even longer coming down; and one more leading nowhere, just for show!

#1 - The chasmfiend Kaladin killed with the Patternblade in WoR having "cloudy eyes". This is the only one that is really a potential gotcha to me. For all that she's an "unreliable narrator", that generally applies to things about herself, or something she wishes to lie even to herself about. When it comes to observing things and people around her, she's razor sharp. I would say it might be a clue about chasmfiends being special somehow, but as you pointed out, one that was killed in TWoK was described as having its eyes "burn out" like anything else living. Maybe she was studying the "spren rising from it like smoke" so closely, they were so dense as to form a "cloud" around the eye sockets (like they were streaming out of them)? That feels like a reach, though. Otherwise, either there's something special about this one chasmfiend, or maybe something special about this one's particular mode of death: having "death throes" is also a bit unusual for a Shardblade wound to the brain, you'd think death was instantaneous. The chasmfiend Elhokar killed with a Shardblade didn't thrash, as well as having its eyes burn out. So maybe, somehow, Kaladin's stab through the roof of its mouth into its brain with a Shardblade wasn't actually what killed it - like he Blade-severed some motor control region of its brain, causing it to thrash, and some part of its thrashing against the walls of the chasm proved to be the fatal blow? Going back to the end of TWoK Ch. 13, Elhokar Blade-stabs the chasmfield in the neck, causing its eyes to burn; then stabs it in the chest, which now got cut normally, it being dead. So maybe the head of a chasmfiend isn't where it keeps extremely vital parts, for Blade-severing reasons. Or, it was just an error. It happens. #2 - Dalinar thinking Kaladin "likely ran out of infused rubies" as a reason for spanreed silence. This is from Dalinar's POV, it isn't Navani saying that out loud, she has only shaken her head no to indicate that she'd not received any message yet from Kaladin. Dalinar is not familiar with personally using a spanreed, much less an understanding of its creation and functioning like Navani would have. He only knows "infused rubies" are involved, that's all, and is assuming that Kaladin simply had more urgent uses for infused rubies (consuming their Stormlight to fly). #3 - Rlain doesn't see Lopen's spren. This may well have been the first time Lopen himself ever saw Nua, and he went pretty far away from Rlain to investigate, to be "on the other side of the plateau". Maybe even at that distance Rlain would have seen a flying spren, like Syl did in initially acting like a windspren, but for whatever reason, Nua chose to appear while hiding under rocks. Not very strange, then, that Rlain wouldn't see that from across the plateau. #4 - Dalinar's "old general's trick" to flick a spanreed without words, where spanreeds were only invented since Gavilar's assassination. Well, at this point of his life, Dalinar is an old general, and for all we know, he invented the trick :). That, or some other general a generation older than him thought of it a few years back. Once again it was from his POV, so perhaps Dalinar thinks of it as "Old General Tsotav's Chicken Flickin' Maneuver" or something. #5 - Renarin opening the gem drawers with Stormlight. I figured this was a kind of fabrial in action, the act of pumping in Stormlight is what fueled or trigger-operated the drawers. His Truthwatcher nature (possibly his prescience flavored version) is what gave him the insight to do that.

So, I think we all suspect that the "undoing what Rashek did" thing left out the Southerners at least partly because what happened to change them from Classical humanity had not been done with the power of Preservation. But you're right about how incredibly inhospitable Scadrial was described as being once the mists and ashfalls were removed from play at the endgame at the Pits of Hathsin. The searing heat was described as happening "as the sun rose into the sky" after Marsh killed Elend, and then Vin destroyed Ruin along with herself. So did all that happen "overnight" - the deadly heat was due to Vin Ascending, stopping up the ashmounts, and withdrawing (absorbing) the mists? When did the ashmounts stop again? When Vin looked at how Rashek had used the power, Earlier, Ruin was described as having increased the output of the ashmounts; if he'd really been after the destruction of life on Scadrial, shouldn't he have stopped them up instead? (I know, he was leaving Vin and co. in play to find the atium for him that he couldn't do directly on his own.) When Elend arrives to Luthadel to see Kredik Shaw "exploded" from Vin's Ascension, he notes that the planet lurches, and the afternoon sun suddenly drops below the horizon. The next time the sun rises, is when things are blazing hot. So what happened in the South while all this was happening? If they were lucky, it was "winter" for them while it was "summer" for the Northern Hemsiphere? That's assuming Scadrial has or had a significant axial tilt like Earth's that causes the seasons to alternate between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In which case, the real "hot spot" on the planet that would have been in the most trouble would have been not the other hemisphere, but the far side of the same hemisphere: when Luthadel and the Pits of Hathsin suddenly lurched from afternoon to nighttime, then started burning as the sun reached midday the next day after Vin absorbed the mists and plugged the ashmounts, the worst off area would have been the part of the Northern hemisphere that got pulled from nighttime to around 8am from her "planet lurching", and had already spent half a day baking in the unshielded sun.

Right. When Rashek changed the northern hemisphere to rely on ashmounts for cooling, he also altered human physiology - but left the Southern hemisphere unchanged, including the people, who then evolved to deal with at the hotter climate. When Harmony "undid Rashek's alterations" immediately upon Ascension, that reckoning would not have included those in the South. The fact that they had naturally adapted in ways that would have a reversely bad effect on them when he restored Scadrial to its Classical orbit may not have occurred to him until later, when his intent as Harmony would make it much harder to make sweeping changes. What he could do was to send some agents. Which perhaps he did.

You are in the running for among the best user names on this site in my book... I can't even say which would be more awesome, if Sandy Branderson were your real name, or if you just thought of that as a board name to use here

My head canon is that the earring spike Harmony originally passed along to Wax is for A-pewter, and then fueled that Allomantic power with the mists (like Preser-Vin-tion did for Elend outside the Pits of Hathsin). But only lightly, so that Wax never got the surprising realization/sensation of burning a new metal reserve the way Spook did when he was "blessed" with pewter by Ruin in Urteau. Whether that's because the spike is a fragment of the original spike, or because Harmony simply used a light touch (as is his M.O.), is unknown.

Any defeat of TLR in single combat would have to involve a combination of him being overconfident, and getting surprised by something quickly fatal to him before he has the time to tap a zincmind (to figure out what's going on) and a steelmind (to get away from the threat). Basically, what Vin did: he never expected her to draw on the mists to power up her Allomancy to his level, which was the only way she could have Pulled his atiummind bracers off of him, and that was the very first thing she did with the power boost. I suppose TLR also had his steelmind in the same bracers as his atiummind, too? He'd already exhibited Steelrunner speed early in his beatdown of Vin, and otherwise there's no reason he wouldn't have been able to all but empty his steelmind in one huge, sonic boom making tap to get to them before they flew out the window. (Unless tapping a steelmind would also have sped up his body's "snapping back" to his normal age? Hmm.) Anyway, to surprise TLR with Nightblood you'd have to disguise its nature somehow, which is pretty tough, given what happens as soon as it is drawn. I don't think Rashek would kill himself with Nightblood, partly because he doesn't see himself as "evil", but also because he could flare A-copper to shield himself. I think offensive Soulcasting at a level we saw Jasnah doing it during the time of Perpendicularity at Thaylen Fields would be hard for anybody to deal with. Rashek would have too much Investiture in himself for straight Soulcasting to work directly on him (like turning him into smoke or crystal), but if it's true that aluminum can be Soulcast, then creating a thick aluminum bodysuit around him could be annoying: he wouldn't be able to use Allomancy to Steelpush it off of him, he'd have to tap a pewtermind to burst out of it Hulk-style or something. So maybe, surprise him with a Soulcast-from-air aluminum bodysuit as move #1, and be ready to draw and stab him with Nightblood as quickly as possible as move #2?

You mean, why is Azure's blade sentient enough to have opinions on someone who picks it up, reminiscent of Nightblood but without the Investiture draining? I think it's fundamentally a part of Awakening a Type IV BioChromatic Entity, "sentient objects made by Awakening inorganic materials like metal and stone." Half dead, or half alive? Contrast her sword and Nightblood with Kalad's Phantoms, which needed organic materials (bones) to anchor them and are modeled in the form of a living person (being statues), and thus are a kind of hybrid between a Type II Entity (Lifeless) and a Type III Entity (an Awakened organic host that was never alive, e.g., a cloak or a rope). Awakening a completely steel sword, with no organic component and not in the form of anything living, requires so much Breath that putting that much Investiture into it automatically comes with a level of sentience - a "sprenification", if you will. A Rosharan sentient spren is a being composed of Investiture centered around an abstract concept. that gives shape to how it thinks and acts. On the other hand, the driving concept in the investiture-come-to-sentience that is an Awakened Type IV entity is its Command. And we don't yet know what Azure's sword was given as its Command. To the honorspren that examined it, instead of being a "dead remnant" of a pre-existing spren that has had its driving concept ripped to shreds (the oath that was made and a bond that was formed to a living host, and then severed), while leaving it able to manifest in the physical form of a Shardblade, Azure's sword is coming from the other direction: something that was originally "dead" and wholly of the Physical Realm and essentially no Investiture, that had no driving concept but was given one along with sentience-level Investiture.

Actually, this reminds me - I wondered about that epllogue reveal of Epic Mizzy, because I thought that Epics were created by Calamity, who has "left the building". So what is the mechanism for new Epics to get created, if Calamity is not around? Does that mean Mizzy was among the last ones Calamity created, or is there some kind of Calamity's Heir who confers Epicness? Is the whole "confront your fear/nightmares" thing gone, without Calamity? I guess that's all RAFO stuff, isn't it? (Any WoBs about it?)

Since you TMI side-eyed the annotations specifically, I assumed you meant the bit explaining Jewels' prior and ongoing relationship with Arsteel/Clod.

They Hoid it through the grapevine. (haha, only serious: this is a real fan theory...)

Indeed, it's mentioned somewhere that after a certain point the Compounding is like a runaway train you can't stop. (Though I think that was a character POV like from Wax, and not a dictum from Harmony, so it could be wrong.) I think it would be similar to the effects of A-tin savantism that Spook showed in Urteau, when extinguishing his metal made him completely numb. Someone accustomed to constantly tapping an infinite steelmind for physical speed, or an infinite zincmind for mental speed, might just "seize up" if they stopped or lost access to their metalmind.

Actually, I think it's a fair question to which we don't have a sure answer yet. We have WoBs that Rashek left the Southern Continent free from his twiddling of mankind, as a "control group". But the night mists on Scadrial were always something of Preservation, not something Rashek constructed, and predated him - so it's fair to assume they would be everywhere on the planet, not just the North (not counting ordinary weather related mist), especially the kind that appeared after the Well was released and the mistsnapping began. There wouldn't have been lerasium-descended power levels of "Natural Born Allomancers" in the South as there were in the North, and certainly no Mistborn or Feruchemists (Terrisfolk), but I would think Natural Born Mistings would be just as rare (but still possible) in the Scadrian population as it was before Rashek's Ascension, which we also have WoBs indicating that was the case. So why wouldn't "mistsnapped" Mistings have been created (those who survived it) in 16% of the non-Allomancer population in the South when the Well got filled, as happened in the North? However, we don't have confirmation that the mists did, in fact, exist in the Southern Hemisphere during the time of the Final Empire, do we? That's an assumption based on the mists and their snapping effect when the Well got full existing in Classical Scadrial (per Alendi's logbook), and also assuming that whatever was caused by Preservation and Ruin to happen as "global effects" in the North would also have happened in the South. It's also possible that the Northern Hemisphere was in fact "special" even without Rashek's changes, because that's where both the Well and the Pits were (the Perpendicularities for the two Shards).

Presumably, any indirect Shard-to-mortal communication (or whatever Hoid qualifies as - though Endowment dismisses him as "merely a man", that's not exactly true...) would be replied to in the same way as it was received. So Frost's reply, plus the three Shardic replies, may offer some insight into the medium of delivery. Endowment: "I received your communication, of course. I noticed its arrival immediately, just as I noticed your many intrusions into my land." Autonomy: "... You have spoken to one who cannot respond. We, instead, will take your communication to us - though we know not how you located us upon this world." Harmony: "Your letter is most intriguing, even revalatory. .. I can be surprised. I can perhaps even be naive, I think. ... If you would speak to me further, I request open honesty. Return to my lands, approach my servants, and I will see what I can do for your quest." And Frost's reply includes: "I'll address this letter to my "old friend," ... Now, look what you've made me say." (While Frost is not a Shard, it seems reasonable that Hoid may have used a similar means of cross-world communication with him.) What might this tell us? Frost and Harmony refer to sending or receiving a "letter", while Endowment and Autonomy refer to a "communication", and Autonomy specifies it as a "spoken" one (the reply could easily have been, "you have written to one who cannot respond"). "Letter" technically implies a written communication, but it doesn't have to be, and Hoid's own letter to Frost called itself a "missive". Harmony replies, "if you would speak to me further", not "if you would write to me further", or "if we were to continue our correspondence". Frost uses a very colloquial offhand remark after insulting Hoid, "Now, look what you've made me say", which seems very oral to me, being a little bit too stream-of-consciousness to be something one would write on a piece of paper. Not entirely impossible, but it is suggestive. Suggestive of what? Of some kind of dictation or recording based communication, rather than an actual written-on-a-page type of letter. There is a formal composition and preparation of thoughts, to put into a single transmission (it's not like an "instant text message" type of back-and-forth reply), but still has room for ad-hoc or last minute interjections and musings, like Harmony's very Sazed-style "humble-hedging" comment, "I can be surprised. I can perhaps even be naive, I think." Someone writing a letter and editing it before sending it would almost certainly not put the redundantly hedging type words "perhaps" and "I think" there, it's a kind of verbal tic. Furthermore, Endowment implies noticing the agent's "arrival" in the same way that she notices Hoid "intruding" into Nalthis - meaning it worldhopped in via the same path that Hoid himself has been using, and Harmony demands "open honesty" in a direct discussion with Hoid, implying this first communication was via a go-between. So my wild, wild theory: the letters are a kind of Lightweaving type magic that can be tied to a living or maybe Cognitive Realm based agent, which upon receipt can do a "help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope" type of playback, and perhaps includes a of mechanism for taking back a reply in the same way (like a SASE of old).

"I'd buy that for a clearchip!" The only thing I'd object to is that Shardblades in particular hold such a special place in Vorinist society... Would you really "outrank most of Alethkar" and gain landholding status of the fourth dahn for having a twinkly sword that isn't oversized, can't be dismissed and summoned, doesn't burn out eyes, and feels heavier than it should instead of lighter? But then again, Nightblood and Azure's sword would probably be the first things on Roshar to "feel like it's a Shardblade, except for all the inconsistent bits that make it seem wrong"... Like... Ever. And as you say, they have a clear penchant for stretching the lexical umbrella.