Oudeis

I will find this in the annotations, but I am certain that I read that the Aons do, indeed, exist (with their meaning) independent of the Aonic language. In other words, their language operates in reverse. They did not come up with a drawing that they thought went well with the idea of "light"; before the Arelish people had a language, the symbol existed, like a physical law of the universe, waiting to be discovered. It was absolutely not a magic system being born from a language; the language was born from the magic system. And, he's said, there are Aons that no one has yet discovered.

Just re-read the vision at Feverstone Keep, the day of Recreance. Dalinar watches scores if not hundreds of men pick up shardblades for the first time. Unfortunately, he says nothing about their eye color when he does so. It just occurred to me to wonder about the eye colors of the men from the start of the vision until they get the blades... I'll re-read it later and see if I can nail down whether-or-not their eyes were dark to begin with.

I'm searching twitter... I don't see it...

Or, this being a vision granted by Honor, maybe it's just a painful memory, and the despair Dalinar feels is, in fact, Tanavast's own emotion transferred via the vision.

That was incredibly accurate, informative, and succinct, Sats. Thank you! I'm going to throw in one last thing, however. This being a story, and not real life, I think I weight the option slightly in favor of an Endowment-endowed vision. As I've said, his eventual obsession with his past informs a lot of the actions that lead to the fulfillment of his destiny, and the memory of this woman is a large driving force for that. Purely logically, and in real life, postfactum memory adjustment is far more likely. This being a tale, I'm not sure but your second option has more weight.

I'll try explaining it again, but it's nothing I haven't said before, and I can't think of a different way of explaining it. You're comparing apples and oranges. In your analogy, the child is able to tell the difference between "red" and "white". He can see the shapes; they don't have meaning to him, but he can still see them. I have about a million other problems with your theory but this is the one we'll focus on. In your version, the information is there in his memory, it simply needs to be interpreted. Let's say I see a word written in Russian. I take time and effort to memorize it, and draw it out later for a friend of mine who actually knows the cyrrilic alphabet. He can then look at what I've written, and tell me retroactively what it means. That's a plausible scenario, but it's not applicable to this situation. Your explanation requires that people can get the information in the first place, and store it, perfectly, in their minds. Neither of those two things are true, at least on Earth. The human eye is simply no more capable of seeing exactly how many shades a red is darker than "true red", any more than our eyes are natively capable of seeing individual blood cells. It's simply not something we can do, and it's only possible on Nalthis with the magical assistance of the Third Heightening. Further, even if we could, it's brought up a million times in Mistborn that human memories degrade the instant they form. Without a method of storing a memory, perfectly preserving it, there's no way that five years later, even if his eyes took in the information but couldn't process it, he would have remembered the image well enough to deduce the literal shade. Let me rephrase your theory in a different context. If your theory holds true, then imagine a skaa on Scadrial. One day he's walking through the mists, unable to see more than ten feet in any direction. A block away, a woman crosses the street. He's looking right there, but the mist is in the way, and he can't see her, has no idea she's even there. Two years later, he Snaps and turns into a Tineye. He gets some tin, and burns it. Would he now look back over his memory, retroactively see through the mist, and see the woman? That's what's happening here. The Third Heightening adjusts your sight and gives you the ability to distinguish differences you couldn't before, just like tin lets you see through mists, which you couldn't before. The only way your theory works is if people on Nalthis operate fundamentally differently than people on Earth. Maybe that one single Breath does, in fact, store data without giving it to your mind to process. There's no evidence to support that, it wouldn't make any sense, and like I said, it'd be magical hand-waving, but it's technically possible. The far simpler and far more likely option; Lightsong doesn't remember being a human, so literally can't imagine what it's like to see his niece's face and NOT know the exact shade of her lips (ew ew ew). This is a very human trait that is documented to happen on Earth literally any time anyone ever accesses a memory; he just feels he should know something, so his brain makes up something plausible enough for him to believe. This is why the Keepers have copperminds. EDIT: To re-iterate my credentials, video editing is literally the trained job I've been doing for ten years. I know what I'm talking about when I tell you how visual information is stored, processed, and what the options are to enhance it after the fact. If information is taken with a device like a poor camera or a human eyeball, that's it. You've hit the upper limit of how accurate the picture will ever be. You can fake it, you can pick an ideal and "enhance" the picture towards that, but there's no way to know what color it was SUPPOSED to be. It just isn't how vision works. There's no information encoded in the picture that just needs to be interpreted, derived, unlocked, or inferred, what you see is all you get. TV shows like Bones or Numb3rs will take a blurry picture, run it through "made-up hand-waving computer program" during the second act and come out with a perfectly rendered picture of the killer's face; that's literally impossible with the way visual information is stored, either in the human brain or on a computer.

Womp womp woooooomp...

Meh, RJ never did anything but poach. Every name, concept, and idea he came up with was stolen from somewhere else. Ogiers, Paendragon, even the yin-yang. The guy couldn't even steal properly; in the actual yin-yang, the white half represents male energy and the dark half represents female energy. I'm not surprised that some of his ideas came from Jewish history; every idea in that series was taken from somewhere.

I've heard it speculated that the "Final Metal" is chromium (and its alloy, nicrosil) which never showed up, nor was mentioned, in Alloy of Law. Just a fan theory, I believe, with no real basis. I would suspect not, for the same reason that they don't have Allomantic properties. 16 is a big number to all three Arts, and there's not been a case yet of a metal having properties for one Art but not all three. (Unknown properties, sure, but known-to-not-exist, no)

I still don't see how his brain can store information it was never given, but like I said, "it's magic" so it doesn't have to make any actual sense.

That's actually a lot closer to my second theory than to Kurk's....

Curse you, wikipedia... My point remains that there are metals that are mixes of base metals.

A lot of the alloys are "alloys where you combine two base metals". Duralumin is aluminum and copper. Brass is zinc and copper. Pewter is tin and copper. Bronze is copper and tin. Steel is iron with carbon, which isn't a metal, and electrum is gold with silver, which isn't allomantically active on its own and, you guessed it, copper. Nicrosil is chromium with nickel. Bendalloy is bismuth, cadmium, tin, and lead; it's own base metal, another base metal, and two non-allomantically active metals.

I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just remaining skeptical until we see it happen or get some evidence that's not "the smartest two kids in a backwater town out in the sticks who have never seen a Shardblade before in their lives". I'm not saying I think for sure it isn't the case, all I'm saying is, a lot of people on the fora talk as though it's a foregone conclusion that we've seen explicitly proven, and it isn't. There's evidence, but nothing even close to proof.

Why didn't Ruin directly stab anyone? Beyond my guess that he didn't have access to his shadow of self without knowing where the atium was, there's the fact that everything was going according to plan. Vin was on her way to the Well, convinced that she had to release the power, which is exactly what Ruin wanted. When Sazed, who might have stopped her, tried to stop her, Marsh showed up to stop him. Why send Marsh and not directly manifest? I dunno. In any event, what Ruin did worked, so that's probably why he didn't do something different. Someone asked, obviously in a different thread cuz I can't find it, what happened to the knife. If the Mist Spirit in Classic Scadrial stabbed Fedik, why did no one find the knife? To which I give you this answer. Twice in Well of Ascension, Preservation's shadow of self manifests physically as a metal. Once, he's standing in a tent over Elend, she strikes at him, and feels resistance, as though someone had blocked her dagger with a weapon. The second time, he actually does stab Elend, not with any object, but just his own substance. So, that's clearly an ability "shadows of self" can do.

It's possible that the symbols aren't related to any metal at all; these symbols represent the metals but unless I'm mistaken, they're also used for sounds (letters) and numbers. It's possible they needed more sounds, didn't have any more metals to correlate, so they're just symbols without an associated metal.

AHA. I finally found it. And... yes, it's far less conclusive than I had recalled. It's Kal telling Laral "My dad said this" and it's less the slam-dunk than I remember. In context, it's unclear if "Father says that doesn't happen very often" refers to a dark-eyes winning a Shardblade, or the Shardblade turning dark eyes light. Still, until we actually see it happen, I'm going to remain skeptical that it's simply "what happens".

How is that "working within the limitation of the system"? It's breaking the system by giving one person a special exception that works simply because plot needs it to. Are you assuming then that Dominion was a "positive" Intent shard?

At the end of Chapter 3 of Warbreaker, Lightsong remembers his niece's face in Heightened detail, being able to name exactly how many shades off true her lips were Is this: a. either Returned or anyone at the 3rd Heightening can recall things from the past filtered through their new senses, b. Is this a vision directly from Endowment, hence why he's seeing it perfectly? c. Simply a faulty memory; he remembers her, but can only remember being able to see things with the clarity of the fifth Heightening, so, as memory actually does in real life, his brain invents details that he thinks he should be able to recall?

I agree with the underlying principle that you're referring. Where I disagree is with the basic underlying idea that it can apply to specifically this information. Charlie, on Numb3rs, was able to do a fairly basic (although I'm not sure technically possible, see below with MathEpic) calculation to get information that was in the original picture, it simply hadn't been deduced yet. There is no way that, with nothing to work on but the picture, Charlie could ever have told you if the man taking the picture were currently hungry or exactly how long it had been since his last haircut. In the specific case of the memory of his niece's lips (ew) we've got a few things working against it. Firstly, it's not a picture, it's a memory, and memories are inexact, though that's a minor point. The bigger one is, take my example of a picture. If a picture is taken with a still camera and the picture it out of focus, no amount of upgrades to the camera or focusing after the fact will let you focus the picture, and there's no computer program that can make a blurry picture accurately focused (there are ones that will "clean up" a picture, but they're based on heuristics and best-guesses and, in the main, are more concerned with making a picture "look better" than "be more accurate"). The information on the shade of her lips is data like that. His mind can recall that they were red, but since it didn't have the capacity to distinguish between shades that closely at the time, it can't store that data to be narrowed down later. If it could, he would have known about it at the time. It would be like taking a photograph in black and white, and adding color later. You can infer, you can make best-guesses as to what the colors were, you can pick colors that look natural and add them on purpose, but there's no information inherent in the picture itself that will give you anything as exact as "three shades off the seventh harmonic". EDIT: for a typo, and another thought. We don't know that Lightsong was right. Maybe he was just remembering it as best he could, and made up a more specific shade for her lips (again, ew) to be. It's fairly consistent with how memory actually works. Here's to someone who understands that sometimes you have to turn your brain off if you want to enjoy a show.

As you re-read, if you happen across the time when Lirin tells Kaladin about Shardblades and whether or not they turn you into a Lighteyes, please let me know which chapter that is. I'm having the devil's own time finding the quote.

Thank you! Those were fascinating sources of information! If you want to read my theory that copper and bronze push/pull on Innate Investiture, please feel free! I've wondered about the bendalloy bubbles myself; they say frequently that Bendalloy burners have to be inside their own bubbles, but not that they cannot shape them. They might even be able to size them; Marasi mentions that she can make a bubble the size of a small room, not that it's what she does by default, though the semantics there are weak. I'd suspect it would be incredibly difficult and not intuitive to shape the time bubble. I'm sure I've read somewhere that a Smoked Seeker cannot Seek, period. Being in a cloud completely deadens whatever you sense is, period. Interesting question about Sel... remember, a lot of Aons are constellations.

My impression, from the annotation and from Lightsong's eventual perspective, is that Calmseer didn't remember anything until that moment, then when her daughter stood before her, the recollection all came back, she remembered the voice telling her, "Your daughter will need your help one last time; will you go back and save her?" and she recognized her own daughter just before giving up her life to save her. Now, if you want my whole thoughts on "how does Returned Destiny work, is Lightsong's experience universal," please check out this. Interesting. So when Vivenna gets all of her Breath, can she call up a visual memory of Fafen and see her in perfect tones? If so, it works NOTHING like how visual images work on Earth. Every week on a forensic criminology show Bones, they show the scientists "enhance a picture" and get more information out of it than was there in the actual picture; in reality, that's impossible, unless you literally time-travel back to the past and take the picture with a better camera. I could be wrong, but I've been video-editing for ten years now, and most "picture enhancement" is, "this is what I think it should look like, so I'll make it look like that," rather than actually making the picture a more accurate representation of what it is; so, for example, I could take a picture of this girl's face, decide I want the lips to be "three shades shy of the seventh harmonic," and make them be that, but there's no way I could take the picture and tell you what shade her lips actually WERE in real life. Well... actually there is exactly one trick that I know of which will truly make a picture more accurate. It's called white balancing, it means the picture has to be either very luckily framed or deliberately shot in a way that makes it possible after the fact (which isn't always possible), and it might have been able to manage something like this... but only if Lightsong's original memory were so precise, all the colors were distinct to such a level, simply skewed off true. In other words, if he was given a sample of "the seventh harmonic" on a swatch, and held it to her lips, he'd've had to be able to tell, "Yup, that's exactly three shades off, all right," which I don't think he could have done. It's possible Returned (or even just Heightened) memory works that way; it is, after all, magic, and doesn't have to make sense. For something so innocuous, so unlikely to tip the balance of power to or away from anyone in any sort of dramatic conflict, I'm willing to accept that Heightened memories are so gifted. It's possibly more likely, however, that Lightsong received an accurate retrocognitive vision of his niece. After all, we have it confirmed that Endowment grants him accurate premonitions at times, so presumably showing him something that happened in the past would be no more difficult. (For that matter, since his niece is still alive, they could still be premonitions, even if Endowment is somehow restricted from granting past visions). As for the "why"... Lightsong's obsession with his own past informs a LOT of the decisions he makes in pursuit of his Destiny, and this mysterious woman is a large part of his fascination. EDIT: One final thought. Kurk is right, this might be Heightened Memory, not Returned Memory. We have only one example of it, from a man who is both Returned and Heightened, so we have no way to know which was responsible for the specific phenomenon. The best argument against it is specious; Vivenna, the other Heightened primary viewpoint character, never mentions it, which means either she doesn't have the same trait, she has it and doesn't realize, or she realizes and simply never mentions it.

Until presented with facts to the contrary, I choose to believe it, anyway.

Does Awakening something rigid, like stone, grant it the fluidity to move when you Command it, the way Awakening a rope grants it the rigidity of strength to move/grab/strangle/fetch cups of water/fling boulders? Can you Awaken water? Could you Command it to Freeze? Can you Awaken fire? Can you Command a log to Burn?