Oudeis

Eh. Rashek could have known what it stole; recall that from Marsh's POV, at one point, we learn that Rashek held something back, the Inquisitors were never complete. It's possible, maybe even likely, that Ruin provided him with the information and that the knowledge was stored somewhere in the Steel Ministry, but that Rashek chose not to make his Inquisitors compounders. We do have evidence of the ars arcanum being wrong at times, but the author does seem to obey some basic rigor. She (most people believe the author is a woman) might sometimes write things which prove to be wrong, but she rarely comes to a conclusion based on assumption or speculation and puts it in a chart as fact; such speculative work tends to be reserved for notes on the powers.

It is, in fact, not. The metals revealed are electrum, malatium, and aluminum, I believe. Malatium is revealed in Vetitan city, and the other two were in Urteau and Statlin, though I can't recall if we're told which is which. Neither Luthadel nor Fadrex had metals. (EDIT: To clarify, I mean that they did not explain the secrets of metals.) I agree that Rashek would have largely surpressed knowledge, but I also suspect that the artist arcana (and maybe Nazh) are good at what they do and would likely have found a way to find it out, if it was known by anyone in the Ministry. (We know he wanted the knowledge suppressed, but he let people within the Ministry know about electrum, for example, which posed enormous risk. In other words, maybe they knew, maybe they didn't. There are plausible, even likely scenarios supporting either argument.

We don't know people didn't know of duralumin. They knew about aluminum, after all, and like Vin, could have intuited that there must be an alloy. Rashek, as a feruchemist, could have found the right alloy simply by touching it, not needing to try burning it and getting sick like Vin. Nor would he have been as restricted by her paucity of aluminum. It's possible that neither he nor anyone else ever discovered it, but I think that's unlikely.

Well, they have changed. There's information in the Well of Ascension Ars Arcanum, for example, contradicted by the Alloy of Law one. It is in-universe and therefore suspect, though I believe that is subjected to more rigor than most in-universe things we've read, and I personally consider it a level of canon above something like the in-universe Words of Radiance.

Who is 'metronome'?

If by alethi writing you simply mean the characters that translate to phonemes as we know them, yes. However everything you see written in "alethi" in the books is actually just in coded English; I don't believe an actual alethi language has been made. So if by "alethi writing" you mean "the Stormlight Archive actually translated into alethi", nope.

The people who worshipped Trell mapped the stars; they might have been able to build a stonehenge type thing and get a celestial reference point to chop up the year. Or the old standby, just go by weather and growing season. Could feruchemcial bendalloy store the effects of drugs and poisons?

About Vin and Hoid, he's said once that she was simply too observant for her own good. Not sure if he'll expand on that. Do we already know the Moon Sceptre contains a gemstone? Shai herself forged one; can she forge gems? Not Forged, but forged. He recently tweeted that he was trying not to answer "tell me something about ____" in a tweet, but he was talking specifically about personalized books, so might be worth a shot! Don't know if you know this... the 'two people who got married' are actually Sharders here on the forum; their cameo was a wedding present, I believe. Do you want the backstory in-universe?

Are there other compounders with potentially extinction-level powers? I can't see it for pewter, tin, steel, zinc, copper, bronze, bendalloy, cadmium, gold, electrum, or aluminum. We've already discussed brass; a point of enough heat on earth, even if your body is destroyed, could set off firestorms and end life on Scadrial. That leaves iron, duralumin, nicrosil, and chromium. Nicrosil and chromium, while we can speculate, the truth is we have not the first idea how they actually work. Commenting on them is pointless in the extreme at this time. Iron. I would guess not, as a factor of time? Once you die, the weight goes away. While maybe if you created an actual black hole for a moment, you could harm maybe a few miles radius around you, I don't see the effects reaching far enough to end life. Any physicists want to tell me I'm wrong? Duralumin I'm tempted to say no, but maybe? Might your connection extend to every human on the planet? Is it possible you could overload spiritwebs, doing spiritual damage to all humankind that would lead to their extinction? Still, the odds of this causing anything more than humans to go extinct, and maybe the few animals near extinction we're trying to protect/resuscitate, seems slim. If anything, other creatures would thrive, even if this were what duralumin means.

Are you talking about an "explosion" like thunder, how the sudden heating of air makes sound and something of a shockwave? I suspect there would be too many forces involved, and the kinetic energy of the air would probably kill you. I'm also gonna parrot what other people have said; we know that feruchemy gives your body a limited ability to compensate for an attribute you draw out rapidly; a lot of people have extrapolated this to, "You gain full immunity to that quality" which I think is an overreach, considering what we've seen; Sazed gets nauseous from tapping too much sight, tapping too much strength makes his muscles swell until he can't bend his elbow, Wax is slower and has difficulty walking when he's tapping a lot of weight, etc. Someone said it above; you could prolly safely raise your temperature above what you normally can by tapping brass, but at some point it will hurt you. Even if you have an infinite ability to deal with just the heat, you'll dehydrate (if not dessicate), or set your clothes on fire and be burned (burn damage =/= just heat, I believe).

I'm envisioning now a mob of simple, yet elegant with subtle distinction stick figures... everyone assuming they'll be terrible, not realizing each is an understated work of art as they dismantle dragon after ogre after lizardman...

Sourcefield: The weakness made her not-an-Epic. She was sane and lucid because she was without her power, and therefore without her madness. She hadn't faced it and become good, she was simply temporarily protected from being evil. Once her weakness was gone, she'd've gone back to being the same Sourcefield as ever. There's no reason to think, in that moment, she suddenly had a bizarre moment of realization. Meghan faced her fear when she realized she was entering a room full of her weakness, to save David, because there was something she cared about more. Sourcefield did not have that. She never made a choice to overcome her fear, to realize there was something she cared about even more. The kool-aid simply made her human for a moment; nothing more.

But that doesn't matter. No matter how perfect a memory is in a coppermind, it's still in the coppermind. That means he'd still have to sort it through all the faces he's seen in the past thousand years. Even if he sorts it to the two or three thousand faces he might potentially see on a given night, that's a ton of faces. He can't restrict it just to the people invited to a party, or the people likely to come to a party, the legends are created on the days he remembers someone he could not possibly have known would show up that day. Remember, these people are, themselves, grifters. They live by playing a party and pretending they know more than they know. They're familiar with all the tricks, all the times someone pretends to remember someone while letting the mark lead them to the right answers. They would know if the Lord Ruler were faking it, and the idea that he sorts through and compares a face to several thousand in his copperminds is ludicrous. I think compounding copper must give you the ability to recall a memory perfectly, forever, without it degrading, in your own mind.

Would spren look any different within the aura of an Awakener of the fifth heightening? Would their colors be enhanced, or not?

...no, none of this. If Breath were stored in metal, they'd be stored, and he would get no benefit. A feruchemist carrying around a full pewtermind is no stronger than a normal person; to use the strength, he must tap it, which means his muscles would swell. You're using feruchemy as an example of exactly not how feruchemy works. Roshar is not dull. There are plants everywhere, they just retreat a lot. Clothing is brightly dyed, walls are brightly painted. The idea that someone might not notice an aura because Roshar is, as a whole, bland, holds no water. Per Warbreaker, the aura makes fire burn differently. Surely you're not suggesting that fire burns differently on Roshar?

I personally find a thousand years of perfect recall to be impressive, and the things you can do when you never forget anything are interesting to me. We know Rashek could hear Ruin for a thousand years, so he must've had a hemalurgic spike somewhere.

Why? Vin had no such "cognitive expansion". I suppose he could have the Blessing of Presence...

Eh... every PoV we get of Vasher gives us clues that there's more to him than meets the eye. There's no such hint in the PoV of Teft; quite the opposite. He recalls a biologically typical and recent childhood. Vasher never "believed a lie" from his own PoV, he never thought or remembered something that would make him being a Returned impossible. If Teft's memories are accurate, he cannot be a Herald. If they're inaccurate... I suppose that's possible. Shallan has inaccurate memories, after all. I would still be surprised. The rest of the Heralds all seem to know quite well who and what they are. Which Herald do you think he is?

I just assume burning the coppermind makes the memory perfect in your brain, without degredation. You can keep it in your mind at all times and it won't fade with time. But that's just my thought. Otherwise, even copper wouldn't explain how he can remember literally everyone. He'd have a coppermind storing every person he's ever met, face matched with name, for a thousand years, and every time he has to remember someone, he has to sort through the whole thing? That seems... unlikely.

1. Please don't double-post; if you have something to add and no one else has replied, you can edit your post to include the new sentence. 2. While it's nice of you to warn of spoilers, please put them behind a spoiler cut. 3. When Tindwyl meets Sazed in the refugee camp and they go off to study, we switch to Breeze's point of view, and he had been Soothing them both.

I read it as: "This thing is true and I believe it!" "But isn't it wildly inconsistent?" silence (at this point in the quote his first reply actually is to stand there silently thinking this through) "Teft?" "Um... whatever." I don't read it as a man admitting, "Here are some things I was told, let's try to work together and figure out what of it is true and what isn't." He bluntly states a fact like it's a foregone conclusion. When it's proven to lack integrity at a casual glance, he stands there sullenly in silence for a moment, before admitting he can't reconcile it when pressed. I think you give him far too much benefit of the doubt to assume that his forthright statement, followed by an awkward pause, is a man admitting that he isn't sure. Just because he's wrong doesn't mean he's not certain he's right.

Ah. In an epigraph, the Hero of Ages mentions that Ruin needed to find Mistborn to give duralumin to his Inquisitors, so we know at least some of them died there. Others prolly died in squabbles between Kings, and Vin killed a few. There were never hundreds. Basically, I just figure any that didn't die in the wars following the Collapse didn't realize that using their powers would signal to Ruin, hey, here's power for you, and were found and spiked by the Inquisitors.

Sorry; I don't mean to be argumentative. Your basic theory is still valid! There's just so much about Desolations we don't understand, and I feel like there are a lot of assumptions on 17s about them that don't bear up under scrutiny. I think this was deliberate on his part; Mr. Sanderson wrote the Prelude in a way to give us an impression of the Desolations, so when we learn what they really are, we'll be shocked and surprised.

Teft is not knowledgable. Teft claims to know things, but is usually wrong. Teft is not "unsure" if every Radiant has all powers; he is sure, and he's wrong. Teft knows a few things, and most of what he knows turns out to be wrong. He could be a Herald in excellent disguise, deliberately saying false things so that no one would ever suspect him of being a Herald. However, we also have a PoV from him, at one point, and it proves to me fairly conclusively that he's not a Herald. If he is, he's a Herald who has lost his memory, and somehow remembers being a small child relatively recently, and having parents who believe even more false things than he does about Radiants.

No... because from the Starfalls vision, the Midnight Essence appears when they expect a Desolation. If the Final Desolation had happened, people would believe no more Desolations are coming, and wouldn't casually mention that one is on the horizon. So the Midnight Essence couldn't have come outside of a Desolation after the Final Desolation. Nor does the Radiant seem especially surprised, like Midnight Essence outside of a Desolation is especially unusual. She says, we don't know who released it, implying that they know about the Ten Deaths and that it happens often enough that the mechanism is understood. Basically I just think there's a lot of evidence challenging the basic assumption I usually see, which is, "A Desolation means Thunderclasts and Midnight Essence are sent to destroy humanity."