robardin

I don't think Rock is a coward, as in afraid of death or even a challenge. I think he may fundamentally disagree with the idea of there being a "king of the peaks", as he would more or less automatically become, as a Shardbearing nuatoma. He said they "have not had one for many years" - maybe there is an additional expectation that comes with being one. Kind of like how Eshonai and the other Listener elders sought to avoid the return of their "gods", maybe the only thing preventing the Unkalaki from getting together and doing something Rock doesn't want them to do is the lack of this king, and now he's become that king.

I think the "only 4th sons fight" is the thing Rock has lied to Bridge Four about. And knowing Rock, it's not an outright lie, but a lie of omission. I'm thinking, the full truth is that only 4th+ sons and the nuatoma fight... And that the nuatoma is either the eldest son of the clan ruler, or a role that can devolve to anybody with the right blood claim and who acts to claim it, as by fighting. This would fit in with the seniority by birth order apparent in what Rock describes of his society, with his describing the relatives (clan members) of a nuatoma as being like his servants, as the Alethi are to their Brightlords, and of course with an Unkalaki nuatoma periodically coming down from the Peaks to challenge a Brightlord to duel for Shards. In this interpretation, the two names his wife mentions, Tifi and Sinaku'a, were his two next older brothers, the eldest being the nuatoma in question who challenged Sadeas. In so doing they were not "breaking traditional roles" but essentially each in turn claiming the right of the eldest to be the nuatoma and to continue the fight for Sadeas' Shardplate. Whether out of cowardice or some other reason, Rock deferred (despite likely being the most combat trained of his brothers, as Tifi and Sinak'a would not have been fighters?), and chose to become the chull dung cooking bridgeman we met in The Way of Kings. But now, having picked up the Shardbow and used it to kill Amaram to save Kaladin (however he managed the draw), he has simultaneously claimed the role of nuatoma as well as become a full Shardbearer, the long-awaited High King of the Horneaters, or whatever the Unkalaki term for it would be. He bowed his head from the weight of the responsibility of it, and whatever unspoken reason there had been for him to have been dodging it all along.

Drat! Foiled again!

What if the "gold shadow" turned out to be similar to the deal with ... that one Epic in Sanderson's non-Cosmere Reckoners series whose main power involve pulling from what is a pretty specific alternate reality (a "neighboring" reality, if you will)...? Without spoiling that reference, perhaps one's gold shadow is "real" from where they come from (where "you" would be the gold shadow to them)?

Can A-gold actually give you infinite "alternate career paths" like that...? It seems like you're picturing something along the lines of what Shai does in The Emperor's Soul with her soulstamps of a highly trained warrior warrior, a multi-linguistic scholar, and a contortionist, street-savvy beggar based on "plausible versions" of herself with a rewritten past of being adopted by a warrior society, and so on. But she carved those soulstamps herself, over many years. There's no indication that an Augur can choose a particular "gold shadow" - the one that pops up automatically seems to be either the most likely alternative, or the most opposite one based on personality (i.e., the "other you" you'd despise the most, and vice versa). In any case I don't think even Shai could make a soulstamp of something specific she didn't know - like "the version of me that saw a specific murder happen that I did not witness". Let's say a murder happened one night at a restaurant - Shai could probably make a soulstamp of a version of herself that ate at that restaurant every night, requiring a plausible backstory leading up to it, but I think that would just mean that version of herself could, say, detect a subtle change in the recipe used for a long time (a generic result of "I eat there literally all the time"), not "I now recall the events of two weeks ago around 8pm, when I was of course there, even though I wasn't really". Also, the experience of burning gold, and especially of touching one's "gold shadow", is described as being "very disturbing." If being able to selectively "summon" even extremely unlikely alternate versions of yourself were something an A-gold savant could learn to do, without knowing that was an end possibility, I don't know that any given Augur would burn enough gold to get to that level of savantism. In-world, after all, "burning gold" is literally an expression synonymous with "something useless and/or to be avoided".

Yeah, I remember wondering if sunglasses had been invented yet in Era 2, and that maybe that's one of the ways Marsh would avoid notice when not actively trying to impress someone as to who/what he really is, like he did with Marasi in Alloy of Law. It'd be like The Corinthian from Neil Gaiman's Sandman saying, "Oh, I can see. I see just fine." ...and, in searching the text of Alloy of Law, I see that yes, Era 2 has indeed got them! In the scene in Chapter 15 where Miles burns A-gold to see his alternate self shadow:

I dunno about Bridge Four, at least the original crew that was already there when Kaladin joined; but there's a suspicious new member of Bridge Thirteen in Oathbringer (who would have joined after Dailnar took them over) who struck Dalinar as "a little off". He smells of off-planet to many people.

I missed your post when I wrote mine (left my browser session open overnight), LOL. I was going to ponder what it would mean for there to be a worldhopper Radiant, but of course, now Hoid has apparently bonded a Cryptic, so, we'll find out soon enough what getting a spren off of Roshar would take or be like. And Wayne-was-a-kandra-all-along cracks me up!

I also immediately suspected Rial of being a non-native Rosharian from his demeanor and suspiciously casual attitude with Dalinar - plus the description: So, Rial stands out as somewhat physically different, has a noticeable accent that could be based on using a Connection-based language hack that just happens to sound like a regional accent familiar to Dalinar, has only "shown up among his guards" about a week ago, and describes himself - as if as an in-joke aside to himself - as "reborn in the bridge crews." Yeah, smells like a worldhopper. That sphere (coin) rolling habit sounds familiar, too. Wayne doesn't fit the timeline, nor would I think Wayne is getting set up to be a worldhopper, but.. Is there someone else we can think of? But only now did I realize something else: He is, or was, in Bridge Thirteen. Which at the end of Oathbringer was described as "all having gone up as squires to Teft". Unless he's skipped out already, Rial has Surges, at least when around Teft, and is on a path to bonding an honorspren himself!

If you're partway through WoR now, I wouldn't say to put it down (as if you could) to read Warbreaker and then come back to WoR just for the full "easter egg" experience. That said, if you DID put WoR down partway through for whatever reason, and decided to start from the beginning to refresh your memory, ... yeah, read Warbreaker before doing that, because the payoff for one of the last scenes in WoR would be nice. OTOH the Copperrmind annotation may have spoiled that "aha / whoa!" moment anyway, to some degree. There's no plot linkage between the stories, it's just that it was fun to have read (and re-read) Warbreaker several years before reading Words of Radiance and Oathbreaker, and feeling like I had an inside view as to what the nature of certain things or characters were. (As well as the additional feeling of, but that only raises MORE questions!) In the end, no information is lost or gained, only a feeling of recognition, if you read the books in the published order versus in-universe chronological order. That's standard for many a long-running "shared universe" fantasy series, though, especially ones that jump in location or time from one book/series to another.

This is a very interesting line of thought (and more in line with the point of my OP - I wasn't speculating on the limits of how much Breath Endowment could potentially give out, but in terms of how much existed in toto at the time of the events in Warbreaker, i.e., how many living people of various Heightenings could there reasonably be). Given how valuable Breath is, it should be something passed down like any other valuable to one's heir(s), either on a deathbed or in a formal coming-of-inheritance bestowal ceremony (possibly using the "temporary object" mechanism to reserve at least one Breath for later recovery, before passing the Family Breathball along). The "it dies with you if you don't pass it along in time" bit is a built-in limiting factor, is my guess, plus the Court of Gods having an interest in preventing a non-Returned from reaching the Fifth Heightening. We have a clue in the very first chapter, when Vasher reflects on why Vahr was being kept alive: to torture and break him to the point of surrendering his stockpile of Breaths. "Not even the government of Hallandren — which had such strict laws about the buying and passing of Breath - could let such a treasure slip away." And that stockpile was enough to bring Vasher only past the Second Heightening, about 200 Breaths. And Vasher described the amount of Breath he gave Denth to stun him in their final duel - 50 Breaths - as "more wealth than most men will ever know." Lemex really was a bad, bad Idrian, wasn't he, to accumulate upwards of 500 Breaths? (More, actually, since Vivenna is described as having the Third Heightening when she goes to the Court of Gods.) By his own account, "Men with Breath are respected here in Hallandren. I could get into parties where I normally would have been excluded. I could go to the Court of Gods when I wished and hear the court assembly." Later, Denth and Tonk Fah mention that "Someone has to have at least fifty Breaths to be considered worthy [of watching judgments in the Assembly at the Court of Gods]", which is the First Heightening, at which stage one could instantly recognize the BioChromatic aura of other people (i.e., to know how many Breaths they held). Then, when Vivenna does go to the Court of Gods in Chapter 14, she sees that: So there ARE people in Hallendren with the Third Heightening, just very few of them, and I'm going to guess the Fourth Heightening is the maximum allowed by law. And they would be able to spot people violating this limit on sight.

You know, I really hadn't noticed any of this - I'm gonna have to go back and re-read Vols. 1 and 2 to see what other "errors" like this there are.

Well, it does kind of fit in with "Autonomy" as an Intent - it's not exactly "cost free", as it does require white (Invested) sand to work, plus someone with the ability to do that level of Sand Mastery, to do. And don't forget, water is more than just a necessary fuel for Sand Mastery, it's actually a necessary fuel for human life, period. It's not so much a loophole to gain "end-positive" results with the magic system as "you can use this magic to help you and others to survive in a desert environment", coupled with "one of the costs of the magic system is to expose you to a major hazard of a desert environment: dying of thirst". Even if the water gained from slatrification is more than the water lost in making it, Investiture was still expended (turning the white sand black), plus the physical exhaustion it puts onto the Sand Master. It's not like a Sand Master could turn into a human oasis by constantly slatrifying.

That's certainly one of the ways that Divine Breath functions, and the only one we saw in Warbreaker, but that doesn't mean it's the only way. As the saying goes, "there's always another secret." There is clearly something different in the Divine Breath of a Returned from the ordinary Breath of a Nalthian. It's not just a super-Breath as a splinter of Endowment, it has different properties. It powers a dead person's Physical body back into being alive, while also "deifying" it. On its own, it grants the Fifth Heightening, and can be "suppressed" somehow, as we see Vasher and Denth do. They use the same Command to pass it on to another person as with ordinary Breath, which kills (super-Drabs) the Returned (returning it to a dead state) while also draining it of color... Upon which the recipient is (involuntarily) healed, including "restoring" functionality of a faculty they never developed (as in Susebron being able to use his regrown tongue immediately), rather than gaining a Divine Breath. It doesn't make a normal person into a Returned, nor can one "stockpile" DBs as commonly done with ordinary Breaths. (I don't think Susebron now has two Divine Breaths because of Lightsong... Or does he?) So it stands to reason that one could use other Commands than "My life to yours, my Breath become yours" with a Divine Breath, even if they'd behave differently than the same Command for ordinary Breath. Maybe one that would enable stockpiling them?

I was excited to see the cover of "White Sand Vol. 1", but as many have expressed, found it lacking in the way it does a lot of the action scenes, including something as basic as depicting Sand Mastery. I think the original artist (Julius Gopez) excels at single panel stills, but didn't really "get' the story of White Sand, and/or isn't adept at depicting action, Sand Mastery specifically. The scene in Vol. 2 where Kenton saves Lord Raagent with Sand Mastery, I had to discover several panels later that Kenton had "decapitated" the monster - I went back and studied the final panel of the fight scene, and I still couldn't see how the decaptiation was meant to be portrayed. I just didn't see it. Heck, even the first really dramatic scene where Kenton's father "goes nuclear" and buries everybody in sand to end the battle - it looked more like he was pulling a huge cloud of arrows towards himself, like Kaladin in The Way of Kings, than anything else. But the text said "he buried everything in sand", and then everybody's buried in sand after showing him plugged full of arrows, and I was like, what just happened? Similarly, Kenton using SM (er... maybe I'll stick to spelling it out from now on) to rescue the trapped builders from collapsed scaffolding, I really inferred that from the text. I looked again and again at the panels depicting that scene, and I just don't see it. As for sand mastery in general, the artwork actually left me confused at to exactly how it works - not just mechanically, like, "you need water and the sun of Taldain to charge it with Investiture", but actually what is supposed to be going on to make things happen. They speak early on of controlling "ribbons of sand" to do things like move objects, make themselves fly, and to use as weapons, but as drawn in Vol. 1 and 2, it's shown as literally "ribbons", like cloth ribbons, surrounding their limbs like an aura, which I don't think is what it's supposed to be. I think it's supposed to be more like, say, waterbenders being able to move liquid water in Avatar (the animated show/comics, not the James Cameron film) to lift objects or themselves up - i.e., the sand envelops them like in a column while raising them up, and it would take three "ribbons" of sand to be strong enough to support the weight of a person. The part in Vol 2 where Kenton fights off assassins who are personally immune to sand mastery by using it to pick up and throw furniture made it clear that the magic is about literally moving sand around, not that the sand is like fairy dust to them, so what's with the earlier depictions? Given that that was the last part of the book the artist worked on, I think he realized he just wasn't into it (or was so assessed) and pulled the plug. Unfortunately there is no do-over, but we can hope that Vol 3 will be what it could or should have been all along.

(moving my post to the other thread about the art in White Sand - I started out talking about the original artist and intending to talk about the changes in Chapter 6 in Vol 2, but never got around to it)

So, how about stapling four Returned together into a koloss?

It's a little confusing the way Sazed explained it - Compounding doesn't "create a new metal" in the sense of "it is no longer gold", in the case of Miles, but in the sense that a Compounder is able to burn a metalmind in a way that is different from other Allomancers. One thing I always wondered: can a Compounder burn one of their metalminds for its Allomantic property alone, eschewing the 10x or whatever Feruchemical burst? When Vin burned Sazed's earring pewtermind, she could sense but not touch "a reserve of power" that "did not belong to her" - Sazed's Identity-linked Feruchemical store of physical strength. But, she DID still get the normal use of the pewter as an Allomantic metal. So, could a Compounder "type cast" the filtered investiture to be the Allomantic flavor, but still get the 10x burst? That could be interesting for metals where the Feruchemical attribute is significantly different from the Allomantic power it gives, such as steel, if a steel Compounder had the option of getting a 10x return on his stored speed, or a 10x super-flare of a Steelpush, by burning a steelmind.

Breath is unique to Nalthians, right? It's a little piece of Endowment in everybody born on Nalthis. Everybody starts with one Breath. We've seen mention of several characters having hundreds, even many thousands of Breaths, so you'd think there'd be a lot of Drabs walking around... Except that Breath can be passed along to someone, and isn't linked to the person who was born with it. A Drab can always get Breath on the open market, and it won't be any different than getting their "original" one back, and a cache like Peacegiver's Treasure is a stockpile dating back to the Manywar, whose original donors have long since passed away. So unless people die with more than their original Breath on them, Breath is something that is generally accreting on Nalthis, at least once the Command to pass Breath along to someone else was discovered. So as of the events of Warbreaker, outside of uniquely massive stockpiles like that, what would be the most Breath (a) that someone could reasonably acquire by normal means (on the open market), or (b) could Susebron acquire if he made it his goal to take all the actually Breath in the world onto himself (assuming he's the person in the current lead on that count)? I know we have very little basis to go on in the text, but maybe some folks have some WoB up their sleeves, or some foundation for educated guesses

That the Bands are not "raw Mistborn power" is exactly my point. A Mistborn is not an aggregation of Misting powers, it's a special superuser case, and the Bands do not grant atium. I don't think I said or implied otherwise. Basically I read Leras' comment (and who would know better?) that only sixteen types of Misting Allomancers can ever naturally exist (get born) at a time, as a built-in to the way that Allomancy works, and that all Mistings are equally likely to any other kind. Your idea would require that there be sixteen "base metal" Mistings, plus some rarer, less frequent number of god-metal Mistings that are simply not seen in Era 2 because how would they ever reveal themselves? I just don't see why that would be the case, it seems far less elegant and unnecessary to the magical structure. There's literally no reason for there to be god-metal Mistings any more. And we have a WoB that states that for atium Mistings to exist, Leras had to "take out the most unlikely (difficult to make and use) metals" to do so, in terms of what Mistings mists could Snap people into becoming. So my idea that 16 was not just a number Leras liked but is actually part of the way Allomancy works (the scope of metals for naturally occuring Mistings) has pretty solid support.

Hmm, I like it, but on Roshar aren't lighteyes/darkeyes unions typically limited to first nahn DEs and low-dahn LEs? I can't see the King (first dahn) marrying a woman from a family of low enough dahn to have had a near relative one generation removed marry a darkeyes. Of course, Graves was a lighteyes of the fourth dahn (being a Shardbearer) who had married a darkeyes, so it's not like it was illegal, just rare. But seeing how Elhokar treated Kaladin after he saved Adolin in the dueling arena for being a darkeyes who dared to challenge Amaram (not to mention how he handled the Roshone Affair), I don't see him being particularly progressive on that front.

How about Suit (Edwarn) being told that, for his service, he would be allowed "to serve in another Realm", just before blowing him to smithereens? Is the capital R supposed to imply he's still operating in the Cognitive Realm, Kelsier-like? (One assumes not in the Spiritual Realm?!) If the Series can prevent Edwarn from "Moving On" to the Beyond, that's gotta be Shard level stuff, no?

I'm going off of the premise that there are only meant to be sixteen kinds of Allomancers under normal circumstances, based on what Ministry Dogma was about the Metallic Arts (as mentioned by Yomen) in observing that 16 "is a recurring number", plus the hint that 1/16 of the "mistfallen" were the atium Mistings, plus what Preservation (Leras) straight up says to Kelsier in the Cognitive Realm in Secret History that "sixteen is the number of metals in Allomancy" (and that Kelsier's objection that there were only ten, "eleven if you count the one I discovered", was "stupid"). In doing a little digging on the 17th Shard, I find that there are also WoB that atium Mistings "were designed and created specifically to do what they did" (by Preservation), and that that Leras did so by removing metals from circulation, as it were. The fact that in Era 2 there are sixteen known metals, with Mistings in each of them, suggests that Harmony "un-hacked" the set of 16 metals, i.e., removed atium and put back what Leras had swapped out for it, what I personally guess to be cadmium and/or bendalloy. Which means, no Mistings for any other metals that those sixteen. Ferrings are Feruchemy "fractured" by the genes for Allomancy along the lines for those metals, so if there can only be Mistings in sixteen metals, there can only be Ferrings in the same sixteen metals. We already know Mistborn can burn "all metals" and full Feruchemists can store/tap into "all metals", but that's not because they are an aggregation of "all (sixteen) powers" the way the Bands of Mourning are, rather they're a superuser level kind of sDNA that says "no matter what it is, if it can be burned/tapped, you can burn/tap it". And the only metals we know of that are burnable/tappable other than the Sixteen are the god metals, or some alloy thereof.

Ha, the one thing I am sure of is that that is NOT the "lost metal" of reference in the title, any more than the Bands of Mourning were actually what everybody thought they were. Or else it's going to be atium, but in a new context from what we've ever seen it before. Anyway, in case it wasn't obvious from my first response, if I'm correct that atium Mistings were a hack by Leras in the first place and no longer occur in Era 2 (and that malatium Mistings may not have existed even in Era 1), then there certainly cannot be atium or malatium Ferrings, because Ferrings are a reflection of the power of Feruchemy broken up - sharded or splintered, if you will - into the 16 "spokes" of the Allomantic powers on the wheel of Metallic Arts. While there are going to be god metals "off the wheel", they won't have Mistings for them; it would need a Mistborn to burn them, except for the special case of lerasium, which is kind of the ultimate source of Allomancy in the first place. And a Full Feruchemist to use them as a metalmind for whatever it is they would store. As for what the feruchemical attribute of malatium would be: we have no idea, but even if A-malatium appears to be a kind of reversal of what A-gold gives, that doesn't mean F-malatium stores a reversal of F-gold, since the power of A-gold has nothing to do with F-gold. It's not like F-iron (weight) and F-steel (speed) are "paired" to each other or similar to the allomantic powers for the same metals.

I think those two statements are contradictory, in my thinking/understanding of how "Mistings" occur I do like the idea that Yomen would have been able to burn malatium, that an atium misting could basically burn atium and any of its alloys, as an aspect of its... godliness? But I don't think there'd be natural Mistings of a god metal, that's part of what makes then "god" metals, yeah? But absent a Shardic twiddle which now apears to have been undone, the sDNA for Mistings would be semi-randomly spun out of the base wheel. To be specific - I agree that there were "naturally" atium Mistings in Era 1, but only because of Leras' twiddle, which was there from the beginning. But after Sazed remade the world, he restored the Metallic Wheel, and there are no more atium Mistings (supported by the fact that there ARE Mistings of all sixteen metals in Era 2).