Raven Wilder

Odium says that, even if he agreed to Dalinar's terms for the contest of champions, he can't force the Fused or the other voidspren to come back to Braize, that the Everstorm puts their ability to return beyond his power. So I think that creating the Everstorm was specifically done so Odium's forces could return even while the Oathpact held ... but that Taln needed to break in order for Odium himself to act on Roshar. That makes me inclined to think that, after four millennia stuck in Damnation, Odium cooked up this Everstorm plan to work around it. Taln breaking around the same time it's put into motion is thus either a coincidence, a choice Taln made in response to the coming Everstorm (either wanting to go fight it, or giving up in despair when he sees there's no point to his continued suffering), or the result of someone else machinating events so these things would occur with suspicious timing (*cough* Cultivation *cough*).

Yeah, combining Zinc and Electrum that way could be a good way of achieving low-grade atium: with enhanced mental speed, you can keep track of all the flurry of electrum shadows and analyze patterns in their behavior, to see which courses of action seem to yield the best results. And if we're listing generally useful Twinborn combos: Bendalloy Allomancy and Steel Feruchemy. The downside of being a Steelrunner is that, in order to move at high speeds, you have to spend a lot more time moving at super slow speeds. But if you store your speed while in a bubble of accelerated time, no one will notice.

The fight would go like this: Atium Seer sees that the Steelrunner is going to run around behind them to cut their throat. They therefore thrust their elbow backwards, timed perfectly so that it will connect with the Steelrunner's gut at the exact moment they rush at the Seer from behind. But! We've seen that Steelrunners can maneuver, change course, and react to new developments while running at high speed. So they'd see that, if they proceeded on their original course, they'd run slam into the Seer's elbow, so instead approach them from another angle. As a result, the Seer's vision of what was going to happen splits in two, because by seeing what was going to happen they've changed what was going to happen, just like with Vin vs. Zane. That particular instance took incredible skill to pull off, but that's because the two combatants were about equally fast; when one combatant is many times faster than the person burning atium, it becomes exponentially easier. As for the dangers of performing hand-to-hand combat at highspeed, it's a little unclear how that would work. However, even if a Steelrunner punching someone at superspeed would wreck their own hand, so long as they're punching the Seer somewhere vital, like the head, they'd still win. Even if they walk away with a broken hand, the Seer would have a broken skull.

As the Bondsmith Herald, his insanity has likely caused him to become obsessed with uniting people, just as Nale has become obsessed with the law. He may have some deranged notion of humans and spren all living together in the same Realm, united, rather than living apart.

What I'm wondering is, what happens if an Awakener drains the color from a gemstone? Can it still hold stormlight or trap a spren?

Alternatively, maybe what finally broke Taln was showing him, "Ha ha, we're gonna start a new Desolation anyway! Your sacrifice has been for nothing! Loser."

I get the impression that Radiant Shardplate doesn't require stormlight. There's a mention near the end of the book that, since Kaladin's sworn the Fourth Ideal, his Shardplate is now always surrounding him, even if it's not usually visible or tangible, which would not be practical if it was constantly draining stormlight. Besides, it makes sense; the Radiant's main spren doesn't require stormlight in order to become a Shardblade, so the lesser spren becoming Shardplate shouldn't either. I'm guessing it only needs extra Investiture if it has to heal damage. What I really want some more info on is how Soulcasting and Releasing work in combat, given they're two of the most potentially destructive. We've seen almost nothing of the latter (and don't think I wasn't pissed that Windrunners vs. Skybreakers was left all off-screen in RoW), and while we've seen Soulcasting during battle, it's always under unusual circumstances. Shallan sucks at Soulcasting, so the only combat Soulcaster we've seen is Jasnah, and her three fight scenes have been 1) against some back alley thugs she barely needed to try against, 2) during the Battle of Thaylen Field, when the perpendicularity was beefing her up, and 3) during the battle in Emul, when she was deliberately holding back her Radiant abilities to get a feel for semi-normal combat.

Dalinar rejecting Odium's offer happened, in part, because of how Cultivation structured his boon/curse, so in that case presumably they're the one messing up Odium's futuresight with their own futuresight.

No one says you have to use the traits you store. You could store your sense of pain in a tinmind, and then just throw the tinmind in the garbage, never to be used again.

Did Dalinar ever actually swear not to summon the Stormfather as a Blade? As I recall, after they bonded, the Stormfather simply declared that he would not be summoned as a Blade, without any input from Dalinar on the subject. I think the issue with Dalinar summoning the Stormfather to work the Oathgate wasn't anything to do with a broken oath, but with summoning the Stormfather like that without his consent (with the Stormfather seeming surprised that that was even possible).

The Skybreakers are all about following the exact letter of the law. It's possible that, so long as Dalinar never specifically ordered Szeth not to kill Taravangian ...

Thing with Jasnah is, we don't know her too well at this point. We've had, what? Four or five chapters from her point-of-view? (and those written to keep a great deal of Jasnah knows hidden from the reader) And in other characters' viewpoint chapters, Jasnah's stoic and aloof demeanor keeps her something of a mystery.

Darkeyes are a disenfranchised caste of people, with some being made slaves as punishment for various offenses. The skaa all start off as slaves. There's also the fact that the Lord Ruler was a true absolute dictator; the law was whatever he wanted it to be, which allowed unlimited scope for cruelty. On Roshar, none of the leaders (except maybe Ishar) have the same ability to quash all opposition with their own, personal power. So to retain their authority, they have to avoid becoming too oppressive, otherwise they'll turn the people they need against them (as we saw with Kholinar under Aesudan).

Now, if a Drab from Nalthis got Investiture from another source (say, by bonding a spren or eating some lerasium) would they still be a Drab?

It seems a little convenient, doesn't it? That Wit (a.k.a. Hoid) just happens to develop a romantic relationship with one of the most powerful people (both politically and magically) in all of Roshar. I can't help wondering if Wit has been playing the part of the besotted lover, and gotten Jasnah to develop romantic feelings for him, because it lets him more easily gain her trust and influence her actions during the coming crisis. Especially when you recall that Hoid is an Allomancer, so who knows if some surreptitious Soothing or Rioting has affected Jasnah's feelings for him.

If you look at all the Shards' Intents (the urge to destory, the urge to preserve, the urge to be autonomous, the urge to be merciful, etc.) they don't really add up to a complete, psychologically complex person. You'd need way more than 16 Shards to cover all the aspects that make someone who they are ... unless you divide them into 15 Shards that each embody one of their main characteristics, and then another Shard that covers a whole bunch of a minor, miscellaneous characteristics. There may not be a Shard called Curiosity, but that doesn't mean Adonalsium couldn't be curious. Or be bored, even if there's not a Shard called Boredom. So while Honor and Ambition and Devotion and all the rest make up the bulk of who Adonalsium was, maybe that still left a bunch of other Intents, none of them prominent enough to be a Shard in its own right, but who could be pooled together into an amalgam Shard. That might result in a Shard with no clear direction, one that can switch from embodying Pride to embodying Sorrow or Humor or Delusion or Reproduction at a moment's notice. Such an erratic Shard could justifiably be called Whimsy.

I do have wonder about Subsumer Ferrings: do their metalminds simply store caloric energy, or do they also store nutritional value? Suppose I ate a bunch of deep fried cheese curds. I could store all the calories from that snack in a bendalloymind, so I wouldn't gain any weight, but would I still be adding a bunch of salt and cholesterol to my bloodstream? That really affects how useful it would be for someone who wants to pig out without dealing with the health consequences. You don't fill a zindmind during something fun, like watching Netflix. You do it during something boring, like waiting for a bus or having a dental exam. If your mental processes are slowed down, it should all seem to go by a lot quicker.

While I enjoyed the Original Mistborn Trilogy, I've never been as enamored of it as some, and mostly prefer the rollicking, fast-paced adventures of the Wax & Wayne books.

The big deciding factor, as I see it, is that Twinborns' only powers are the two metals they're able to use, while Radiants get other powers in addition to their two Surges. At a bare minimum, every Surgebinder has the ability to rapidly heal from major injuries; while it's limited by the amount of stormlight they have access to, for the period of a brief fight any one of them is as difficult to kill or disable as Miles Hundredlives. And I don't think anyone but a Mistborn or full Feruchemist would even have a chance against a Fourth Ideal Radiant with Blade and Plate. Now, you do have a point about it being theoretically easier for an Allomancer/Feruchemist to become a Radiant than vice-versa. Then again, who knows what's possible with the Bondsmiths' nebulous power over Connection.

Wasn't there a WOB that a character in Era 4 Mistborn is planned to be a Dysian Amian/Sleepless? Those guys are functionally immortal, so they could easily be one of the ones we've met already.

Does coercion violate the "willing" part? Like, if you told someone, "If you give me your Breath, I will, in exchange, not beat you to death with a shovel."

I thought Ruin and Preservation created Scadrial from scratch, rather than seeding life on an existing planet? That'd mean it couldn't have existed pre-Shattering.

Maybe Progression/Regrowth is pure Cultivation, like Adhesion is pure Honor, and the Tower's abilities only shut down Surges that are a little of both. While Raboniel only singles out Adhesion as not being a "true" Surge, that could be because Honor has been the primary opponent of the Fused and Odium for thousands of years, so there's a lot of animosity there. While Odium's forces are theoretically opposed to Cultivation, too, she doesn't seem to have been much of an active participant in the war.

I thought it was sort of a transitive property thing, their bondmate hears the screaming and relays it to them. Either way, at some point we're going to need an answer about why Shallan isn't constantly hearing the screams of her dead spren. ... Or maybe she does hear the deadeyes screaming, but because it's been going on constantly since she was a young child, she doesn't consciously notice it, just treating it like background static.

Were their names chosen by the people living there? Or are they something that's been assigned to them by the Shards and/or worldhoppers? Like, if you told an average citizen of the Final Empire that they lived on the planet Scadrial, would they have any idea what you're talking about?