Oudeis

Well I can't edit the title anymore. I'm sorry and I'll try to be more careful. I think you're missing the point. We know the model of Soulcasting is, you experience Shadesmar, locate the cognitive aspect of the thing you want to change, and change it. But she's not changing the whole page. Does this mean you can get the cognitive aspect of the entire page, but convince only specific parts of it to change? Does she create the cognitive aspect for "the part of the page in the shape of an S i want to change" by thinking about it? Precision doesn't really come into it. We already know Soulcasting isn't like aiming a Transmogrifying Ray and pulling the trigger.

A few issues. The main being that the quote makes it clear that she's burning it at least letter by letter. But there are others. To Soulcast an entire page, she'd have to be able to see in her mind the entire page full of text all in one go, every comma, every diacritic mark, every dipthong. Also she says she's not good with organics. And can you Soulcast something into two pages at once? If paper is like earth paper, it's plant material. Even if we don't assume Shallan saw actual fire, wouldn't the charred bits be more like smoke than plant?

A field is possible, but I think it's covered by the enhanced physical attributes Plate grants your body. Your whole body is stronger in Plate, as has been shown frequently. It's easier for Eshonai to walk around in her Plate with her wounded leg than out of it. Whatever is artificially strengthening your body could also easily account for keeping your brain unconcussed.

On one level I'd like to simply point out how odd Jasnah's Soulcasting is. We now know it was always Surgebinding, yet she successfully convinced people it was only via her Soulcaster. I would be surprised to discover her mother never once saw the Soulcaster or saw her daughter Soulcast, and if she did, Jasnah successfully fooled a scholar of fabrial science (though, by her own admission, more like a Master's than a PhD.) In all the times we see her Soulcast, of which there are more than a few, she's never noted to ever inhale any Stormlight, or to glow. In fact, when she first Soulcasts that boulder to free Taravangian's granddaughter, she inhales, and the stones themselves glow more brightly. If she were draining their power, they'd dim, and she'd glow. She also comments that the stone is very large and will take a lot of Stormlight to Soulcast; presumably in a dark corridor she could not get away with glowing unnoticed. How does she do it? How does she Soulcast without seeming to Invest, herself? How does she fake a powerful fabrial? The simplest answer is, she's one of the best Surgebinders we've seen yet, and she simply knows how to do things Shallan or Kaladin don't. (If this next book does focus on Dalinar, I guess we can get used to people still stumbling and trying to get used to their Surgebinding.) In other words, RAFO. However. I'd like to talk about something a little different right now. At one point, Jasnah burns words onto a page. How on earth do you do that, with the mechanism we know of for Soulcasting? When she wants to inscribe the letter S, does she search the cognitive realm for "the cognitive aspect of the indistinguishable tiny fraction of this page in the shape of the letter S and properly kerned to my paragraph thus far"?

I'm not just saying the Shardplate is strong, I'm saying the Shardplate makes the wearer strong. It makes your muscles, organs, and bones strong. You're not shaking around inside the armor like a ball bearing in a sardine tin. I wouldn't be surprised if it does actually have a field inside that keeps your body stable, but whether or not it does, it makes your body strong. Mistborn You don't suffer a concussion because your brain, and all the stuff that's supposed to keep your brain and your body more-or-less in-sync, are all strong enough to shrug off concussive force. Also, it's possible the armor negates it.

It's incredibly difficult to keep a Shardblade in existence when it's not touching your hand. Adolin is one of the best Blade bearers there is, and he can barely manage. Apart from the idea that I just don't find it likely, there's barely anyone who would have the capacity to do this, anyway. If it were possible, wouldn't Adolin have been trying that, instead of summoning and then throwing his Blade?

I honestly wouldn't be able to begin. I cannot draw something in two dimensions, trying for a 3D model is just not happening. What might also be interesting would be to draw a Savant... mostly a normal spiritweb, but one portion of it would be golden and engorged, with a thick cable leading off-panel. Let's go with tin. The threads of this one would be much, much larger, pushing aside nearby bits of spiritweb. Thick golden connections would also snake down into other bits of the spiritweb, connecting to five other small, internal patterns that all share a basic underlying similarity to the huge one; each of these are also over-sized, though none of them have the same golden glow as the huge pattern. Around each warped pattern, nothing has turned red or orange, but connections are broken, patterns are bent, and in some few places the blue threads turn black and withered, snapped off into dead-ends.

Kurk beat me to it. This was one of my big questions for approximately ever, and I had much the same mental model you did at first before I read these, thought about it for a long time, and eventually got my mind around it. I cannot express enough that this is only my personal idea of what's happened and that I can in no way prove most of it. That said, I do believe it maintains internal integrity and matches what is known, and is therefore a viable model, whether or not it proves to be entirely correct. I still wonder in morbid fascination exactly and specifically what would have happened. I suppose to be brutally honest, it would have been rather boring. We see from Vin's perspective, when she tries to do something, she feels resistance from an equally-powerful opposing force. Presumably, once he had the atium, Ruin would simply have reached into the planet's heart to kill it, felt the resistance from Preservation's force, and simply been able to overpower it this time.

Moogle, we've had a long, long debate on the subject, and I have no intention of falling into that rabbit hole yet again. I'm not going to post the same WoB I posted last time, only to hear your rationale just like I did last time why you post the WoB that agrees with you, but not the ones that don't. He's said one thing, then said another, sometimes saying that Honorblades cannot be bonded, "only given", other times saying sure, you can totally bond one. W's-o-B on the subject are confusing and contradictory. So all you have is one brief comment made right at the end of a book by a woman who has enormous gaps in her memory. I would very much like to find out what exactly she meant by that sentence, but we certainly don't know enough to tell people, "This is entirely and completely the model for how it works." "A man who holds Stormlight will heal from almost any injury." That's a true statement. Yet it doesn't just mean that if there are spheres in your hand, you're immortal. It is true, in context. Syl's statement is utterly devoid of context.

Moogle, we've discussed this many times before. There are a dozen W's-o-B about how a person uses the powers of an Honorblade, whether it's called a "Bond" or not and if it can happen by simply picking it up. It's a confused, muddled mess. Cherry-picking the quotes that support your theory without admitting there are many others which don't is insincere, and in the past month or so a lot of new faces have shown up who might not be aware of your particular relationship with whether or not a thing is true.

I've read this too... I feel like it's not on Theoryland, but there's somewhere Mr. Sanderson is talking to alpha readers and it's brought up... "I can smell things happening one hundred yards away, but not five feet to my left!"

I concur with most of the above. Shardplate simply grants strength; we know this. You can leap impossible distances, crush rocks in your hands, and catch Chasmfiends. Renarin apparently has fits, but Dalinar comments that as long as he's wearing Plate, that won't matter. Even with protection, it shouldn't be okay to seize in the middle of battle, but apparently Plate grants you something that fixes that. It probably sucks up Stormlight from the gems faster to do so, but somehow Plate absorbs concussive force, protecting the person inside. In the big Duel in Words of Radiance, someone fights with a hammer, yes? That should damage the person inside, too, yet doesn't seem to, at least not very much. Also, as a far more mundane answer, Adolin talks about all the cushioning you put on, too, right? Though I guess most of it isn't around the head.

I try to stay away from looking at any aspect of a system of Investiture and trying to deduce what the Shard might be. Mistborn spoilers.

Per chapter 32, Lifeless used to take 50 Breaths. Nothing is said about whether that meant personality, but I doubt it did. I imagine it was just an incredibly inefficient use of Breaths, that all that energy was going towards doing it the hard way. If you used the better Command, but somehow did shove in 49 extra Breaths, maybe there'd be personality? Who knows?

Yeah, a lot of people, especially someone with that much Breath, is prolly gonna grow used to the idea that there's always more time, that surely I've got another few months in me, you're only as old as you feel. Combined with the sure knowledge, if I give up this Breath, that's it. No more protection and my life will end. I'm sure some Hoards are passed down, but I don't see them combining like you say. It says most people get to 50 Breaths, then stop, because Heightenings above that are crazy expensive. So let's talk about a rich merchant. His father was a rich merchant, and has 50 Breaths. The merchant saves up, buys a few Breaths a year, and finally has 50 of his own. But he's married. So more years pass, more saving, and finally he gets the same for his lady wife. But, in all these years of wedded bliss, they've got three kids! Well, you're not gonna let your kids get sickly while you're hale... but it's been more than a decade now, just to get two sets! Your old man is feeling his age, talking about passing on... hey, why not give your Breaths to the eldest! He's got no Breaths. And I'll spend the rest of my life working until i can get Breath for the middle one and... well, the youngest one is just gonna have to either buy his own set, or wait until his mother or I are ready to pass on. I'm sure some of them do pass on. But the above scenario assumes uninterrupted prosperity for one family over the course of a whole generation. And what about when all three of those sons have their own children? Will you not pass your Breaths onto your granddaughters? Maybe your youngest son wants to become a sculptor instead of a merchant. Will his kids die, while your oldest son has children who live a decade or more longer, just because one of them preferred a job that paid better? Long story short, even the times that someone is wise enough to pass on his own Breath and face his own mortality instead of taking it to the grave via denial, even past the times of sudden heart failure, accidents, or misadventure, I don't see it being altogether likely that people will often be in the position of inheriting two or three sets of Breath. But, that's just me. I'm sure it does happen every so often, I would be surprised if it NEVER happened, but I don't see it as prevalent.

Thank you for finding the quote!

I'm afraid I can't find the quote, but we know very little about the swap. We do know that it was swapped, and we know for sure Wit did not take it.

Also, by Alloy of Law, allomantically speaking, they've only discovered one new alloy; Bendalloy. All six other alloys; steel, pewter, brass, bronze, electrum, and duralumin existed in Hero of Ages. No on in-universe has yet mentioned nicrosil. That said, they are in the ars arcanum, and their feruchemical properties are known. I concur with Battah. They prolly found Ferrings (or maybe even an entire feruchemist?) to test until someone got bendalloy to work. Sazed mentioned additional metals to Spook in his letter, so it's entirely possible there were clues or suggestions.

Because people die, losing their hoard.

Ahem.

All of this makes me wish I could draw... I want to make an artist's rendering of a Koloss spiritweb. Most of it would be one big mass of blue lines, like a three dimensional spiderweb made of light, with small patterns within the greater mass, and a few big cables leading out of the mass to connect it to other things. At some intersections, there would be quirks, like color changes, yellows, greens, purples, odd places where the lines curve in ways they shouldn't. But then, at four points, there'd be a sharp, angry spike of red, glowing brightly with light. These short, straight lines will connect the spiritweb to a single, red/orange patter, the pattern replicated for each spike. However, outside of the pattern for each of them will be unique fractions of patterns, some red, some hits of blue, much of it black and withered. Within the main mass of the spiritweb, the same pattern will be found in one place. This place will also be red-orange, connected to the four spikes by red/orange lines. Various bits of the spiritweb around all the red/orange will be warped and disfigured, pushed out of the way, occasionally broken and torn. I suppose this would have the most impact if I actually drew a non-modified spiritweb, first. Too bad I can't draw.

Well, apparently I've been using the phrase "legal document" poorly. The lawyers I've spoken with agree, as a whole, that something is only a "legal document" if it's an actual law. I had been under the impression that things like peace treaties, contracts, and permits were all "legal documents" but it must be another category. My apologies for my mistake.

If Nightblood were on Scadrial, could Ruin talk to him? Could Nightblood talk back? Would Nightblood being made of metal have any affect on whether or not Ruin could communicate?

The First Returned, Vo, Returned 600 years ago. Two hundred years later, Awakening was discovered. We do not as yet know how, or what specifically that entails. Does that mean no one ever passed around Breath before? No one ever reached a Heightening? Presumably no one realized that all humans have Breath until you learned you could start passing it around. Maybe humans swapped Breaths all the time for hundreds of years, but no one thought to try using it to make straw men dance around until just recently. Chapter 32 tells us a lot.