Oudeis

Please, if you're going to discuss a chapter of an unreleased book, do so behind a spoiler cut.

Aaaaah, sorry, I missed this. Yes, I concur with you. There are only ancient Soulcasters. I still think transformation is more likely than transportation. There could be other factors, but the facts are, we have seen her Soulcast very well and we've seen her Transport very poorly. While I look forward to finding the answer and even being proven wrong, it would be a plot twist at this point. I think someone pointed out the Soulcasters that form air into buildings. This seems to imply that the ending shape is important, not the beginning shape. It's also an example of "turn a quantity of a thing into something else", rather than "turn the whole of a thing". So this is interesting; while we get no further insight into the model, we have proof that Transformation does do this thing under other circumstances. If I recall correctly, the event was inspired by Jasnah running out of ink. Odd she wouldn't just Soulcast air into ink, or use the Transportation Surge to steal ink from somewhere and claim she'd just Soulcast it. I know she's better at fire than... is ink oil liquid or non-oil liquid? I truly don't know. Anyway, if she can, when necessary, Soulcast a human's blood without killing them, surely it would have been simple enough to make a small quantity of ink, compared to using up her Stormlight to burn words into a book...

But that's not addressing the issue. Why would the power start so far away? Why would it be drawn equally from all directions towards the well? If the Well is what is drawing the power, wouldn't the power logically start, and be strongest, near the Well? Why then is the Well the actual last place? Is the power somewhere else at the time, outside of the Final Empire somehow perfectly equidistant from the Well?

Look, it's simple. The man just has six eyes.

FOR CINEMA!

Potential use for cadmium! Very niche and very specific. If I were a feruchemistborn with all feruchemical and allomantic powers, I could land in the middle of a group of bad guys, in view of some people I wanted to impress, throw up a low-burn Cadmium bubble, then run around inside tapping so much speed I'm moving in slow-mo while the bad guys are functionally frozen, and show off how totally awesome I am at taking down the bad guys.

?? Has someone said that there are modern Soulcasters? I'm pretty sure we were all on the same page on that one. Fabrials based on the Surges seem to be something fundamentally different from "modern" fabrials, and are all ancient. Shallan actually watched Jasnah burn the words onto the page, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Since it's a talk about precision, I doubt she's using Transportation. Jasnah is in the middle of the wilderness, with Wit, no less, a week's walk from the nearest village. Not from her actual destination, just the literal closest human beings. If she could Transport literally any more accurately than that, I assume she would have. I could see it being a mix of the Surges, the way people seem to accept she did with the muggers, but not soley Transportation.

sure he could. harmony says he was fully capable of making one thing if it could be used to destroy two more.

I feel like from what we know, the clone would have as much chance of being Metalborn as the person himself did at birth. If the person was from a powerful allomantic line, high chance. If we cloned Allriane, for example, the first allomacer born to her line in hundreds of years, I feel like you could make dozens of clones without any of them being allomancers. Of course, I could be reading way too much into one quote about twins not necessarily having the same metallic traits. Maybe a clone of an allomancer does have a much greater chance of being an allomancer, even if the person him or herself had only a small chance. As I've said, the spiritual realm (and, by extension, spiritual aspects) are the ones least known about. I wonder if the creatures who live in the Spiritual Realm have anything to say about it. Is your spiritweb constantly being tended by creatures you cannot experience? Also, for terminology, I'm under the impression sDNA and spiritweb are the same thing. I could be wrong.

If you cloned someone genetically Scadrian in Elantris, could they ever be an Elantrian? Could they ever be metalborn? My take is that it was still an instakill, it's just that there's a grace period whereby strong enough healing magic can heal someone recently dead. Honestly I'm not sure what it would take to make sure someone was killed just so utterly and totally completely that they were beyond the reach even of healing magics. Presumably the grace period is no more than a few minutes, though some stuff from the end of Hero of Ages suggests that Kelsier stuck around for a REALLY long time. Hrm. Since something cognitive or spiritual of Kelsier is clearly still around, apparently even by Alloy of Law time, if someone found his bones and had a Regrowth fabrial and a LOT of Stormlight, could he still be revived? Is his spiritual aspect changed too much from "living viable human being" at this point? Given what we know of the four major Shardworld and two Splinterworlds we've seen, what would be the most effective way to kill someone such that they'd beyond the reach even of healing magic? (For the sake of this pretend no Shard is either killing or reviving the person.) My money is on the Shades from Shadows for Silence. Would it help to burn the body? Is there a type of magic, or something mundane? Is there a window of time? If you just babysit the body and prevent healing magic for ten minutes, is that a guarantee of death? What if you immediately Awaken the body as a Lifeless? Is there a way to prevent it from being Returned (though that might tread into a Shard getting involved...) Hrm. Sazed mentioned that he tried to bring Vin and Elend back, but couldn't. If he had, would they have been like Returned?

Well it really depends on what you think of as "soul". Are you talking in a religious sense, like the bit of you that passes out of life after you die? Or are you simply talking about someone's spiritweb? Everything has spiritwebs. My keys have a spiritweb. The button on my fly has a spiritweb. It's just the spiritual aspect, like how everything has a physical aspect, a spiritual aspect, and a cognitive aspect. The spiritweb of my keys are prolly not as complicated as the spiritweb of a person, more like oh gee let's just say a stick. Spiritweb and soul get used interchangably sometimes but that's not always specifically what people mean. Since we're talking about metalborn traits, I'm going to assume when you say soul, you mean spiritweb, since that's where metalborn traits are centered. So. Where would the clone get its spiritweb from? Who knows. Different people have different ideas. Maybe the cell nucleus you take, which should have its own tiny, not very complicated spiritweb, develops into a larger one the way one cell becomes a whole person. Maybe not. The general sense of the spiritual realm is that it's all about connections, so maybe as the life is created, a connection appears to Miles, and one appears to the place where he's being cloned, and one appears to the person doing the cloning, maybe others from Miles's actual parents, maybe there's someone who cut Miles and stole the finger they're using to clone, all the people and things that might impact the clone all converge, and start making the new spiritweb. Who knows? Of all three realms, the spiritual one is least well known. Now I want to know. If you cloned someone genetically Scadrian in Elantris, could they ever be an Elantrian? Could they ever be metalborn? To the ultimate list of questions! In the quote, I feel like "soul" means the viable portion of the spiritweb, the portion with the "Identity" of Miles. The other half would still have a spiritweb; it would just not be that of living Miles. It wouldn't have his identity, and it would no longer be a carrier for his metalborn traits. You couldn't spike anything out of it. Who knows if the individual cells could be cloned to make a metalborn.

That element already did change... there was a fungus or something that fed on the light, died, and turned into slime.

We know identical twins, who would have DNA as identical as a clone, wouldn't necessarily have the same metalborn traits. Man, my google-fu is weak these days. I cannot find the quote.

Well... I believe the definition of a Splinter is "something that was part of a larger whole and was broken off", and the other thing we're talking about was a lot of little bits all formed together into one, bigger thing. I suppose my definition of Splinter could be wrong; I'll do a quick Theoryland search and see if I can find a formal definition. Hrm. References (there are spoilers for other books). I cannot find a single, formal definition, but many things strongly suggest that a Splintering only goes one way, from bigger to smaller. At this point, it might be a pedantic case of semantics... but it also might not.

Well, we do know that, per Zane, when he tries to think about the fact that there's a spike in his chest his own mind shies away. So I could see Ruin convincing Vin, "Oh, he's burning most of his metals, I worry about my safety with him so I'm gonna concentrate on the physical ones..." Vin ignores emotional allomancy a lot less than most Mistborn do, but her primary focus has always been the physical ones; it's not wholly out of character for her to dismiss their use among others. Since in my head I liken Ruin's control to an extreme version of emotional allomancy, this makes it interestingly meta. Yo dawg. I see you there manipulating Vin's emotions. Let me manipulate Vin's emotions so Vin doesn't notice that you're manipulating Vin's emotions. I also concur with you that it would be unprecedented for a Shard, especially one trapped as Ruin is, to deliberately restrict the power they grant. Especially seeing as in this case, he'd prolly have to let Vin continue piercing his cloud to notice other bronzepulses, or else she'd be like, wait why am I suddenly not sensing him burning Iron as he's allomantically holding himself on this wall? Still, it is an interesting thought. Stormlight Archive. I don't yet know whether I think this is what happened or not, but your theory certainly holds water. The only counter-argument I think I can make to it is, it shows a level of understanding of humans and their emotions Ruin is typically characterized as not having. Still, we know he can sense when people use allomancy. If he noticed Zane using zinc and brass, it wouldn't require too much insight to think, it will help him if I dull her suspicions a bit. (This does, however, lead me back to a question I've asked in another thread. Why did Ruin seem to ship Vane? It doesn't actually make all of the sense. How were Ruin's goals advanced by Zane successfully pulling Vin away from Elend?)

Warbreaker Thank you for providing your own reference, but I think you mischaracterize the bond by saying it "would act just like" the other thing.

No no, it's cool, you put way more thought and effort into it than I did. Never apologize for agreeing with me.

Listeners operate in male/female (or malen/femalen) pairs to accomplish tasks. Due to the division of masculine and feminine arts, so do Vorin. Is there a connection there? 2: Zane was under Straff's thumb, so I'm not sure how Kelsier could possibly have recruited him away? We know Zane loved his father a lot. Vin joined the crew as a mixture of, teach me about my powers, and literally a lack of other options. Zane had other options, and he had people teaching him allomancy. Why would he have joined Kelsier? 4: Hrm. Apparently not. I thought it had been one of the metals mentioned in the caches, but it wasn't. It's possible they knew of it and didn't say anything, but that seems unlikely. Also, it turns out to be a not-uncommon alloy of aluminum, which they did know of, and Rashek could have learned it was viable just by touching it and trying to use it feruchemically. So, they seem not to have known of it, but I don't see how that could be. The Lord Ruler presumably, then, did not choose to directly control them. I can think of reasons he wouldn't. Among other things, he was arrogant. When Marsh did betray him, he got angry, screaming about how he had made Marsh dominant. To his mind, he'd given Marsh this amazing gift, and thereby deserved loyalty. He couldn't understand that someone would want something more than power. I assume the caches still exist? Except for the Pits, where the terris were with the remnants of Luthadel's population, they were all chosen to be a geologically stable as possible, to survive the literal destruction of the world. They would all now be located at the Field of Rebirth in Elendel. Unless deliberately destroyed, it would take a cataclysmic event (or direct Shardic intervention) to destroy them. Also there's apparently a museum there with relics from the World of Ash, so presumably effort would have been made to maintain the caverns for historical reasons if nothing else.

Quickly let me say: as someone who writes a lot of fanfiction, and reads a TON of it, I wasn't trying to just dish on "a story I didn't like," I'm legitimately offended when people pull a stunt like this and pass it off as fanfiction. Whether I liked the underlying story or not is irrelevant. Many fanfiction sites have rules stating that you're not allowed to write a story, then post it in a dozen different sections just by changing the main character's names to names of dramatis personae, and for very good reasons. I can understand wanting people to read your original works, but people go to these sites because they want to read fanfiction. Tricking them into reading your work by using search-and-replace to change some names is as honest as me putting a band-aid on the ear of a Mario sprite and passing off a livestream playthrough as the documentary, "Super Van Gogh Bros." Believe me, the fanfiction I write is the absolute worst, and no one who writes legitimate fanfiction will hear a single harsh word from me; I even feel guilty offering constructive criticism. It's the people who abuse the system and crowd out people trying to do actual fanfiction I have issue with. Interesting. Also, yeah, totally been there. My buddy asked him once, "Are there beings native to the Spiritual Realm the way spren are native to the Cognitive Realm" and his reply was yes, but not the ones you're thinking of. And my buddy was like... but I wasn't thinking of any... I'm actually going to extend this. I think that Syl is going to prove to be one of the more "human" spren we meet. I think most of them will just be alien. Someone like Wyndle, if he really is associated somehow with plantlife or cultivation, might understand gender a bit better. But does "Truth" have gender? Does "Law"? @Kelek: Yes, that's basically what I've been trying to get at. Hansen's assumption is that the only options are, gender is assigned at total random, or gender is assigned based on sexual preference. As I've pointed out, and as you expanded upon beautifully, there could be a ton of other reasons. I've long suspected that at some point Syl stopped being a spren of "the idea of honor" and became the spren specifically of Kaladin's honor. That's why his broken promise killed her; if Kaladin loses his honor, and she is his honor, he loses her. As you pointed out, there could be a ton of reasons he personally personifies his own honor as female. Maybe she represents the women he'd like to protect. Maybe, being Vorin, he just grew up seeing male-female pairings being two people who get one job done (an interesting quirk shared by the listeners). Presumably, even if a man were other than heteronormative, any man he's attracted to still wouldn't be able to read, or do sciences, or do any of the other things he'd need in a business partner, so when envisioning someone to be a partner in a non-romantic endeavor, a Vorin would be likely to select a woman.

Actually, I have much the opposite concern. She's always burning bronze around him. Most times she's with Zane, she comments how she can sense his pulses, frequently in the context of piercing his own coppercloud. The two times we see him approach her from his perspective, he makes mention of her noticing him when she shouldn't be able to. She burns bronze a lot that book to listen to the thumping, and she makes a comment towards the end that she's almost always burning it these days. Why, then, doesn't she notice that he's burning brass and zinc? She proves in her moment with Breeze, one of the most skilled and subtle Soothers there is, that she can tell who someone is Soothing. I get that her coppercloud was down because she found bronze more useful. But why wasn't her bronze identifying that she was being Soothed and Rioted?

First: spoilers, people. This is the Warbreaker forum. Second: WoB is that if different systems do the same thing, they might end up doing it in similar ways. Maybe there's an aspect of Awakening that is a bit like the other thing.

Renarin in many ways reminds me of one of my good friends, who is asexual. Until we see him express the least romantic interest in anyone, that's my head!canon. Mistborn

No no! Posting theories is great. You're not trying to post conclusively-proven things (I mean, a few of us try that sometimes, but for the most part we just spitball). We are all your academic peers. Post hypotheses, people will (mostly) be nice in supporting or rebutting. Let us help you find facts that either aid or contradict your ideas. Honestly, if nothing else, you've made me think about Seons and other related entities in new ways. I don't necessarily think you're wrong, and you've given me much to think about. I, for one, am very happy you posted this idea.

Ironically it might be a lack of killing people. Nightblood is compared, by Vasher, to the Returned. But he's not. He's got a powerful mass of Breath, he's got self-awareness. But Returned don't jumpstart self-awareness from scratch. They have the procedural memory and some of the base personality of the people they once were. Could this be what Nightblood is lacking? On the chart of Types, Nightblood is supposed to be opposite Lifeless. The two metrics are human body/not human, and sentient/not. Type IV and Type II are directly opposed in both. You make a Lifeless by taking a body after the rest of the person has gone away and animating it with Breath. What if the opposite process is what it would take to make a functioning Nightblood? One that wasn't stunted and insane? What if the trick to a Type IV entity is to kill someone and bind a cognitive and spiritual part of them to the new Object? So here's a question. If you could choose to die in order to be Awakened as an immortal, non-human Object with a single Command that would provide an eternal compulsion for you, most of your own personality, and almost none of your own memories, what would it be?

Eh, not entirely. Warbreaker