Pagerunner

We don't know much about them yet. A lot of people think they're from Mistborn's planet, far in the future, but Brandon has remained closed-lipped.

Yo, it started happening again. There's a double-posted topic in Introduce Yourself, and I got the error message in Cosmere Theories.

Here's the quote in question.

You're missing Warbreaker, a standalone. The good news is, Brandon has the entire thing available for free on his website - here's where you can get started, right now!. There's also White Sands, which is one of the first novels Brandon wrote, but was never published. It's currently being adapted into a series of graphic novels; one is out now, and there are two more in the pipeline. (But, then again, if you have Arcanum Unbounded, you should be aware of that.) If you email Brandon through his website and ask, you can get the full manuscript (which isn't quite canon anymore, since Brandon has changed one character from a man to a woman. Although, it's pretty close, so far.) Once you're up to date on the books, you can get into the really fun stuff - Words of Brandon (or WoBs), which are collections of interviews or answers to questions from tours, social media, annotations, etc. You can find annotations on his website, in the Library section, for many of his cosmere books - they're behind-the-scenes notes. A site called Theoryland hosts an interview database. (It's primarily a Wheel of Time stuff, so there's a lot of interviews with the original author of that series, Robert Jordan. But they've continued to collect quotes from Brandon.) There's a lot of info that people have gleaned from Brandon over the years, that's not available in the books themselves yet. (Here's an example: Secret History name-dropped a number of Shards for the first time, like Autonomy and Devotion. But this community had known those names for years, since we'd been curious about those Shards since they were referenced in Way of Kings, Aona and Bavadin. And then Dominion, called Skai in WoK, wasn't officially revealed until Arcanum Unbounded. During release events, people would ask questions about which Shards Aona, Skai, and Bavadin held, and eventually Brandon told someone the names, and they got added to the WoB database. But that info wasn't written down anywhere in the books for years.) So, perusing Theoryland can be very...enlightening, to say the least. Oh, and by the way, welcome to the forums!

Yes, the people using the Soulcasters in Stormlight suffer from a similar effect.

If you want to do some further reading into Brandon's plans,I can direct you to a couple of places. (Theoryland has a ton of cool quotes, but I don't have the time to link to all of them.) He's also posted some essays about his unpublished history as a writer (he wrote 13 books before his publisher finally bought one, and some of those unpublished books will eventually be updated and rewritten.) He's changed his plans somewhat, to include the four Wax & Wayne Mistborn books, which weren't in his original outline. (That's right, there will be one more of those coming.) He talked about that in the Mistborn section of one of his yearly updates. You're correct that there's only one Mistborn trilogy that would fit that description. However... Brandon has spoken of a space opera that's not Sci-Fi Mistborn that he wants to write. It's been in the works since at least 2011, but he didn't specify in that interview if it was cosmere or not. I suspect it's Adamant, just because there's no room in the 36-book original outline for another cosmere sci-fi series unless Dragonsteel gets really crazy. Or there's a chance it's Dark One, which wasn't in the cosmere at that time.

I don't think he's said that about Dragonsteel specifically... especially since it's a prequel to the cosmere, so there's no past to any of these characters that won't have to be introduced in the story anyways. I think he was talking about more Secret History style stuff about what Hoid was up to when we've caught glimpses of him in all the other stories, like what exactly he was doing during the events of the Mistborn trilogy.

Is the bonus scene from Elantris is anything to go by, Hoid believes in the God Beyond, so I'd expect Shards might be open to it, as well.

I've seen that WoB, but there's a more recent one that refines it as 'nearly 50" Allomantic metals. 8 metals, 8 alloys, 2 god metals, 32 god metal alloys, and harmonium total up to 51, with maybe a 52nd for a distinct atium/lerasium alloy (depend on what particular brand of crazy theories you ascribe to). Going down the rabbit hole of lerasium-(atium-alloy) alloys to create malatium Mistings and the like will leave us well above 50 metals.

That's actually a question that came up a long time ago, after HoA was first published. Someone asked Brandon about it, and he said Sazed was referring to two new pure metals, not the two alloys that go with them. Chromium/Nicrosil were the ones people theorized originally to fill in the chart (since we were missing two Enhancement metals), and we later learned that Atium/Malatium weren't the true External Temporal pair, which was Cadmium/Bendalloy. The Ars Arcanum pages in all of Brandon's cosmere books are actually in-universe documents, written by a worldhopper who goes from planet to planet observing and documenting magic. Her observations reflected the current in-universe understanding, and they thought atium was a temporal metal. Atium, like the metal that Vin fed to Elend in the Well of Ascenscion, are god metals, is comprised of the pure essence of a Shard, and it's not a natural metal. The full power of these metals has yet to be explored; they each have 16 alloys (with each of the other Allomantic metals).

He's a lot older than 300 years... he's been alive since before the prologue to the Way of Kings, which is set over 4000 years before Mistborn. (He may have been in a form of stasis for a chunk of that, though.) How he stays alive is a bit of a mystery, but he likes to collect magic from various Shardworlds, so one of them might have granted him something like immortality. When Brandon has spoken about his plans for Hoid and the cosmere as a whole getting series, he's told us of two sets of books: Dragonsteel, which tells the story of the Shattering of Adonalsium (and is set way in the past); and a Mistborn space trilogy, where Allomancy and Feruchemy are used to achieve faster-than-light travel, that will be a sort of grand finale to the cosmere. Both of those series have Hoid as a main character. Unfortunately, we'll be waiting a long time to get those books... Brandon wants to finish Stormlight before jumping into Dragonsteel.

So, I've started NaNoWriMo a couple of times, and I never get anywhere. I think a novel is just too long for me to write; I don't have the time or the experience. So, I'm doing something different: planning a collection of short stories/novellas set in the cosmere. I've got some new Shardworlds with magic systems, expansion of a couple existing Shardworlds, and a couple Shardworlds without Shards that I think can make interesting stories. Here are my ideas: Scadrial: Story focuses on a prisoner of an Inquisitor scientist. He's trying to escape, while the Inquisitor is exploring the metals of the secret fifth quadrant, the Shadesmar metals (Mercury and Titanium). As they learn what these new metals and alloys do, the prisoners (who are being experimented on) need to put together a plan and escape before the Hemalurgic experiments come to fruition. Powers granted by Shadesmar metals include gateways to Shadesmar, listening/talking directly to minds, and making yourself functionally invisible. Lots of combat, and I'll probably try to do a detailed blow-by-blow style like Brandon does in Mistborn. Sel: an Elantrian who tries to do good but can't do anything right with his new powers. He exiles himself to a far-away region of Sel, where his powers aren't as strong (and less able to cause damage). This region is basically inspired by the old MMO Runescape, and the magic involves collecting/crafting Runestones and combining them to make new spells. I've got twelve kinds of Runes (not counting God Runes, which will probably be a thing in the system, if not in the story), combining for a total of 98 spells. (Of which I've only identified like 30. I'm still filling out the chart, and I'll probably leave a bunch of spells involving the Spiritual Realm blank for now, and just say they haven't discovered the Spiritual rune yet in-universe. 'Cause we have a lot to learn about how the Spiritual Realm works). Anyone who can find Runes can use them, so the country is pretty much in total anarchy, which really goes against the selfless Elantrian's personality. Not planning on a ton of combat, but there will be some. It's more a growth journey for the Elantrian. New Major Shardworld: a simplified version of my Elemental Tetrahedron. This story is an aspiring Elemental, all of whom are ascetics, playing off of a worldhopping explorer with all kinds of magical 'toys' who's also trying to join. Is the Elementals' life unnecessarily hard? Or has the worldhopper's soft life left him unprepared for the trials of becoming an Elemental? Lots of talking; I'll have to try very hard to show, not tell, as the two main characters will be arguing their viewpoints. New Major Shardworld: suffering from an interplanetary invasion, need to discover why they're being invaded and put an end to the war. Magic users are called Temporal Monks, and they have the power to revert something back in time while they are in contact with it. (Kind of like Siri's power in Brandon's unpublished Mythwalker.) A good amount of combat, very high stakes (trying to avoid the end of the world). New Minor Shardworld: Armor that everyone believes drives you insane, but what if what you see is real? An old story idea of mine, largely inspired by Rand from the Wheel of Time. Another combat-heavy story. New Minor Shardworld: A world where reincarnation is real. The story is a courtoom drama where someone's trying to use a reincarnated animal as a witness. New Minor Shardworld: Everyone has their place determined in the world since before they were born. And that's meant literally - the Book of Life records your place in the world, your duties, who you will spend your life with, almost everything important about you before you've even done it. How can someone unsatisfied with his life rebel against the universe? New Minor Shardworld: A 'witch trial,' but the charge is reading. No one reads, on the whole planet. Take all the tropes for townspeople being afraid of witchcraft, and twist them to fit charges against reading. This is another really old story idea of mine, and there's nothing about it that necessarily says 'cosmere,' but I'm planning on using it to introduce a character who's relevant to the last story: Conflux: an Avengers-style teamup of main characters from many of the above stories. At this point, I would like to tie everything into Silverlight, but we don't know enough about it yet. Since this will probably simmer for a while, it's possible we'll learn more about them by the time I would actually get around to writing this (if that even happens). It has one new character, a 'pristinely ungifted' who is suffused with counter-Investiture, so they're immune to magic. (It's a concept I really liked from Sword of Truth, and I think it could fit really well into the cosmere.) I haven't done a ton of planning of this story yet, because the hints I have planned to lay in the other stories can allow the actual story to go in a lot of different directions. So, I'm hoping that having a bunch of smaller stories will actually help me get something finished. I'll probably start off with the two new Major Shardworlds (since there are some secret connections between those two worlds and stories that I'm toying with). But I'd like to be able to get all of these done somehow. I'm thinking of calling it Arcanum Extrapolated.

Ruin and Cultivation aren't opposite intents. To the contrary, they're quite compatible.

Welcome to the Shard! Have you read any of Brandon's other adult fantasy novels, like Mistborn, Warbreaker, or Elantris? There are some subtle connections between all of those books... let's just say Honor and Odium aren't the only gods in that universe. For Stormlight, Brandon did write a novella focusing on some of Lift's adventures, called Edgedancer. It's currently available only in a collection of Brandon's short fiction, called Arcanum Unbounded. It might be a bit expensive to grab the whole book for a single novella, but most of the stories in it stand alone (There are some 'bonus scenes' for Mistborn and Elantris, and a novella called Mistborn: Secret History that shouldn't be read before the Mistborn books. But there are three really cool standalone novellas, called Emperor's Soul, Sixth of the Dusk, and Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell, that aren't part of any other series.) And, there's always the option of rereading. Brandon hides a lot of secrets in his books, both foreshadowing of future plots (like all the death rattles) and mechanics of the universe (all of his magic shares underlying principles, and we here on the Shard have a lot of fun trying to puzzle out exactly how things work). You might be surprised how much new stuff you can pick up from Way of Kings once you've read Words of Radiance. (How many Heralds have you seen on-screen, for example?)

Not confirmed, AFAIK. Last I recall, it was specifically RAFOd. They have some sort of abilities (longevity), but we'll have to wait and see what else they've got. That may influence whether or not they can bond a spren; to do so, you need 'cracks in the soul.' A Herald's soul might have some form of Honor's Investiture already there, which might interfere with bonding a spren. (Although, I think we recently learned you can bond multiple spren if you can attract them all, so this may not be the issue I'm worried it is.) But I am pretty confident that Nale has his Honorblade. We knew from WoB that one Herald retrieved his/her Honorblade, and one Order (the Skybreakers) remained active in secret. It would require a very... interesting turn of events for Nale to not have his Honorblade. And, I think you have it backwards; the Highspren imitate Nale's Honorblade, not the other way around. The Heralds were the original Surgebinders, and the spren copied what they had. Oh, and Szeth's resurrection, we've actually seen that glowing fabrial before, in one of Dalinar's flashbacks. I think it's hinting towards the deeper knowledge of fabrial science, not Voidbinding or an off-world magic system.

Considering we don't know many of the bonding spren, we're not even able to make very educated guesses. We know of Highspren (Skybreakers), Liespren (Lightweavers), and Inkspren (Elsecallers), but there are still 5 Orders we don't even know the spren name for. I don't think we have enough for a pattern. If I had to guess, I'd say Highspren are close to Honor (they follow a code of law), while Inkspren and Liespren are more of Cultivation (writing and lying both take careful planning to be done effectively). I'd like to challenge an assumption you've made, though, that the Orders themselves can be of both Shards. My view is that all the Orders are of Honor. (Fair warning, everything below is my view of how the Shards interact with the magics on Roshar. I'm presenting it so you understand why I'm having a bit of a hard time answering your question.) Surgebinding is a magic system, and magic systems belong to Shards. There are three major magic systems in Roshar (Surgebinding, fabrial science, and Voidbinding), and three Shards in the solar system. Each of them has a magic system, and two of them we know require interactions with spren (we don't know anything about how Voidbinding works, yet). Spren themselves can be of any Shard, or a mixture of Shard, but they can still interact with all the magics of the world. (Kind of like in Mistborn, where atium [Ruin] has a unique ability in Allomancy [Preservation].) So: Honor has a magic system that requires oaths, actions, and bonding a spren. The kind of spren gives access to various Surges, but that spren can be of Honor, of Cultivation, of Odium (it's theoretically possible to bond an Unmade, and I like the crazy theory that Glys is an Odiumspren that's still allowing Renarin to become a Truthwatcher), of Endowment (based on what we're seeing with Szeth/Nightblood), which will give access to the magic of Honor. Surgebinding was originally done by the Heralds, and they all had splinters of Honor and, probably, a direct connection to Honor that powered their magic. (I learned at a recent signing that the Heralds didn't always need to draw upon Stormlight from gems to power their magic. The Radiants always needed to do so, however.) Cultivation has a magic system that requires capturing spren in gemstones and feeding them stormlight, using them to power fabrials. These spren appear to be different, less intelligent spren than those bonded in Surgebinding. But fabrials aren't like some other magic systems we've seen, where there's a mechanical application of the magic system. They're not mechanical Surgebinding; they're a different magic entirely. We don't know anything of Odium's magic system. But, I expect it is based on the spren, as well. (I'd might as well carry on a point from another thread, and suggest that this is our missing end-negative magic, and it involves consuming spren.) The Parshendi, and Greatshells, have other ways of interacting with spren, that is not a part of any of these Shards' magic systems. (Since they existed before any Shards went to their planet.) It requires a spren bond, and can be with spren of any Shard (and maybe even of Adonalsium, since there are some Adonalsium spren floating around, and the Parshendi existed prior to Shards arriving on Roshar). This 'natural' spren ecosystem probably interplays in a unique way with Surgebinding; it appears when spren bond, they achieve intelligence, and the bonds formed through the magic of Surgebinding may be stronger than the natural bonds that are formed by Roshar's native inhabitants. (We are their broth, their meat is men, or however the line went.) Oh, and there's also the Nightwatcher, which I suspect isn't a magic system, but direct alterations to the spiritweb. But more ways for magic in Stormlight. Roshar has Brandon's most complicated magic arrangement, by far, and there's a lot we don't understand, but there are a lot of different interactions at play with the spren, some of which occurred even before the Shards arrived on the planet. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot wrong with my explanation, but the fact that each Order needs to take Oaths leads me to believe they're all of Honor because of the kind of interaction with spren, even though their individual spren come from various sources. The Bondsmiths are a god example; they probably have spren of both Shards, so which Shard is the Order of? Easy to answer, if they're all of Honor; hard to answer, if the Orders, not just the spren, are on a spectrum. I don't think it would change what you're trying to ask, since you're getting at "which spren are of which Shard." So, I'm more just responding to how you associated the Orders with Shards, and I just kept going and ran with it since you accidentally opened the door to something that got deep fast. I hope the larger context of spren and magic systems can give you some insight into how spren align with Shards.

Why?

You kinda left out the obvious two, in my mind. Dakhor seems the most end-negative, very similar to Hemalurgy in that it requires the loss of human life. But, it might fall under the broader umbrella of "Selish magic," and you can argue that we've seen more than just hints of it. So, that leaves Voidbinding as my #1 candidate; we haven't seen anything of it yet, but we have seen hints like it lets you see the future and has 10 levels. EDIT: Oh, by the way, I asked about Ambition on the AU tour. It is not currently on a planet.

I think Jealousy is encapsulated in Odium, and why he wants to kill other Shards and be the only one left. That's where you see the word 'jealous' applied to God in the Bible, when his followers start worshipping false gods. Only thing is, in the cosmere, there happen to be 15 other 'true gods,' the same level as Odium. (For now...)

I really like the approach, @Jondesu - it's one I've been slowly researching, as well, trying to fit all the Shards we know to either attributes or traditional names of God and then extrapolate the others. I've even considered applying Aseity to Autonomy, myself. Impassibility, however, I stuck with Immutability, and lumped those together in Preservation. God never changes, nothing can change God, and therefore the extreme embodiment of Immutability would want nothing to change as well. I like the concept of Autonomy's Intent not being extremely proactive. A phrase in the Chronicles of Narnia that describes Aslan might also apply to this view of Autonomy: "He's not a tame lion." Bavadin does what she wants, and the Vessel might be the driving factor behind her actions, not so much the Shard, because of the nature of the Shard itself. Which gives her the freedom to meddle in other worlds. However, I must admit that I think the evidence stacks up a little better for a different interpretation, one that we were discussing in another thread (I can't recall if you were there or not, so sorry if I'm repeating myself), that Autonomy's Intent has to do with giving mankind free will. I don't know of a theological term for it, but it's God limiting his sovereignty to allow man to make their own decisions. When taken to an extreme, you would get a 'divine clockmaker,' who sets the world in motion, and then doesn't interact with it ever again. That could describe why Bavadin is trying to overthrow Harmony, to remove his influence from his world. It would make her mission and Odium's somewhat compatible, in destroying other Shards. And it might mean that the various anti-magic religions that pop up around the cosmere are all from Bavadin, trying to eliminate the use of Investiture. (I don't want this explanation to be true, because right now I want to ascribe that particular Shard to Frost, actually, as the hide-and-survive Shard, like the point @DarkJester was making. But a lot of Autonomy's actions fit the bill.) Do you have any interesting thoughts on any divine analogues for the other Shards, aside from Autonomy? I've been struggling with what Divine Ambition is (right now, I'm going with a rather twisted Omnipotence), and with finding a particular attribute to go with Ruin.

The original Original Plan was 3 books, the original contract was for 6 books (because the publisher knew Jordan liked to run long), and it eventually jumped up to 12 books. That series had a ton of scope creep.

Nightwatcher is a strong possibility. Cusicesh is another, although we know he's a level below the Stormfather and Nightwatcher. But, no, we don't know for sure what the other two are.

You know, I thought we recently got this confirmed, but I can't find the quote. I may have conflated it with confirmation that Gavilar was becoming a Bondsmith, and was further along than Dalinar is now. So, I expect it's very likely that Gavilar was bonding the Stormfather and receiving the same visions. But I don't think it's been confirmed as such yet, and it's possible Gavilar was bonding one of the other two Bondsmith spren.

Someone was asking a similar question at a recent signing I was at, and Brandon made it clear that was a very good question to ask, although he wouldn't say if it was possible or not. If it's a part of the ultimate plan for the cosmere, then we won't be seeing anything definitive about it for a long time, most likely. It'll require buy-in from the Shards (maybe not all of them, maybe enough can force the remaining ones to go along). I'd expect one of them would be able to reverse what Odium did, drawing the Investiture back into the Spiritual Realm, allowing it to coalesce (if it hasn't already) and be taken by a new Vessel.

An interesting idea, but in Arcanum Unbounded, the Scadrian essay says they are both humans.