Ripheus23

Aha! Now my ad hoc theory becomes less so. My theory is that Preservation brought copies of books from Yolen, books that Scadrial's future history was partly based on. Or he created copies of the books along with the world. Or something

Seems they do?! OMFG someone actually got a WoB about this question

The only reason I despise Shallan is because she has ruined my Kadolin fantasy

Hmm, this testifies against a theory of mine, unless I make a quasi-ad hoc adjustment to it...

Like Uli Da? Or maybe Ha Dah was Uli Da, and the name became warped over time. Could just about any of the "false" religions of Classical Scadrial be named in relation to Shards? If so, hmm... Cazzi, the Shard of the Grave Valla, the "Survival" Shard? ("The Vallan religion is notable for being the longest surviving after the rise of the Final Empire and the Lord Ruler's persecution of religions other than his own. The religion even survived after all the leaders were killed.") Ja, the Shard of Chaos (or a prophecy of Discord/broken Harmony?) Dadradah, maybe Dadra Dah, another Sho Del Shard? EDIT: The inspiration for this thread was the idea of making a joke thread entitled "Ati is not Preservation" and suchlike, in honor of the threads with titles like "Trell is/is not Autonomy."

Are they there already and I've missed them?

I don't recall if it's said whether he literally did, or if he's more just strongly suspected to have done so, or what. HALP

There's a lot of guilt going around with the reveal of the first Voidbringers. I imagine this also dampens some people's willingness to be hostile towards Szeth.

OK, there's a WoB about the Ghostbloods that testifies to the virtue of our endeavors on this site (Another member quoted this in a different thread.) So, going off the analysis-of-obscure-details aspect of this, I will argue that the Ghostbloods' symbol is an image of their goal: to bring about the first tri-Shard. They are working the Roshar angle due to the presence of three Shards in the system. If Kelsier is or will be affiliated or otherwise involved with them, I think it will be because they also have logged Scadrial as a candidate world for the emergence for a tri-Shard, if Autonomy is Trell and is able to be more fully "drawn to" that world and then potentially inducted into Harmony. Now, here are three ways I think this theme could play out until the end of the entire Cosmere saga: ONE. The x-Shard This depends on x as a number that is, per the story, the maximum that a Vessel will or can hold. The most conservative narrative option is to have all the currently Vessel-less Shards picked up by either a new Vessel, or some given Vessel, minus Honor. I think Rayse will be forcibly bound to the Shard of Honor and this will resolve him through the SA interlude, after which I believe Cultivation will eventually defeat Rayse to become the first tri-Shard, fulfilling the Ghostbloods' plan to whatever extent. So that leaves us, as far as I know, with Devotion, Dominion, and Ambition. So let's say a new Vessel picks up those and becomes another tri-Shard. Then the stage will be set with possibly one di-Shard and two tri-Shards (I have a feeling it's possible for Harmony to fail to bring his Shards into enduring balance---not necessarily so, but just possibly---in which event he might die. It would be ironic for Harmony to self-destruct and destroy Scadrial in the process, and also provide one of the motives for the future Scadrian space forces to engage in whatever search it is for whatever they're looking for (let's say Trell causes Harmony's ultimate imbalance)). Or we might have a di-Shard, a tri-Shard, and a quadri-Shard, if instead of a new Vessel it's some other holder of a Shard who takes the vulnerable three. Of course, it's also possible that Honor might be picked up by the same being, so the problem as such would be a penta-Shard. If Odium's Vessel dies we might even have a hexa-Shard to deal with. And if some other Shard dies in one or another book, however many more die and aren't taken, might be taken by the problem character in question later. (And who knows whether a Shard could ever voluntarily give their divine portfolio to another? (Although I will hesitantly suggest that Dalinar will take up Honor but when the void of Odium devours Kaladin, in an act of ultimate humility Dalinar will give his Shard to the Child of Honor, and while being devoured Kaladin will force Rayse to take up Honor's Shard.)) But I would say the strongest conservative gloss of this option is a quadri-Shard, who is (A) already a holder of a Shard and (B) able to sum up the overarching narrative significance of books like Elantris and the future Threnodite novel. That is, the build-up period story of the Shards would be the Story of those Shards who died and thus "paved the way" for the quadri-Shard. Sanderson has said it's unclear whether a single Vessel could hold all the Shards or become Adonalsium, or whether Adonalsium can even recombine as such at all. (Unclear from the POV of the audience, anyway.) I can't remember why but I was thinking that a 15-Shard might be possible for some special reason, though. However, the process that would most likely result in this event leads me to theory #2. TWO. The cataclysm of Adonalsium It is odd to me that Rayse is afraid of other Shards in terms of what would happen to his Intent if he picked them up. You'd think the obvious solution is, well, hey bro, just don't pick them up! Also if they're being held by someone else, that drastically reduces the chance of them being held by Rayse, so he could save himself twice the trouble if he didn't kill other Shards in the first place. Moreover, there has to be a reason for the 17th Shard to think that no good can come of Shards dwelling together. My intuition tells me that the reason for all this is that the Shards as Shards, not as the Vessels, have a natural dynamic whereby they will coalesce back together unless actively restrained. The sheer Spiritual gravity of the Investiture will draw them together, maybe. This might take ages of ages to come about but from the vantage of a Shard's Vessel, this could seem a more present threat. Now, if Adonalsium is reforged, and yet if it is not clear whether Adonalsium could return to the Cosmere, I'm going to guess that this would be the case not because the sheer Investiture of all the Shards cannot be drawn back together into one, but because this density of power would either have no Vessel (possibly unlike the original Adonalsium) or its sapience would not be personally identical to the original Adonalsium's. Why would this be a problem, though? Let us suppose such an incident took place as the successor of all the lesser cataclysms in the Cosmere since the Shattering. Investiture will be diffused in many and strange ways across scores of worlds. There is a chance that something like a Cosmere-spanning superperpendicularity would arise, cycling objects between Realms in a crescendo. If you've read The City at the End of Time, I'm talking something like the Typhon's emergence and devouring of the universe. Of course, maybe Adonalsium's second coming wouldn't have such terrible consequences, but someone would fear such an outcome and would him- or herself pose a massive threat to the Cosmere, say by trying to annihilate the whole region in an attempt to preserve the rest of the Physical cosmos, or whatever. But... THREE. He already wrote the Last Battle... Sanderson has already written what is arguably the greatest magic battle scene in history, the finale of the war in The Wheel of Time. Since the "opposition to Adonalsium" is not, so far as we know, a parallel divine being, it does not seem as if the Cosmere has a Dark One of its own, nor will it. However, in my thread based on the book Answer to Job I presented what I think to be some of the religious background for the Cosmere, namely the story of the vessel-shards of God, in which goodness and darkness are intermixed. Either it's pure coincidence that Jewish mysticism is deeply relevant to the Cosmere and that the core narrative of Jewish mysticism involves references to vessels and Shards of God, or else Sanderson's theme of the Shards involves an implicit reference to that narrative. But if this is so, then by applying the sliding-scale-of-villainy trope to the sum of Sanderson's writing to date (and what we can reliably project him to have eventually written), we can infer a possible ultimate antagonist, here, in the form of the darkness of Adonalsium itself. That is, instead of two divine beings, one of Whom is good and the other of which is evil, there is (was) just one divine being, and its Shattering was perhaps meant to forestall the emergence of the evil side of this one being. But let us suppose that the Shards have not purged the darkness within them, and indeed have oftentimes cultivated it, so that the Shards as a system of reality are becoming corrupted---for if power corrupts, and if absolute power corrupts absolutely... FOUR. "All of the above" There's nothing stopping Sanderson from including all of the above kinds of scenarios in the Cosmere endgame, is there? (Along with entirely other scenarios besides!) He could set the stage/red-herring the audience with the x-Shard situation, which becomes the prelude to the reforging crisis, and in the process of being reforged, the power of Adonalsium (if not the person too) casts its inherent shadow across the stars.

They're being controlled by the Shard of Weed.

No @RShara, the thread is reincarnating, so it fits its title perfectly

Hmm, 80-160-240-320-400-480-560-640-720---that means SA10 will be a black-spherical number of pages long

Let's start with... This is informative as far as it goes. However, I think the questioner was on to something. For example: There's also this: This all adds up to something that sounds like breaking infinity into pieces, which might not make sense. (If it was just about access to knowledge of power, then Harmony, because he knows less than Odium, would not be vastly more powerful than the other, and possibly not even more powerful as such at all.) But I have a different idea... Also: All these WoBs together suggest to me that the question is about two uses of the word "Investiture" in relation to numbers. The difference is between extensive quantity and intensive quantity---extent and degree. All the Shards are Invested to an infinite degree: the degree of their matter and energy is Spiritual. But Investiture also manifests in a distinct way in the Physical Realm. Let's say that there was a field of Adonalsium's power spanning the entire Cosmere, and at each point in this field, Adonalsium could act to an infinite degree. When Shattered, this field of power was divided into sixteen "levels" as well as sixteen sets of regions. To get the idea visually, let's say the following set of numbers and letters represents the extent of the Cosmere-field, with different symbols representing Physical quantities of Investiture: 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 0,0,0,0,0,A,0,0,0 0,[Yolen],0,0,0,0 0,0,A,0,0,0,0,0,0 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,A So the fields are everywhere, but the particles in the fields are not, and 1/16th of the particles were assigned to each Shard, even though the fields themselves are all Cosmere-wide and of potentially infinite degree. (A) are the "pockets" of Autonomy's Investiture particles that are scattered across the Cosmere (she is as it were pre-Splintered, it would seem?), 0 is the default excitation of any field (that is, not all particles in the Cosmere are Invested), and at Yolen there were most of the n + 1 excitations (most of the already-Invested particles). So a Shard can only directly act in the Physical Realm via the packets of Investiture assigned to it. These packets are bound together so Splintering them is a special process. By contrast, becoming a Sliver means attaining the degree of a Shard's power without the full extent of the Investiture being used. So the "prison" of Ruin was like Ruin being Splintered not because a packet of his particles were split off from another packet, but his whole degree of access to his Investiture particles (at the time in the form of atium) was interdicted (it was a Cognitive barrier, after all, that Preservation put in place). And the Well allowed one to Ascend even though the Well was not the sum of Preservation's Physical Investiture. Another implication of this would be that the Shards are all the same rank as Adonalsium was. Adonalsium's distinction in might as such would've been having all the finite quantity of Physical Investiture particles assigned to him. This might help explain how it was mathematically possible for the Vessels to kill a being who otherwise seems likely to have utterly surpassed them.

Ruin in MBE1 was a villain as a Vessel who'd been perverted. Rayse is a villain-Vessel who was already evil and has become even more so. However, if the Shards in themselves have some kind of sentience or sapience or awareness or what, would it be possible to have the Shards as such become antagonists? Maybe it's hard for a Shard to defend against being picked up so this would provide for an easy way out for the protagonists (get close enough to the Shard and take it---so maybe the Shard would be on the run?), or maybe Shards are drawn towards being picked up (I think I've seen a WoB about this?), or who knows but it would be an interesting way to twist the ultimate endgame, if possible...?

RAFO!

Some WoBs! I thought there was a WoB that said there could have been different numbers of Intents as well as different kinds, or something along these lines, but I couldn't find it EDIT: Found it! I think this suggests that the Shattering was a "subjective" event, or in this context a highly Cognitive one, where the Vessels' different beliefs about the nature of God helped to determine the incident. Here's a way to reinterpret the "infinite power" question. There isn't an infinite "amount" of Investiture in the Cosmere even though Investiture is throughout all of infinity. I think this means that the extensity of Investiture is finite, but the intensity isn't necessarily so. There are only certain Physical regions where there are enough "Investiture particles" (not really point-particles but something roughly quantifiable along those lines) to do magic. These sets of quasi-particles can shift across space, attenuate, etc. so doing specific magic becomes more widely possible. Originally, the 16 each inherited the infinite degree of Shard-power, and then 1/16th the measure of the same. Picking up a second Shard doesn't change the degree of the Shard but the extension of its assigned quasi-particle set. EDIT 2: Thank you @Child of Hodor!

I was reading another thread about the Ghostbloods and totally realized I forgot to wildly speculate that they will have a space force too! If the Cosmere star systems are relatively close, pure/stereotypical FTL issues might not arise so much when it comes to traversing the intervening space. It could be that the other civilizations besides Scadrial's have interstellar but not intergalactic technology? EDIT:

Favorite theory of the day!

Why is Rayse hostile to other Shards as such, and why does the issue of a pact about settlement have a place in this? The only explanation I can think of is that the Shards have a natural tendency to start reforming into Adonalsium, or at least reforming into a supermassive perpendicularity (so to speak), or whatever like that. Hoid is a possible example of someone who is copying/advancing/w/e this process by collecting samples of powers from different systems, but so does Mraize seem to be doing such a thing, whereas I think the 17th Shard might be against such merging per se. Maybe they have a police-like role under the Shards. Since ... then maybe the 17th Shard was appointed to try to interdict people from using Investiture contrary to the will of the Shards. That is, Odium for instance can't block Voidlight but maybe the 17th Shard could, just enough to prevent at least some individuals from "unregulated" usage?

[Kind of a story. Kind of a covert theology...?] The Motive of the Adversary In the beginning, God was Three-in-One. Below Him did He forge the angels, and seven of these the highest. Unlike humanity, only some of the angels held the power to become indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and those who could were those seven. One of the two highest of these, Samael, argued with God in the shadow of His Throne, for Samael did not accept the role his brother Michael had been given. "First," Samael shouted, the echoes of his discord trumpeting through the halls of Heaven, "You decreed that it would be a once-mortal man in Whom You would be Incarnate. Neither of the highest of us, and indeed no angel at all, but a human nature would You assume. I cannot see, and this man in Whom You are to exist cannot know, the day or the hour of this promise. What is the meaning of this, o Lord? "But this is not all," the proud child of God continued quietly. "Not only are You to become a man, but those sinners You shall redeem thereby will be appointed to judge all the world. I and all the other angels will be so judged. Man, even sinful man, You shall exalt higher than us. Why, o Lord? And why is this humiliation not enough for You?" Next to Samael, Michael held an eerie smile of fire on his face. His eyes looked vacant to Gabriel's sight, and the latter angel shuddered. The accuser of Heaven railed silently again, his tenebrous voice a whisper and a roar. "It appears not," Samael thus so intoned. "For even after You lowered all the angels in these ways, You chose a mortal woman to be the door of Thy Incarnation. And not only that, but because she will be this door, she alone shall outrank any angel in Heaven. Only the human frame of her Son shall stand higher in the created order. "But we have heard it said that salvation is by faith." Michael turned the inferno of his gaze towards his darkened brother, his smile no slighter nor wider, and as Gabriel shuddered even more, Samael joined him---not out of fear but rage. "I have had faith in Thee, o God, no matter that You have done all of these unknowable things. You cannot lie, and are the fountain and sun of all that is holy. Whence would I have cause to defy Thee? And even had I cause to, how might I? I am the highest of Thy spirits of service: I see Thee in all Thy light. I am no fool, as if to say in my heart that there is none Who is God." While Michael and Samael stood side by side, and Gabriel in immortal terror across from them, Belial far from those three laughed. Samael had spoken with the high seraph before, offering him a place in the things to come. If Samael made his case before God, Belial would be glorified forever over all evil. The only honor he would have to share would be with Azazel, the angel standing next to him. Both hoped that their overseer was not bluffing to question the Lord here, now. "I asked, therefore, but one thing of Thee." And Michael's smile at last grew, the flame inside him becoming an aura around him. "You will not torment the damned. Even those who choose to defy You once and forever You would not inflict Thyself so upon. But because angels have been else made lesser than sinners, You have allowed it to be that one among the angels shall be given to bring agony to those in Hell at the end of days. This is the only glory I pleaded for, o God. And yet instead, You have given it unto Michael my brother, he who is not the mightiest of us. And this is what I do not have faith in, o God. I, and I alone, must know the horror to be paid to sinners for their iniquity. Michael cannot know what I can." What Azazel and Belial had been promised was this. When Hell was born, the one would be the angel who brought souls there, and the other, under Samael, would execute the sentence of God upon those souls. But God had elected Michael to both roles. Samael had no pretension of displacing the Almighty---he knew that was absolutely impossible---but he was in peril of laying claim to the mantle of the Lord in this case. For in being denied the auspices of eternal torment himself, he made himself as if to be the one who might appoint the others in this. But Belial and Azazel were almost fools and did not easily see how they had been misled. [This is all I've come up with for now.]

Both! Actually you have a better grasp of the geometry question in this case than I do

Let's guess what kinds of space fleets we'll see by MBE4! Scadrian ships. A given as far as I know. My guess is that artificially intelligent Hemalurgic ships will use duralumin and steel as one step in the FTL process (the AI-ship will metabolize steel in duralumin bursts to accelerate the ships drastically) and then cadmium and bendalloy as another step (to somehow deal with relativistic problems), and then the unknown elements will be added to the equation and voila, FTL. Design will be very spartan in the sense of pure metallic colors and metallic-stereotypical curvature. Rosharan ships. Semi-given, AFAIK. Rosharans will fight in space somehow, as per some WoB (I think it was something to do with Radiant Space Marines?). I'm gonna guess that if this involves spaceships and not Radiants fighting in Plate-mecha format or what, there will be lots of gemstones involved, so crystalline ships, maybe with radial symmetry (along the lines of the Dawncities---even if/though the Dawncities were not spaceships). The entire planet of Sel. This is super-wild extrapolation but let's say not just the countries there but Sel itself becomes a fully sentient being. And then picks up the Shards of Devotion and Dominion. We'd have a godplanet, which would make for an interesting force to be reckoned with. ALTERNATIVES: Invested asteroids are made self-aware, or parts of countries are detached somehow and sent into outer space. The trick is gonna have to be getting country-like structures in space (if there's no reliable way to nonlocalize AonDor), so besides the whole dang planet moving self-consciously as such, I would posit asteroids or chunks of land as candidates for the process. Ire ships. With the caveat that AonDor can be nonlocalized in some set of cases, I will guess that the Ire will do this enough to make at least very small ships. I like the idea of rival/divergent Selish space forces, though, so I personally hope we get a godplanet on one hand and little scouter vehicles or what on another. (Also if the Ire hijack an Ascension at some point, they might make a spaceship using their new Investiture set, so who knows!) Awakened ships? I haven't considered this possibility beyond the term. Supercolorful ships as an image might be capitalized enough on by having fabrial starships so maybe Sanderson wouldn't have much reason to develop a Nalthian space force as such... 17th-Shard ships. I'm going with a high view of their capacities, so I will suspect that if they ever get ships, they'll be a space fleet unto themselves, or close to it (maybe partly/heavily dependent on exchanges with a Shard or Shards who are on the organization's side). Haven't the faintest notion what they'd look like. Autonomy's Avatar Armada No-planet Shard will have something up his/her/its sleeves... If multiple dragon-Shards, maybe dragons in space A Hoidship. Think the Heart of Gold made of Top Ramen? If Rayse survives until then, Voidships Spaceships created by Adonalsium himself... "Godships" (or Shardships?!)

I love the idea of setting a story in a universe with planes of existence. The Wheel of Time and the Cosmere stories feature limited but striking examples of this quasi-subgenre; D&D materials, maybe Magic materials, are probably the most expansive users of the trope. But, now, the two main rationales for multiple planes seem to be either (A) planes are based on elements/categories or (B) planes are based on cognitive rankings (e.g. the WoT world has the world, then dreams, then the superdreamworld, and also side-worlds, IIRC). My first shot at trying to outline a planar story, then, turned on trying to come up a nifty set of elements/categories to go off. The best thing I came up with on that basis were (I think) Planes of Light, Darkness, Life, Death, Hope, and Despair. I don't remember the logic for these but I believe those are what I went with. However, the muttering-philosopher in me had to call such a scheme into doubt, like, are those really the 6 broadest+highest categories, at least as per forms of planes? So now I have come up with two alternate models: One plane per each "crystal system" as described on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_system for a septaplanar world (at least if this world is 3D only). I've recently updated this concept by pairing the hexaverse notion (as described in another thread) with this one, where the hexaverse is hexaplanar (one plane per Divine Person) and the septaplanar reach is the result of a pantheistic function (that is, there are 6 transtheistically created worlds and 1 pantheistically created one). Next to the hexaverse and the septaverse is a region of sheer mathematical possibility, where anomalous forces can develop for insertion into the more carved-out worlds of the plot. One plane per each category of amendment (so four planes, one for apologies, one for forgiveness, one for punishment, and one for redemption). A similar notion is to expand afterlife options from Christianity as much as possible, using CT/Conscious Torment, NS/Neutral State, A/Annihilation, and H/Heaven, as vectors, with finite/infinite divergences. So there'd be an afterlife that is pure CT, finite NS before infinite CT, alternating NS and CT, finite CT before A, pure A, finite CT before infinite H, and so on.

OK but where did these people get the idea that they could defy or disagree with Shards from? Unless they're similar to a nonviolent resistance movement, I feel like they would have been organized around/with figures of great power, who could protect them from Shards who would interfere with the non-interference policy. Either that or at least one Shard favors noninterference too and is a back-up for the group, though then it would seem like the group would then be, say, the 12th Shard (if the one in question was the 12th on some relevant list). I mean I know non-golf clubhouses could also be named after imaginarily numbered golf holes but there's at least a decent chance that there's a semantic relationship between the average clubhouse named like that, and the question whether that clubhouse is part of a golf course. EDIT: All Investiture was assigned to the Shards, so if the 17th Shard uses Investiture at all, they have to depend on a Shard or Shards for that purpose. Maybe there are several Shards who are members of the 17th (that would possibly be ironic). The alternative is that the 17thS, if they have enough power to "enforce" their policies, have non-Invested equipment that can accomplish this. Not exactly an example but the First Gem (if this is indeed part of the "weapon made to fight Adonalsium") represents the possibility that artifacts can be forged by entities on a lower level than the highest Shardic-ranked entity, but still with power to affect the higher-ranked (I call Adonalsium "Shardic" in the sense that the Shard concept is derivative of our concept of him, as it were). That is, it is possible for non-Shards to have power commensurate with Shards unless the Vessels used Investiture to kill Adonalsium.

I'm betting on Aona and Skai being daughter and father, maybe. There can be some pretty precise Dominion and Devotion inside that kind of relationship, as much as patriotism is a blend of the same as per AonDor.