kimni

Actually, I don't think it would matter if the Aon is damaged. At least Raoden thinks that an Aon written in dust will keep functioning if the dust is wiped away, so even if the armor was damaged, the Aon should still work.

Glad you loved Warbreaker, it's probably still my favourite in the Cosmere. A lot of the stuff that's going on behind the scenes (like who stabbed the guy, and what a lot of characters, like Vasher and Denth, are doing while they're off-screen) is actually explained in the Annotations - if you're curious, give them a read. They're on Brandon's website. I'm not completely sure, since I haven't read them in a while, but I think they answer pretty much all the questions you asked in the first post. If I remember correctly (again, it's been a while since I read the Annotations), Denth went sneaking in after Vasher and he killed the guy because he didn't want anybody alive who'd seen him sneak in. Don't pin me down on that, though. I am pretty sure that there was nothing specifically important about Mercystar's palace - it simply happens to have an access to the tunnels. Mercystar herself had absolutely nothing to do with anything that happened.

That doesn't change the fact that it doesn't take that many people from each Shardworld to establish a kind of worldhopping community. Also, once you've got a few thousand people hanging out in Silverlight, you're probably going to get new additions from children born there (does it count as Worldhopper if you're born in Silverlight?), not just "new" worldhoppers coming from the Shardworlds. A few thousand is enough to start a sustainable population, even without any influx from outsiders. And with people from the different Shardworlds joining them, I see no reason why Silverlight shouldn't be growing in population (assuming they've got enough soucres of food and water and so on, and since they established a city, I guess they do). As for groups like the Ire, well, why wouldn't they exist? All it takes is one person discovering Worldhopping and instead of going off by themselves, starting a group. But how they all manage not to be noticed by the people of the Shardworlds, I have no idea. Maybe most of them stay in the Cognitive Realm most of the time, and only a few people actually travel to different worlds (these would be the Worldhoppers we see), and the majority of Silverlight's inhabitants don't go running around on different Shardworlds, just like most inhabitants of Shardworlds never leave their home world.

About the 30 years war: yes, armies foraged off the land. Or started to, until there was nothing left to forage. I've heard it described as one of the most destructive wars in human history (in terms of infrastructure and impact on society), and for precisely that reason: the armies were not sustainable. There were too many soldiers, and not enough people working in agriculture to provide food. With soulcasters, that kind of militarization on the level of technology available then might have been possible, but without it, the armies basically caused famines (and the epidemics that followed because of starvation) everywhere they went.

I think Adolin murdering Sadeas was basically a choice between two evils. Either let Sadeas continue his plotting (because even with Dalinar's power at the end of the book, there's no way he could ever have stopped/punished/killed Sadeas in a 'legitimate' way), or kill him (which is murder, no matter the reason, and might lead Adolin down the proverbial slippery slope - or might not. We'll see). Adolin chose what he saw as the lesser evil (though the choice might have been mostly subconscious, since the murder was rather unplanned). That doesn't necessarily make his actions justified, and we don't know yet if he made the right choice. I guess we'll see in the rest of the book. Personally, I think Sadeas deserved a knife through the eye, but there will definitely be consequences to his death, and they won't all be good.

I've just thought of this, but maybe somebody else has already pointed it out... The death rattles could be connected to the idea in Warbreaker that the dead can see the future (but on Nalthis, they actually have to be dead before they see it, and forget it when they Return). Maybe all Moelach does is tweak that so people can see a glimpse of the future before they are actually completely dead? Though that does leave the question why, and if all death rattles are actually the future, since some seem to reference the past. Perhaps Moelach is just gathering as much information as possible because he (she? it?) can't target anything specifically? In the hopes that if there are enough death rattles, eventually there will be something important (king of quantity over quality)? I think the ability to see the future after death is something the Unmade can't do, so they tap random dying humans for information?

I actually thought about that a while ago, and found this: http://www.writing-world.com/sf/hordes.shtml It's basically an analysis of how many soldiers you can get from a given base population. It's on the assumption of a medieval setting, but it does nicely show that compared to population size, armies are relatively small. And then there's the matter of paying for them (both paying your soldiers, and having a large enough part of your population producing food for everyone - given the efficiency (or lack thereof) of medieval agriculture, that's not trivial). A more modern setting could sustain bigger armies (relative to population size) because advances in technology make it easier to produce, store and transport food. So, it really depends on a lot of things. Most of the examples mentioned so far are pretty okay, I think, although it's hard to tell in ASoIaF because I don't think we actually have any hard figures on how big Westeros and its population are. Of course in Stormlight, Soulcasting throws the entire matter of food supply out the window, so it really only depends on how many men the Highprinces can pay.

It's actually mentioned in one of Lightsong's chapters. People who return as children continue to age until they are adults (physically), and their mental growth is faster (so they are mentally adults while their bodies still appear much younger). No explanation why that happens, though.

I really like that idea. I hope we'll get more details to work on when Nightblood comes out to see if it is true. Thanks for all the replies!

I hadn't considered the Cognitive part... I guess that makes sense. I do understand pigments and additive and subtractive colour systems. My question wasn't about that. I know that black has all colours, I was just wondering why Awakening treats black and grey differently, since grey also has all colours in it, it just reflects more light than black.

This is just a tiny little detail that has bothered me since I first read Warbreaker, but I stumbled over a question on Awakening (or specifically, colour): We know that Awakening drains colour to grey, and that grey does not count as colour for Awakening. But at the same time, black does count as a colour. Do we know anything about where the cut off is, so to speak, between black and grey, or how that would be determined? Where does "dark grey" become "black", or the other way around? It can't be perfect black (absorbing 100% of all light), since that is pretty much impossible to achieve, and someone in Warbreaker (I think Vasher?) does use black stone as colour, so it is definitely something that's possible. It's probably not very important, but I thought I'd ask if anyone else has any thoughts on this.