king of nowhere

I always supposed they got lost or shattered beyond repair. 3000 years are a long time. a shardbearer on a ship sink to the bottom of the ocean, another shattering his plate beyond repair to not let it fall in enemy hand, a blade sank in a mudslide... granted, losing a shard is not common, but it may happen eventually in 3000 years. It is also possible that most of them are left in urithiru, and no one knows how to go there. or that someone is gathering them, but why? if they have 500 shards, they can already conquer the world, so I don't see why they should work in secrecy.

I suggest dumping the girl, because she's clearly not intersted enough in you. In fact, you can forge yourself so that you never went to the date in the first place but left her waiting. That would suit her just fine. Or, if you can't find the right words to break up with her, forge yourself so that you already did the breaking up. If you still want to try to court her, I suggest using emotional allomancy to riot despair and loneliness (or other bad feelings) every time she touches the mobile phone. See how long it takes before she get a pavlovian response to it.

I was under the impression of greatshells being the only animals with gemhearts, but I may be wrong. Do we have word of sanderson on this? Anyway, even if chulls have gemhearts, they are bound to be much smaller than those of chasmfiends. Maybe they get harvested once the animal dies, but they are not the main source of gems. sort of like electricity generated from burning garbage, it is done but it have little impact on the national energy plan. or maybe most gems are harvested from animals. It is not written where they come from in the book, but they certainly seem common enough to be widely used, which make me think of a renewable resource. But they don't need be. Look at how commonly petroleum is used in our world, for example. Last, I am glad to see that sanderson adddressed the problem of overhunting the greatshells. I have been saying it all the time that that kind of hunt can't last for long.

without bias? difficult, we are all fans here. Anyway, about the books droning, in my reread I found that they don't. stuff keep happening. the problem is that the story is following half a dozen main characters and several minor ones, so every book only has a few chapters for everyone. That gives the impression of droning. And when you have to wait 2 years for every book is really annoying. But when you can read it all at once it works. I also disagree with those point vast similarities to tolkien. there are similarities between the lord of the ring and the eye of the world (first book of wot) but after a few books the story start expanding. it is no longer a protagonist making a quest, but a whole world and a set of characters interacting with it. About the ending, I haven't read it yet - can't wait to get my hands on the last book. All in all I can say, I've never been a great fan of fantasy before i discovered the wheel of time. I still am not, but I love both the wot saga and sanderson's books. EDIT: but consider that I am an accanite reader who can wolf down 300 pages in one day when really enticed. I prefer long books because with the shorter ones I finish them just when I was starting to enjoy them. Reading 10000 pages is something to occupy me for 4 months while doing other activities as well. If you are the kind of person who need one month to read a pocket book, then you should not start reading the wheel of time.

If I were a regular misting facing an inquisitor, I'd try not to attracct attention. if the inquisotor was after me, I'd run as hard as I could. there's no way, short of a deus ex machina, a misting can be more than a speed bump for a full inquisitor.

Egwene was getting on my nerves too between book 3 to, say, 6 or 7. She grew up a lot after that, and she does a very good job of being an amyrlin. I join the chorus of those not wanting other books. I would have liked to see the prequel of tam (I like his character a lot: he's one of the few who is reasonable and will persuade people rather than bullying them) but continuing the story would just not be the same. every good story need a good ending. Also, I prefer sanderson to write the stormlight saga. it has the potential to even surpass the wot in awesomeness.

I think there's only a limited number of miths that can be made before they start resembling each other. That's the reason conspiracy guys see massonic/satanistic symbols everywhere; there are enough of them that with a bit of fancy there is nothing that do not resemble one such symbols. So it is normal that many religions have things in common - whether is comes from an acutal influence of god or from some quirk of the human mind, it's up to you to decide. and when creating a fictional mythology for a fictional universe, the mind, consciously or unconsciously, takes bit from here and there. P.S. rao is not italian, and while it an sound a bit italian, I can't think of a single italian word with that sound in it.

can you provide a link to that? that's exactly the kind of material i was looking for. Why should I become crazy trying to figure something out if someone already has done it Also, my range is 1-10 because it takes as 1 the weakest aes sedai. if we take morgase as 1, then of course it will be an entirely different matter.

actually, that's exactly what happened. when rand is taken prisoner, in LoC chapter 51, he was already channeling when he is cut off. the fact that he is able to break the shield when held by three aes sedai confirms my assumption of rand as being 7-8. those three womed were far from the weakest, and if the strenght of most aes sedai is somewhere between 1 and 2, those 3 probably had around 5 between them.

I've been trying to figure out the relative strenght of channelers during my reread. We know rand is as strong as possible, yet the 13 weakest aes sedai can "easily" overpower him. We can arbitrarily set as 1 the minimum power required to be rased to the stole. given that the strenght of a circle is not strictly additive, and you need to be "significantly" stronger than someone to shield him once he's already embracing, we can estimate radn's strenght around 7-8. in the stone of tear he shields both elaine and egwene at the same time, with enough power left to weave several other flows. assuming those other flows didn't take much power, I estimate the girls' strenght to be around 3. We have no direct comparison with nynaeve (there's a scene when the circle heals mat from the dagger when she claims she could wield half of that unaided, but that was considered a wrong statement since siuan was using a sa'angreal), but she's probably 4 or 5. moiraine was one of the strongest women in the tower, but still much weaker than egwene or ealyne, so probably around 2. About angreals, i think most of them multiply the power of the wielder by a number between 2 and 10. after being freed from the tower of genjei, moiraine can barely lit a fire by herself, but with the angreal (very powerful, almost sa'angreal) she is stronger than before. before losing her power, with a lower agreal she could make a wall of fire a few hundreds of meters long. I estimate her actual angreal to multiply by 10 or 20. moiraine's strenght now is around 0,2 unaided. that's still a bit greater than sorilea and much greater than morgase. sa'angreals generally have a multiply factor of 10 to 100, but sky is the limit. With callandor rand could "level a city with one blow". the most powerful explosion he can make unaided are akin to big conventional bombs, and leveling a city is a power akin to a nuclear bomb. a small nuclear bomb is approximately 10000 times more powerful than a big conventional bomb, so callandor multiply the wielder's strenght by a similar number. We don't have ways to estimate accurately the choedan kal, but from what we know to be possible with it, I think it's safe to assume it has a multiplicative factor of at least several millions. That's what I managed to figure out from my reread. Is there some official data on the matter, or some more comprehensive collection of speculation?

trying to find info about the I happened on this http://www.brandonsanderson.com/blog/1007/MYTHWALKER-Prologue%E2%80%94Updates in particular it says "the only annotations I have written now are for THE ALLOY OF LAW. I hardly think you would appreciate me putting those annotations up before the book is even out." So it means that those annotations are already written - they had been for more than one year - and need only to be published. but as far as i could see they are not on the site. So what happened to them? any idea on why they haven't yet be released and when they will be? Not sure this is the right place to ask, iin which case I apologize.

I think it should work. I'm pretty sure we see some scene in alloy of law where wax changes his wheight in midfly, and he doesn't slow down or accelerate. that means that iron feruchemists are not energy conserved. flying should however be difficult. you can modify your wheight, but you cannot modify that of your anchor. and you need a heavy anchor to push effectively, so that would drag you down. However, two iron feruchemists, one of them iron misting, should pull the trick neatly. they are together, one of them (say A) makes himself heavy and the other (say B ) light, A push B (manually, you don't need allomancy there) who shot forward without A slow much. then B makes himself heavy and A light, and they pull, so A catches up with B. repeat at will.

get an hemalurgical spike that grant you the power to burn aluminium

I'm not asking an author to write an essay on the consequences of the hero's actions on the economy of the world with iin-depth generational span. I'm just asking for consistency. Dalinar wondering if the supply of gemhearts could sink the market once they are brought back is enough to satisfy it. And it dont rrquire the author to take years to check everything. A good general culture from the author is enough to spot and clear most potentiual inconsistencies, but the thing to do is having several experts (not a world expert, just someone with good knowledge on the matter) of different disciplines among your alpha readers and asking them to find any such problem, along with proposing potential solutiuon that would not alter the plot. It's what sanderson did for the medical scenes of kaladin after all.

If a guy is swinging a shardbalde nbext to you, it don't matter if he's on your side, you still would like some protection against accidental friendly fire. But I agree with everything else. Shardblades cut investiture - and pass through everything lacking it, so shardplates block it because they are invested. That's the basic of it, even if there's more to it. But I wonder now about the implications. If kaladin or szeth draw enough stormlight, will he become resistant to shardblades? can other fabrials block blades too? I doubt anyone tested them that way.

I don't see how that could be dangerous to the shardbearer. thanks to his high mobility he will arrive there much faster than the enemy army, but even if he find the enemy army there, he will spot it in time to turn back and run away. And if the enemy went to the plateau that fast, it means that they would have gotten the gem out before the army could arrive anyway, so nothing is lost. The only danger could be posed by enemy shardbearers applying the same tactic. That's why I'm suggesting adolin and gavilar do it. They are two extremely skilled shardbearers, and I don't think the parshendi can have that many shards. They should be able to disengage even against several parshendi sharbearers. Not every undefended pawn you can take with your queen is a trap. Sometimes it's just a pawn you can gain.

There is an alternate approach to the gems that should be ffar more efficient that the strategy employed by the armies. We have seen that what is normally done is send an army to the plateau and hold the ground while some try to open the crisalys with hammers. That takes time and generally the enemy army can also arrive and fight for the crisalys. But we have also seen adolin open the crisalys with a few moves of the shardblade. And we know a shardbearer can run faster than any men. So, if the goal is to take the gems, why not send a single shardbearer instead of an army? the shardbearer could run all the way, much faster than any army. he could jump most chasms, but if needed he could carry a pole like the scouts. he would arrive before any enemy, take the gems in a few minutes, and run back with them. he'll be back in the camp before the enemy army can even reach the plateau. The only way to counter that would be to send another shardbearer against him, but I don't think anyone could compete with dalinar or adolin. So dalinar and adolin, by doing this, could have taken most of the gems by themselves.

I disagree on that, I think a good storyteller should take care of all those details and try to make the story as consistent as possible. The answer could not be 100% accurate, or could be a bit unlikely, but there has to be an answer. I can accept a "just roll with it" only for humoristic purposes. That said, there can be plenty of reasons the value of the spheres stay fixed. The easiest is that while originally the respective values were based on the soulcasting use, with time they became fixed. probably there was some kind of agreement on that, and they became a fiat currency. At this point I expect the value of the coins would not change even if the market was flooded with gemhearts - even if maybe the value of the gems would go down. As for why we haven't felt the effects of inflation by now, it's because those kind of things would take time to happen in a society like that - only our society today reacts to changes very quickly. the price of gems will eventually go down, but it will take some time. I am more concerned with extinction of the greatshells. an animal that big can't have a very high population density, and the shattered plains aren't that big. if the armies have killed a few each week, their numbers should be starting to dwindle. And then the army could not soulcast food anymore.

as far as medicine goes, they knows the basic principles of hygiene, and that alone puts them on a totally different level than our middle age. their child mortality should be pretty low, except for modern first world standards. On the other hand, I realized that the concept of "sparsely populated" is pretty different now from what it was once. The roman empire was estimated to have some 60 millions inhabitants, and it covered all the mediterranean basin, while today that is the population of italy alone. And roman empire was heavily populated for the standards of the time. And the story of leonidas at the thermopylae says there was only one road in that mountain range that could be passed by carriages, and that was in greece, another populated place. So maybe having one village of 500-1000 inhabitants (including surrounding farms) every 20-30 or even 50 kilometers is a normal population density when the main economic activity is subsistence agriculture.

I doubt it.I don't think you can steal stolen powers, but even if you could, you would only steal one power. remember, there is no spike to steal the power of a mistborn, but you'd have to steal every single metal.

I suppose you meant a gold misting, so he could compound with a gold ferring spike; but anyway, that's the best formulatiion of the "hemalurgy for healing" idea so far.

I wonder why brandon don't insert a table of currency values in the appendix of the books. it's not a plot point to be rafoed and I'm sure we're not the only opnes intersted.

dead heroes returned, yes. however, they did not went to mat to fight for him. they went to rand, and they asked him to pull out the banner. Also, they didn't engage the seanchan in a normal way. their fight was directly linked to the one between rand and ishamael in the sky. when rand advanced, they advanced, and when he retreated, they retreated. If the heroes were just fighting regularly their battle would have been independent from rand's. So to me it's pretty clear the horn is linked somehow to the dragon and the heroes will not simply come and fight. As for the horn never being sounded before, here what says the wot encyclopaedia Tor Website Q&A � The Horn of Valere was known during the Age of Legends. It was an artifact from an earlier Age. It was never used, partly because the Third Age was mostly peaceful and partly because its power was considered a myth. It was lost and thought destroyed during the violence that preceded the War of Power. After its recovery, it was included with the Dragon Banner and the Eye of the World because the Foretellings that made up the Prophecies of the Dragon said it must be so.

We've been told in the books that the heroes of the horn will figth for whoever sounded it, but I wonder if it is real. As far as we know, no one ever sounded it in the age of legends, so maybe they didn't really knew the details of it.

the 1) is probably true. not sure how that affects the sentience of the kandra, but it would surely affect the blessings. the 2) is intersting. there was a discussion on using hemalurgy in hospitals by having one allomantic gold spike and one feruchemical gold spike (both taken from volunteers), and planting them in the patients so they could heal by gold compounding. one problem of this was the decay of the spikes when they are outside of a body (you won't find many volunteers to be spiked, so you need to make those spikes last), but if they could be stored in a kandra it would be a pretty nice trick to bring back someone on the brink of death ion a matter of minutes.