king of nowhere

When they were in shadesmar and syl had physical form, there were times where I got the impression of romantic undertones. well, that's focusing on the negative. syl is a sapient being and identifies herself as a girl, and for some people that's enough; it's really no different from interspecies romance in sci-fi, and at least in mass effect it was done (sometimes) in a believable way. As for their bond, you make it seem like one of those unhealty relationship where the couple is incapable of living without the other and a breakup is often followed by violence, but that's far from the case. at the beginning they were stuck together, mostly. So it's more like taking a housemate to split rent expences and eventually deciding to become a couple.

speaking of adolin, I'm glad to see him being badass without powers, without needing a radiant to come save the day (well, except to heal him in the end). In all the previous books, his accomplishments have been undermined by kaladin doing everything better. It is often the case in fantasy that people cannot achieve greatness without some supernatural aid, and I always like when this trope is defied.

I also was underwhelmed by the big reveal. ok, the part about destroying their previous world is actually relevant, except that we have no clue how that may be; I have the feeling it may be something akin to an overuse of the surges, so just learn to practice sustainable surgebinding. But the "invaders" part, that's really irrelevant. I was born on this land, I worked it, I built my home. Therefore this land is mine. It does not matter that 100 generations ago my great-great-ancestors stole it. Yes, it was wrong, but should I feel responsible for something bad done so long ago just because I have a genetic relation to those people? For that matter, I am the descendant of invaders, because europe was inhabited by neandertals, and then the cro-magnon came and the neandertal disappeared. anyway, it seems also most characters took the new in the same way. except the skybreakers, and they have a close fight with the diagram and the sons of honors for the title of dumbest secret society on roshar. I am a teacher, and yet I cannot help sympathize with you...

Yes, I remember seeing that theory before, and it was considered likely, given how alien they are over the general landscape. Among confirmed theories, we have also dalinar killing his wife. I don't think anyone guessed anything about the fused before they appeared in book, though.

I'm not sure about that. There is only so much taravangian could have written in 20 hours, and with an ever-branching future, there are limits to how many possibilities he can predict. I believe at this point that taravangian is basically grasping at straws, taking out-of.context pieces of the diagram and intepreting them as he wills.

the dalinar flashback sequence was masterful. It was a chore to read through shallan's and adolin's, but not those ones. And that bait! Just when I was thinking "well, the warmongering is done. Dalinar was not a bad guy, but he didn't do anything irredemable", and then slam! rathalas round 2! Also discovering that he never really loved his wife, and that he was an absent father for his children. My admiration for adolin is even greater now: he turned out so good despite a father that cared little about him until he was 18. the sequences in the way of king when adolin supports and helps dalinar are much stronger for it; dalinar was not a good father, and yet adolin still stands by him. And despite everything we uncover about his past, dalinar still gained redemption. Just sublime. Incidentally, dalinar not only redeemed himself, but a lot other people in the process. by acting as he did, he won the trust and admiration of both adolin and szeth. if dalinar had been a shred less honorable, kaladin would have been in moash' place, and szeth would have sided with odium. All this from someone who committed genocide ten yeas prior. redemption is a really big theme in the SA. Pretty much every main character needs to gain redemption from something. Some achieve it, while others lose their chance. And the top contender for this is taravangian. really, near the end I was thinking he'd tell everyone to dalinar, come clean and support him. instead, he just told dalinar enough to gain his trust, and then he allied with odium. really? I mean, really? the diagram failed big time on predicting stuff. and if dalinar managed to resist odium despite vargo's best attempts to sabotage him, then maybe the rational thing to do would have been to ditch the diagram and help him. but no, he had to go and ally with odium.this is where I stop seeing him as a deeply conflicted man and start seeing him as a fanatic. on the down side, I found the book slow in the kholinar arc - mostly because I didn't care enough about all the shallan's sub-arcs - and I was expecting more in the dialogues between shallan, adolin and kaladin. I mean, when she told adolin about the split personalities and he told her about sadeas, it had the potential to be a crowning moment of hearwarming, but it was more like "meh". also, superpowered mutant amaram was too much over the top.

that. just that. those guys spent 1024 years hiding in society. they did not wear an armor or carry a sword because that would make them stand out. and when you are an assassin standing out is really bad. the capacity to surprise the target was worth more. so mistborn got an equipment that was good for that - well except the mistcoat, which as an equipment I never liked anyway. it is said to have some protective function though, so I'd guess it's made of hard leather and has some limited armor functionality. Then with the fall of the lord ruler the rules change. from there to the final ascension is only a couple years. not enough time to rrethink the equipment, and mistborn are becoming really rare anyway.

yeah, I was going to write that obsidian is but a kind of glass, but you got there first. i don't want to steal the job from someone more versed than me in medieval weapons, but the better weapon depends on circumstance. A polearm works better in formation, because it gives reach and lets you create a spear wall. as a weapon for a single combatant, it is not good, because someone can just get into your reach and you have big troubles hitting. Swords are versatile, which is the reason they were carried around. A mace or a greatsword is good when you have to smash through an armored target. A knife is not a good weapon, it is at best a side weapon. However, there are some advantages to a simple knife that make it better suited to mistborn: 1) concealment. mistborn mingle with noble society, and people don't know who they are. they can carry a knife under their clothes.if they carry around a pike, people will ask questions. Also, carrying around a sword inside a ballroom may not be socially acceptable, while a hidden knife remains hidden. 2) manufactoring. A knife can be made of glass. A sword cannot, glass is too brittle and such a sword would shatter too easily. mistborn cannot use metal weapons - welll they could, but it would be stupid - and that rules out swords. there are also reasons why the normal disadvantages of knives do not apply to mistborn 1) unsuited against armor: nobody can use an armor against a mistborn anyway 2) short reach: that's a problem for normal people, but mistborn are more like flying around an only occasionally exchanging blows, so the short reach will matter less. 3) mace or hammer: those are good at penetrating armor, which is not a problem for a mistborn. Against an unarmored target, the sword or knife is better. So, let's look at all the weapons you mentioned: 1) polearm: too encumbering to carry around, too lumbering in battle. doesn't work well in 1v1. Especially when your opponent can use pewter and afford to get wounded once if that lets him close the distance and stab you three times. 2) sword and shield: you can't make a sword of glass, and even if you make an aztec-style macuauhitl it will still be too large to comfortably carry around - though it is a good weapon and inquisitors use a version of it. The only shield you can afford as a mistborn is a wooden shield, and it would be too big and heavy too be worth carrying.

elend couldn't replicate the horseshoe trick. he lacked the finesse of control needed to pull it off. it is stated in the book. and they've been fighting koloss for hours and hours, until they consumed all the atium. it would be really strange if elend, a strong mistborn, would not help himself with pewter. and since he run (well, steeljumped) to the pits leaving tthe rest of the army behind, he left his alllomantic supplies behind. and he spent a lot during the trip. so no, he had good supplies, he still run out. anyway, there was no winning against the army they were facing. And I really can't remember a single fight when somebody lost for running out of metals (except atium, but that's because it's so rare). The only potentially relevant scene is when vin is captured in fadrex. she drinks the sleeping concoction and burns pewter to fight it; if she had more pewter, maybe it would have worked. then again, maybe not. After all, poison is absorbed slowly from the stomach, and a duraluminium burst would only, at best, remove what she had absorbed - leaving what remained in the stomach to finish the job. And she was wearing a ball gown, so she could not carry too many vials without them becoming too visible underneat. which bring us to the reason why many mistborn favored glass knives: probably simply because they are light and easy to conceal, unlike the axes favored by the inquisitors.

first thing, it's elend, not aland. and luthadel, not lothadel. And your whole grammar could use some upgrading, you write like a flux of conscience and you are difficult to understand. Second thing, you keep saying that "multiple times" characters get in troubles because they run out of metal, buut you always bring out elend's death as an example of it. Care to add more examples? Because as far as I can tell that's the only time when having more metals may have made a difference. Except that it didn't, because elend realized he had to die anyway. Third thing, elend actually had more metals that time, it's just that the whole army have been fighting for hours, he had been fighting for hours, and at some point he run out because his stores weren't limitless. May I also point out that they were facing the end of the world, their home city was overthrown, and they were retunring from an extended campaign; that kind of thing tend to dwindle one's stockpiles of everything. fourth thing, vin would have never survived the clash with ruin. It's not like the little trickle she gave elend made any difference. She was a shard, she had the power to make and collapse planets. saying she died because she had given some allomantic power to elend shortly before is like saying a runner lost the run because a teeny tiny particle of dust deposited on his clothing and weighted him down.

Exactly what it says on the title. I don't think that's intentional; maybe it got lost when the content was transferred to the new website? Also in the annotation for chapter 19 it says " Anyway, if you want more on linguistics, head over to the ‘goodies’ section of the website. I’ve got a whole essay on the languages in ELANTRIS over there. " Well, I'd like that, but there is no "goodies" section anymore. So where can I find it?

I did specify "before duraluminium bursts". three vials will give you some half hour of burning for pewter, hours for the slower metals. that's enough. only after vin discovers that she can use a whiole vial in a second there is the need for more vials.

because three have been enough for every situation we've seen (at least before duraluminium bursts), because the more metal you have the more anchors you give your opponents, and because fighting with glass objects on you carries the risk of greater injury. Overall, there are more problems than benefits at having more than 3, and even then only those expecting a protracted fight carry more than three.

antarctica is 1/7th of the total land area of the planet, and 1/30th of the total surface. we have no scale for the map, but seems an appropriate size for "big, but still a small part of the planet". We also can make an estimation according to kelsier's travel in secret history: he takes a few months to reach the edge, and he doesn't tire (much) and never needs to sleep. walking at 4 km/h he would be able to cover 100 km/day, a bit less because he did stop sometimes. we could give him 2000 km in a month? a circle of 2000 km radius would have a surface of about 12 million square kilometers. And kelsier takes more than a month, so it is likely bigger. don't forget that a cubic kilometer is one billion cubic meters. to get even one single centimeter of accumulation on the continent (which seems reasonable for a normal ashfall) we need 10^12 cubic meters, and 10^4 cubic meters is a pittance. not enough to add up. in luthadel it rained ash once per week, in the ouside dominances oonce per month, and even if we assume that an ashfall is only one millimeter (which is the minimum to be reasonably called ashfall) it still takes a lot more ash than my knowledge of vulcanology can account for.

but it went on for a whole thousand years. I am sure the total ash that was spewed in that time was much greater than the equivalent of one meter over the whole continent.

I can't believe I never thought about this before! See, the ashmmounts were spewing ash, and a LOT of it. The final empire was continent-sized, and covering it is an incredible task. Assuming a surface of 15 million square kilometers (the size of antartica, which seems appropriate as it is a continent covering a polar region) to cover the whole empire with one meter of ash one would need 15000 cubic kilometers of ash, which means a cube of over 20 km in side. A shard is certainly capable of generating that amount of matter, but a big plot point of the story is that ruin could do nothing because it was trapped, and preservation could do nothing because it had no mind and was using everything it had to keep ruin trapped. The lord ruler made the ashmounts, but then he had no shardic power left. So the ashmounts kept spewing ash for a full millennia, and it was a natural phenomenon, as no shard could fix it. And there is just no way this would have been possible. volcanoes spew mostly lava; some of that get nebulized into very fine dust and goes up in the atmosphere, so volcanoes produce some ash, but not nearly enough for our purposes. If the ash was produced this way, then also lava would have been produced, in much greater amounts, and it would have covered the whole final empire in kilometers of rock. It also does not work to assume that the ashmounts had ash inside; subjected to the pressure and temperature of the planet's mantle, the ash would get melted and compacted and become regular rock. There's no way it could remain fluffy over a thousand years. Not to mention that ash doesn't offer much support for the weight of the above strata of rock, and a reservoir that big would probably cause the above crust to collapse. So, is there a way to make this work?

yata gave you the correct mechanics, and from those you correctly inferred that clubs or dox were gone in the beyond well before sazed could do anything about them. As for elend and vin, it is possible that sazed has brought them back, but did he want to, or did he saw reasons not to? and would they want to come back, or would they rather enjoy their rest? I won't tell you the answers to those questions, but I tell you that they HAVE been answered. The answers are in mistborn: secret history, which details some events that were happening in the cognitive realm and that strongly influenced the story. I don't want to spoil, suffice to say that there is a reason marsh managed to gain control from ruin at exactly the right time to remove vin's spike, when he had always failed before. you should read the new trilogy first, though, as it contains some minor spoilers for that one too (although, as it reveals some of those answers, you could say that it was the new trilogy that contains spoilers for secret history).

well, I already postulated that shallan will split her personalities more, and while vanilla/shallan will stay with adolin, veil will hook up with kaladin, and radiant will consider a political marriage to make peace with an enemy, and marry amaram. The three characters will remain oblivious to the true identity of their love interests for the better part of the book; near the end, they will discover that it's always the same shallan, but shallan will convince them all that she's actually three people in the same head, and so she can totally have a relationship with all three of them. She will also persuade the priests, on account of her not being dalinar; therefore they will allow her to marry three times for all her three personalities.

personally, because I suspected it to be so. It just made too much sense. This is no fairy tale with simple white and black morality; in a real world there can be confliting views, and radiants are not exempt.

by the way, since we're here, @maxal, a few weeks ago we had a discussion where I predicted a kaladin climax at the end of part 1, and you predicted a shallan climax at the end of part 1. Turned out we were both correct.

Let me disagree on that. During high school years, girls are generally more mature than boys of equal age. At reaching adulthood, well, I've seen cool responsible men and women, and I've seen dumb irresponsible men and women. I don't know if there is a statistically significant difference - I don't think anyone can define "maturity" well enough for it to be measured - but even if there was, it becomes irrelevant when discussing individual cases. Now, in the case we are discussing, both shallan and adolin are young people who have been burdened by terrible responsibilities. both have answered the call with outstanding performance, and both are cracking under the stress. I would not say there is any maturity issue between them. There is the issue of shallan's crazyness, which is still a secret for adolin - and indeed, all other characters.I have no idea how that will work out, will depend mostly on how shallan can cope - I doubt they have any pshycologist capable of helping her on roshar

According to the coppermind, Shallan is 17, Jasnah is 34. 17 ages of difference is a large gap, but at least two of my friends had stories over that same age gap when they were shallan's age; one of them lasted one year, the other I don't rememeber. The point is, such stories happen, and they are not that rare, even if it is rare that they last (although the current french president is a good example of one that happened and lasted, and with an even geater age difference). Especially the pupil/teacher relationship, it was considered fairly common in ancient times, especially in ancient greece where, at least judging by the writings of Plato, a certain degree of homosexual attraction between teacher and student was the norm. Later, society decided that it was exploitative towards the younger party, and therefore wrong, but it was probably an overreaction to some cases of actual exploits and especially to growing concerns for pedophilia. It doesn't help that nowadays, since it is considered so wrong, the only people trying it are those who do not care for what is considered wrong, i.e. they are generally immoral people who are actually trying to exploit the student for sex. So, the bad reputation of pupil/teacher relationships is not undeserved, but it should allow for exceptions. As a high school teacher, I don't see my students as attractive, even though some of them are very pretty. I see them at their worst: discipline problems, failed tests, lack of interest, and general lack of maturity. The school environment is perfect for showcasing what those young people still miss to become adults. Somebody like Shallan, however, is a different matter. She has intelligence and maturity and passion and dedication (she is also crazy, but she hides that very well), and if I was in Jasnah's position, I can see myself developing attraction for her. P.S. To avoid misunderstandings, I must point out that even if I had a Shallan-like student she would be off-limits anyway, because she would be my student, for as long as she is my student.

Thanks, that's moving. But there is really nothing to be done without paying a lot of extra bucks. Luckily my brother has an amazon prime account, which will cut down shipping cost and time; the book is scheduled to arrive on november 22, but those expeditions are never 100% reliable. And waiting a week to read is already a big improvement over waiting the best paet of a month, as I did for most books in the past. I tried ebooks, but then I read the contract for one of those. It goes basically "you give us money, you don't buy anything, the book is ours, we just give you permission to read it, but we may change our mind at any time and stop giving you the book and no, we won't give you your money back in that case". In general I really dislike many ebook marketing and pricing policies, but I don't want to launch in another rant here. Suffice to say that I feel buying the book should entitle me to have an electronic version almost for free, since the main cost of it is the intellectual property, which I already bought with the paper book, and last time I checked the market disagreed with me. Now, I am reasonably certain that if I wrote an email to sanderson (attaching a picture of my extensive sanderlibrary) he would give me a free ebook, because that's the kind of things he does, but really, I could not do that. I am just one person, and waiting a week or two is not so unbearable that I have to bother the author himself.

I just got a random idea: since the various facets of shalllan can be called different people, they could also entertain different relationship. Shallan is a good fit with adolin, but veil is more kaladin's type, thus ending the shadolin/shalladin argument. radiant is more pragmatic, and could go for a political marriage instead; I suggest amaram, it makes more sense to reunite with an enemy that way. And she is good enough at talking that she may actually manage to persuade all parties involved to play along with it

Don't think that just because there are a few lucky people (or trolls) it is the norm. I live in europe, italy to be exact, and I can't find sanderbooks anywhere, translated or in original llanguage. Heck, Last weekend I went to lucca comics and games, which is probably the biggest convention in italy, with up to 80000 people participating in a single day, and people asked me to get sanderbooks for them. And I was all 'yeah, that's easy, you can find everything at luccacomics, and sanderson is even famous'. And yeah, turned out, if I wanted any marvel comic from 50 years ago, I could have gotten a full collection. If I wanted any comic from bonelli editore (which I suppose few people outside of italy know, but it's a bit like marvel here), I could buy more copies than I knew were in existance. There were full stands of most book publisshers too, huge fantasy libraries. And of sanderson, I found exactly 6 books. Elantris, rithmatist, mistborn 3 and 4, calamity and firefight. I got elantris, and found that there are no drawings of aons. The puboishers saw fit to remove them; maybe they were too expensive to print ? I already know they removed random artworks from other sanderbooks. I order everything on internet. I will read oathbringer weeks after you other guys, and in the meantime this forum will be offlimits. don't even start complaining about failing to get the book early.