robardin

Also probably not easy. Think about it - nobody is likely to sell you 2000 Breaths in one transaction, since that would mean the other person was him/herself of the Fifth Heightening, and giving you those Breaths would mean giving that up. For gold? Not likely! No, you'd have to go buy up 1 Breath at a time from 2000 people, and once it became clear what you were up to, those Breaths would get more and more expensive. (Plus I bet the priests from the Court of Gods would have something to say about a non-Returned being of the Fifth Heightening, that word being "no".)

So the hierarchy goes: Array, Suit, Sequence, Meld, Flush, Ffifteen-two, Fifteen-four, and His Nobs?

I think we're going to see it in flashback, maybe? Like the scene has to be in his head, but it got shuffled out of the Oathbringer deck because he was focusing on Dalinar and Shallan POVs in Urithiru at that time?

Hmm. In the non-Cosmere area, one word I find myself using for fun is hrair, the Lapine word to mean "uncountably many" for rabbits in Watership Down. (Which a footnote notes means "more than four" since rabbits can't count very high. Heh.)

I don't reach for Cosmere words for ordinary swearing, no. But I do find myself playing Words With Friends and being annoyed that words like CHULL, FABRIAL, and SKAA were not in the game's dictionary. What? But they're in MY mental dictionary!

It doesn't even have to be as form-fitting as a leotard, just any container that was lacking enough movement space to keep his arms trapped at his sides or in their current position. Imagine if her target Shardbearer were simply standing erect and unsuspecting on a street corner - and she Soulcast a crystal coffin around them. There'd be no room to summon the Blade. And for a Radiant like Kaladin who could summon a live sprenblade in a smaller form, there still wouldn't be room to physically maneuver it.

She can turn people directly into greasy smoke, fire, or crystal. And has done so, multiple times. That's terrifying. I'm sure it's harder (maybe impossible?) to Soulcast a person who's full of Investiture, i.e., if Kaladin held a lot of Stormlight. But given enough Stormlight herself, based on what we saw at Thaylen Fields, she could just turn the air around Kaladin into stone and trap him until he ran out. If it were form-fitting enough of a stone wrapping, even summoning Syl as a Blade wouldn't leave him enough room to carve his way out. Granted, the prioximity of the Spiritual and Cognitive Realms at Thaylen Fields may have enhanced her skillset in particular, but every time I re-read those parts of Oathbringer I seriously think she's the most dangerous Radiant of them all, and not just because she is likely to be the most advanced in Ideals of any on Team Dalinar. (Since Nalan is a Skybreaker of the Fifth Ideal.)

This is a SHARDOOL ... Please keep it that way "I don't get it," said Raoden. "Who put this up here? What does it mean, Dashe?" "Some guy with a shock of white hair was seen hammering this into place, cackling that this won't translate but I don't care, then he just dove in and disappeared," Dashe replied with a shrug. "I guess we ought to keep a closer watch on this place, now that we know there are some kind of comings and goings related to it?"

Also, DILAF is an anagram for FAIL'D. Sorry bro

Well, at some point Marasi might conceivably carefully flare her cadmium pulses every now and then for a bit to let Allik catch up with her in age, if things get serious. That would be kind of sweet

This would be a great name for a band. "The 5th Heightening" (spelled with a numerical digit)

True. I guess it's open to interpretation, but I picture the description of Shallan "thrusting her hands forward. Mist twisted and writhed in her hands as a brilliantly silver Blade formed there, spearing Tyn through the chest", as the Blade forming (from mist, which was external to Tyn) in an extending fashion that "speared" (poked into and through) Tyn, not forming ex nihilo inside of her body. Maybe like a lightsaber coming out from the base, except here the base formed from mist first, then the blade coming out of it, all at a very high speed, propelled by Shallan's thrusting motion.

The Fifth Heightening seems like the lowest penalty (if expensive) route to go for functional immortality. On the other hand you're pretty exposed to any kind of Investiture draining effect, such as a Leecher Allomancer or a Larkin from Roshar. I wonder if that Kholin swordmaster ardent "Zahel" would freak out if he ever met Rysn with her pet Larkin?

Yes, it's definitely a difference between a living and dead spren for the Blade. When Adolin kills Sadeas in a knife-grappling fight on the ground, he reflects that even with both of them having Shardblades neither of them had summoned one, as the size of them made them "less good than a rock in such a close-quarters fight". Yet in Oathbringer, Kaladin summons Syl as a Shardknife to stab a flying Fused in the sky while holding onto it while protecting the Wall Guard in Kholinar, in a very similar combat scenario.

I think in several Comsere magic systems, being super-Invested carries with it an increasing degree of instinctive use of that Investiture. We see this in Warbreaker with the upper Heightenings, and of course, when Rashek and Vin temporarily Ascended to the Shard of Preservation (talk about super-Invested), they instinctively knew how to wield the power to do what they wished, even if it wasn't immediately clear to them what they should wish for. And Marasi tapped enough out of the Bands to draw mists around herself. That's not necessarily Ascendant, but it's close to it - much stronger than just "hey, I just became a full Mistborn!" or even "hey, I just ate a bead of lerasium like Elend did!".

Breeze couldn't affect himself by himself, as a Misting who can only burn brass; but maybe a full Mistborn or Fullborn could effectively do so. Like when Vin sees her gold shadow that hates her for being so trusting, she could physically touch her shadow on the face - what if she'd tried to Soothe it? Would that reverberate somehow to her "real" self? Or some kind of loop involving using F-aluminum for shunting Identity, or using Metallic Arts technology, like storing a pulse of A-brass Soothing into an "allomantic grenade" and then triggering it on yourself. Besides, there are Soothing Parlors in Era 2 Elendel, so all a Soother would need to do is to go and find another Soother and they could mutually Soothe each other.

I think we should just leave off thinking about this topic, and concede that @Invocation is probably right that they simply haven't given it much thought because EW. Though part of me does suspect that if there were in fact signficant cost savings to be found in such a "recycling effort", a cremstain like Sadeas would have used it, at least to feed the bridgemen. ———— "Say, Rock," Teft asked at the Bridge Four meal one evening. "How did you manage to make so much stew with the handful of clearchips we were able to pool together in our bridge running days?" "Was not easy. Even flangria is expensive when all one has are clearchips, at 1/4 of a pound per chip! But I found a place to get a full pound for only three clearchips." Teft stopped eating. "Rock. Don't tell me you used Flangria Green." "Yes, Flangria Green! Same as flangria, they even gave me a taste first, maybe a little older, but in stew nobody notices." "Rock... Flangria Green... It's... It's..." "What?" "Never mind."

Hmm, yes, I seem to remember this detail mentioned in how they run the Alethi warcamps on the Shattered Plains in "The Way of Kings". (eBook searching...) Ah, here it is. Chapter 28, near the scene where Dalinar starts hammering rocks with his Shardplate, "in what would eventually be a latrine", one that he'd ordered constructed: "A long, sloping trough was to be cut, then covered with oiled and tarred boards to seal in the scent. A latrine house would be set at the high end, and the contents could be Soulcast to smoke once every few months." Even earlier, they mentioned the Soulcasting of stone into food: lavis grain, and also meat called flangria, described in the Coppermind as "produced via Soulcasting, which makes it far cheaper than other kinds of meat... often used to cheaply feed large quantities of people, such as bridgemen." Soulcasting is how they are able to feed their armies on the Shattered Plains without enormously long supply lines from the interior of Alethkar. So... Why not Soulcast the... output... of the latrines into food instead of smoke? It's easier to Soulcast into one of the Ten Essences than to do a more complex transformation, so if you're going to transform waste as cheaply and cleanly as possible, turning it to smoke makes sense. But Soulcasting stone into flangria is already doing a complex transformation. Once you're already Soulcasting stone into flangria, how much harder would it be to Soulcast latrine waste into flangria? You wouldn't have to quarry out blocks of stone first, which is also a labor cost, if non-magical. And if the waste is largely derived from eating flangria in the first place, wouldn't that make it cognitively closer (and easier to Soulcast) back into flangria than stone? Storms, why am I thinking about this at all?

The Champion he had prepared, who "dominated a battlefield" like the sun does the sky, was Dalinar. And that preparation has now come to naught. As for Moash/Vyre being the second choice, it may seem "too expected", but it'd also be kind of bad if the mantle fell on some random other character in Odium's camp just because it was unexpected. I mean, Moash has now gotten (and after Dalinar's refusal) the rare honor of a directly commissioned hit job from Odium, on Jezrien with a special dagger, and now has been given Jezrien's Honorblade to wield in Odium's service. He's basically Dark Kaladin at this point. I don't see him "choosing" anyone else who's already a Radiant and in opposition to him; he thought he had Evi's death and Dalinar's long association with the Unmade Nergaoul in his pocket to beat Dalinar down into "surrendering his pain" for the bliss of the Thrill. Adolin doesn't even regret his killing of Sadeas, the one act he might be reviled for by Team Honor.

Also in play is knowing what the other person can do, which is why Metalborn often try to keep their abilities secret or hidden. A Steelrunner has a large advantage of surprise or initiative when tapping speed, but like we saw with TLR, having a super large edge over everybody else likely means you get used to never using your full maximum ability. So while they could choose a speed-driven course of action that was unavoidable with a few seconds of atium foresight (tapping for Mach 1 level speed), without knowing about the atium they would just tap enough speed for overpowering a Johnny Normalman, giving the Seer much more time to work with (possibly even to kill them with, like putting a knife right where they're about to move to at high speed).

Very sorry to have misled anyone by accident (I've updated my post more clearly) - I was making a half-joking reference to a very similar exchange in one of the Mistborn books, The Bands of Mourning, though also seriously suggesting that the logic that follows that particular exchange about the mechanics of certain objects applying the Metallic Arts of Scadrial could also apply on Roshar to the Honorblades and Surgebinding.

I see what you mean. What the Steelrunner could do in that 2 second window could be awesomely inescapable, but if he would only begin doing that action 1.5 seconds from now and you foresaw it 2 seconds earlier with atium, you would still have 0.5 seconds in which to prepare for that inescapable 1.5 seconds to follow. From a practical perspective it's probably not much different, unless you yourself were also a Steelrunner or a Slider like Wayne who could "cancel out" some the speed from the steelmind, especially if the feruchemist were unprepared for the maneuver. Or had some quick escape mechanism to trigger in that time.

Bingo! Bonding an Honorblade grants the use of the associated Surges. So the question is, can one bond more than one Honorblade at a time, the way we saw Amaram bonding two deadspren Shardblades at the same time? They shouldn't really have been designed to do that if they were created for specific bearers, which is interesting to consider. I mean, it's not like the Heralds ever swapped Honorblades (...or did they?). Yet somehow, bonding and un-bonding an Honorblade is pretty simple, since for most of Oathbringer, Bridge Four trains up on Windrunning skills without Kaladin being around to en-squire them by passing around Jezrien's Blade. And bonding Jezrien's Blade didn't make Szeth or anybody else a Herald. The Oathpact, and the resulting cycle of the Heralds who swore it being sent to Damnation to withstand torture, was separate from the Honorblades they bore. And neither unbonding their Honorblade nor forswearing the Oathpact reverted the Heralds to mortal status, they each lived on for the next 4500 years. (Until Moash.) It's as if the Honorblades were created before the Heralds existed or were assigned to take them up. Did the Heralds have to abandon their Honorblades at Aharietam, then, or were they just tired of carrying the symbols of their Heraldom? Could the Oathpact in theory have been renewed by someone else picking up an unbonded Honorblade and "speaking again the ancient oaths?"

Exactly. So where seeing 2 seconds into the future would let you avoid anything a boxer would throw at you, if the Steelrunner can move towards you at the equivalent of a bullet fired from a gun at 1000 feet per second (roughly the typical muzzle velocity of a rifle), and he's only 10 feet away from you with lethal intent and an axe, you're not going to see anything but a red haze of your own flying blood for all but a fraction of the next 2 seconds.

I think the obvious answer is "only one atium shadow - the one that's going to kill you in the instant you see it", if the Steelrunner either has enough speed stored or is in close enough range with a deadly enough object to make any defensive reaction irrelevant. I don't think Steelrunning is as useful as atium from a defensive POV, though, unless one could also tap a zincmind, because speeding yourself up doesn't mean slowing everything else down. Just because you can now move (say) 1000 feet in one second, doesn't mean you can effectively dodge a 1000 fps bullet that was just fired at you... Seems like that would depend on a number of things requiring split second decision making, where burning steel would allow you to execute those decisions in split seconds, but not necessarily give you the mental time to realize you need to do that in the first place.