Ripheus23

For what it's worth, Allomancy is quite druggie in a lot of ways... I will say, your moss reminds me of Again, for what it's worth.

I don't think they've explained how Nahel-bonded spren can manifest in the Physical Realm as metallic weapons, have they? Maybe we've gotten outlines... But so Nightblood would have been an attempt to turn something, presumably widely available on Nalthis, into a Shardweapon. Random notion: Nightblood is an anti-perpendicularity. Like a black hole in all three Realms. (Maybe he's an example of the kind of weapon that was made against Adonalsium...)

Maybe they're "gravitationally bound" by the implied mass of the Investiture available to them?

So, inspired by Lord Sanderson, I have been thinking up a specific system of magic. Well, honestly, I've thought of many because of him: he calls his genre "science fantasy," but my term for this kind of work is "transcendental fiction." The idea is that scifi = extensions of known laws of physics, fantasy = suspension of physics, transfi = alternate laws of physics/metaphysics. Which having Investiture alongside matter/energy fits with very well... Anyway, step 1 in this system of mine, for the sake of this thread, is a God-concept. In this world, God would be understood in terms of three primary attributes, M(ight) and K(nowledge) and G(race). Now, God exists as a full person per the order of the attributes. So there is a divine person = MKG, another = GKM, and so on, for 3! = 6 divine persons total (instead of 3 as in the Trinity). The idea is that God can be defined as ultimate power that defines Its own knowledge, which in turn defines Its grace, or as ultimate goodness implying ultimate wisdom and hence ultimate strength, etc. I don't have much else thought up for this system except that the following sequence of numbers would be relevant: 1! = 1 2! = 2 3! = 6 4! = 24 5! = 120 6! = 720 Also whether a hexagon or a hexahedron would be the typical geometrical symbol for the system, I haven't decided. Maybe there'd be a common emblem based on interposing the two (like a super-Star of David, if you will)?

Re: Yolen's tech level, I read the source and I found: I am not sure if this Prime text is the one he's saying is unnecessary/will never be published. It seems as if the "Prime" books are the ones that later evolved into something else, e.g. Mistborn Prime. If so, then Yolen being technologically deficient would not be canonical, though. Besides which, if "magic [] didn't really get used that much in the first book," then presumably the Shattering wouldn't be in the first book, since other than technology, magic would be required to accomplish the Shattering, wouldn't it? But by some later book, maybe the tech would be more advanced. To my knowledge, the accelerated expansion supposedly began 5 billion years ago, not "in the beginning," and contrariwise the initial expansion is attributed to a hypothetical "inflaton field," i.e. a field in which gluons, photons, W+/-&Z bosons, and gravitons were all fused as particles of expansion called "inflatons."

One time, years ago, I attended an LDS service and one of the official speakers made an unusual remark, that the dark energy believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe was nothing less than the Light of Christ itself. Without going into any sort of detail on the nature of that Light otherwise, I will say that some other posters here (I can't seem to find the actual threads ) got me to thinking, well, if Adonalsium was a superconcentration of Investiture, and if Sanderson has said that Investiture is third with matter/mass and energy... Not only did Sanderson draw some inspiration from The Wheel of Time but he was, after all, tapped to finish the series, so I suspect there might be clues, in there, to some of the... cosmological... aspects of the Cosmere. In The Shadow Rising there is a vision shown of when the Dark One was unbound from its prison. Scientists had done this, by building a machine to "drill" through spacetime itself, into some other plane of existence in which the Dark One dwells. So I also was thinking, what event IRL does the Shattering of Adonalsium remind me of? Now, if Adonalsium had all the magic, then those who Shattered it didn't use magic to do so. I mean, if they did what they did to get that entity's power, yet they already had magic power enough to kill the source of the same thing, it'd be kind of like letting a man forge two swords, dueling him with one, winning, and then breaking the loser's sword into 16 pieces and replacing your winning weapon with one of those pieces. Besides which, why would Adonalsium have granted them the power to kill him? However, let's suppose that there was a civilization powerful enough to affect gravity on a vast scale. I mean technologically powerful enough, using electrons and photons and gluons and all that jazz, in whatever way gravitons would be manipulated by those. So, this civilization notes that there's a third thing, in the universe, like matter and energy, only this thing didn't start expanding outward during the initial inflation of the universe. Or, it did, but once the initial inflation ended, it remained otherwise supercondensed. This thing is alive, and it's made of magic, so it's a God after all, and so 16 people in this supercivilization cause the space-time in which God is condensed to start expanding with the rest of the universe, resulted in Adonalsium's Shattering. Like a "Big Rip" scenario but only for 1/3rd of the matter/energy/magic triad. And, incidentally, this Shattering, because it requires an action involving cosmic levels of gravity, results in the acceleration of the rest of the universe's expansion... QED!!!

Aleph-numbers aren't like ordinary numbers, in many ways. That is, aleph-16 isn't some aleph-ness multiplied by 16. The context of Sanderson's remark is numerological, in that some Shards are numerologically associated with specific numbers. But all the Shards are associated with infinity, which is a number, or type of number (in the aleph-context). OTOH your explanation/citation is easier to follow than the kind of algebra I was thinking of...

So there is this fascinating site mentalsymmetry.com, which divides reality into (by name!) a Physical, a Cognitive, and a Spiritual plane. Some engineer and his social-scientist brother apparently did the academic footwork for the sake of this site (it's maintained by the engineer); but now anyway, though their own system focuses on 7 personality types, it relates back to what is called MBTI or the Meyer-Briggs Type Index (IIRC?), which is 16-fold. Coincidence? Hoid? God ? Anyway, if so, let's speculate on Shardnesses... We've got feeling/thought, introverted/extroverted, sensation/iNtuition, perceiving/judging. So let's suppose Ruin was, IDK, introverted-sensation-judging-thought or ISJT. Odium seems similar as far as being a world-destroying type, so let's say Rayse was... ISJF? At any rate, there might be a way to relate individual Intents to the MBTI categories.

Ditto... I thought 16 was tied to Preservation via the total number of Shards anyway, instead of being a Scadrial-centric factoid...

I was puzzled to read in different Cosmere texts that the god-level beings could each show people an "infinite" amount of power, yet some of them were apparently stronger than others AND all were under Adonalsium, in principle. Yet I wonder... ... I wonder about my memory So, for years and years now I've been obsessed with "Cantor's paradise." It's the belief, among many (most?) mathematicians, that there are actually an infinite number of different kinds of infinities. For example, the rational numbers are called "aleph-zero," the irrationals/reals are (believed to be...) "aleph-one," and so on. However, the number-suffix can be an entire aleph-number, too, so there's also "aleph-aleph-zero," "aleph-aleph-one," "aleph-aleph-aleph-zero," "aleph-aleph-aleph one," and so on and on, forever and ever, amen. (They're usually written out with subscripts, so they look more... manageable, haha!) So, for example, there's an aleph-aleph-aleph-aleph-aleph-aleph-42. Also there are other dimensions of these numbers, that I have next to no idea how to write out. I think they're called "inaccessible cardinals," among other things. I'm guessing (purely guessing) that they're called "inaccessible" because they can't be expressed in notation that involves only changing the number-suffix/subscript for that original aleph-series members. But I honestly don't know. Anyway, let's suppose the power-level per Shard, so to speak, can be measured in aleph-numbers. Since the first such number is indexed zero, let's say that Adonalsium was equal to aleph-16 and the Shards each match up to one of the 16 aleph-numbers from zero to fifteen. (So interestingly enough, Adonalsium would itself be the Seventeenth Shard, in a way?) OR Adonalsium was aleph-aleph-...-aleph [16 aleph-steps] -something (10? there's got to be a reason people keep messing up, like on Scadrial or Roshard, and thinking there are only 10 of the things that there should be more of, like the metals?). Let's say you could hold multiple Shards and "sort of" aggregate their individual power levels, but if you go the Harmony route (total speculation!!!) you compound their aleph-dimensionality, so Harmony is not just the aleph-number for Ruin + the aleph-number for Preservation, but is, for lack of a better way to put it, (R+P)^2. QED

Maybe the 16 were like Adonalsium's Apostles? And Hoid was like... hmm... IDK... Not Mary, but... to suck in some Islamlight the Mahdi (forerunner of the superhero's return)?

I'm not talking politics in the... average sense? I'm talking a highly metaphysical sense of the subject. Now the fact that one of the Shards is known as "Autonomy" is an indication along the lines of what I mean. (I know, multiple meanings to that word, but...) I had no knowledge of this, I don't know what the Sibling is, etc. I don't mean to imply that the only magic derived from Adonalsium/the Shards is ultimately Aon-like/cymatic in appearance/style/whatever, but that there's an importance to the similarity, and to the unity we imagine Adonalsium exhibited. I guess I just meant, also as an advance reply to... ... that Sanderson's LDS background would be a source, for him, for an image of a divine city, a being sort of similar to God. That is, there is no temple in Zion because the Father and the Son are Themselves the temple (and some people say the Spirit is "the River of the Waters of Life" that flows from the Father and Son), and Zion is the place of God's Name, and God is His own Name, and so on and on---that is, Zion, in Christianity, is not just some location corollary to God, but part of God being Incarnate (or so it seems to me). So maybe it's not so much that Adonalsium was a "city" but a "temple"? I think (from my reading of the Book of Mormon) that the New Jerusalem is, according to the LDS Church, supposed to be a city in the Western Hemisphere, so who knows, though.

Either the continent or the planet, I mean. (I was toying with a theory that the continent is some kind of ultra-greatshell, and that the highstorms pass when this animal swims across the Origin, but if this were true I think it would be hard for people to sail beyond the continental coastline and remain properly oriented towards their own origins, so to speak.) I partly hope this idea turns out partly true, at least, since I'd love to see a scene where the whole world lights up with Stormlight.

Doesn't Veil go on for a little in OB about how cities have feelings or something? And I mean they specifically say Urithiru, a city, was alive. My idea is that the Aon-patterns (and like forms) are equivalent to cymatic patterns, and that Adonalsium was some kind of unity of all those patterns, so that when the Shards/Splinters dispersed and "landed" in different places, they caused cymatic shockwaves e.g. on Roshar that laid the foundations for the Dawncities, or on Sel re: Elantris, and so on. Now, all that being said, I don't deny that Adonalsium had a human-guy kind of form, too. We're told that Ruin had a physical body that basically consisted in a lake of atium-metal, but he could adopt a manly physique, if you will, too. And Odium has his human/parshman shape, and then that expanse of gilden flame. On another level, "a force that became sapient (which Investiture will do if left alone, and Adonalsium was the source of all the Investiture in the Cosmere" is Sanderson-speak for LDS metaphysics of matter. The LDS Church doesn't say that matter itself was created from nothingness, but that divine creation is a special action on pre-existent substance (hence that fancy name for Tanavast, I don't recall it right now but the name that translates as "He Who Transforms"). Besides this basic "stuff," the cosmos also has a sort of automatic force-field of intelligence to it, and in "If You Could Hie to Kolob" (an LDS hymn) there's a section that goes, "Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity, Find out the generation where gods began to be?" So, in LDS cosmology, there's a multiverse, and God as we know Him is "just" the God of this "sidereal heaven" (how one of the Prophets put it, IIRC). But He (Elohim) was a man, in a parallel universe, Who became exalted by following the ordinances of exaltation in that reality. (Whether He was redeemed man, with a Savior, is a different question; He might have been like Christ is in our universe, i.e. divine without having been recovered from sin first.) But as all time is "one eternal round," there is no privileged vantage, over all others, from which we can identify "where gods began to be" per se. So in the Cosmere, Adonalsium presumably achieved exaltation by following some peculiar process in His original reality, and the exaltation of the Shards proceeded according to a peculiar process in the secondary reality that He, Adonalsium, created (and His being killed, there and then, is something akin to how Christ, though a divine being, was able to be actually killed---in the LDS system, the Son didn't just die "in His human nature" but both natures, I think---in fact there's not so sharp a divide between human and divine essence, on those grounds). And now the Lord Ruler and Vin and Elend and Dalinar and so on and so forth are all achieving a tertiary exaltation, while Hoid/Cephandrius(?) is trying to "see the outside curtain, where nothing has a place," i.e. the point of the primary exaltation attained by Adonalsium.

Starting with book 4 (of the 10 total), the Thomas Covenant books feature an extremely strong woman as a protagonist. She has moments of particular weakness, sure, but so does Covenant. And she does some pretty awesome things with magic, here and there. (There's a scene in book 8 that is as good as Sanderson at his magic-system finest, what with compounding different sources of theurgy and all...)

IDK, why can't you kill a city? You can kill anything that's alive, after all. If there are sentient concepts (spren) in this universe, why not sentient cities? EDIT: And the Shattering as a personality-splitting (among other things), that's a given, sure, but a political division is not a division of mere physical power. I'm thinking in terms of the political scientist Hannah Arendt's notion of politics, "the space of appearances" and such-like things (Google it if you like). A sixteen-fold personality could easily fit into a process of such a division.

Late in Oathbringer it is indicated that Urithiru was once alive. The Elantrians' powers depend on their city; the Dawncities correspond to cymatic patterns comparable to the patterns in Elantris; indeed cities are prominent locales in much of Sanderson's Cosmere storytelling. Ruin's body was made of metal. Besides words like "aluminium," the word "Adonalsium" is similar to architectural names like "coliseum" or "Palanaeum." So... What if Adonalsium was a city? A living city, that is. Not God, then, so much as Zion. A city, that is, in the Spiritual Realm, exemplary of that Realm. Or, even, a city in all three Realms at once (hence Dalinar's quasi-apotheosis during the Battle of Thaylen City, for instance). The Shattering would have been the political division of that place, then. (For those who are familiar with the Book of Revelation, and maybe Ezekiel (I don't know Ezekiel that well), the New Jerusalem/Heavenly City has 12 gates, correlated with 12 gemstones; so maybe the city of Adonalsium goes with 16 gemstones, instead.)

He hasn't opened the box yet so I'm not sure what I think of him, could go either way...

What if I'm not from that planet? Also, if I'm not human, I might not breathe... I might not even be alive... However, for the sake of the locals, I will say, "My organic presence to yours, my atmospheric metabolism become yours," if that fits.

I was gonna try to say something like "Ermadnerslersiurm" or whatever, but figured I would look like a cat stomping on a keyboard if I did that... In case it wasn't evident, I am not a cat. I'm probably human, though according to which probability calculus, I won't say...