Invocation

Lance hesitated. "I know. It doesn't feel like you have power enough to do anything. Not having enough money to do the things you want to do. No resources able to lift that melancholy. Your past haunting you forever, weights on your ankle in a sea of things you can't quite handle. Other people directing your every move. "Never feeling like you're enough. "I know." Lance grabbed her shoulders and pulled her into a close hug, acutely aware that she just had a dagger in her hand but deciding to take the risk anyway. "Trust me, I know." @ZincAboutIt

"Running from your problems doesn't get you anywhere except a one-way ticket to Ironeyes," Lance said, hopping over the balcony railing and onto the parlor's roof and lowering himself down beside her. "Not that I have any particular reason to be lecturing about that." He smirked slightly, hoping she missed the grimace moving his leg caused, but still staring out over the mists. "And of course I didn't pay for that room. It's my building." "Selling that aluminum would be a bad idea, Nerin. All that would do is draw attention to you. Where would you get rid of that much aluminum at? You'd bankrupt half the noble houses in the city trying it. Plus, then what you do? New Seran can be nice, but you'd always be looking over your shoulder. What happens then? When all of this catches up to you just when you forget to check? "That threat will always be there." Lance mentally chided himself. Who was he to be talking about this? The people he'd known, the things he'd done, they might have told him these things, but he still wasn't beyond doing it again. Why should he lay that weight on Nerin? He should have taken the offer he'd been handed months ago. He'd have been gone, but at least he'd have been beyond all this. The rest didn't come back from that, and he was still feeling the weight. He knew he wouldn't have made it back either, but at least he could have tried. @ZincAboutIt

Lance snorted. "Mistborn? Me? Far from it. Maybe if..." he shook himself free of that melancholic train of thought. "No, I'm not. I didn't find it, either. It found me." For once, he revelled in the sensation Nerin's Soothing gave him, tapping no determination. "There's always something else out there, you know? Something that will always find us." What would you give, Mister Rapis, do be able to have more power? Anything within my means. A mistake. @ZincAboutIt

You may not have, but his vibes were rancid the entirety of the first book for me, and the Square Executions just reinforced those vibes. SH came as no surprise to me, with no need to reevaluate his personality. Maybe it's a personal thing? I don't know.

I mean...he kind of does. He might be a protagonist, but he's not a good person, and if he wasn't overshadowed by the particular combination of TLR and a larger rebellion that made him into a better person in our view. He's really not a good person.

Lance took a while to answer, still staring out at the mists. He felt stretched. Maybe he'd finally taken on too much. Maybe it would finally catch up with him. "I have done," Lance sighed eventually, "what I can. They won't bother you." Hopefully. "But that's as much as I can offer for now. The only step beyond this..." his chest throbbed in time with his heartbeat, as it always did when his thoughts strayed this direction. Oh the things he'd do to protect more people. "The only step beyond this is one that I am not willing to take."

I mean...while he was in Shadesmar, he started having some pretty serious thoughts about his own worth as a human and if inconsistency truly lurks in him. Brandon has also said that most of the examples of Radiants we have so far have cracks beyond the minimum to form a bond, so I think Adolin's blowback from his mother's death would be enough to allow him a bond even without that or the blowback that's probably going to happen from Dalinar learning to read and write. That said, I want Adolin to stay powerless.

In a way, that's what Mistborn was (at least the first book).

Lance smirked from the balcony of the inn next door, new mask in place and tenebrous mistcoat as comfortable as ever.. "You are on the wrong roof. Did you enjoy the gift? You did ask for blood, after all."

Look at what happened when Columbus came to America. A disease that a population has no resistance to can be horrifically deadly where others would shrug it off. Especially in the Purelake, where medicine that could help would likely have to be obtained via pseudo-magical fish.

I just knew it was going to have something to do with them.

It was probably the call of the void.

Did we ever figure out what the deal was with that plague in the Purelake area mentioned at the end of Words of Radiance?

Same. I've always mourned Ambition for the fun that Shard would have brought to the Cosmere. Also, I agree with RShara that it's probably Rayse doing his thing. He did specifically seek to become Odium, so he probably had an idea of this plan from the beginning.

There is a better one than that. Not giving specifics, but it's there.

Still hilarious to try. Imagine a game of keep-away, only it's the Shard trying to keep away from an implacable Radiant with Nightblood running around the Cognitive.

In a theoretical capacity, yes. But at some points there will doubtless be a congealing of power as they focus their efforts somewhere and that could be what Nightblood would track.

That means there's an easy way to find where Lift is too haha. Wait if you chucked Nightblood into a Shard, would he be able to track the Shard indefinitely? Or just while the Shard's Vessel remained the same?

First draft of Way of Kings had Elhokar dying, so from a meta standpoint, maybe.

Fabrials should, but their entire function is directing that Investiture into the outer world, potentially dispersing it some.

It's still a tiny chunk of a purity that a Feruchemical metalmind (even one that gets you to mistpoint) wouldn't have.

I'm honestly not that surprised at this. Spren are tiny chunks of Investiture in and of themselves, and that doesn't change when they get manifested into a Blade. Hard to get much more Invested than that without being a Shard (or Nightblood, I suppose).

Feruchemy was a gift to the Terris people. It would almost make sense if it was Preservation giving the gift, or it had directly manifested from the interaction of the two Shards present, but what if it wasn't? Here's my thought: Worldbringers and Worldsingers are related in name between Scadrial and Roshar. There's some commerce between the two, as we've seen with various people showing up on Roshar over the course of Stormlight, but the easiest way for something like that to occur, especially since Hoid has "a relationship with the Worldsingers" in some way, shape or form, is that he influenced both of those in taking root. How would he have known to do that? He uses something similar to Chromium Feruchemy to know where he has to go and what he has to do, but why would that be? He's a Yolish (and now Rosharan) Lightweaver. Why would he have Feruchemy? Simple: Feruchemy, just like the Lightweaving he shows, was originally a Yolish magic magic system in some form. That's why his Fortune manipulation is close to Feruchemy but isn't quite there. Now if you'll remember, Leras and Ati based their Scadrian humans on the Yolish variety, which means that if there was a form of Feruchemy there, it makes sense some of that would have manifested on Scadrial. But it wouldn't have done it on its own. There's some influence there. Hoid can get to Yolen and back, and does so frequently enough that Frost has learned how to anticipate it. Provided that Feruchemy manifested on Yolen, they'd know about it, and I'll bet Hoid "borrowed" someone from Yolen to teach the newly created ancient Scadrians how to manifest their abilities. That person he borrowed from Yolen is probably the source of the Terris prophecies as well, down to the name Worldbringer and its origins as a corrupted form of the name Worldsinger that likely originated on Yolen with a similar principle to Copper Feruchemy and essentially being a traveling bard. I'm not saying it wouldn't changed via interaction with the two Shards (Yolish Feruchemy might not have the metal-focus or the bounding into 16 metals), just for the record. At some point after that, Hoid would have travelled to Roshar and founded the Worldsingers there. Now I'm not saying he'd have done that in the event that Feruchemical bloodlines end up on Roshar, but I'm also not not saying that. I'm also really not not saying that the Ones Above in Sixth of Dusk are the fruit of that labor as a mixed Scadrian/Rosharan bloodline group. Feruchemical Radiants! Tl;dr: Hoid gave the Scadrians Feruchemy thanks to some Yolish shenanigans and founded the Rosharan Worldsingers in the event that the Rosharans get Feruchemy from Scadrian Worldhoppers.