Vortaan

Something I think that needs to be addressed... I don't know that the current Desolation can give us any kind of good model for past Desolations, in terms of the forces gathered or the triggering events. The Everstorm is something completely new, and it seems to me that the triggers for the Listeners to become Voidbringers had to be different. Jasnah's slavery model doesn't really seem to work given what we now know about Listener culture. Dalinar's visions have shown us probable thunderclasts, and those certainly seem to be voidspren, not Listeners. For all we know, Listeners prior to the current Desolation were more like special forces or elites, instead of the shock troops they appear to be now. As for population destruction, we also can't use Nohadon's Desolation as anything close to a baseline. 90% casualties are heavily implied to be the result of internal wars prior to the Desolation, as well as it's exceedingly long length. If previous Desolations had a smaller casualty rate, even something like 50%, that drastically changes the level of technology we could reasonably expect to survive Desolations.

The thought with the koloss spikes though is that the amount of Investiture they are stealing is pretty small, just the bit of Preservation that was in people.

Thread necro ahoy! Anyway, we can assume that Splintering either kills the person holding the Shard, or that killing the host is part of the Splintering. Why? Because Honor, Devotion, and Dominion are all Splintered, and Tanavast, Aona, and Skai are all dead... so yeah.

So, let's talk about Hemalurgy and the Returned, shall we? From what I gather, on Scadrial there have not been hemalurgic spikes that have been completely Invested. This is what allows Inquisitors to use their spikes as metalminds. So, keeping that in mind... if you spike a Returned, do you steal the Splinter? Does that fully invest the spike? What happens when you use it?

I feel like that adds more reaction time to his trick. Read the mind, see when Wax is going to shoot, move... eh... maybe. I always find psychics to be a bit overpowered in media, though, so your mileage may vary. (Correction: receiving telepaths, that is. Sending ones always seem a bit under powered...)

If that were the case, she should have been able to use the tensors at some point. They make a point of saying how she can't get them to work.

So... an interesting question that no one seems to have asked. Presumably Lessie is around Wax/Wayne's level of skill, right? How did Bloody Tan not only capture her, but drag her into a basement? Yes, she's injured, but Wax doesn't worry about her running around a town full of gunmen who do not like them. Was she a metalborn? If she was, what kind, and what kind of metalborn would be able to defeat her easily? Note here that it has to be pretty easily, I don't get the impression that a ton of time passes between Wax and Lessie parting and her death. Tan had to have taken her shortly thereafter, so... how? It might help us figure out which of the possibilities is more likely. Just a note though on the pewter misting idea: we know Wax has faced Thugs before. If he expected their reaction time to be fast enough to pull off the maneuver, he wouldn't have tried the shot. The fact that he was trying again when Marasi is captured indicates to me that Allomantic pewter is just not quick enough for it.

Throwing an odd idea into the mix... how about Tonk Fah? We know there were some kandra that Ruin took control of prior to being defeated. I wonder if KanPaar and his associates survived that without being tainted by Ruin's influence? We never see Tonk Fah wounded. He slips pretty easily from jovial mercenary to sadistic sociopath. He has a very disturbing interest in anatomy... not only were his pets tortured, they were flayed open. Maybe a kandra looking at organs and comparing them to Scadrian species?

Conversely, why drag it out when you have a whole city of skaa to get to killing?

I'd wager a lot of these people who took on Preservation's power lived on in lore as the gods of various religions

The thing is... at this point there's nothing to prove, really. There's no populace to intimidate, there is just a traitor Inquisitor and an assassin to deal with. With how pragmatic we see Rashek being in the creation of and maintenance of his empire, you'd think he'd learn that if you send someone to be killed, and they make it back to threaten you again, don't let them live for any longer than you possibly have to the second time. As for the Hemalurgy charge thing, I'm really starting to equate a Hemalurgic charge to Breath. If that's the case, the size of the spike is probably similar to having something in human shape, ie not necessary but makes the process easier and cheaper.

We know Jewels is basically doing this to Clod. End of topic, moving on...

I'd wager a spike has about as much Investiture as something with a single Breath in it. Storing things, however, probably adds Investiture in some kind of ratio to how much you have stored, and probably what it is. I'd imagine Feruchemical gold might require more Investiture to work than Feruchemical iron, for example.

I think you are forgetting some key points about the two time frames. For example, most Terris males at the time of the Final Ascension were either eunuchs, old, or deliberately left for the breeding program. This being the case, the most logical way for the Terris to continue to exist as a people would have been to integrate some of the other refugees from the cave into their society. During the three hundred years following, the Allomantic lines could have certainly weakened the Feruchemical ones to the point where Ferrings are all you get. After all, the whole -point- of the breeding program was to keep Feruchemical abilities to a minimum. Second: You act as though there were a lot of Keepers about. Evidence seems to point the other way, considering all Keepers were reported killed by Marsh and the Inquisitors. Vin and Elend kill one Inquisitor with a steel spike, Marsh has something like twenty spikes, and the other Inquisitors have fewer. Assuming a high-end number of four additional spikes per Inquisitor, and also assuming that Ruin marshaled all his forces to Luthadel to fight with Vin, we can assume something like 60 or so Keepers (10 spikes in Marsh, 4 in the other 11 Inquisitors, plus a few spares in case I missed something). This leads me to believe that the Keepers were very much a small secret organization, with probably a lot of aid from normal Terris people. This is all theory, but it seems likely to me unless we get WoB that there were a lot more Keepers than I thought. Third thing: we have no evidence that Sazed substantially changed the kandra from their mistwraith-like forms. Yes, someone probably put the spikes back in, but... mimicking muscles is one thing, mimicking an organ to create genetic material that is drastically different than your own? I don't see it happening.

The problem with using an Invested object as a spike is that it's already Invested, and there seems to be an upper limit on how much of a charge anything can take. Using Nightblood as an example, which we know is a highly Invested object, we can theorize that most materials won't soak up much more than a thousand Breaths. It makes me wonder what the ratio between Stormlight and Breath is, and how that relates to things like Allomancy or more specifically Feruchemy. Is one Breath equal to five hours of strength? Ten? Two hundred? I wonder if we'll get a Feruchemist that uses a sword as a metalmind, we might find out.

Just a quick thing on the original theory: there does seem to be an upper limit on how much you can Invest something. I personally don't think you could stick a thousand Breaths into a Shardblade, but your mileage may vary.

But burning aluminum isn't a "hey, I'll burn this awhile" thing. When Vin does it, it instantly gets rid of ALL her reserves, including aluminum. I doubt you could keep a burn of it going, since when you first started it'd kill your reserve.

I wonder if maybe it's not the storms that move, but Roshar... but then the stars would change. Still, that sounds like it'd be pretty interesting.

Why would you ignore the major effects of aluminum in this situation? I mean... burning it for a secondary effect when the primary one is so awful seems a bit... not great. Also, I suspect that an Inquisitor wouldn't have the self-control to burn anything that the person controlling them didn't let them burn, similar to Marsh's inability to move even a finger on his own if Ruin didn't want him to. The control granted by the flaw seems pretty total.

Vasher did indicate that he and Nightblood killed Shashara. It's possible he absorbed a Divine Breath that way. However, I still think our definition of Shardblades is alright. Considering it's a world with magic swords already, Nalan could just have been using terminology that Szeth would understand easily.

I think the trap people fall into is that because Ruin and Preservation manifested their physical aspects in something tangible like beads of metal, other Shards would have to as well. I wonder, though, if that's really the case. On Sel, I think it's very possible that the land itself is infused with the Physical aspects of the Shards, hence the super strong ties to geography. If that's the case, it's probably so diffuse that there's no real power to be had, unlike the very concentrated atium and lerasium beads.

You can't say for certain that Hoid wasn't helping Ruin. He's so indirect in Mistborn that it's pretty hard to tell what he's actually up to. Letting Elend know about the Inquisitors certainly put them under the clock, and he may have told Vin some things at their set up meeting that would have led her down the wrong path. All in all, impossible to say.

And the type of Honor described binds people together... seems to fit the pattern, no?

Is it possible that Cusicesh is another splinter of Honor? We know that the Bondsmiths only ever numbered three, and we can assume that was because they either each bonded a spren relating to one of the three Shards, or... maybe three aspects of Honor? Honor as the Stormfather, Honor as the Almighty, and Honor as the protector of mankind from the Voidbringers?

I fail to see how this would be useful though. Let's say you take over an Inquisitor with Soothing or whatever, and he uses aluminum to cleanse the influence. Now he's got no metals, which means first off he's blind (no steel lines), he's got no reserves... and you can still take control again because hey, you're not the one who got rid of your reserves. I suspect this would be more useful for actual Aluminum gnats, but I have trouble seeing how, since burning aluminum once gets rid of your reserve, and aluminum is pretty rare... yeah. I don't know. Overall probably not a great technique.