Oudeis

Am I the only person going crazy wondering this? What would have happened if he'd touched Steelheart's neck?

Kelek talks about how Jezrien used to be a king; I had assumed that meant in his human life before he was appointed (Invested?) as a Herald. But that's just my read, it could be taken other ways.

I think you misread his question, although perhaps I am. I think he means a Twinborn who has f-nicrosil and a-steel. Let's say he's got a charge of investiture. If he taps it feruchemically while burning steel, I think he was asking if that would make the steelpush stronger.

However, I've gotten confirmation from a meteorologist: The speed of storms on Earth is affected by winds in the upper atmosphere, meaning they do NOT travel any faster over water than over land. So, my theory is made out of nothing but holes. I still say the circle that the world is explains the Wandersail. Actually, there's something. The Wandersail left from the leeward coast of Roshar, and still got caught in a highstorm that was clearly more than the pitter-patter of rain. Granted it was a fable...

While I realize I can't safely assume density is the same, we've been given absolutely no valid reason to assume ... anything, really, about the density or volume of the planet. It feels like cheating to assume high enough density to shrink the planet, just to fit my theory, so I'm leaving it alone until I hear otherwise. Minor point: Shinovar itself is protected from the worst of the highstorms by the mountains. I think it's been said that Aimia, which is even farther leeward, DOES get hit by highstorms, though your fundamental point that storms are weaker as they travel across Roshar remains valid. About the storm gaining power over water... I mean, that's what real storms DO. They develop over water, then weaken as they cross land. In the relatively rare circumstance of a storm big enough to survive crosses a large island like Haiti/Dominican Republic, it will lose power over land, then pick up more when it gets back over water. Being so heavily Invested, highstorms could work differently, but until I see a reason to believe differently it's probably a safe baseline.

OKAY. Much more math. Available on demand, but I do not feel like typing every scrap out again unless someone actually cares. I took the volume of the earth and WoB that Roshar's gravity is .7G. Without information on relative densities, the best I could do was assume similar density, and calculated the radius at Roshar's equator. Taking Baltimore as an idea of a temperate climate, I calculated that the radius of lattitude there is about 78% of the radius at earth's equator, so I figured the radius of temperate climes on Roshar would also be 78% of the radius at Roshar's equator. Using that I got the circumference, and officially half the info I need to see if a highstorm can circumnavigate the globe, using a TON of gross assumptions (the main one being, I treated both planets as spheres rather than geoids, because I'm not that smart and the math was hard enough as it was). With the best information googling can provide me on the speed of a storm, and assuming a generous 50% increase in speed from Investiture, it would take a highstorm almost 8 days to circle the world, about a week-and-a-half on Roshar (which has five day weeks, see above link). So... a highstorm's speed over water would have to be more than double my already generous estimates for my idea to work. Until and unless I hear some good news from the various calls I have out re: storm speeds in the specific, this is probably me giving up my theory.

OKAY. Better numbers now. Math available upon command, but the radius of the earth at a temperate lattitude like Balto is 4,951km, roughly. I'm still waiting on my MUCH smarter friends to give me a good speed on storms, but for now I'm sticking with my half-again-as-fast speed of 90mph (or 145km/h). Roshar's gravity is .7 Earth, and I honestly can't BEGIN to tell you what change the radius would have to go through to get 7/10th the mass. I assume it has something to do with "to the third power" and I welcome anyone to give me more specifics. I'll be back tomorrow to see if I can do it myself, but there are many people in this forum much smarter than I, so I hope to avail myself of them.

I agree with Isomere. This place is a great forum for debating with intelligent compatriots, but too often I see people espousing their own theories on unprovable evidence, while tearing down others for not being unassailable. I don't ever want to discourage anyone from throwing out their idea just because they can't prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it's true.

While I agree with you, one huge act of 'good', especially when it required no sacrifice on his part (and may have been a benefit to him, easing his transition into death) does not invalidate the evil he did in life.

You forgot to mention the littlest Inquisitor, who never fit in because he had an extra iron spike directly through his nasal cavity, until one Rulersmas when the Deepness was so thick, no one could see through it! The Lord Santa, though, knew what to do. He put the Littlest Inquisitor in front of his reindeer, who used f-brass to heat his nose spike until it glowed cherry red, lighting the way! All good little Obligators were astounded to wake up the next morning and find that The Lord Santa had delivered their presents after all. It was a Rulersmas miracle!

I can't get a very good reference but this says that a fast storm on earth can travel at 60 mph. Maybe faster over water? The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles at the equator. (Again, anyone out there with a better means of checking the circumference at a temperate clime like Roshar, please feel free. Actually, does anyone know what it says about axial tilt that the seasons shuffle like a shell game?) So it would take a normal thunderstorm on earth about 415 hours to circle the equator, or 17 days. I'm going to assume that a Stormlight-charged highstorm can travel at 90mph, half-again as fast as an Earth thunderstorm. I'm also going to peg the typical frequency of a highstorm at 5 days, and see how small the circumference of the planet would have to be at tropical Roshar for the highstorm to make it around. I get 10,800 miles. (Sidebar, in my attempt to figure out the circumference of Earth at specific lattitudes, I just broke maps.google labs. Sorry.) So... for my theory to work, it would help if I could get supporting evidence that highstorms ARE faster (at least over water) than Earth storms in Ohio. If not, then with the already-generous half-again estimate on speed, in five days a highstorm could make it around a circle whose radius is 1720 miles, approximately, so significantly less than half Earth's radius at the circumference. I know Roshar has lower gravity than Earth, so it's not wildly implausible to suggest that it might be smaller, but that seems much. There are still ways to save my theory: meteorilogical data that storms move faster over water would be one, or some trigonometry (which I will do tomorrow, when I haven't just taken a sleeping pill) which might give me better numbers for earth's radius at a temperate clime, or an alternate path for the highstorms (they might swing off course and take a short cut past a pole). Or, the simplest, Crys's theory that there are two or three storms chasing each other around the ball. LIES. I'm doing the math now. It'll be fun to wake up tomorrow and see how many mistakes I made. I'm using Baltimore as an example of a city with moderate temperate climes. I would be tickled to have someone explain to me that there's a better lattitude to pick to be more Roshar-like. According to this, Balto is 2703 miles (4350km) away from the equator. The earth's meridionial circumference is 40,007.86km, so I'm going to imagine a half-circle (I realize the Earth is SIGNIFICANTLY off from perfectly round, but unless you can do it better, don't bother pointint out how wrong I am) that is 20,003.93km long, with two points, each 4350km from an end. According to my calculations, each point is about 28% of the distance along the whole arc. Since the whole arc has 180 degrees, that means it is 50.4 degrees. So the angle between my two points is 180 - 50.4 - 50.4, or 79.2 degrees. So. We've got an isosceles triangle, the apex angle, and the length of the similar sides (I'm using earth radius, which I know will be too long, but again, please tell me how to find a better measurement from Balto to the spinning molten core of the Earth). If I remember my trig formulae correctly, the final side of the triangle (the line which connects Balto from its theoretical lattitudinal twin) should be Earth's radius * sin(theta/2). And the answer is... about 4061km, which should be the diameter. The radius, half that, would be 2030.5km. Which is... something like a third the Earth's mean radius. That makes NO sense. There's a reason I don't do math for a living. Forget everything I've typed, I'm off to bed.

So here's my theory. There's only one Highstorm. It travels from east to west. It comes from over the sea, and disappears over the sea. No one ever sees it END. In the story Wit told Kaladin, he spoke of the Wandersail, a ship that rode a highstorm out to a foreign land (which somehow spoke english but whatever). Then they rode a second highstorm back. I think we've got ourselves a "christopher columbus" moment here. Without being able to travel to sea, I don't think people really get the idea that their world is a globe. Go far enough west, and you return from the east. (Though they do seem scientifically advanced in ways that surprise me sometimes, so maybe they've figured it out.) I think the storm just keeps circling the planet. There is no Origin. It picks up energy over water, the way storms do on earth, then gets weaker as it goes over land. Then it hits water again, lather/rinse/repeat. Seasonal wind/current changes could account for the fact that they come on a rough schedule, but not "every three days". Some trick of Investiture is why it never really dies. It'd be a Sanderson-esque trick if it turns out the True Desolation is the END of the highstorm. No more stormlight, which I think is more than just light for humans and power for shardplate. Greatshells all contain gemhearts, and they strive to pupate when the highstorm is near. I think stormlight DOES something for the planet, and Odium's (or the Voidbringers's) plan to destroy Roshar is to remove it. The highstorms, which everyone fears but unthinkingly counts on, ends up being a gift from good Shards (maybe Cultivation? This could be her watering her garden), and provides an apocalypse scenario the good guys can't just kill people to stop.

Amen to "only Brandon knows". I had not thought about rock porous enough that the floor IS the drainage. Interesting point.

They hunted the greatshells of Aimia to extinction, yes? Could there be a clue in what happened there?

Do we know that Hoid only took one?

I disagree. Thousands could not die per week. The largest battle there's ever been had 10,000 Parshendi. The average battle would have to be, at best, on one of the 10 or so plateaus that's even half as big as the Tower. Someone with real-life military knowledge help me here with the specific numbers, but the number of troops you lose before you retreat is shockingly low. Like 10%. And it was expressly said that the Parshendi are known to disengage long before you'd normally expect. It was months between fights on the Tower. The average normal battle would be, at best, half that size, so 10,000 troops total rather than 10,000 per side (I think even that is generous). If the Parshendi stayed until they lost 10% of their troops, that would still be less than a thousand (Parshendi have 5,000, lose 10% = 500 lost, Alethi bring 5,000, lose <10%, means <500 lost, combined lost <1,000). And that's in the largest conceivable non-Tower battle. I've done the math and I think 250,000 is generous but... actually surpringly close to my own number, so I wonder how we came so close on such differeing premises. But that's spread across six years, and across ten Alethi camps. There cannot possibly any bodies that would survive more than three or four highstorms in the chasms without being sent out wherever the water drains, so it's not like there's an endless supply of bodies. At my calculations, it's about 800 bodies per week. If you assume a generous four weeks before a body is claimed by the storms, that's 3200. If every single body made it all the way to the Alethi side every time, which is an unreasonable assumption, you'd have that many. If you assume Sadeas has a bigger chunk of the chasms than any other highprince, the way he's got a bigger chunk of the permanent bridges and a bigger chunk of just about everything else, let's give him a 20% haul on dead bodies, twice what you'd expect if everyone shared them equally. That's 640 bodies at any given time. One pile of 30 bodies is something like 5%. I think my original point was this. To find a pile of 30 bodies and have it be relatively unremarkable, that must assume that EVERY body from the plains ends up at the Alethi edge. If the water were draining Stormward, it would drag many, many of the bodies with it. Where does the water go? Why aren't there pools in the dips of the chasms?

Wait, me? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give that impression. I think it's a given that (at least in general terms) the tops of all the plateaus are fairly level. Maybe there are broad trends but with few exeptions, if you're standing on a plateau then all the ones surrounding you will be of a (VERY APPROXIMATE) level. I think what I failed to properly convey was this: The original buildings might not have been the same level, but if they were deliberately hidden in Soulcast stone, then the stone is all level. Think of an ice-cube tray. Put small objects in each one. A coin, a marble, a bottlecap. Each thing comes to a varying height. But fill them all with water and freeze it, and even though the things inside are of different heights, the tops of the ice cubes are all level. I realize I did not explain my position well last time. I'll strive to be more clear moving forward. Yes, according to the premise of chasm duty, the force of a highstorm drains everything to the west, which is why so many bodies end up there, despite the fact that only small armies can be fielded at once, and that the Parshendi tactics mean that skirmishes have relatively few losses. But the west IS where the Alethi are. All along it. If there were a place for the water to drain, it'd be an obvious possible escape route that Kaladin would have suggested. If the water all poured there but then drained east, it would pull more bodies with it. I also say that Kaladin would not have mentioned so often during chasm duty "oh sometimes the plateaus are a hundred feet in the air" if that was only revelant if they were to inexplicably travel several miles away from their actual positions. The Tower is hours away, it would be like him mentioning "the weather is much nicer in Kharbranth" as though that were relevant. I can't see why he'd bring it up if it weren't for the fact that, in his immediate area, some plateaus were significantly farther up than others, and at no point does he say "as you travel Stormward" or "deeper into the plains". Since we all agree that the tops are level, then the chasms must be changing their depths. I realize the book never expressly says "the ground slopes up and down through the chasms" but it also never expressly says "the chasms all have a gentle, even downslope Stormward" so my argument is at least as valid as yours. There should be pools of water. I realize they've never been mentioned, which I find weird, and could be used to support the theory that "well then it must all slope Stormward" but if that were the case, finding a body would be a rare event, not so astoundingly common that the bridgemen ignore a small pile of corpses and won't bother with anything less than a morgue's-worth, as they are shown to do.

On Earth, I'd agree with you. On Roshar? There's a place were people live in enormous hollow stalactites. There are places where they live in huge claw marks in the ground. Maybe there's a reason they were all built to a certain height, and we just don't know it. I realize that's a bit of a cop-out, but it means it's still a plausible idea. Or, to follow my soulcasting theory: maybe when they hid the town under all that stone, they decided to make all the stone level. Maybe someone decided leaving them different heights would look too much like a city, so they more-or-less leveled them all. Or maybe almost every building used to be taller than this, but four-and-a-half millenia of highstorms wore down almost everything higher than surrounding ground level.

They specify in the books that they must only touch the blood as they enter you; from then on, your body can heal around it, and as long as it's still inside your body, it works as a spike. And YES, you bleed when you get a tattoo. I assure you.

Exhibit B: The Pits don't produce atium very fast. Elend and Vin could only have used it to gain a VERY small amount of atium in the time they had, if they were willing to force people to work in insane conditions. A more compelling argument, considering where they eventually FOUND the atium cache, is that he's a villain by destroying the Pits, because this meant Vin and Elend had no reason to go there and discover what they'd eventually discover.

Cool. I know what it looks like, and I know that the people of Roshar assume that this was once a normal plain that somehow broke. I simply disagree. Where does it drain? All the water the highstorms drop goes somewhere. If this were a normal plain, then got broken, would it be likely that it'd form into something with drainage? Here's a part I'm a LITTLE unclear on. They say that some plateaus are 40 feet off the ground, some are 100. When Kaladin mentions this while his bridgecrew is on chasm duty, it seems relevant, so I feel like he isn't talking about the difference between "right at the Alethi edge" versus "at the tower". If you can put a bridge between plateaus, then I doubt they change height by sixty feet all that frequently. Doesn't this mean that the ground at the bottom of the chasms slopes up and down? If that's the case, where are the lakes? Shouldn't there be some point where it's 100' to the top of the nearest plateau, and both forward and back are uphill? In a world with highstorms, that'd form a lake. Why doesn't it? The chasms drain. I think they're the roads and the plateaus are the buildings. I don't think the Plains are one mass that shattered, I think it's a city with streets and towers. That's why everyone who looks at it thinks they can see a pattern there. It was designed, planned, and built, or at the least it was built around a formation like Kholinar's windblades.

I've said this before, but however much of an optimist Elend is, the world is literally and obviously ending. This is the rainy day you save stuff for. He's got his best academics telling him "it's about three years until there's no more food in the world." Optimist or not, he's time and again in the books done what he needs to, in order to save his people. A lump of metal isn't doing anyone any good. A loyal friend with the powers of a supermistborn might save the world. At that point in the story he might've, but he doesn't know at the time that Vin is going to get taken hostage. If he did, he would probably have been more likely to use the lerasium earlier, to prevent the occurence from coming about. There are a few other issues. "Hey Yolen! Give me my wife in exchange for this metal you've never seen before! You just kind of have to trust me that it does something awesome, there's no way to test it." Studied how? What's he got to research, apart from observing Elend himself? Also, see above re: they don't really have the luxury to take their time. It's crisis mode. They've seen it doesn't kill you, and they need more people with the power to control Koloss. Shardlet covered this pretty well. They trust him with the whole empire. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a hard, desparate decision, but they made a lot of those as the world was ending. They'd eventually risk giving him that much power, if it meant a chance to save the world. Vin's bloodline seems to be one of the most pure aside from Rashek and Elend, so I don't think that having taken the Lerasium would increase her powers THAT much. I feel that they would have come to the same conclusion so I doubt they would have given it to her. I feel like here, the thought process would be more like "we know what happens when a normal person takes lerasium. We don't know what will happen to Vin." We, the people here on this forum, have it from the man who invented and controls the metaphysics what would happen. They didn't know that, in the book. Apart from the argument that increasing her powers isn't as good as making a third mistborn, I don't think they'd've risked learning that a mistborn burning lerasium does something interesting, but not actually useful. You're leaving out the fact that, in Sazed's hands, the bead could have created an all-metal compounder in the vein of the Lord Ruler. It's true that they didn't have a complete understanding of compounding (heck, we still don't), but they did work out the basic principle in the epilogue of book 1. If Marsh could figure out how to do it (he achieves immortality through atium compounding), I would bet Sazed could. EDIT: Never mind -- you were leaving that out. Miyabi addressed it. All the same, I would risk a potentially corrupt dictator to stave off the apocalypse. All I'm gonna mention is, in my first initial post, I did point out that Sazed would be a full Compounder. I agree with you. I think that Vin and Elend would trust Sazed, but even if they didn't, they'd prefer to give the world to a tyrant than watching it die. EDIT: Um... in my attempts to multi-quote, my quotes seem to have broken. Trying to fix. Not... working as well as I'd like. My apologies to everyone I'm quoting, I don't mean to give any offense or fail to give you your due.

I can see where you're going with this, but due to the fact that the world was literally ending, I feel like even Elend would have accepted that there wasn't a lot of point to "safekeeping".

It's widely assumed that Hoid went to the Well before Vin made it, and stole one of two beads of lerasium, leaving the other, which Vin gave to Elend blah blah blah. What if he hadn't? How would the events of the third book have been different if Vin gave one bead to Elend, they all realized what it could do, and they had one more bead left, to use as they saw fit? Would it have been given to Vin? Make their most powerful weapon even more powerful? I feel she wouldn't have wanted it. Her own powers at that point were peculiar enough to herself that she might not have wanted to mess with them, and she'd've made the case that two supermistborns and a well-trained mistborn was better than one supermistborn and one well-trained supermistborn. Would it have gone to Demoux? He was young, strong, fit, a decent fighter. They didn't at the time know he was an unsnapped Seer. In their eyes it would have been elevating one of their allomantically weak but trusted teammates into a very powerful tool for Elend's empire. Or Sazed? As a full Keeper, he would have become a full Compounder, which EVERYONE knows is a freakishly powerful thing. And there's no one who doesn't trust him. He himself would prefer not to have it, but I feel like enough people would have convinced him it was a good enough idea and he'd've done it. Tangent I just thought of... can a Kandra burn lerasium? We know they can't mimick a Soother and actually soothe, but do they have the ability every human has to burn lerasium?

I remember that part, and I'll read it again, but I don't recall them saying that the Greatshells there were LARGER than on the plains, just that they existed, like they exist in Marabethia (Chapter 40, Eyes of Red and Blue). Sigzil says they have Greatshells, "and of course they have gemhearts", so presumably there are other places in the world where large, carapaced beings grow gemhearts. I realize this makes for a bit of a weakness in my theory, but I still say that even if Greatshells do grow Gemhearts elsewhere in Roshar, there's something special about the ones in the Plains. There's no reference to Greatshells pupating anywhere but on the Plains. And there's talk of the specific spren that hover around dead chasmfiends, which aren't reference anywhere else. EDIT cuz I caught a mistake I made: Sorry, I misread your original post, Shardlet. I thought you said it was during Rysn's interlude in TWoK, because I recall something about there once being Greatshells on the Western Coast, in Aimia or something, but I just re-read and saw you were talking about WoR. So, yes, you have information I don't. It looks like I could be wrong. Oh well, it was just a theory.