Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

The Nightwatcher looks at you and her big luminous eyes brim with tears as she says "Thank you, sweet mortal. Thank you." You see she always dreamed of writing poetry, but Cultivation kept her so busy with dispensing boons and banes that she never had time to try. Unfortunately your bane is that you have to listen to her poetry. Here's a sample of one of her Ketek's: And one of her better free verse poems: Thankfully, your bane is of a limited duration. After a couple of weeks (and about 20 poetry readings) Cultivation steps in and forces the Nightwatcher back to her old job. The Nightwatcher is ok with this because she realizes that if she had continued she would have been Unmade into the 10th Unmade, Die-Groan-Laugh-at-us, the incarnation of Bad Poetry. I wish that hemalurgy could be applied non-terminally and remove more abstract qualities of personality and also remove more mundane conditions of being. For the abstract quality type of hemalurgy, an example would be that you could spike out someone's tendency to complain about the post office, and say use that spike to give that characteristic to your cat. For the mundane condition of being type of hemalurgy, an example would be that you could spike out your tendency to get halitosis, and then give that halitosis to someone else. And since these spikes are non-terminal, they would be great for pranks. Put a hemalurgically charged pin on your teachers chair with the abstract quality of the proclivity to flatulate explosively, and hilarity ensues. Once the pin is removed, the condition is removed as well, no harm done, all in good fun.

Granted! A 12 inch ruler appears in your hand and you are instantaneously transported 44,015 miles from the surface of the earth and the Nightwatcher is feeling generous so you are in an oxygenated temperature controlled space suit. You find when you extend your arm fully, and are holding your 1 foot ruler at a distance of 2 feet from your eye, your 1 foot ruler completely covers up the earth. You my friend have just rulered the earth. Unfortunately you only have 12 hours of oxygen to enjoy your time rulering the earth as you drift slowly through space, but here's a cool picture of you during your brief yet glorious time rulering: I wish I had the magical power to summon things that were lost. Like my car keys. I could just summon them from wherever they were currently at and they would appear in my hand (not embedded in my hand, but on my hand so that I could grasp them).

Awesome! Toll of the Hounds is my favorite Malazan book! Guess Bauchelain and Korbal Broach will have to wait. I like to know to be on the lookout for things, not a spoiler at all. I'm glad I stuck with the ICE books, I'm actually kind of curious what a reread of Night of Knives would be like now...For some future time. I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the Novels of the Malazan Empire. I was so excited to hear about Ruthan Gudd in SW too. I actually went back and read the scene where he fights in his Stormrider armor, so good! Thanks for the tip on the Black Company reading order, I just looked up the series on Wikipedia and saw that Port of Shadows was just written last year, I'll definitely take your advice on that one.

Granted, you now have the elusive 10th pancake! He goes by the name of Lil' Tashikki, and he's a 100% spiritual pancake: While he is adorable, he does follow you around incessantly and likes to perch on your head while you are waiting for the bus: I wish that I could be a cognitive time traveler, and by this I mean I wish that I could start doing a task and then skip forward in time to when that task is complete, so that I have no conscious memory of having done that task, but I still get the benefit of having done that task. So I could go to the gym lets say, and skip forward 2 hours in time to the point where the workout is done, retain no conscious memory of having done the workout but still have the benefit of having done it. Or I could sit down with an Encyclopedia set, and then skip forward 1 week in time where I have the read every volume of the Encyclopedia, cover to cover, and retain the same information from that as I would have had I been consciously aware of reading the Encyclopedia set.

Just finished Stonewielder, what a great book! Iron Bars! Iron Bars! Yeah yeah! I agree with you @Briar King, the Ivanr parts are incredibly dull and are totally unnecessary. The taking of the city of Ring by the army of Reform was completely unimportant seeing as Gosh and Carfin of the Synod were the ones that made it so the Stormriders could take out the portion of the Lady in the undersea hold. I think that the whole Ivanr arc was an unsuccessful attempt to show that the struggle to end the Lady's reign was a widespread movement and to give context to Greymane's sacrifice. I think the Bakune arc (with the mysterious string of murders), the bloodless priests, the fanatic Stormguards, and especially the revelatory telepathic dialog that The Lady has with Lord Protector Hiam (about how he's failed her, and that the cult was set up to give her blood and to protect her from her ancient enemies and had nothing to do with protecting the land) did a much better job of explaining the significance of Greymane's heroic act. Also, Kyle continues to be disappointingly unremarkable. He's kind of like an average Joe with a good heart, a magic sword and a magic necklace. I can see his appeal from a Role-playing perspective as he's a suped up every man kind of guy, but he really doesn't have a lot going on character wise and even with his magic accoutrements he still gets tossed around like a rag doll (like the standoff with the Lady's priest on the bridge over the river Ancy, and even during his final confrontation in the cave temple). He seems kind of adrift, subject to the larger forces at play and content to just kind of go with the flow. That's really all of the critical stuff, now on to why this book was so freaking amazing! Greymane is an amazing character, so understated but so good. It was really fun to see his journey in this book, and I got chills when the treasure hunters saw his form down in the watery hole where the Ring was. So good. He obviously was carried there by the Stormriders, and the appellation of Guardian gives me some hope that maybe he is a player in the Stormriders house, and possibly we might see more of him in the upcoming Karsa Orlong books by Erickson (those take place after Crippled God, right?) IRON BARS!!!! Holy crap, he is quite possibly my favorite character in all of Malazan (which is filled with SO MANY amazing characters). Ever since his standoff with Ublala Pung against Seregahl in the grounds of the Azath in Letheras, he's been one of my favorites. The slow reveal over 3 books about what the Avowed are was amazing from a pacing standpoint, and one of my favorite scenes in any book was when Ussu was scrying using the power of the Vow, and he looked down with his hand on Iron Bars beating heart and Bars' eyes were buring with rage. HOLY CRAP, that is so awesome! After the scene where Blues transports Bars and the other Avowed to the Skytower fortress and Bars charges Skinner as he's slipping into the Crippled God's warren to flee with last piece of the Lady I have officially firmed up my mental image of Skinner: Victor Kurgan, from the original Highlander. The Stormriders are just plain awesome! Esselmont really hit his stride in this book too (if you conveniently ignore the Ivanr arc). His descriptions have taken on more dimension, and he has turned into the master of establishing environment that I was hoping he would get to with RotCG. The Stormwall is awesome, really well described (I was glad to be reading this book under my electric blanket), and he is really good at setting scenes up with an economy of words. He's gotten much better at controlling atmosphere, and he's coming up with better characters too. Manask was awesome, Bakune was great, Ussu and Borun were great, Overlord Yuell was a well fleshed out incompetent tyrant (the detail with him always being cold was a really nice thematic detail too). I like a lot of the events that happened in RotCG, but I think SW is a better book and it makes me really excited to read Orb Scepter Throne, Blood and Bone, Assail and to start the Path to Ascendancy books. I'm really excited too because I got the 2nd collection of Bauchelain and Korbol Broach novellas. They only sell the volume 2 collection in England, so it was a pretty long wait. Can't decide if I should read the B & K collection or Orb, Scepter Throne next. Also, @Ammanas, I decided to get Glen Cook's The Black Company with my audible credit, I've only listened to about an hour of it so far, but it's really good! It's interesting what a direct line there is between the Black Company and the Bridgeburners, and really the tone of Erickson's Malazan is very similar to the tone of The Black Company (seems like this book is one of his primary influences). I've got a ton of work to do that I can do listening to my audiobook, so pip pip, full steam ahead.

@TheOoklaThatComesBefore, let me know when you're done reading Master and Margarita, it has one of my favorite scenes of any book in it and it would be fun to hear what you thought of it. Also, have you read Murakami's Kafka on the Shore? It has a scene that reminds me an awful lot of Woland from M&M, and it's an amazing book and not nearly as bleak as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Honestly, my favorite Murakami book is Hard Boiled Wonderland / End of the World, especially the End of the World portion. Just read about Venusberg, sounds like an interesting book, I'll check it out when I take my daughter to the bookstore to get some more Diary of a Minecraft Zombie (which I'm going to be reading the first volume of, because it comes highly recommended).

Great podcast! A couple thoughts about Hemalurgic Chromium and the stealing of Destiny, completely in the realm of pure speculation. Destiny implies inevitable future events that are outside of the control of the individual experiencing these inevitable future events, and further more is classically ascribed to beings that are powerful and able to manipulate said destiny. What if the quality of destiny that chromium can spike out is part of an indvidual's spirt web that Shards use to push a specific individual to take a certain future action? As you guys mentioned, the prophecies in Mistborn seemed to imply that Preservation was able to manipulate Elendi's, Vin's and Sazed's destinies. This could be happening in a couple different ways, this could be a particular push on a specific indiviual's destiny, to ensure that a specific crucial action is taken at a specific time, or it could be that a pre-destined sequence of events is set up, and this predestined track starts to pull individuals with compatible destinies towards it. The latter would imply that the Shard in question would be creating a destiny construct, and that this construct would pull and shape the individuals caught up in this pre-destined track towards the pre-defined end of the sequence of events. This could potentially have consequences for Era 3 mistborn, where Trell and Harmony are both trying to shape the course of events along a pre-destined course using their future sight and pushing on Individual's destinies in order to achieve their future aims. What if the agents of Trell, using knowledge from Trell's future sight, were able to find out who certain key actors are who will be instrumental to Harmony's long term plan, and spike out their Destiny? Maybe this is the reason that era 3 is about a serial killer, maybe this is a long term structured attack on Harmony's future plans by the faceless immortals. Also, if an agent wants to be completely free from a Shards ability to meddle with their volition, they could self-spike out their destiny, assuming they have a means of healing after this operation. As to Atium needing to be refined, I think it's just the case that with feudal level technology the process of extracting the Atium from the geodes introduced chemical impurities into the Atium end product. When the veins of pure Atium are condensing within geode they are probably forming within some other material matrix and the Era 1 Scadrians probably lacked the mining technology to separate these veins of pure Atium from the substrate they were embedded in. So even though the Atium itself would be chemically pure, it would still need to be refined to separate it from the extraneous matter that was harvested along with the Atium.

I think this definitely seems to be the case, and further I think that this self-consuming transformation when bonded with Yelig-nar is symbolic of the main theme of Odium, namely that by fueling your hatred with your passion you consume yourself and are left with a void. It's no coincidence I think that both Aseudan and Amaram's chest cavities were hollowed out wrecks, and also that their hearts had seemingly been replaced with the swallowed Gem. Hatred enflames passion which leads to passion fueled self-consuming acts of hatred which leads to the Void, the whole Odious journey all tied up in a nice visual metaphor. It would be interesting to re-read the Aseudan and Amaram scenes and see if there is a positive correlation between the rate of gem-ification to the apparent magnitude of their hatred/passion. If like @Pathfinder surmises, Yelig-nar also consumes the bonded vessel's spirit web, then Yelig-nar will always only be an auxiliary temporary force, unless the transformation is reversible. Though, since Aseudan is dead and wasn't killed directly, it seems likely that the transformation is irreversible and given the extreme physical transformation (kind of similar to soulcaster's turning into the substance they soulcast) it seems likely that once the transformation has reached a specific threshold it is a terminal condition. That's why I think it would be pretty awesome if the Yelig-nar only consumes the physical vessel. That would opens up 3 of the coolest possibilities in my mind. A Fused like Turash like @Invocation suggests. A Herald like Nale or I think even more likely to succeed Ishar/Tezim A Sleepless. Any of the above three could handle the destructive side effects of bonding Yelig-nar if it's restricted to damage to the physical vessel, and like I said earlier I think the most interesting case would be Ishar. That fact that one of his divine attributes is guiding might help him to control Yelig-nar without the downside of having his physical form consumed, and possibly if Yelig-nar consumes the spirit web as well, Ishar would be able to circumvent this side effect as well? The sleepless are ostensible allies of the Radiants, but really, we don't know too much about them other than that Arclo is super creepy and is capable of making short work of two Skybreaker squires. They could probably also withstand being consumed physically and spiritually, and probably have the best chance of disengaging or reversing the bonding process.

I will edit this post in detail more, but I was just watching a pretty amazing podcast about n-dimensional polytopes. It's a Numberphile podcast with Mathematician Carlo Sequin talking about Perfect Shapes in Higher Dimensions (spoilered below): At about 14 minutes in he talks about the 600 cell, which is a 5-Dimensional tetrahedra. Pretty rad stuff. This is a tesseract, a 3 dimensional unfolded 4 dimensional solid. Just like you can unfold a 3 dimensional cube into a 2 dimensional shape (basically 6 squares with shared edges, in the shape of a cross), you can unfold a 4 dimensional shape into a three dimensional shape with shared edges. There's a great story by Robert Heinlein, House on a Crooked Hill, about a house built in the shape of a tesseract. After all of the cuboid rooms are built, there's an earthquake and all of the cubes fold in on themselves to make a 4 dimensional hypercube. Pretty awesome story. Interesting. I think you may be onto something, but I don't think we have enough information to say for sure. There are some variations of string theory that posit up to 26 dimensions, and the string's themselves are one-dimensional constructs that exist in n-dimensional space. Some of the big mysteries of Quantum mechanics could potentially be explained by strings existing in an entangled state in n-dimensional space, some of the things we percieve (like quantum entanglement) as "spooky action" could be simple translations of force through a linkage in a dimension that we can't percieve. I really don't have a ton more to add to this, but I am interested to see what else you come up with. Your posts @Ripheus23 are always interesting to read.

Granted, unfortunately you don't get to decide which laws of physics no longer apply to you. You realize your dilemma when you try to walk away from the Nightwatcher. Unfortunately for you, for every action of yours there is not an equal and opposite reaction against the force you exert. Your foot pushes against the earth in your effort to propel yourself forward, but the earth does not push against your foot and you slip and fall on your arse. You now live in a world without friction. Your vocal chords no longer are able to vibrate against each other, you have to communicate using Morse code conveyed by eye blinks. Fortunately you have a family that loves you very much, and carts your atrophied, gelatinous body around in a high walled radio flyer wagon. You have to be fed intravenously because, guess what, you can't exert force on the things you are trying to chew, and the big un-masticated chunks of food slide frictionlessly down your throat and get clogged in your plumbing, because the normal peristalsis of your digestive tract is broken as well. But due to the fact that you are basically confined to a world of pure thought and no action, you figure out the grand unifying theory of all physics, and using your enhanced understanding of Quantum mechanics and n-dimensional strings, you are able to travel back in time in your puddled slippery gelatinous state and warn yourself not to make that accursed wish. Then you wake up in your bed, and as you lever yourself out of your bed using your arms to push off from your mattress, you look towards the sky and say "Thank God for Newton's Third Law of Motion". The Nightwatcher says "Umm, Ok", and as the words leave her lips you hear her think to herself "Man, that boon is it's own bane, poor kid". As you are riding the bus back from the Nightwatcher's Valley, you spy a cute girl/boy sitting on the seat across the aisle, chuckling to yourself you use your new found power to spy on their thoughts. You hear the following "I don't think anyone is looking, it's probably an ok time to pick my nose..." then you watch horrified as he/she stealthily picks their nose, pretending that he/she is really just scratching their nostril. Then you hear in horror as he/she thinks "That went pretty well, don't think anyone even saw that. Now I am feeling a bit peckish...". Unable to turn away you see him/her put the boogey in their mouth and you hear him/her think "Umm...delicious". You turn away in disgust and instead focus on the thoughts of an elderly gentleman reading the paper, thinking this will be a safe target for your newly acquired powers. Unfortunately you hear him think "Why does my back hurt so much, I think I wet myself when we went over that last bump. I wonder if I can eat tuna fish, have I had too much salt. What's the deal with salt anyway, how come it's bad for you when it tastes so good. That reminds me of the time I was in the war....etc, etc." It only gets worse from there. You hear every unfiltered, half formed, nonsensical thought emanating from every person around you, and realize that the conscious barrier between thought and speech exists for a reason. Not every thought should be expressed, not every thought is what the person intended to say. There are walls between the Id, the Ego and the Super Ego for a reason, thoughts should be private because intention can only be expressed through filtration of thought. Doh, Ninja'd by @Atium The Nightwatcher looks at you with pity in her green glowing eyes and says "Granted!" Ewe R know a sapeent, self-awar spel cheker (could you check that last line I think you have some work to do Mr. AI). I wish @Atium, the sapient spell checking AI would give @Inklingspren spell checker advice on my spell checker advice thread: *EDIT* Just realized that my last wish was prohibitively restrictive, and that it required a specific person to do one specific thing. So I'm going to open this up with a different alternate wish (don't care which is granted): I wish that I had realistic tattoos on my eyelids that looked like open eyes. And since this is a magical wish, I wish that these were animated tattoos, capable of movement and were able to respond to environmental stimulus. Further I wish that these animate tattoos would maintain the perfect illusion that I am awake and paying complete attention to anyone who happens to be talking to me, while in reality my eyes are really closed and I am most likely sleeping.

Awesome! Thanks Mestiv! Tested the new source link with the longest Event name on Arcanum to see how it looks on mobile, it looks great! (test spoilered below):

I like naps, like reading under my electric blanket, and I'm the same age as Brandon Sanderson. I think I started reading the Wheel of Time series when I was old as Brandon was when he started reading it. Definitely an outlier here.

Granted, you get some scrambled eggs. In fact, you never run out of scrambled eggs for the rest of your life. Only problem is your never ending supply of scrambled eggs comes from the fact that your pockets are always full of scrambled eggs. Every pocket. As soon as you put on pants, shirts, jackets, tuxedos, whatever, the pockets are instantly filled with delicious and nutritious scrambled eggs. So you do what anyone with magically cursed pockets perpetually filled with scrambled eggs would do, you start an all you can eat breakfast buffet. I wish that there was a sitcom called Baby Mama, about a baby who's also the mom of 3 troublesome teens, and I could watch it.

The Nightwatcher gets a very peculiar smile on her face and snickers a bit to herself before she says "Granted". With much anticipation, you go back to your domicile and discover that you have indeed been given a "Chicken Nugget". You soon discover that this is in fact no ordinary chicken nugget. You have been given an Awakened Chicken Nugget, that was awakened with 10,000 breaths and given the command "Rule well". Seeing as this chicken nugget bears an uncanny resemblance to the first president of the United States, George Washington, you decide to set up a presidential campaign office for your awakened sentient Nugget. Here's one of the more popular presendential campaign poster for your canidate, George McNugget: Needless to say, when your awakened chicken nugget makes the most brilliant political move since Karl Rove used micro-targeting for political ads and picks BBQ sauce as his running mate, George McNugget wins in a landslide victory. And because he is a candidate that comes from the heartland of America and is a composite of many different animals and many different parts of those animals, he governs as a true consensus builder. And since he is technically your Chicken Nugget, you get to move into the White House with him. The campaign had a bunch of memorable buttons too, but I'll let you fill those slogans in for yourself. I wish that my canidate for the 2020 presidential Election won instead of George McNugget, Barack Toastbama:

I've been using Arcanum more recently, and one feature that should be pretty easy to add that would be helpful when viewing copied WoBs is to have the Event Name and date appear in the source link at the end of the copied WoB. Here's an example of what I mean: Instead of just having the link to the source WoB say source, it would be nice to have something like this: It's information that should be pretty easy to pull into the link, and the date of WoB is an important piece of information. Arcanum is amazing, I just noticed that it would be helpful to know how fresh or stale a particular WoB is. Thanks for all your hard work, Arcanum is amazing!

Totally see your point, I just really like the God Priest of Tukar and think it would be great to see him Yelig-Narrred up. Thanks for the WoB, I'd seen that Jezrien one before, just forgot about it. And extracted, the bit about the heralds makes you wonder who is growing these bodies for the Heralds? This whole mechanic is interesting, but based on WoB's we're probably going to have to wait until the back 5 before some of these questions get resolved. Who knows though, maybe we'll see an ardent from the Devotary of Herald Body Farming in book 4.

So found these WoBs (spoilered below) are there others? The fact that the Herald's don't need to consume investiture to maintain their form would imply to me at least that their bodies are more durable than the Returned's or that the mechanic for anchoring their cognitive shadow into their bodies is at least more efficient or more permanent than for the Returned. I think this just means that their cognitive shadow is a separable and discrete component of the composite entity that is the herald. I.e. that in place of a soul (that a normal human would have) the Herald's have a cognitive shadow (that is made of fossilized Investiture). I really don't think we have enough information about how Yelig-nar works to do more than make reasoned conjectures about how this all works, but I don't think that should stop us from speculating. That's the fun part, I think.

In SW, I'm at the part where Bakune is being sprung from prison by the priest of Fener and his buddy Manask. The part where Manask "dissappears" using his amazing thieving skills and the Ipshank uses the following analogy to describe his amazing disappearance, is one of the funniest scenes in Malazan (I thought). "Like a fart in the wind".

Good point I agree in the main, but there are a couple of fundamental differences between the Fused and the Heralds. The Fused are cognitive shadows that use the gem hearts of singers as anchors to staple in their spirit webs to the physical body of the body snatched Singer. Heralds are not body snatchers, so the only alternative explanation (I think) is that their physical forms are created from investiture to house their cognitive shadows. The exact mechanic of this is unknown, but I think that they probably have advantages as hosts for Yelig-nar over the Fused. Namely that they don't have a competing anchor of fusion for their spirit webs. I am not up to date on the WoB's regarding the mechanics of the Fused, but how I've described it is how it seemed to me to be implied in the text of OB (and the one WoB that describes cognitive shadows being stapled into bodies). It could be that the Heralds, because they are also Cognitive shadows stapled into a body, would likewise be unsuitable hosts for Yelig-Nar, and it could easily be too that Yelig-nar as a parasitic entity destroys the spirit web that it is fusing to (it definitely seemed like Amaram's body was being consumed by yelignar, and maybe this extended to his spirit web as well, which if that is the case, poor Amaram). So, if I was Odium, I would experiment with the Fused first and if there was no adverse effect to the Fused's spirit web after fusing with Yelig-Nar, I would have my new buddy Tezim swallow Yelig-Nar. Now that I think about it, because Yelig-nar is a splinter of his own power, Odium would probably know what would happen without having to experiment. And with his recent decision to "Vyre" Jezrien, he might not be unhappy with the outcome where Ishar's spirit web would be consumed by Yelig-Nar. The more I think about this, the more I see no reason that Odium would have for not letting Tezim swallow the Yelig-Nar pill. It's a win win, and Ishar as Tezim definitely is not lacking in self-confidence, so I don't see him hesitating to do it either.

So here are some WoBs spoilered below with emphasis that address this point: Terminology WoB, Innate investiture: Investiture seepage, perpendicularity tipping point: The Shards are a'movin: Shards reside in the Spiritual Realm, but their essences is in the Physical Realm, also splinters and invested entities have difficulty being far away from the Invested shardworld: Kind of older WoB (2015) but states very explicitly that a Shards influence of power is based mostly on Physical distance, it's paraphrased, but it's not a very technical question or technical answer: Very Old WoB (2012) but with a significant detail about a Shards power being built innately into the world they are invested in (this type of fundamental mechanic probably hasn't changed in the intervening years): The above spoilered WoBs imply one thing very strongly, namely that though a Shard's consciousness (the thing it would refer to as itself) resides in the Spiritual Realm, it's Essence is projected into the physical Realm. And further, any significant concentration of Essence ties entities composed primarily of that Shard's essence to this pooling of Invested shardic essence. This is what is referred to in the terminology WoB as Innate investiture, and I think it's really as simply as it's the bits of Power associated with a shard that has been converted to either Cognitive matter or Physical matter. It still retains the particular "spin" of the investiture that was used to create, and is the projected Essence of the shard that made it (or if it was existent at the time of the shattering, the matter that had the particular "spin" that was associated with the component intent of Andonalsium (like Patji was associated with Autonomy's "spin")). In the realm of pure speculation, I think this is an incredibly interesting idea and while their isn't a ton of proof other than the circumstantial variety, the fact that Roshar's moons are incredibly weird and that they seem to share a lot of common traits with the shards invested in the Rosharan system (detailed below) does seem very significant. As far as explaining how a Shards might go about Investing in a more or less non-permanent way and moving between solar systems (which we know is happening as shown by the Shards are a'movin WoB) this is a great possibly non-catastrophic solution, and a moon could be positioned so that it is proximate enough to the new planet that the shard desires to influence so that the physical essence constraint can be overcome. As a discrete and moveable focus for physical essence, a moon would be ideal, and another point in favor of the moon theory is that Brandon has stated that the Windrunner power set would be perfect for getting out into space (and by extension allowing KRs to check out the moons). The color of the moons has always struck me as significant, Salas is violet, Nomon is a light pale blue, and Mishim is a green. Voidlight is violet, honor spren are blue and the Nightwatcher is green. This seems like it's not just coincidence, this seems like intentional symbolism which hints at a fundamental mechanic. The one problem I see with this theory though is that the orbits of the moons around Roshar should have some kind of noticeable effect on the magic systems at play. While this might be slight, it should still be noticeable, especially given the difference in distance between apogee and perigree in the moons' eccentric orbits. With the ardents investigating the properties of spren (like the quantum mechanics like effect on the frozen flame spren after they have been measured) this orbital effect of the moons on Surgebinding/Fabrials might be something that will be noticed in the future, and possibly a goad to explore the moons in person. All in all, this is a very fun thing to think about and I'm looking forward to see where this discussion goes.

Like @Toaster Retribution said with his suspicion that Nale might be the one to bond Yelig-nar, I think we have seen characters that have both decided to side with Odium and who won't be bothered overly much if their fusion with Yelig-nar temporarily destroys their physical vessel. Nale is still taking his orders from Ishar and his decision to fight on the side of the Singers was made with Ishar's blessing. My hope is that Tezim, the God Priest of Tukar is going to be the vessel Odium chooses for Yelig-nar. I think it would be awesome if Ishar, bonded with Yeligar, leads his Tukari troops and some of Odium's Singer and Fused forces in an assault on Urithiru. He has already threatened that he plans to take back the tower in his spanreed communique to Dalinar in OB, and being bonded to Yelig-nar would give him a tactical advantage I think, and being the Herald of the Bondsmith would give him the greatest possible ability to survive the bond (or at least maintain the bond for the greatest possible duration).

@Arash.F Here's my wish for the Nightwatcher. I wish that everyone in the world would be unable to swear for one full day, and further if anyone tried to swears during this 24 hour period the foul language that would normally be coming out of their mouth would be replaced by a butterfly or a fragrant breeze redolent of roses or some other such substitution. I would be very interested to see what effect this would have.

Granted! You are now the most amazing chef in the world, unfortunately that's a short lived distinction. Your bane is that you are transported into outer space without a spacesuit. As your lungs collapse from the equalization of pressure between your lungs and the vacuum of space, a single tear falls from your eye and freezes in the form of a perfect sphere while the oxygen in your blood boils away. Fortunately there is an afterlife and you are still a good cook in the here after. If you end up in heaven you can cook like an angel. If you are reincarnated, then you cook amazing vegetarian dishes. If you go to hell, well, it's always BBQ night.