Oudeis

Yeah? Kinda exactly? Those descriptions are why I'd expect the Blessing of Stability to keep you from insanity (I mean, it's even CALLED the blessing of stability) and why I wouldn't see the Blessing of Presence staving it off. John Nash. Alan Turing. "That Guy" from Stormlight Archives. People who have focus. People who have clarity of thought. People for whom that was no defense against insanity. Elantris If there were no Blessing of Stability, I would assume that the Blessing of Presence also extended to emotional control. But as you say, Stability lets you be aware of your own emotions and what is affecting them. That is exactly what we see fight off insanity in other books. Stormlight Archive I just don't get it. I don't see how the description of the Blessing of Presence could keep someone sane through trauma. Admittedly, we know little about it and our understanding could be flawed, but if it does include the emotional control you'd require to stay sane, then what exactly does the Blessing of Stability do?

TenSoon stays sane throughout his imprisonment due to his Blessing of Presence. How does that make sense? Surely it would be the Blessing of Stability that should protect him. Trauma like imprisonment doesn't drive people insane because they're too stupid, it's because of emitional problems, right?

Hrm. True, simply being born there might not be enough. But, it might be. Especially in a land where the Investiture is an equal mix of Devotion and Dominion, I could see possession being nine-tenths of arcana. Hrm. What if you took a Selish ovum and used it to grow the Scadrian nucleus? Even without Selish DNA, would that be enough?

If a metalborn dies of, let's say poisoning, is there a window of opportunity to steal his metallic traits? Seconds, minutes, hours? Does it have any connection to how long he can be dead before Regrowth could bring him back?

...Using a bow with a sight. Also, he hit the fifth ring, not a bullseye. I can't find anything on the attempt saying how many inches off center he was, however the standard target for a 90m outdoor shot is 12.2cm/ring. If they used this, he missed his bullseye by more than 20 inches. As has been pointed out, a Shardarrow would have to be very, very accurate to have a better than average chance of doing more damage than a normal arrow. While I'm not totally willing to concede that a Shardarrow could change its own course, if it can, so can a Sharderang. ...Have you read Words of Radiance? You don't see the Lashings as something Kaladin uses on the battlefied? Sure, there's one specific example of a time he fought without Lashings or his Shardblade, but that was for one book out of a total of ten. Moving forward from this point, he'll have access to all the rest of those things. Also, keep in mind that Radiants arose to fight things like thunderclasts. I do not believe arrows will ever be as effective as many of the Surges against such beings. Now, maybe others of the Ten Deaths were best fought with ranged weaponry, in which case maybe we'll see that. After all, Mr. Sanderson already has invented the Shardbow. (Which annoyed, and did little more to, the Chasmfiend.)

I don't think your mind is your cognitive aspect. Your "mind" is a series of electrochemical impulses traveling through your brain matter, and as such are as physical as a stick on fire. I think your "cognitive aspect" is a representation of what you think about yourself and what other people think about you, which is strongly related with a huge cross-correlation, but still distinct. However I agree with you that clones would likely share neither physical, cognitive, nor spiritual aspects with each other, even if all three would have a greater degree of similarity than you might find between two random people.

...Why? Spren still need to be wielded. We've never seen a Sprenblade fling itself across the room to attack someone. Syl might be able to realize she's going off course, but what would she do about it? Also, how fast do arrows go exactly? To kill someone with a Shardarrow, you'll have to hit an absolute bull'seye... as has been stated, the majority of your body can take a shardwound the diameter of an arrow and suffer less than a would from an actual arrow. So from whatever distance, you'd better hope he's either standing perfectly still or moving at one set velocity that you can predict with perfect accuracy, or you'll miss by two-inches and not-kill him. If he's running at you and sees you fire, surely he could jump one step to the side and prolly miss the entire arrow in the time it takes the arrow to get to you (at least if you're far out at the distance between how far an arrow can fly or a boomerang can be thrown). I'm also gonna point out that your 500m figure from above was for Flight Archery, for which there is no target. I'm trying (and failing) to find what the longest bullseye someone has ever shot is, but as a baseline, the longest standard distance in target archery is only 90m. ...Unless he Lashes himself forwards and up, goes over their heads, and slashes at their unprotected backs with a Shardspear.

The question didn't say bonding spren, just spren.

The Blades are similar but not the same. In Shallan's drawing, the hilt has three spikes. In the icon, it has two.

As noted above, a Shardarrow doesn't have the profile to do very much damage. At very much range, arrows have limited accuracy (even when your opponent isn't on the far side of a wall) and there are a lot of places the arrow could pass through someone that wouldn't even do very much damage; any normal arrow wound would at least make a bleeding wound, but shardarrows won't. Also, recall that there's not zero-drag through solid things. I wonder how thick a wall a Shardarrow could make it through. Basically there's no part of this scenario that a sharderang wouldn't improve.

If it was being written by someone who knew Vorin script, and it wanted to be understood, why write in code? The explanation for why Vargo did it was, he was so smart, the new language was so much easier to write in, it didn't occur to him others couldn't read it as well. In fact, doesn't he remember exactly that? There was a place where he wrote three sentences, one atop the other, and he actually remembers looking at them and thinking that they looked perfectly distinct and easily decipherable to his expanded mind.

At the end of Words of Radiance his eyes are permanently light... Also, minor point. It was "at least a week", not four weeks.

What is this Stormlight Archive logo? There's nowhere on my book where it says Stormlight Archive and shows an actual Blade. The most I can find is one that has the stylized Windrunner Blade.

Flamespren and Rainspren aren't shown as things with gender.

Then my confusion is, per WoB, the Well isn't "full" until the end of Well of Ascension, but the mists are already starting to strengthen many months before that, all at the edges of the empire. So, the Deepness comes before the Well is full, by a very, very long margin. As to your other point... so you think the Well is sucking up the power of the mists? A viable enough theory, I suppose. I will ponder it. Do you have anything to support this model? To talk about another Well... Vin has to remove her earring to use the Well of Ascension. Yet, atium can be used allomantically. One might expect pure Ruin would be incompatible with a mechanism of Preservation. Her earring itself carried a hemalurgic charge. Yet allomantic metals don't carry charges, themselves, at all. What, if any, restrictions might be on who can use Ruin's Shardpool? Would it reject you if you had the spiritweb of an allomancer? What if you were an allomancers, but had no reserves? What if you had reserves, but weren't burning? What if you were burning metals? EDIT: So... this makes some sense, actually. Well, some. There's still the issue of the fact that the sun did effectively burn away mists, so why they'd be so strong elsewhere is odd. But basically, you're saying that for a thousand years, the Well is sucking up all the Preservation around the planet to fill itself with Millenial Power. However, in the last few years, as it starts to fill, the suction weakens. Like when the water pressure in my hose slows to a trickle when the spigot is being turned off. So what the Well needs can be gotten from nearby, so it stops drawing power from the further away places, until it's only weakening the mists right around itself... I do wonder though. By that logic, once Vin used the Well, it should have started sucking up all power before. Ruin having the spare energy to devote to the Mists and strengthen them so much they are still more powerful than they ever were even when the Well was totally full feels like a stretch to me. Also, we know the Well DID get totally full, so you'd think by that point, there would be no suction, and the Mists should have been blanketing the land 24/7.

Gravitation and allomantic iron? Or allomantic steel? Pushing is tricky sometimes when you don't have an anchor. If I get into a push contest with you, we'll both be flung back. Unless I lash myself directly at you three or four times, in which case now you're pushing against multiples of my weight, and I'm only trying to knock you over/back. Soulcasting and any allomantic power. Turn dust into the metal you need to swallow. Awakening and Adhesion? Full Lash a lot of knives to the edge of a carpet and Awaken it to slither amongst your enemies. Heightenings and allomantic tin. Very good and precise sight and hearing. Shardplate and allomantic pewter. Stormlight and feruchemical brass, to warm yourself up after getting yourself covered in frost. Stormlight and feruchemical gold. Everytime a Highstorm is about to hit, drain all of your spheres to nothing, store a ton of health while magic is healing you. You're about to get the spheres fully infused anyway, and now you have some free healing.

If he wrote it in a different language because it was the native language of what was possessing him, why would he write a translation key?

It's also interesting that his response seems to indicate that simply having gender is typical of spren, which I'm surprised to learn. Still, he didn't flat-out say it.

I mean... I'm confused by your phrasing here. I guess it would help if I knew; what specifically are you referring to when you say The Deepness? The Mists staying longer and coming sooner? The Snapping of people? Is it not The Deepness until the Mists stay all day long? Why would the Mists start in the middle? Why would they start far away from the Well? In fact, the rest of the world is uninhabitable because the ash doesn't fall as strongly, and the world has turned into a desert. The world was pushed close to the sun so that it would burn away the mists. So, we know hot sun will, in fact, burn away mist. This makes it even stranger that the mists would be strongest at the edges of the empire, where the ash is weakest and therefore the sun is strongest, yet be so weak so close to the Well which, coincidentally, is the place most protected from the sun.

Some boomerangs have sharp edges, and if they don't, just have your spren take the form of an edged boomerang. Or a Shard chakram. Sharkram? ...Seen here, displayed on the Sorting Hat...

I don't know that everyone assumes it. I personally see it as Honor, but there are people who think it's Odium. I think I've heard people say that they think Odium is insane, and therefore 'broken'.

People... Sharderang... solves all of these problems... think about it.

Hrm. Interesting, and I don't disagree. This is definitely an idea worth considering. Gonna toss out a few thoughts of my own, however. 1. Insanity and forgetfulness. I could see off-the-charts intelligence producing these, for essentially the same reason. His brain is working, faster, on a level it never has before. He can't make it slow down enough to make himself understood by those around him. This is why he seemed to be insane. Likewise, I would say his memory gap isn't due strictly to forgetfulness, so much as his brain's inability to remember. His thoughts were so multi-layered and complex that his current brain literally cannot even process them. They weren't typical, single-threaded cognition. He was at a level where inventing a code and writing in it was faster than just writing the sentence normally. His brain, as it is, isn't working well enough to even process the thoughts. Like something traumatic, the memory might be there, as I believe he mentions when he says that sometimes while reading it he gets an impression of what he meant, but inaccessible through average recall. 2. Smart enough to deduce emotional responses. Yeah, I'm with you on that one. It just doesn't make sense to me. I mean, if it turns out to be true, I won't throw the book down, but it just doesn't scan. 3. Things he couldn't have known. I'm not sure here. He has access to he Palaneum; he owns it. He's met the Nightwatcher. He knows of Gavilar's visions. There could be a TON of information he has, a lot of stuff we, the readers, don't. The entire point of the Veristitilians is to read biased records of the past and deduce what actually happened. Presumably, Vargo's read their stuff. This is the point I have the least trouble accepting. Someone looking at history, lore, religion, and superstition with a critical eye and a lot of raw data could find the trends and deduce what actually happened from many, many biased records. I like your miscellaneous thoughts. I have one possible addendum to your conclusion. I don't think we necessarily need to throw the entire idea out. It might be what it appears, but more than it appears. Rather than decide it wasn't intelligence at all, what if there's simply more to it? What if he did have an insanely smart day, but also an additional source of information? Maybe a book we're unaware of, maybe it was influence from something Shardic. Hey, maybe it was Hoid. I think you might be right, it might have nothing to do with intelligence. But maybe intelligence was only one part of it.

And sometimes they Ruin things. And being territorial, they can also Preserve. And the hunters act with Honor. And the evolution of these creatures is a form of Cultivation. What I'm saying is, we need something concrete to start speculating about whether the Splinter here is a Splinter of one of the Shards, or maybe a Splinter of Adonalsium itself.

Thank you!