Oudeis

I concur. I find "the dragon lives on yolen" to be very likely, but non-canonical.

Your question seems to be more specifically, "Is Investiture purely spiritual, or can it exist/be native to the physical and/or cognitive realms"?

Who, specifically, are you talking to? Personally, I was referencing Weiry, who spoke of whether or not the Dragon was part of the Shattered Plains part of the book. Since we've established that there were no dragons in the Shattered Plains part of the book, all I'm saying is, it was likely in the non-Shattered Plains part of the book.

I'll try to find it... we know that metal inside of a person, literally any person, has resistance to pushing and pulling, and there's WoB I will attempt to locate which says this is because of a person's innate investiture. Further, when hemalurgy steals physical strength, senses, mental capacity or emotional fortitude, they are taking some of that person's Innate Investiture, which is what turns the non-sentient Mistwraiths into sentient kandra as they now have an imbalance of Innate Investiture. I suppose this doesn't prove that the amount is all the same, but I still don't see where all the extra Investiture is going. Everyone has some, even skaa with no noble parentage, even Terris whose bloodlines have remained pure of lerasium's influence. I suppose it's possible, even with all my statements being true, that some people have got buckets and buckets of Innate Investiture, and some people have got barely any, and intermarriage between these people is what's diluted the power. I don't buy it, but it's possible.

That was a typo on my part, I meant to say, "Why wouldn't they have different cognitive aspects?". My apologies. As has been pointed out, they've have different cognitive aspects almost for certain. How can we know that this doesn't include Investiture? Why is it impossible that there be some Investiture in the cognitive aspect of a piece of copper that gives it the capacity to store memories feruchemically and become a coppermind? For your second paragraph... you're still jumping a premise ahead. You haven't proven, and no one has conceded, that Preservation's Investiture is solely spiritual; in fact, you yourself pointed out that it exists physically as lerasium, the liquid in the Well, and the mists. So I agree, Preservation's Investiture would not be any different from a different Shard's, and they would all exist in whichever realm they felt like. Valid point on soulcasting, though keep in mind in the first Mistborn book we were told rules of allomancy that proved false. Just because something is written in the ars arcanum doesn't mean it is correct; perhaps the way "all non-oil liquids" lets you make water, maybe no one has figured out (or they've forgotten) how to Soulcast forms of energy other than fire; perhaps lightning, or sound, or even Stormlight is something you could, in theory, soulcast with a ruby. Once we've seen people soulcast a lot more, I think we the readers will have an easier time distinguishing the "rules" from what's actually possible. WHERE IS THIS QUOTE?!?! This is something I want very much to be true. If you can find this WoB I will kiss you on the mouth.

Kay. Than this dragon prolly wasn't in that part of Dragonsteel.

I think Intents are simply non-absolute. I'm not going to argue specific degrees of how an Intent affects you, because it's rampant speculation. What I am going to argue is that people on the fora (maybe I'm reading it wrong) seem to say a lot that "Intent is the thing that matters, and the only thing that matters," and we know that's not true. Shards all have rules. They have universal rules, and they have individual rules (by which I mean, some rules affect all Shards, and some only affect specific Shards). We know they have to Invest in a planet; we know that's a big deal. We know it grants them some capabilities and takes away others. We know that neither Preservation nor Ruin could create, yet for some reason together they could. Why? What part of their "Intents" to preserve and to ruin magically made them able to create? We know most of them have the ability to see the future, and that many of them do it to different degrees. Honor isn't "Iceman" whose powers all have to do with ice. Honor is a Shard, and that alone is a big deal. There are a ton of powers, restrictions, and rules that come with simply being a Shard. One aspect, an important one, perhaps the most important one, is that he views the world through a lens of Honor. It is his baseline, and it's what he thinks of everything in terms of. That doesn't mean we have to assume he has no powers that can't be traced directly back to some basic concept of Honor; it doesn't mean that he pauses before literally every action to think "Wait, could I be more honorable right at this very moment?". Obviously, he has what can only be called an obsessive compulsion to be honorable. But look at the show Monk. The man's OCD affected every action he took, but he was still a human, and he was still a detective. He still had to eat, breath, sleep, walk from place to place, because there are rules about being human that don't go away just because you're now obsessed. He still had skills and drives that were shaded by his compulsions, but not created by them, nor for their express purpose. Honor still felt love. I'm sure he always acted honorably to Cultivation, and I'm sure his romantic gestures were especially noble because that's who he is. But I bet you anything when he looked into her eyes, even after thousands of years, honor was still the second thing he thought about. All I'm saying is, I see people on these fora take it for granted that any question we have about any Shard can, will, and must be answered with "Well, according to his Intent..." and I disagree. I think we've seen evidence that this isn't true.

In the actual game, people aren't allowed to discuss things during night-time. Think of it this way. The Spiked are listening. If they know people will keep talking, it behooves them to hold off on their actions, letting all the normal people talk longer and giving them more to work with. In other words, by discussing the game, you might be slowing down the game. I think the roleplay is awesome and should absolutely continue, but I for one solemnly vow not to discuss past or future votes, or my suspicions or anything, because I want to encourage all the nighttime people to cast their votes as quickly as possible, to move the game along. Just one man's opinion. My apologies if I sound like I'm trying to arbitrate the game.

I disagree with a few of your underlying assertions. Why would Scadrian iron have a different cognitive aspect than Nalthian iron? Also, even if true, all you've proven is that one specific instance of Investiture manifests in the spirtual, rather than cognitive or physical, realms. In your own post, you point out that Mist is Investiture that manifests physically. All you're really proving is that different forms of Investiture can manifest different ways. You're saying that it's impossible because you shouldn't be able to change how much Investiture is in something. But soulcasting isn't free; it costs you stormlight, aka Investiture. Presumably, then, if you tried to make something Invested, it would simply "cost" more stormlight in order to do so.

You're absolutely right. His basic point, that the culture of Terris was very near the locations of concentrated Ruin and Preservation, is entirely invalid because Ruin was seven feet to the left.

Well, he says that the Shattered Plains parts made it into Way of Kings. Does anyone remember any dragons? Any at all?

I see in this thread a lot of what I see all on these fora, which is the idea that Shards can only take actions that specifically align with their Intents. There are rules, there are things they can do and things they cannot. But all Shards can see into the future a ways, though to differing degrees. I'm not sure I agree with the base assumption that Honor must, in literally every action, specifically act "Honory". I agree with this sentiment. One of the epigraphs points it out specifically in Hero of Ages. It says the minds of Ruin and Preservation, much like the powers of same, could not touch without destroying each other. If Ruin tried to stretch his consciousness past Preservation's "prison", it wouldn't have been like hitting iron bars, it would have felt like hitting an electrified fence. Presumably, two Shards that are less-than-diametrically opposed would not have this problem: Odium, for example, could have survived touching Honor's power/mind long enough to force open a path without having to actually die in doing so.

Your theories are interesting, and warrant further thought.

All he said was that the Well "contained" part of Ruin, which it did, much as this glass sitting next to me contains water, even though the water isn't part of the glass. His statement was correct. Regardless, within the Terris mountains, no more than a week's journey from the Well (and not quick travel; treacherous mountainous travel. Can any mountaineers out there guess how many miles per day people with technology roughly analogous to Earth between 1000 and 14000 could travel in such circumstances?) was Ruin's own Shardpool.

?? No. Why do you believe Adonalsium shattered within the past two thousand years?

Meg: You understand me correctly, though I'm frankly less convinced the quote means exactly what you say it means. I find it to be a slightly confusing sentence, though you're right. I still think, even if it's just a semantic term, that there's something inherently different about the Innate Investiture that everyone possesses which interacts with steelpushes and shardblades, and the patterns on your spiritweb that allow you to use formal methods of Investiture, i.e. "shardic magic". I was actually referring to Vin's father, a non-allomancer who nevertheless had a Mistborn daughter with a skaa woman. The fact that Straff, even being an allomancer, was able to have a Mistborn son with a skaa is a second example supporting my thesis. You get your spiritual DNA from much more than your parents; Mr. Sanderson has described it as a 4-dimensional punnet hypercube. Regardless, if that were the case, wouldn't Mistings and Mistborn still be as powerful as they were back in the day? Literally every human on Scadrial has Innate Investiture, of approximately similar amounts, so there's no way this would have ever been diluted; there's no one to mate with who doesn't have innate investiture. How, then, have Mistborn and Mistings grown weaker? If that's the theory to which you refer... I don't agree with it. I find your support to be speculative or interpreted in nature. I don't really feel like looking up evidence opposing it, however, so I plan to wait and see what happens. If you're right, please feel free to tell me that you told me so.

The black smoke was of Ruin, and it was physically located at the Well.

Nope, all I've got to go on his his useless, useless body, and all the footprints and particulates and weapons and blood splatters and lividity and fingerprints. Utterly, utterly worthless to me at our level of technology and scientific reasoning. I only know how Gray died because I was holding the basket.

"Cause of death: Edgar beheaded him. Hey, forensic criminology is easy!"

It needs a better name than that. I don't think that the quote means there has to be a fourth art; I think the fact that there's ostensibly a fourth one means there is a fourth one. Aluminum cannot be Pushed or Pulled, it blocks emotional allomancy, and was stated to have an unknown effect on Thugs. This all happens without someone burning it, touching it, or having it shoved through them, so it's not allomancy, feruchemy, or hemalurgy. It's a fourth art. I was using the quote in a roundabout way, which I should have been more clear on, and I apologize. I have my own theories on how the Southern Scadrians use the metallic arts mechanically, and one of the flaws in my theory is that Mr. Sanderson has specifically used the term "the metallic arts" when I so far believe there's no need to use feruchemy or hemalurgy any differently down south; why then is allomancy alone referred to as "arts"? If there's a fourth art, one that's inherently mechanical, it might resolve the flaw in my theory. I'm sorry I confused you.

Feruchemists are like that. Ceteris parabis, one Feruchemist can take down one Mistborn, no question, the only thing is, they can't just drink a vial and be back at full strength. A Mistborn could take down fifty human assassins over the course of two weeks; if a Feruchemist tried that, by twentieth he'd be running low on most of his battle metals, with no break to restore them.

I'm just jotting this down so I don't have to keep trying to do the math in my head each time... 36 hours from now in EDT is 1am on Thursday.

I'm not sure I know what you are replying to here. Also... I suppose technically just using metal for innate properties is, in fact, a "fourth art," though I personally would never have thought of it that way. Perhaps this is why Mr. Sanderson spoke of "a mechanical way to access the Metallic Arts". He wasn't talking about any of the three we already know, he just didn't want to spoil the existence of a fourth. Four is also a number more related to 16 than three is. Anyone want to speculate what this fourth art is called?

The "imprison the mind," it's possible that he didn't think of it. From the annotations, Leras surprised Ati with that move because Ati hadn't thought it was an option. Maybe Honor just didn't think of it. For the rest, who knows? Shards have a TON of rules, and we can't necessarily guess what one group are capable of just because we've seen two in action. Perhaps there was some "law of metaphysics" that prevented such a simple solution, or maybe Odium arranged things when he arrived so that doing so would have made something even worse happen. Good questions, but we're gonna need to learn a whole lot more about Shards as a whole, and this specific occasion, before we can even speculate on the answers.

Yeah, it simply says that they could challenge him; presumably, any Shards are simply powerful enough to challenge any other Shards, simply by virtue of power alone. It's been stated that Odium's ultimate goal is to be the most powerful being in the universe, which means Shattering the fifteen other Shards. I think Mistings are certainly less powerful than Mistborn, but that's not my point. My point is, in a line "strong" enough with Allomantic power, a man who isn't even an allomancer can have a Mistborn daughter with a skaa woman. Yet Spook, a full Mistborn himself, had kids with (presumably) Beldre, an Allomancer. The fact that none of their kids or grandkids became, themselves, Mistborn, seems somewhat unlikely to me, if that's all it took. Totally not proof, maybe just a shade better than speculation. What is this theory you have? I would very much like to read it, though it seems to conflict with my own personal theory, which is that Innate Investiture on any planet is almost entirely separate from formal Systems of Investiture, though I'm on the fence with Nalthis where it's possible that Breaths are tied in with Innate Investiture.