Pagerunner

Hopefully, someone will have a recorder. Otherwise, we're going on your memory, so I'd suggest writing down the gist of your answers sooner rather than later.

I think it more illustrates a misconception on what the Radiants were. Windrunner ideals are about protecting others. Edgedancer ideals are about helping others. But there are eight other large Orders, and the Bondsmiths who need to attract one of three specific spren. To put a possible new perspective out there, Gavilar wasn't starting a new war. He's trying to end one that has long been dormant. He wants to finish what the Heralds have delayed, he may want to finish Odium off instead of leaving Rayse trapped on Braize. If he was indeed getting the same visions as Dalinar, then he was given a command to do something about it. Dalinar led his troops to the center of the Shattered Plains, which costed many lives, but was necessary for the war. Gavilar may have been in a similar situation; either leave Odium alone until he breaks free and destroys the world and everyone on it, or take drastic action to bring the Heralds back and defeat Odium once and for all. Neither possibility is good. But there is really only one option.

It's possible that harmonium was known in the days before the Lord Ruler, and lost to the Northerners sometime before Rashek's Ascension. This would probably require some very odd things to have happened in Scadrial's past before Preservation betrayed Ruin but while they were still working together. It fits well with my idea that combining the two Shards was always the desire of the original Vessels, and that Feruchemy, as a magic system, has always been of Harmony, even before Sazed held both Shards. Likely? Not at all. Possible? Certainly.

They would call a soul to themselves that could theoretically be spiked, so it seems they would have a full spiritweb. Source. As for medallions, we'll need to see exactly how they work. There is a 'hack' Brandon has referred to with regards to the initial step, something involving the Nicrosil Feruchemy, that allows everyone to use them, and I don't think anyone has figured out the specifics yet. But, in general, if they have souls, I would expect they would be able to develop cracks as well that would enable them to use magic systems.

Believe it or not, I had seriously considered whether or not it was an actual typo for that exact rationale when he had first revealed it as the working title, and only when he called it that in a few other places (like Twitter and State of the Sanderson) was I convinced that will actually be the title.

It would have to be a pretty consistent typo, considering that's also how he called it in this year's SotS.

Very cool to read, and thanks to all who have worked on transcriptions. A couple of thoughts: The humans stopped the Parshendi from transforming by capturing a very old spren. I suspect this third spren is of Adonalsium, and is the third Bondsmith spren. It's not Nightwatcher or Stormfather (since Lift visited Nightwatcher, and the vast bulk of the Parshendi haven't been released to bond forms yet), and for some reason I'm not leaning towards one of the Unmade as being a 'normal' part of the Listeners' life cycle. A third superspren, one that has been present since before the Shattering, would fit with the Listeners predating the Shattering as well, and provides a likely candidate for our missing Bondsmith spren. I don't think Cusicesh could fit, since he's not trapped in a gemstone. The voice in Klade's head is attuned to the rhythms. This is reminiscent of similar instances we've seen in Mistborn, which would imply it's a Shard that is using the rhythms to speak into someone's mind. We have two active Shards, Cultivation and Odium. It might be a hidden plan of Cultivation, it might be that Odium needed a war to push the Listeners to experiment with stormspren. I can see either Shard as being a distinct possibility for now, until we learn who's pulling the strings. An off-the-walls idea is that it's the soul of Roshar that's coordinating these events, but I find that to be unlikely and am only mentioning it for completeness' sake. The Parshendi didn't acquire Szeth until right before the assassination, seemingly by coincidence. How did Szeth get into an Alethkar slave market? But, he was already an assassin, and the Parshendi didn't give him his Honorblade, that was from Shinovar. This is probably one of the reasons Brandon had to write much of Szeth's flashback sequence, since it has to make sense how he arrived where he is, where he got his reputation, and how the Parshendi learned he was a Surgebinder. (Or, did they even know that? Did he say he was an assassin, and then they didn't know what to expect when they turned him loose?) Looks like Voidlight is confirmed. Not a spren, but pure Investiture required for the Listener Forms of Power. Where is Eshonai's sphere now? How did it make its way over from Braize? Gavilar is trying to bring the Heralds out of hiding. He knows most of them are on Roshar, but he must not have realized there was at least one in his palace that very day. Gavilar is trying to bring pack the Listeners' old gods, of which Odium is king and the other gods are the Unmade. I don't think we have explicit confirmation on this, but it's seeming more and more likely. Thing is, the Thrill is happening in Dalinar's flashbacks, which well predate this prologue. So, at least one of the Unmade is already there and active, right? And the Death Rattles, how long have they been happening? Because that's another Unmade, isn't it? So what was he trying to accomplish that hasn't already been done? There are some cause-and-effect cases I would really like to see expanded on, so it's a good thing there are another thousand pages or so to this book.

See this short discussion. Not sure if it answers your question, or if what you're asking is even a meaningful distinction.

So, that will drop you from what, one-third of all questions down to one-fifth? (I kid, of course. I've actually been going through Brandon's last AMA recently, and it's pretty amazing how much you got out of him. I used to feel sorry that you didn't get a ton in at the Chicago AU signing. But you got, like, 10 years worth of questions in that AMA, so overall you're still well ahead of the curve.)

Thanks for the quotes @The One Who Connects, that clarifies the situation for me. I thought @Yata was saying that a Leecher had to first deplete the Feruchemical potential before depleting the Allomantic potential of the metals. But it's not quite that, it's that the depletion of the Allomantic potential (for which the metal needs to be ingested or piercing the skin) goes slower because the Investiture associated with Feruchemy is interfering with the Leecher's actions. Subtle, but important. As for the second, I'm pretty sure Brandon's 2015 AMA (which I've been reading through for an unrelated reason) has an answer about this topic, but the AMA was only partially captured in Theoryland. (Brandon kept coming back to it over a couple of months, and at some point nobody kept on updating the Theoryland entry for it.) I don't have my notes with me, but I'll get a chance to check later today if no one else has taken a look by then.

I might need to make a Reddit account just for this.

Can you go into more detail, maybe with sources, about the interaction between Chromium Allomancy and metalminds. I seem to recall seeing a WoB that said a Leecher wouldn't be able to drain a metalmind's stores, which is what you seem to be saying. I'll try and look it up later.

Defining a twist as 'good' or not by what it isn't seems like a bad standard to judge future plot developments. Yes, for the Bands of Mourning, we were being misled the whole time as to whose they were. Yes, for Hero of Ages, we were being misled as to whose it was. Yes, for the Well of Ascenscion, we were being misled as to where it was. So, there's precedent for a very misleading title. But my personal favorite twist in Mistborn is the introduction of the Southerners, which is not foreshadowed by the title. The Lost Metal could very well be atium, it could very well not be, but I have confidence that neither path would detract from the enjoyability of the series.

Correction: Hoid did not switch the blades.

WoB Count: 405 Reddit: 15% Twitter: 0%, 0/93 months Blog: 22%, 31/144 pages Interviews: 0%, 0/475 Okay, so here's my first structured update. I've made posts pretty frequently this last week and a half, but I'll probably shoot for once a month now that I've gotten things rolling. Two major differences from what I said I was gonna do. First, I've added Brandon's blog. A lot of them were included in Theoryland's interview database, but I spun them off into their own category. There's not a ton of info from there - I've looked at over 300 posts, and only got like 5 useful bits of info. (Side note, Brandon's old posts are painful to read. But that might be the fault of SCAAALZIII!) I've also gotten a final count of the Theoryland interview and signing pages I want to look over. It's a little lower than I had expected, because a good number of them were from Brandon's blog. But even for all those, many of them probably won't have anything I'm looking for, especially the interviews. The other big change is Reddit. I was working through Brandon's posts in reverse chronological order, and I discovered that Reddit won't let you look past 1000 posts. Based on rough math using Brandon's total karma and average karma per post... he may have around 8000 total comments. That's a lot that I can't see. Thankfully, most of the good stuff comes from topics he's posted, as well, and I can still find all of them, so I can get most of it pretty easily. Here's my new path forward: Go through AMAs, list all comments in chronological order, find Brandon's posts. I've identified three major AMA topics, and I'm halfway through the first. Theoryland has collected Brandon's reddit posts for 2010 through... 2012, I think, and they've got a Reddit Q&A thread or two. I need to pull them all in. Sort Brandon's posts by "top" instead of "new," and see if there's anything I've missed in his top 1000 comments. Also sort by "controversial," but his most controversial posts appear to be from his philosophy, religion, and thoughts on Magic: The Gathering, so most of them probably won't be relevant, either. So, I've basically assumed that there are five things to do. First is what I've done, 1000 newest posts. Each of the AMA's will probably be large enough to classify as their own thing. And then everything else will be the fifth thing, since no piece should be too large. I've finished the first thing and I'm about halfway through the second thing, so that's why I said 15%. I doubt I'll be able to provide any more granularity than that. I'll close with one of the WoB's I've tagged as notable, which I'm not sure there has been a lot of discussion about. I think it's neat: Source

Yeah, I immediately saw dissonance between Khriss's explanations of Cognitive Shadows and the Kelsier points of view we've seen. It's not the WoBs that are wrong, it's whether or not in-universe sources are completely accurate.

People have been trying to get at Wax's and Wayne's for a while. Brandon said he hadn't completely narrowed it down yet, the way Wax's Resonance (the technical term) and Savantism would play off of each other. There's a topic floating around Cosmere Theories, from about a month or so ago, after the AU tour, with some in-depth discussion that happened via Reddit PM, I think. Windrunners' aren't just having squires - there are some other Orders that have squires, although they don't all do. It's the number and power of squires that is the Windrunner's Resonance.

Good point, I hadn't considered that. If aluminum was a true god metal, not just allomantically inert, then duralumin would be one of its sixteen alloys, and we could look at its composition to learn more. Duralumin consists of: Aluminium-95% Copper-4% Magnesium-0.5% Manganese-0.5% So, magnesium or manganese would be our last pure metal, and the last alloy would be 10% magnesium, 10% manganese, and 80% copper. Since duralumin is a real metal, and the hypothetical Mg/Mn/Cu alloy almost certainly isn't, I'd be very surprised if that were the case. But, you're right, it's Realmatically more possible than I had originally given you credit for. In that case, I don't think you could say it's Adonalsium's god metal, since the planet didn't exist until after the Shattering. Ruin and Preservation wouldn't have been able to manifest Adonalsium's god metal, without having Investiture of the other 14 Shards. Common consensus is moving more towards Trellium as Bavadin's god metal (I was pretty staunchly opposed, but there are some lines in AU that have left me begrudgingly convinced), so I don't think it could be hers, either.

Not necessarily. (And not only because it would make Compounding medallions easy to create and totally break physics on Scadrial.) Compounding is a 'hack,' and it's possible that the Identity isn't just a restriction (you can't Compound with other peoples' Identity) but a positive requirement (you can only Compound with your own Identity). I view it like this: each magic has two halves, the power source, and the application. Compounding is linking Allomancy's power source to Feruchemy's application. However, to make that link, I think it's likely that the Identity keyed to both powers needs to be the same. (i.e., I have all this Allomantic power ready to go, and it tracks along Identity to find two different routes of application: Allomancy, or Feruchemy. If Feruchemy has a blank identity, the Allomancy might not know what to look for.)

I don't think you can make a case that Aluminum isn't an Allomantic metal. It has an alloy with Allomantic abilities. It has Feruchemical application (which would be the bigger problem, in my mind, if it can't interact at all with Investiture), as does its alloy. In Allomancy, metal is consumed, and it shapes how Investiture is used. So, aluminum isn't affected directly by the Investiture in that case. So, even if aluminum is an Investiture blocker, it's not getting in the way of anything, since the user's body is channeling the Investiture in a way defined by a particular metal. For Feruchemy, we see that aluminum must allow some sort of interaction with Investiture, since you can store Identity in an aluminum metalmind. So, it definitely can hold Investiture. Unless, like Allomancy, the metal itself isn't holding the charge, it's acting as a key to an Investiture reservoir that is not stored in the metal per se, but exists in the Spiritual Realm. By having the right identity and holding the physical key, you can unlock that reservoir. But, then having larger metalminds wouldn't necessarily give you larger potential reserves... so I think it is indeed the metal holding the Feruchemical charge.

Uh....

Actually, it probably won't include Aethers. Out-of-universe, here's the scoop: Brandon wrote Aether around 2002 back before he was published, with a whole bunch of other books that he didn't feel comfortable trying to sell. After Tor purchased Elantris, he started taking pieces of those books to write other books. Some elements of Aether (the war between Shards), Mythwalker (an unfinished book which is completely available on his website), Mistborn Prime, and Final Empire Prime were pulled together for the Mistborn trilogy. Warbreaker also used pieces of Mythwalker. In 2007, Brandon tried to write Liar of Partinel to kick off the Dragonsteel series, pulling in the Aethers. Ultimately, he didn't like how the book turned out, and scrapped it. (He did more repurposing for Way of Kings; there are elements from Dragonsteel and Mythwalker in it, as well.) Aethers weren't originally designed for Yolen, they were designed for Vaeria. Brandon experimented with Aethers on Yolen, but that isn't canon, and probably won't be the case going forwards.

Here's his editing process. Things have been a little accelerated for book, since they've been sending each of the 5 parts through on its own. So, Part 1, 2.0 was being done while Brandon was writing Part 5, 1.0. I know Peter mentioned they were already at the beta readers stage on Twitter, so I suspect they're doing that piecemeal, too. But even aside from writing and art, there's printing and distribution. Getting a book cleaned up and ready is a much more well-defined process than outlining and writing, so when they say November, I believe them.

Hey, that might be exactly what I'm looking for! I suspect people would be more comfortable if everything was in a web browser, but everything I can find with a free tier has data transfer limits and branding. (And it's free, so I don't blame them). A runtime disables the design views, which an end user shouldn't use anyways, so I think it will transfer over all the functionality I want. Thanks!

Here's a WoB you might find relevant.