Millennium

Mixed-gender circles do not magnify power per se, but they do allow it to be used more effectively. There are things saidar just plain isn't very good at, no matter how many people are working together, and likewise for saidin. Large all-female circles can overcome those limits by sheer numbers, but they never get very efficient at it. Large all-male circles don't exist, but if they did, they would probably suffer from similar problems. But in a mixed-gender circle, one person controls the flows of both Powers at once. This lets them sidestep the efficiency problem: saidar can be left to do what it does best, while saidin takes over in its own specialties, and this statement is just as true if you swap the positions of the Powers. To an outsider, or even someone who is only versed in one of the Powers, this might look like it magnified the power in the circle itself, but that's not actually what happens. It's about optimizing, not magnifying. As for the "13 women can beat any man" trick, it's a matter of numbers and reinforcement. You can probably snap a thin twig in your hands without any trouble: it's weak and it's brittle. You could bundle two or three together, and probably still snap them all at once. But as you keep adding twigs to the bundle, they start reinforcing each other in ways that a single twig just can't, and pretty soon you can't snap the bundle even though they're all just tiny bits of wood. Even most weightlifters probably couldn't do a bundle of thirteen: maybe none of them could.

This is not a place to look for unbiased reviews, honestly. We're all fans here. It's worth reading, and given its length -fourteen bricks, I mean books- that's really saying something. It's not a perfect series: the flaws are multiple and in some cases quite serious, but you will find better descriptions of these flaws elsewhere. One thing that is interesting about the series is the way that it evolves and changes: the flaws and strengths of the middle books are not like those of the early books, nor those of the later books.

I'd support the idea of updating the Encyclopedia with stuff from his remaining notes, and then putting WoT to rest. Brandon has mended the hole left by Jordan's death, and done so with incredible skill: he has proven that if he wanted, he could make a living finishing series according to the wishes of deceased authors (a note to Brandon: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't do this). But that job is done; the series is finished. Maybe an Encyclopedia update could cinch off the last loose threads, but after that, they should return Randland to its creator. It has earned its rest as much as Jordan has. Let them sleep.

If I'm understanding Brandon right, they're finite but renewable: it is possible to run out, but they eventually regenerate, and could thus be sustained indefinitely if they were managed carefully. This is definitely true of Atium, which slowly regenerates at the Pits of Hathsin. Almost all of it was burned at the end of The Hero of Ages, to deny Ruin his physical aspect, but by the time of The Alloy of Law there might be burnable quantities again. That said, first people would first have to find the Pits again, and then rediscover Atium's value. It's tougher to say with Lerasium. When Vin arrived at the Well of Ascension in the book of the same name, there was only one bead there (though it's now thought that there had until very recently been two beads, and Hoid took one). I can see three possibilities here, but each opens up new questions: Lerasium doesn't regenerate. These beads were left over from Rashek's Ascension, and he left them there for safekeeping. But why did he hold them back? Lerasium regenerates, but does so much more slowly than Atium does, such that only two beads were made in the thousand years since Rashek's Ascension. But why does it regenerate more slowly? Lerasium regenerates, but someone -probably the Lord Ruler- has been taking the beads as they are formed. But since he clearly hasn't been feeding them to nobles or Steel Inquisitors, what was he doing with them? Or was someone else taking the beads?

Well, that cuts out my theory that worldhopping on Sel is dangerous because of a big mismatch between its Physical and Cognitive aspects. On the other hand, it may offer another reason for worldhopping there to be so dangerous. Sel's magic seems to be bound up in static forms: the world itself resists change, to the point that Forging fades over time if not kept up. The Reod was catastrophic because it forced a change on these forms in ways that the magic could not simply adapt to accommodate. It had to be rebuilt, and although the actual process of repairing Aons turned out to be a simple task, the fact remains that it has to be done for each and every Aon out there. Perhaps this phenomenon extends to, and is amplified by, the Cognitive Realm. It could be that Sel's resistance to change there becomes so high that even a simple change in position or velocity becomes too much for it to handle, and so it outright stops such things. Getting trapped in the Cognitive Realm because you can't move to get out would certainly be a danger. The resistance to change might be even higher, preventing hearts from beating or metabolisms from functioning. Of course, this leads to the question of how Hoid gets around it. He could do it if anyone could, but how?

Does The Chasm have a counterpart in the Cognitive Realm?

My personal theory is that if you were to somehow get to Sel's Cognitive aspect, you would not be able to find the Chasm: that something (which could simply be a function of not enough time passing, or it could be some scheme of Odium's) has kept Sel from incorporating it into its view of itself. Given the importance of form and geography on Sel, that fundamental mismatch could very well make travel more dangerous. It may also explain why Hoid showed up on essentially the other side of the world, almost as far from that mismatch as it's possible to get: that might be a somewhat safer path.

I've wondering recently if the Shards have anything to do with Reiss's 16-motivation theory. They clearly don't match up perfectly, but some of that could be explained as Reiss-style motivations (intended for people) being extrapolated to running an entire cosmos. For example, a cosmos doesn't need to eat, but metabolism breaks things down into simpler components: could Ruin be the cosmic version of "Eating"?

Yes. It comes from parliamentary procedure: in a nutshell, it means you approve of something that somebody else proposed.

Brandon said that Odium is as much about being hated as it is about feeling hate, so being seen as evil is certainly in Odium's nature. This does not necessarily mean that actually being evil is in its nature, but whether or not it is, it would be perceived that way. Everything we've heard about Odium thus far, we've heard through the enemies that it must, by its nature, have.

That, I'd imagine, would depend somewhat on mechanics of Hemalurgy we haven't yet seen. We know that Hemalurgic spikes work by carrying a fragment of someone's Spiritweb, but is this fragment embedded into the spike's Spiritweb or is it a distinct (though attached) entity? If it's the former, then although you'd have to write a Spiritweb-fragment for what the spike stole, I don't think there's anything else to prevent it from working. If it's the latter, then you'd still have to write a Spiritweb-fragment, but since it is not part of the spike, you'd have to stamp something else in order for the Forgery to take. What would you stamp? Can this even work? Also, there's the problem of the temporary nature of Forging: what happens if a Forged spike's stamp wears off before being refreshed? Here are some questions I've got: - Could you Reseal a spike victim, repairing the damage to their Spiritweb? What would happen to the spike if you did this? - Could you use Hemalurgic principles -not the kinds of spikes we currently know, but the same general idea- to make an Essence mark permanent by "stapling it down"?

I can't see a permanent Forgery working, because the Shaod isn't temporary and Elantrians are immune to disease. Essence Marks need daily re-stamping in order to continue functioning, but I can't think of a plausible reason for an Elantrian to need daily re-stamping. Without that reason, the Forgery won't stick. A temporary Forgery might work, especially for people who are already from the appropriate regions, but would that be useful? The transformation would cure any diseases a person had: might that cure stick even when the Forgery fades (since the disease is gone)? That could be interesting: Elantrian transformation as a kind of healing. Or would the disease come back when the Forgery faded, since the person was never actually Elantrian?

I'm thinking that we need to be asking the opposite question: not "why does Forging work everywhere?" but "why does AonDor get weaker?" Forging seems to work everywhere, but we also see Dhakor and (briefly) ChayShan working outside their native regions. I got the impression that the Elantrians' region-lock is the exception, rather than the rule.

I would guess so, given that they both act on the Spiritweb. But it leaves open the question of why Essence Marks unravel. If the Spiritweb-fragment itself is responsible for the unraveling, then would it unravel even if stolen? If so, what happens to a person when a Hemalurgic spike loses its Spiritweb-fragment? I'd guess no, for two reasons. One is that if all you have is the spike, then you don't have any blood, and you need blood. The other is that Hemalurgy actually robs a person of that part of their Spiritweb. Whatever's in the spike is not a part of that person anymore, so you couldn't make a new seal using it (or perhaps you could, but it would apply to the recipient of the spike, not the person the spike came from). That said, I'd theorize that you could use it to alter existing seals, if you steal whatever it is that the seal tracks. You could make it not apply to its original target anymore, and then change the target to someone else by spiking them. I can only assume, however, that there would be Nasty Side Effects. Technically possible if my theory holds, but probably not practical. You'd have to steal whatever it is that Bloodsealers track from someone who is already being tracked, then spike your intended target. The problem is that the blood used to send out the skeletals would still go stale at the usual rate, so you'd only have about 24 hours to get all of this done, and then the skeletals would be useless again. And there's still the problem of Nasty Side Effects.

I got the sense that Hoid didn't steal the Moon Scepter, but the copy. He might have other reasons for taking the Moon Scepter, but he also seems interested in collecting artifacts of the various worlds' magics. Given that interest, the copy might actually suit his purpose better than the original, especially if its rewritten Spiritweb allows it to retain whatever properties might made the original interesting.

I would imagine not, as long as it's still attached to you. We only ever see Awakening work on entire objects at once, and so as long as your arm is still a part of your body, attempts to Awaken it would work as if you were attempting to Awaken your whole body, which would probably fail. But if you actually amputated your arm, then you might be able to Awaken it, and this might even work if your arm had previously been struck with a Shardblade. That said, I doubt that you could surgically reattach the arm after Awakening it, at least not without dire side effects. All told, it would probably be easier to just Awaken your shirt with the "become as my arms" Command. That said: might reaching a sufficient Heightening allow you to heal a Shardblade-struck limb? How many Breaths would that even require?

Isn't anthracite a kind of coal?

Brandon has said that Shallan's ten-heartbeats thing "means what you think it means," which is generally taken as confirmation that she has a Shardblade. She certainly feels responsible for her father's death, and the symbolheads don't object to her saying so. That said, Brandon's wording has been careful. We don't know exactly how Shallan's father died, so there is room for her murder of him to be "from a certain point of view." As for the Shardblade, it could have been her father's, or she might have taken it from someone else involved in his death: one of her father's bodyguards, or an assassin who fell. She might also have received the Shardblade as a payment or reward for killing her father: a payment or reward that she might or might not have earned.

Worth noting is that something like this also happens very early in Mistborn: Vin, who doesn't yet know about her Allomancy, refers to her ability as "her Luck". Again, capitalized.

Liar of Partinel was definitely supposed to be set before Dragonsteel, but I don't know if it was ever actually said to be pre-Shattering. It did mention dead gods, though. That said, with the novel scrapped, it's unclear exactly what from the sample chapters can be assumed to still hold true.

Color isn't the power of BioChroma, just like metals aren't the power of Allomancy. Only the power seems to count in these end-equations: otherwise Allomancy would be end-negative, because you don't get the metals back. I used to think of metal and color as fuel -it's a pretty intuitive interpretation, particularly since the process in Allomancy is described as "burning"- but I'm starting to wonder if that might not be the case. A lot of people get tripped up on the question of how Allomancy can be end-positive when it consumes the metals, and truth be told, it's a sensible question to ask. But there's always another secret. We know that Brandon built an inconsistency into Allomancy as a clue that someone had tampered with it. Perhaps this is another case of that: a deliberate inconsistency as a hint that things are not what they seem. Magics that seem to consume fuel are described as end-positive, which seems like a contradiction in terms, but what if the fuel <i>isn't</i> consumed? What if it's more like a trade of sorts -dare I call it "equivalent exchange"- where you get the power in return for what you've given up, but the "fuel" is transferred to some other point in space and time and whatever other dimensions the cosmere has? We already know this is true for Atium: eventually it goes back to the Pits of Hathsin whence it came. What if it's true for all metals, even though the end destination might be different? Question to ask Brandon at the next opportunity: When you burn metal for Allomancy or drain color for BioChroma, where does it go?

It's important to understand that Shards do not create magic systems: they adopt systems that already exist. Ruin doesn't "make" Hemalurgy end-negative; he adopted Hemalurgy because its end-negativity suits him. Thus, when Hemalurgy is used to steal an Investiture, what you get is a weaker Investiture, not a "corrupted" end-negative form of the Investiture being stolen. The result of stealing Feruchemy is a weaker Feruchemist, not an "end-negative Feruchemist". The same goes for Allomancy. What does it mean to be a weaker Feruchemist? The only hard limit in Feruchemy is that you can't store what you don't have: if I weigh 150 pounds, then nothing (short of gaining weight) will make me able to store 200 pounds of weight at once. That doesn't affect how much I can store in total, but it does mean that I can't "afford" to store as much as a heavier Feruchemist might be able to. But there's also a soft limit to how much of what you have that you can store at once, and this is what makes you a stronger or weaker Feruchemist. A beginner might only be able to store 15 pounds of weight at a time, while a more practiced Feruchemist of the same weight might be able to store 30, 50, or even more: he (or she, of course) can charge faster. Over time, either one could store huge amounts of weight, but the weaker Feruchemist has to do it more slowly. This is why Steel Inquisitors need so much downtime between Missions: the standard-issue gold spikes are so weak that they can't store health very quickly. On the upside, storing can't hurt their health very much, so they can still handle internal affairs like making more Inquisitors and spikes, but it's too risky to go out on missions without a good store of health, and that takes time to rebuild. This gave rise to the "exhausted Inquisitor" rumor, which they allow to continue because it's a convenient way to cover up the truth, but there's a reason we never see any exhausted Inquisitors.

Almost every magic system we've seen in the Cosmere to date taps into a greater power: usually a Shard. The exception is Feruchemy, which taps your own power rather than that of a Shard. But in all cases to date, even Feruchemy, it's not something that can be done on its own: some intermediary is needed to reach the source. These things can be put into three categories: Fuels (things that are replaced by the power), Gateways (things the power flows through), and Vehicles (things the power is carried in). The simplest contrast can be seen in the Scadrian magic systems, all of which use a Physical intermediary (metal) but use it differently. Allomancy uses Fuels: you burn metals to access power. Feruchemy uses Gateways: the power flows into, and out of, metals. Hemalurgy uses Vehicles: the power is carried in spikes, and while a person can access that power, if you pull the spike the power goes with it. The big weakness here is that many of the other magics become harder to classify. Depending on which you emphasize, for example, BioChroma could have either a Spiritual Vehicle (Breath) or a Cognitive Fuel (color). Most of the magics of Sel, or at least the continent containing Elantris, use Cognitive Gateways (Aons, ChayShan patterns, Dhakor bones, etc), but Dhakor could also be said to require Spiritual Fuel for its more spectacular effects. Is it possible that some forms of magic just require multiple intermediaries? And then there are the ten magics of Roshar. Stormlight is obviously a Fuel, but of what kind (Physical, Spiritual, or Cognitive)? Some spren, like Honorspren and the symbolheads, could be called Gateways, but what of the things they demand of their users? How do Shardblades and Shardplate fit into this at all? And then there's the fact that the system I've set up here only allows for nine combinations: what does this mean for the tenth magic? There's also numerology to consider. Powers of two are said to be very important to the Cosmere in general, but if this theory (Physical/Spiritual/Cognitive, Fuel/Gateway/Vehicle) holds, then it works in powers of three, not two. Those two numbers don't have any common powers. Why don't they match? Should there in fact be four, with the fourth either unrevealed or taken away? Or is four the "false" number, reflecting something added in? Would the mismatches reflect meddling on someone's part? To make things even more complicated, Allomancy and Feruchemy each seem to have a theme of "three plus one" instead of truly four. Allomancy has Physical/Mental/Temporal powers, followed by Enhancement: a "meta-thing" which works on the other things, rather than being something on its own. Feruchemy has Physical/Spiritual/Cognitive powers, followed by Hybrid: another sort of "meta-thing" that combines the other things. We don't know enough about Hemalurgy to know if there's a similar "three plus one" thing going on here, but it's not yet out of the realm of possibility. Might this also be a clue to something? Could the 2-3-4 thing even somehow be related to the concepts of fain and trune from Liar of Partinel? If fainlife -exotic, poisonous to trunelife, and contagious- were to essentially be trunelife with some metaphysical "thing" added (or possibly taken away), might that reflect some sort of meddling with that world which grew to infect the whole cosmere? Could something like this perhaps even be behind the Shattering of Adonalsium? Anyway, I feel kind of like the Time Cube guy here, seeing patterns where perhaps I shouldn't, or at least missing something very important. Maybe I'm just rambling. It felt like I should get the notes down, though.

So I finally read Liar of Partinel, only to find out that it has apparently been scrapped. Given that, how much of what is in there can still be safely assumed true? "Someone I should have loved" obviously can, because it has been mentioned outside LoP, but for example, can we assume (with the same degree of safety in that assumption) that ur-Hoid and Hoid were master and apprentice, or might that be subject to change? For that matter, what of the story itself? Might we see it come back as an early part of Dragonsteel, or even condensed into a prelude? Might it eventually be merged into something else, the way Final Empire was?

Chuck a beehive at them. Seriously. None of those things is going to do much good against a swarm of angry bees. Our unfortunate Windrunner would quickly find that Basic and Full Lashings are useless against so many targets: there just isn't time to get to them all. Bees can fly, so while a Reverse Lashing may confuse them for a moment (the new "down" and all that), they'll adapt and come right back. Either way, you jab a spear into the cloud of angry bees and you're done. Our unfortunate Shardbearer doesn't fare much better. The wind generated by his Shardblade will push many of the bees out of the way before it can hit them, and even those that he kills will only amount to a couple out of hundreds, perhaps thousands. There's no way to get them all. Jab a spear into the cloud of angry bees and you're done. What about our unfortunate Shardplate-user? Is he safe? Not so fast, because Shardplate isn't impermeable: Kaladin taught us that. Smack him in the face, and some of those bees will get into the armor, where they can't be crushed because the armor is rigid, and bees have ways of telling one another where to go. All you have to do is wait for the Shardplate to stop moving, or else for the user to get out of the armor; in this latter case, jab a spear into the cloud of angry bees and you're done. Here's hoping that Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, isn't allergic to bees.