robardin

So there are reasons to think Liss is a Herald, but also some details don't make sense if she is. For one, she has a Shardblade, but it's not an Honorblade: only one is "missing" from the Shin collection, aside from the one given to Szeth as a Truthless, and Taln's that had not been abandoned - the one that Nin reclaimed. It could be an ordinary dead spren Shardblade, but wouldn't a Herald hear the screaming? (Maybe she does, and just ignores it?) Yet it's a Blade is one that she can dismiss and summon, since she's not carrying it around all the time. I went back to re-read the prologue to WoR and her description doesn't mention her eye color. But she's disguised as a maid, and refers to Jasnah as being "different from other lighteyes" who "turn up their noses" and "sneer and wring their hands" while hiring her services, which suggests she's darkeyed. (Given the expensive, secretive, and exclusive nature of her services I'd think all of her clients are lighteyes, and I doubt a lighteyed assassin would use the phrase "other lighteyes", rather than just "other people") But wait. So far, the only darkeyed wielders of a Blade that could be dismissed (yet who remained darkeyed, unlike Moash) have been Taln the Herald, and darkeyes like Kaladin who have become Radiants (and revert to being darkeyes after a while). She had acquired Szeth as a slave at one point, and had even mentioned him to Jasnah prior to their meeting in the prologue in WoR, but soon sold him (to the Parshendi) because she found him creepy. Shortly after the Liss scene, Jasnah unwittingly overhears two Heralds discussing how "that creature carries my lord's own Blade", surely a reference to Szeth. So if Liss were a Herald, you might think she recognized that as well, and not have just sold him as any ordinary slave? Of course, all of these objections could be explained by the WoB that "all the Heralds are insane". But she has an unidentifiable accent that shifts around ("could be Alethi... Or Veden... Or Bav"), and also deals with Jasnah in a very casual way, not like you'd expect a born and raised Alethi to act around someone of the third dahn, which maybe suggests an off-world origin? Maybe she's with the Ghostbloods, who had at least one set of Blade and Plate at their disposal, to equip Heluran to go after Amaram, are clearly an organization with off-Roshar members and connections, and eyedrops to disguise light eyes as dark (as Moash needed to do from bonding a dead Blade).

Ah, right, now I remember that. I hadn't remembered the detail about catching TLR in an "inn", but I was pretty sure I'd remember it if he'd HAD an inn That is something I've kind of wondered about, how long did it take Rashek to go around conquering the world (well, the Northern Hemisphere) after his Ascension? It seemed to take a while, there was resistance, and he used those lerasium beads to recruit and to create Mistborn allies who would then found the great noble houses of the Final Empire. But think about it. Imagine yourself one of the citizens or leaders of the resisting nations. You've just seen the world get completely changed in a short span of time - the continents moved around, the sky now filled with ash, the plants have gone brown, etc., etc. At least some countries that used to exist would literally not have existed any more, in a very physical sense. Wouldn't there be complete chaos, into which he could step as a stabilizing leader rather than acting as a conqueror of a series of standing nations? In fact, Alendi had already (in his supposed role as the Hero of Ages) done a lot to "unify" (conquer) the nations of the world. As far as his subordinate deputies knew, Alendi had gone off to the Terris mountains to fulfill his destiny, alone but for some Terris guides, presumably planning to return afterward. Then, the world changes and moves around - apparently the destiny in question, which they didn't witness - and lo!, this guy Rashek rolls into whatever was left of Khlennisburg, the capital city of the empire that Alendi had built, and proclaims himself the new emperor by right of divine succession, with the awesome powers to prove it. Who's gonna say, nah, let's get together and resist this claim? Similar to how a lot of Ministry obligators (Yomen excepted) simply chose to work with Elend in The Hero of Ages as a way to keep a functioning government operating, I'd think Rashek wouldn't have to travel around sleeping in inns in between getting beheaded and flayed (I guess he could still sleep, early on, before he had to constantly tap bronze to stay awake to constantly tap atium to stay young).

Yeah, as impressive as what Miles does as a gold/gold Twinborn, he was no Lord Ruler: he still only had the strength, speed, etc., of a normal human. In the end, Miles was brought down by Marasi's use of a cadmium bubble that allowed him to be surrounded and rushed by many people, who tied him with ropes: a situation that Wax could easily have overcome any number of ways, and TLR? Fuhgeddaboutit. In fact, Wax had earlier nearly succeeded in capturing him in a rope net trap remotely triggered by his Allomancy, but there was still enough slack in the net for Miles to fish out a stick of dynamite he carried for just that purpose, which blew the net apart (and himself, temporarily). Had Wax planned for something like that (as Miles noted, Wax should have paid more attention to what hed' done out in the Roughs, as he'd used the "dynamite my way out of a rope net" trick before), using a net that tightened enough, or quickly enough, would probably also have worked. Like by cinching him down into a tiny ball. Once captured, you could do any number of things to a gold compounder to kill him. Even a passive net trap would do it, as F-gold doesn't provide sustenance. Eating food is not the same as "healing from starvation". Thirst would kill even more quickly. It doesn't need to be a net, either. Just a deep pit that he couldn't climb out of, not without physical metals to Push or Pull himself with, or pewter to augment his strength to scoop out handholds.

Yeah, when he tells Vin that he survived beheadings, burnings, and flayings in the early days (with no mention of running an inn...), I had an image in my mind of him doing the Gawain and the Green Knight trick of letting them cut his head off with a sword if he could then cut their heads off afterwards. And then filling a room with pairs of spiked heads to daunt visitors. "These two heads are from when I did the you-then-me head swap with King George... And these, when I did it with the Duke of Timberland..."

Did I miss some material somewhere? When have we read a description of Rashek as an innkeeper? Was it the Waystone Inn?

Hmm, and this is Harmony's doing as well? Because it was strongly suggested that the probabilities were 1/16 each with the workings of the "mistfallen" Snappings. While 16% of the non-Terris non-Allomancers were raised to "operancy", 1/16 of them were sick the longest, a clue that they were special Mistings (Seers who could burn atium) - but also suggesting that all the other 15 metals were 1/16 in distrubition, too. Because if the whole point of the remnant of Preservation triggering an Emergency Snapping System was to create Allomancers, in particular ones who could burn away the body of Ruin, wouldn't he have made more than 1/16 of them Seers if he could have done so? Yeah, I know that the recurring "16" was Preservation's numerical hint, but it seemed to me that making the Seers sick 16 times longer than the others was intended as the specific clue as to their special nature - not that 1/16 of them were Seers (while 1/4 were Coinshots or Pewterarms or something, and only 1/64 were gnats or Mistings of an unknown metal). I looked for WoBs in the Arcanum search for the keywords "Coinshots" and "common" but didn't turn one up saying that Coinshots are actually more prevalent, rather than simply "common" in society (seen and known about), which is the way I took it. I found one that said that Allomancers were common enough in Era 2 that "most people would know a Coinshot"; I guess that could mean that Coinshots are an outsized group of Allomancers relative to the others, or simply that people would know their Coinshot acquaintances as such because they'd be publicly using their abilities, while an aluminum gnat or even a Pulser might be hiding the ability.

Yeah, I see a lot of speculation or thought experiments around here based around becoming an Allomantic savant of one metal or another, and I wonder, why would an Allomancer WANT to do this? For most metals, becoming a savant is kind of warping yourself in a possibly unhealthy way (a la Spook in Hero of Ages). Savantism isn't supposed to be "leveling up in skill or power" so much as becoming rather inhuman as the price for your body having been so long a conduit for a very specific power between the Spiritual and Physical realms, like what starts to happen to (non-Radiant) Soulcasters on Roshar. On the not-so-bad side, we have a WoB that Seekers, and possibly Smokers in a similar vein, often become savants over time, but their metals are not particularly physically taxing. Even with a metal like pewter, becoming a savant isn't a purely beneficial or healthy thing, as pewter savants are "likely to run themselves to death, never noticing that their body was exhausted." When you get to time dilation effects like with cadmium and bendalloy, the "inhuman downsides" become a simple matter of functioning with other humans. Even if a Pulser could Pulse so much that they could Pulse longer, or with a larger bubble, or with more finely tuned area (like a moving bubble, or a projected cone), the cost of achieving that expertise would be that everybody you knew would be old or die while you were still young. And possibly, affecting your perception of time flow even when not burning the metal. That's one reason why Brandon might be backing away from the idea that Wax's unusual facility with steel (as in generating his steel bubble) is solely because of "savantism"; that starts to sound too much like "if only other Coinshots practiced enough, they could do this too!", without there being some awful downside. If I recall correctly, he's started to hint that his bubble power is partly due to something else as well (a resonance with his Feruchemical iron, or yet something else). That said, we DO have it in the annotations for Alloy of Law that Wax is an Allomantic savant with steel, so, whatever warping effect it has on a person, he's exhibiting it.

I like this angle a lot. If more of the Unmade are going to get captured the way Dalinar did with The Thrill, and the way Shallan seemed to be able to do by "getting" the Midnight Mother, I think Teft's firemoss addiction would give him an insight into the primary impulse behind The Heart of the Revel. And maybe, Renarin would be the best one to capture Moelach, who inspires "death rattles" that are visions of a future that may not come to pass. I can't think of who on Team Radiants might be suitable to go after Yelig-nar; what drives "the Blightwind" seems to be an unbridled pursuit of power that eventually destroys. (...Moash's redemption?! Nahhhh...)

Wax is weird in plenty of ways: Harmony can fuel his Allomancy directly with the mists, the way Vin did with Elend. There's some extra Connection to Harmony with Wax, not to mention the question of the unconscious pewter-like effects the mists have on Wax in Alloy of Law (is his Pathian earring a hemalurgic spike for Allomantic pewter the way Vin's was for bronze)? TenSoon tells him straight up at one point that he (TenSoon) is Harmony's Preservation, while (Wax) is Harmony's Ruin, in terms of agency in the living world. And if any kandra knows the mind of Harmony, it's him. I can see the criticism, though, that Wax is a little bit too much of an all-in-one: the Left Hand of Harmony, the writer's own professed "most desirable" Twinborn pairing, created in an interim short story writing exercise that "grew in the telling", who's also the primary POV character in a book series that's now longer than the original Mistborn trilogy, and thus has most of the expository "figuring out how things work" stuff centered around him. By way of comparison with the Era 1 trilogy, all the secondary characters have Wax-driven story arcs, which is not true of the main cast from Era 1. Kelsier has a secret from the other main characters for all of the first book, and Vin, Elend, Sazed, TenSoon, etc., all have "non-Kelsier" lives that we read about or find out about that are critical components to their characters as well as to the story arc. But with Wayne, Marasi, and Steris, they come across much more as "attached to Wax" in AoL, which only gradually changes over Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning. Even then, while we get more Marasi and Wayne POVs, very often their thoughts are centered around Wax or events in motion with Wax at their center, rather than themselves or them reacting to events completely independently. I still enjoy the Era 2 books, don't get me wrong, but it did take me a while to warm up to them, partly for this reason (the other part being that I read it too closely on the heels of finishing the original trilogy and was still pining for news of What Happened to All Of Them, versus enjoying the story on its own).

Uh, unless the theoretical Allomantic power of harmonium/ettmetal is healing similar to tapping a Feruchemical goldmind, I would think that the first time someone capable of burning it did so would be the last time. Unless there were a Twinborn for F-gold and A-harmonium who was prepared for the attempt? Are we sure the Northern Hemisphere of Scadrial has no ettmetal/harmonium, or is it simply something they haven't discovered because they are fat and happy (as Harmony implied), and the Words of Founding make no mention of it (since it didn't exist before)? After all, Harmony told them "there are two additional metals nobody know about (and their alloys)", which they've found in chromium/nicrosil and cadmium/bendalloy, so... God's own checklist is now complete, right? As for Steris: I really like the idea that she's a "gnat". We haven't seen anything about how "gnats" are treated in Era 2, now that such Mistings would be known about, but there are hints that it is indeed something people might keep quiet about. We know from one of Miles' POV in Alloy of Law that "burning gold" is a proverbial expression meaning "to do nothing useful", regarded as "little better than being an aluminum Misting", which implies that such "gnat Mistings" not only exist but know their own nature. Miles also reflects on how Allomantic gold was "far less useful than its alloy" (electrum), which was "in turn was far less useful than one of the prime battle metals" (steel, iron, pewter). Also from Alloy of Law, we know that Lord Harms considered Marasi's Allomantic power so embarrassing that he wanted her to conceal it. And that "Allomancer Jak" plays up his being a Misting, threatening a group of koloss with a warning not to trigger him as "an Allomancer enraged", without mentioning the fact that he burns tin (nobody would be all that impressed with "a Tineye enraged"). Allomancy is hereditary but not its specific expression, so you'd think even being a "useless" Allomancer would be a plus in terms of pedigree, but evidently that's not how it's viewed in Elendel society. I guess that's because one's bloodline (if noble) is already kind of well documented, since the Originators were so small in number. That would also explain Wax's observation that Coinshots and Pewterarms were among "the most common Allomancers", which contrasts with the idea that in principle, there should be an equal probability of becoming a Misting of any of the 16 metals. It's that the most useful Allomancers are the ones most commonly seen or known about, to the point where being known as a "useless" Allomancer could well be worse than being a regular person, especially in those middle school years ("You're an Allomancer, you say? You call that Allomancy? BWAHAHAHA!") And we know that Sazed changed how Snapping works after his Ascension, in a way we don't understand yet - which may also be how aluminum Mistings now even know about their power at all. Aluminum simply extinguishes all metals, including itself, so what would there be for a Seeker to detect? It's almost like being an aluminum gnat would only be known if New Snapping now endows the Allomancer with an affinity for "their" metal, so that one would know "I could burn this" by looking at it, and then realizing, "But that's aluminum? Rusts." Given how Lord Harms treats an illegitimate daughter like Marasi's "useless" Allomancy as "embarrassing" when it's actually tactically useful in certain situations, I could see a very logical Steris playing along with concealing being an aluminum gnat her whole life, as "it's just not something someone needs to know about me".

His "word" was that he accepted the offer of a contest of champions. That's what Odium can't go back on, and Taravangian pointed that out, and he did not disagree. He then (attempted to) name Dalinar as his champion, which role he's clearly refused. So as Calderis put it, "the slot is open", but the agreement is an open and standing one, too. Odium is acting like someone who's throwing out THIRD AND FINAL NOTICE!! letters while disconnecting their phone and refusing to answer the doorbell to dodge a debt collection agency. Based on Mr. T's observation, and Odium's tacit agreement, apparently Dalinar, but only Dalinar, can force him to finish arranging the challenge, as the person holding the remnants of Honor.

It's sarcasm, they insult each other all the time without meaning it.

Not only is/was Malata and Spark working with Taravangian and the Diagram, whose plan all along was to serve Odium while bargaining to save a portion of mankind, Nale (an actual Herald) and all the Skybreakers other than Szeth have decided to fight for Odium, being as he represents the best interests of the Parshendi/Singers, with a prior claim to humanity to being the "original masters" of Roshar. So the First Ideal doesn't preclude siding with Odium. There is still something a little off about Malata and Spark, though: So Spark is an ashspren who bonded a human whose view of "Life Before Death" includes pursuing vengeance, which is the complete opposite interpretation of how Kaladin and Syl take it to mean. Perhaps Malata and Spark are playing some kind of solo long game? She replies to Shallan when she calls her "Taravangian's Surgebinder", "...I am not his. I came to him for convenience, as Spark suggested we might look to Urithiru, now that it has been rediscovered." Which would imply she was already bonded to Spark before she came to Taravangian, and might be working with the Diagram in order to gain access to the Oathgate from Jah Keved (where she's from, and that is under his control following his machinations) to get to Urithiru. Not to "join up" with Team Radiant under Dalinar's leadership, but for reasons of her/their own. Especially now that Mr. T's deal with Odium excludes Jah Keved from being saved, only covering Kharbranth itself, I wouldn't be surprised if her (true) motives are either revealed or changed in a later book.

Trick answer! Vin's left ear is on the RIGHT SIDE OF HER HEAD!

I like how you're thinking Though "chewable metal" could be awful, as anyone who has fillings in his teeth can you tell you!

I checked the book and no, she receives a box containing "a small pouch of metal dust and a thin silvery bar". I've got a collection of Scotch and Irish spirits on a shelf somewhere and have even done a tour of two whisky distilleries in Scotland, so I totally get where you're coming from in not wanting to think of a diluted whiskey suspension! But this thread was begun with the fact even pure alcohol would not really be facilitating long-term storage of metal against corrosion, and meanwhile, other than that one case of Spook's mental POV, we have no evidence that that's WHY Allomancers are using "alcohol suspensions" in the vials - the vials are meant for short-term use. Here's another question: just how big are those vials, and how much solution is in them (are they filled completely, or partway)? Only then could we address the question of how much alcohol (by volume) is in them, right? My point being, if a standard Allomantic vial was the equivalent of a shot glass (1.5 fl. oz.), I can't picture a maybe 100 pound woman like Vin downing 2 or 3 vials to replenish her duralumin stacked metals in the middle of a fight with koloss and Inquisitors, and having that be the equivalent of taking three shots of whiskey in 10 minutes. And 1.5 fl. oz. seems pretty small to me; they are large enough capacity that Vin could demand that Kelsier drink half of one, leaving half for her, when he tested her. Can you imagine trying to drink half a shot? While I guess burning pewter would help there, the point is, they wouldn't do that if they didn't have to use stuff that strong, and as far as I can tell, they don't.

FWIW, I found the passage with Spook and the vials of pewter via a Kindle e-book search of the original Mistborn trilogy for "alcohol", which search didn't turn up any other context explaining or thinking about why alcohol was used for metal vials. There are only ten (10) total occurrences of the word in all three books, and usually it's referring to wine or ordinary alcohol consumption, except for that bit from Spook and in the Ars Arcanum: There's no other in-world explanation for the conventional use of alcohol, so we're free to justify it how we think makes sense. As for oils in the Final Empire, I just searched for "oil", "fry", "fried", and "grease" in the Era 1 trilogy e-book, and only found mention of lamp oil and "oiled" walking boots and of food being greasy (skaa gruel, roast drumsticks served to Vin and Elend by Cett), but that's all possible from animal fat. So as horrible as it seems, it's possible that there were no plant oils in the Final Empire after Rashek re-engineered the world.

This is pretty interesting stuff! (And side brag, my daughter is thinking of being a chemistry major in college!) It was normal (except for Zane) to burn away one's metals every day before sleeping, as having metals in your body for too long is poisonous. Because carrying a significant amount of metal on one's person would be a risk to be used as an anchor by Lurchers, Coinshots, or Mistborn, and because being an Allomancer at all (and what kind) is the kind of thing kept as a secret trump card, it makes a lot of sense for Allomancers to unobtrusively carry around a minimal amount of flaked or powdered metal that can be quickly ingested. Allomantic metals, especially the alloys that needed to be "allomantically correct" for best effect, were typically sourced in the form of bars that could be shaved/ground into powder, or pre-shaved pouches of (dry) powder. This is how Vin receives her experimental alloy of duralumin from the metallurgist at the beginning of The Hero of Ages, and is also how she takes some of the "Eleventh Metal" (which Kelsier left to her in bar form) before heading to Kredik Shaw to confront the Lord Ruler. The powder only needed to be put into vials, on a relatively ad hoc basis, for ready consumption in the near future. For which a liquid suspension makes perfect sense, as it's hard to swallow a handful of dry powder of any kind (and quite probably painful in the case of metal shavings), and you'd want to get all the contents of the vial in a single gulp. So, why alcohol? I get the sense that it wasn't meant to be very strong alcohol, because what Coinshot or Mistborn would want to get drunk before flying? Wax using his favorite Roughs brand of whiskey is something of an affectation, but that doesn't mean it's a vial of full strength whiskey: more likely, it's a dilution thereof (a Steel Highball, if you will). I'd think in Era 1, considering the conditions we see the skaa living in, it was originally used for the same reason that (weak) beer was safest to drink during the Middle Ages in Europe: contagion and disease spread by dirty water, where alcohol would sterilize anything ELSE in the water. Even if by Era 2 they have processes to make pure distilled water easy for anybody to get, there'd be about 1,500 years of tradition behind using an alcohol suspension, so people would be used to the taste of it. (Plus, the cachet of that's what the Lord Mistborn, the Survivor, and the Ascendant Warrior all did, how cool is that?) The only hitch to this would be something like this scene in The Hero of Ages, when Spook is guided by Ruin posing as Kelsier to using pewter for the first time, as he looks inside a desk drawer on the second floor of a burning building that used to be owned by a Pewterarm: So, this passage tells us that there were multiple vials of pewter dust stored in vials of an alcohol solution and kept in a drawer, and that Spook thought it was to "keep the metal flakes from corroding" as well as to make it easier to ingest. Which, as you fine chemists have pointed out, isn't going to be true for a long term, or equally true for all metals. But hey, what does Spook know? He's an 18 year old skaa urchin raised on the streets who can't even talk right half the time. Wasing the wrong of the why as a boy!

So, I'm not the only one old enough to think of this 1980s era song by the B-52s while first reading The Way of Kings. Next you'll admit that when Venli was going around speechifying to the liberated "parshmen", you were thinking of her going, "Stop, collaborate, and listen!" For me, "The Dawnsong" is way too evocative of that awful earwig by Cisqo from 2000 (wow, has it been that long already?). Show me that dawn, that daw- da-daw-da-dawn... So Stormlight 1 and 2 were named after in-world books, and Stormlight 3 for an in-world object (Oathbringer) whose name also ties in with what happens with Dalinar and his becoming the head of the new crew of Knights Radiant. If Stormlight 4 really will be pairing Venli POVs with Eshonai flashbacks for the Listener POVs, it should be titled something with a reference to an in-world thing about them. I really like the sound of The Rhythm of the Lost, unless the X of Y form of book titles are still on the outs by then.

A group of scholars at Silverlight would then get shown to engage in fanfic as well as research, to the puzzlement of others "Say, what's this other notebook you've got here... (browses) Gaz became a Windrunner?! Whaaa-?" "*GIVE ME THAT*"

I thought it was enough to have Amaram's own words on the subject... What wasn't clear to me was whether or not the Sons of Honor, headed by the Restares we seen references to but have yet to see "on page", have gone over to Odium as an organization, or if it was just Amaram. He only uses the first person singular throughout, except for when he refers to the SoH as "we" in terms of "trying to get [the Heralds] to return", so I think it's just him. From his POV, he had worked with the SoH to "bring back the Heralds" by intentionally precipitating another Desolation, which would result in the return of the Radiants and True Vorinism. Then he learned that the Heralds broke (or tried to break) the Oathpact and have stepped completely away from leading humanity in any capacity, and that Honor was dead, so what is left? Besides, as we see further, Amaram not only wanted the power that Odium promised him (all ten Surges - thanks to merging with Yelig-nar), but also for Odium to "take his pain" - the guilt he feels for betraying his own ideals in murdering his own men (Kaladin's squad) to steal the Shards. "You were supposed to be better than this!" Kaladin threw at him; and he had agreed, but did it anyway. "You've switched sides to find peace, Amaram. But you won't ever have it. He'll never give it to you."

I can't see how Nightblood could have been directly made of or with physical Investiture de Ruin (if it's not called atium after Ati's demise as a Vessel, what would it be?), but I wondered if Nightblood might somehow be drawing upon Ruin in a mechanical (passive or involuntary) way, by his very nature. However, the way that Brandon phrased it in that WoB - "What could Sazed be doing with that extra power", as opposed to "what could be happening to balance out Harmony's surplus of Ruin?" - implies that Sazed is actively choosing to do something to shunt it off in order to maintain balance. And for storytelling purposes, I don't think it'd be as obvious/mundane as to create little nuggets of dezasium, with whatever properties that might have different from pre-Catacendre atium. (Since Sazed identified in his mortal life as being "of Preservation", that could be the name for "Reverse Sazed-ium", yeah?) Feeding it to Nightblood somehow (after it was already created, not during its creation) would make sense, as it'd "stay given away" and not re-coalesce, and also suits the Intent of the power, and it's very possible for Harmony to have "met" Nightblood. While Sazed is relatively unaware of the backstory of the rest of the Cosmere, he does know it exists. Per other WoBs there are kandra agents on Roshar, at a time when Nightblood has been on Roshar for some time, and would have had to get there via the Cognitive Realm. That, or the "extra Ruin" is driving whatever the "Excisors" are that the Southern Scadrians have access to, some kind of permanent hemalurgic construct.

I think there are clear hints that Hoid was involved. The pre-FE Terris religious leaders and repositories of knowledge (like Kwaan) were "Worldbringers", all of who were Feruchemists, though not all Feruchemists were Worldbringers (as Rashek and his mates were simply packmen). Kwaan, and presumably his Worldbringer peers, were Realmatically aware; there is some link between Worldbringers and the Worldsingers of Roshar: and Hoid "has a relationship" with the Worldsingers (even taking on Sigzil as an "apprentice Worldsinger"). And when we see Hoid meet Kelsier at the Well of Ascension in the Cognitive Realm Mistborn: Secret History, he is surprised (not expecting Kelsier to have avoided going Beyond by getting "ghosted" and put into the Well by Preservation), and comments that "...you are not supposed to be here. You did what I needed you to, but you're a wild card I'd rather not deal with right now." Meaning, Hoid was part of the machinations to engineer Rashek's downfall that would lead to the freeing of Ruin and Ati's eventual "canceling out" by Vin. As told in the Terris Prophecies.

Cats existed on Scadrial even during the Final Empire, without needing Sazed's restoration of lost things during his Ascension. In the original trilogy (Era 1), Vin is described several times as "catlike"; Elend even straight up said to her face in Hero of Ages (Ch. 28) as they decided to crash a ball Yomen was having in Fadrex City, "You’re like some strange mixture of a noblewoman, a street urchin, and a cat." Later in Era 2, in Ch. 16 of Shadows of Self, we see an actual living cat as Wax reflects on the unrest he's seen while walking the streets of Elendel: And then in Ch. 18, as Wax flies through the city after confronting his uncle Edwarn: They're common enough for albinism to occur: in Ch. 15 of Bands of Mourning, when Wayne impersonates "Death" to terrorize Templeton Fig, the latter is engaged in his hobby of albino taxidermy, in the form of a white crow, thinking to himself: EDIT: cats evidently exist on Sel, too. In Elantris Ch. 36, Hrathen's inner dialogue likens his recovery from his faked Shaod to being "like a cat allowing its prey to run free one last time before striking a deadly blow." And in The Emperor's Soul, when Shai first enters the room where Frava and Gaotona will commission her work: "Both fell silent as Shai entered. They eyed her as if she were a cat that had just knocked over a fine vase."

I caught onto the coin-related habit and his unusual comfortable-yet-foreign, insubordinate-yet-technically-respectful behavior as suggesting an off-world type of origin, but didn't catch the detail about the flask - nicely spotted. He could be Rioting Dalinar here, as we have no indication that Allomancy can create Connection, unless by burning an unkeyed Feruchemical duraluminmind.