Oudeis

I dunno. I sorta feel like it cheapens talent, training and experience to try to find ways that every ability, even mundane ones, are magically powered. I don't know that the idea is actually wrong, but I hope it is. It would make for a far more boring story if no one's ever allowed to just be skilled or have talent, everything has to be a magic power.

THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS WONDERING. I mean, it totes seems his MO to splinter the shards once the holder is dead, but maybe this one was different for some reason? Or perhaps this was the first, and someone DID take up the Shard afterwards, so Odium realized he'd have to splinter from now on. zomg.

Reod Elantrian... Shardblade... ::head explodes::

I'm not going to address every issue, because we're starting to get rather long. I'm going to triage for the issues that I think are critical. If I don't address a specific point which you wish I would, please let me know and I will. If I don't address it, it's not because I don't have a response, I'm simply attempting some brevity. For same reasons, spoilers. I'm trying to decide if I've got an "in conclusion." If I do, it's this. We've agreed a while ago that if Shards have a color, it's simply a matter of divine fashion. Any given Shard, for any reason, might or might not choose to identify itself with a specific color, or even a pattern or a combination of colors. There's no law of realmatics which says it must be a thing, and by the same token, even if Honor is, in fact, blue, that doesn't mean everything blue is going to be associated with Honor. That seems to be most of what either of us are getting at. ... We sure are two people able to collate insane amounts of data and talk for a long time when we've essentially already finished the debate. EDIT: One more point. For the record, I do happen to think the Shardpools on the Horneater Peaks are either of Cultivation, or a mix of Cultivation and Honor. This has nothing whatsoever to do with their hue, though I'll concede that the color has at least a chance of being due to your supposition.

Shallan showed that simple power isn't everything in Soulcasting.

I actually find myself wondering if Jasnah knew Soulcaster fabrials so well, from her mother's expertise, that she was better able to fake it than others would. Recall that a LOT of time passes between the Test and Taravangian's comment that she was definitely a Surgebinder, so he could have found out at another time.

Do we have WoB on there not being any actual full feruchemists? I know it says that in the Supplement, but I don't know Mr. Sanderson has ever flat-out said. I recommend you use my line when someone's trying to make her feel less special. Miles Hundredlives. Make up a few more names. Compounders have existed in history. Therefore, the chance of a Compounder is one, since it's a thing which has happened. What metal did you plan to have her Compound?

...when you hear a man tell a story, accompanying his spoken voice by playing a guitar, and you immediately try to ascertain the hawkishness of his nose. ...And make a point of befriending this man. JUST IN CASE.

The Oathgate had no problem transporting three different armies all at once. Granted, it might work on an entirely different underlying principle. But, maybe either there is one cognitive army, because the general at least would view it as, "this is my army", or perhaps fabrials can operate as computers, parallel processing and individually targeting a thousand subjects as fast as a human Soulcaster could target one.

Dalinar also thinks to himself as he Invests that it feels familiar, like something he's done before. I've heard it speculated that he was starting to become a bit of a Surgebinder even before that moment, so this could explain why something about the Blade bothered him. It could also simply be what he mentioned in the book. I have to imagine it's a rare enough occurrence for someone to Bond two different Shardblades over the course of their life. Recall that they actually do attach themselves to your soul. Two different normal Shardblades might simply bond in weird ways, and with stunted Spiritual senses, Dalinar might only have been able to sense that something felt "different" or uncomfortable, like wearing a different style of shoe before you adapt.

Before I say anything else, I think you're absolutely right to make a story about a compounder. We know they happen, so they're officially, canonically likely enough that you should absolutely have one in your story if you so wish. Something being somewhat unlikely is sorta what makes for an amazing story. A few thoughts: This one gets confused a lot. The actual quote is that historical and societal information in the books is canon until disproven; things like this, the mechanics of the metallic arts, are an even lower level of canon. Not that they are non-canon, but at this point you're out on a bit of a speculative bridge. It's a good number to go forward with, but be aware that the numbers aren't as rigorous as they might be. Hrm... I'm going to mention here again that the numbers prolly don't work out that easily. I, unfortunately, have not the first idea how to calculate how it will work out.Recall that powers still travel in genetic lines. 1/50 people might be mistings, but that's skewed heavily towards the lines that are strong with allomantic power. Meaning average joe-shmoe has a much, much reduced chance. Also recall, in order to be twinborn, you first by default must have mixed-Terris blood. Terrismen were 1/5 of the Originators, though at least their reproductive health was restored to them. (If these two facts are disputed I will get of my lazy duff and provide the quotes. The first was from the text, the second is a WoB.) We also know the Terris as a general rule try to interbreed. Just to get a rough idea of how many people have some, but not pure, Terris blood, we'd have to find a way to reasonably guess what percentage of the Terris population each successive generation elected to intermarry, and find some sort of dispersal algorithm across three centuries. At that point, we'd need to find a way to get some data on what reasonable assumptions we can make about which Terrispeople married into lines with strong, weak, or no allomantic potential. At this point we could begin your process of taking this moiety of the general population, and applying your math to determine the probability of feruchemy, and allomancy, to derive twinborn and thereby compounders. Additionally, there's a comment Wax makes at one point about "the more common types of mistings," and it's unclear if he means simply that coinshots are more likely to take on a profession which takes advantage of their power, of if he's saying that they truly do crop up more than their share of times. I, unfortunately, have not the first idea how we'd start getting any of this information. I suspect it would end up proving that twinborn, and by extension compounders, are less common than your estimate, but even if they're 1/10th as common, that's still more than six just in Elendel, so prolly something like 20 at a time across the planet. I'd like to address one more issue I've seen brought up, which is the idea that people would choose to breed selectively for the metallic arts. I disagree on a few levels. First, the people in the stories don't see themselves as characters, or as cattle, or as playing pieces in need of leveling up. There's no reason to assume women are choosing who they will give their bodies to on the hopes that their offspring will be a powergamer's dream come true. The vast majority of people simply marry for love. Even in the case of Wax, where his one and only play to save his family is to marry someone rich, basically selling off his own name and place in society for an infusion of cash to keep his house afloat, I don't recall anyone mentioning that he'd be a prize stud for his capacity to have twinborn children. Even when his potential match was Steris, a dispassionate woman of such good breeding she was apparently chosen to be kidnapped and forcibly impregnated in a sociopathic attempt to breed powerful allomancers, no one mentioned that they were combining two allomantically powerful bloodlines. I think the balance of evidence shows that it's simply not something most people in this world consider a reason to breed, so it should be left out of equations. I can't find it though I'm sure there's a WoB somewhere saying that Sazed did something to make Mistborn impossible, but Mistings more common. Even if most Metalborn were killed off at the end of the world, Direct Shardic Intervention should nevertheless make them more common. I could be remembering the WoB wrong, however, since I can't seem to find it... Just making sure you're aware, the reason "mostly skaa" got snapped is because the Nobles had already tested themselves, and the Terris couldn't be allomancers. I assume you knew that, but just wanted to state it for completeness in case someone is reading this thread and wondering why you said that.I don't know that he wiped out the genetic difference? Had there been a difference to begin with? Rashek remade the world, changing people to survive it, but didn't give out the lerasium and decide who was noble and who was skaa until sometime thereafter. We know he left the terris as terris, and he didn't conquer the world until afterwards. Even the Hero, in his epigraphs, spoke of not being sure if the Balance was really a thing? We know he changed everyone back to "you can breath normal air" but besides that I think people were basically who they had been anyway. I think the "1 in 10,000" number is inaccurate, if I recall. That's something Kelsier says in the book, yes? I recall a WoB where someone asks him about that, pointing out that it would make allomancers actually ludicrously common, and I think Mr. Sanderson admitted that he made a mistake, and was essentially retconning it to "Kelsier was mistaken, they were actually a lot less common." It was specifically allomancers within the skaa population anyway, yes?

My impression from the Hero of Ages's experience and explanation is that the power exists, and your mind arises to take control of it. It's less like you take up the Shard and more like you take over the Shard, putting your mind into its "body", which consists of energy matrices capable of taking in frightening quantities of data at prodigious rates and of performing feats unknowable to humans.

I dunno, Weiry. There's an awful lot of wiggle room in that WoB... I find this amusing and curious. He's willing to RAFO us on so many things. He is strangely very clear and insistent that Hoid has no Honorblades.

All 10 have been accounted for, in that we know Hoid has none of them. The only one he had access to was Taln's missing/switched Blade, and there's WoB that Hoid did not take that Blade. ...Actually I think it specifically says he did not swap the Blades. I wonder, could he have gotten it in some manner other than swapping? Now I need to find and re-read that specific WoB....

Losing their songs, I would guess.

Sorry for delay of response... I knew I was gonna have a long, boring day today and I have been staying away from the forum so I'd have a lot to respond to. Mistborn. But... whatever else the pools are, they aren't water just because they're liquid, any more than atium is steel just because it's metal. There are things in this world that can be liquid and are naturally green. From the very WoB you posted, "If a similar thing happened on another world, a similar coloring effect could happen." A fairly strong implication there; if something similar happened, colors could be picked. That's a pretty funny way to phrase it if this is a thing which has happened on every Shardworld. First, sometime before I die, I'm stealing your "West Examplestan" to describe something to someone. Second... this is actually a time when "because cognitive" is a perfectly acceptable thing. Because, you're really only talking about a personal decision made by someone, like deciding what shirt to wear, you're not trying to claim that the very laws of physics themselves are changing based on nothing more than someone wanting them to. To take your example a step further, there's no physical law of the universe which demands that honorable troops must wear blue because West Examplestan was both honorable and wore blue. Wearing blue does not make someone more honorable, and wearing red does not make someone more chaotic. It's nothing more than a color scheme. It's possible I've been misunderstanding you. I thought you were trying to claim that it was some important, immutable, fundamental law of the universe. It now seems you're saying it's more like a distinctive haircut. I have absolutely no problem stipulating this. Honor is associated with blue via Syl, and green is... not. We have very good reason to assume the Shards on Roshar have colors, because we we know there's a green Shardpool. And there are other times where you say similar things; for example: "I don't feel that the colors of Shards are intrinsic, but rather that they arise out of interactions with their environment over time." You're saying "you don't feel" about one aspect of the color thing... but by saying that, the underlying premise of your statement is that the existence of the color thing is a foregone conclusion. And your posts are filled with things like "I strongly feel that Cultivation is associated with green" or "I give it a 90% probability" where you're ascribing a great deal of evidence to something which is, in truth, nothing more than a guess on your part. Sure, you think Cultivation should be green, because on Earth, plants are mostly green. That's not the case on Roshar, where plants are any color, nor is Cultivation limited to plants. The same Earth associations won't be true on a place as alien as Roshar, even if you do assume that this "color" thing is real. In conclusion, I don't think we know anything like enough about Shardpools for there to be even a basis for your guesses. Yes, they are technically evidence, like the fact that you've never seen me in person and therefore don't know I'm human is "technically evidence" that I'm a unicorn. When you then follow it up by assuming a premise as you speculate further, or giving things 90% chances of being true, you're overselling your evidence to a ludicrous degree. That I know of, the only WoB we have which even implies that every Shard must have a pool is the one you quoted above, which says that "spiritual humidity will condense like water" which some people take to assume that he means literally like water and it will turn into a pool. I happen to think even this assumption is a speculative leap. But even supposing it's true, how do we know every Shardpool will act as we assume? If the powers of Shards really are like "mist in the air," mist from three sources will mix. We know they didn't for Preservation and Ruin because those were two diametrically opposed Shards, meaning their powers could not mix, like how oil and water will settle differently. We also have WoB that no two other Shards are as polarized as those two. Even if we could assume the blue pool in the mountains is a Shardpool, how do we know it's only Devotion's? Might it not be one pool of both Devotion and Dominion? Maybe there's one Shardpool of both Honor and Cultivation, or even a pool of all three, the way I, sitting at my table at a restaurant, not smoking, cannot prevent the smoke in the air from the cigar of the guy at the table next to me of wafting over and infecting my space. My point is, you're building a castle on shifting sands, and you're using phrases like "strong evidence" or "90% certainty" or just passively stipulating to a premise as part of further speculation like you think you're on bedrock. ...Sorry for the super long post. Like I said, a lot of time today. EDIT: Having just last night read the most recent additions to the Idaho Falls Signing Report, I concede several more points concerning shardpools.

A question for people writing in Alethi and making fonts... do we know what the diacritical mark is you add to a symmetrical letter to indicate it should be pronounced as an h?

Mistborn Trilogy spoilers. Also... are you saying that the shardpool is proof that Shards have colors, just because it's green? So... the fact that it's... visible, and thereby by definition has a color, means all Shards must be bound to a single color? You think that without some external reason, it would have been perfectly natural for a homogenous pool of liquid to be plaid or polka dotted? Summary if you don't want to read the Mistborn spoilers... while I hate to counter without specifics, I can't think of a way to talk in enough abstract to avoid spoilers. It's basically calling into question Moogle's assertions. In short, if this is the first you're hearing about Moogle's hypothesis about colors, basically just realize it is a hypothesis, neither proven nor widely accepted. But still entirely possible. Also, Moogle. Suppose your hypothesis turns out to be correct. What ramifications do you see extending from this? What would it actually mean for the cosmere at large or our understanding of realmatics if it turns out that every single Shard is forced to choose a representative hue? In conclusion, I'm just going to repeat something I've asked you before. I'm not saying you haven't provided some supporting evidence for your hypothesis. I'm not saying it's not entirely possible. What I am saying is, when you simply state it like it's a foregone fact, new people to the fora are going to see that you're staff, see your post count, see your reputation, and assume that this means you're actually correct. It would be so simple to add something like, "If, as I believe, and as I've got some evidence for, all Shards are associated with a certain color..." to your post, and then you're not confusing anyone.

Moogle: Just pointing out for the newbies here who might take you seriously, this whole "every Shard has a color" thing is just a guess on your part, and is hardly confirmed, unless there's a new WoB I don't know about. We have no reason to assume that Honor has a color, and even if we do, we have no reason to think the color is blue just because Sylphrena is. weebojello: The "purple pool" in the chasm was just a puddle with an amethyst broam in it, glowing purple, coloring the water. While it's theoretically possible that the puddle was, in fact, a tiny shardpool of Odium, that would be quite a coincidence. The purple glow has been explained; once Kal removed the sphere, the pool stopped glowing.

Minor point of possibly pedantic clarification... Kalak looked at seven blades. the three he did not look at was Taln's, who'd been sent back, his own... and Jezrien's. While I do not personally support the theory that these seven were the masterworks, and the Herald of Kings just happened to have the only plain one, technically the quote you cited doesn't directly refer to the same Blade.

Do you happen to have that WoB? I looked for it the other day and I'd like to know i have the wording right.

From what I can gather of the history of the listeners out on the Shattered Plains, they've been living free since the Aharietam. They were a specific group of Voidbringers called the Last Legion who managed to break free of Odious control. Perhaps groups like the Unkalaki, the Horneaters, are descendede from other groups? My other, highly speculative theory, based on the creation myth Rock tells in the chapter Patriots, is that the listeners went to the Nightwatcher. He says they went to the greatest gods, and at the time admits that they consider the spren to be gods. So they ask a powerful spren for a boon. Sounds like the Old Magic to me. I wonder. If they asked, "please, save us from the humans who want us dead because they don't care that we were under the control of Odium when we killed 90% of them" maybe the Nightwatcher changed them all into something far closer to human. Just one man's guess.

One person's sacrifice to take down an enemy army. Also, the Oathgates took power from the spheres of people caught in the effect. Steal from the army as you kill them. EDIT: I realize I'm coming across as argumentative, as though I'm trying to justify an unlikely action. This wasn't my initial intention, and I'm going to attempt a course correction now. My apologies for poorly expressing myself up to now. My initial question was whether there was a flaw in the underlying principle. People have suggested possible limits, and my reactions have been to explain that the limits, while they exist, can be overcome. None of them are "this makes it impossible" limits, just difficult and expensive. I understand such a thing might be impractical, it might even be less cost-effective or tactically sound than simply matching them to another army. But, is it actually impossible? That's my basic question.

I for one see Renarin as a seed. He's an obviously very important character, and ironically we have seen NOTHING from his perspective. We got Navani, we even got Sadeas. He's a Radiant, meaning we know he's broken. I'd like to know how. Simply being on the functional end of the autistic spectrum doesn't strike me as enough, not when you have a family that universally supportive and, i cannot stress this enough, insanely wealthy and resourceful. Perhaps the circumstances around losing his mother? It seems so conspicuous to me that in two books we've had not one perspective. Was it simply to hide Glys ? Or in his book, will were be treated to flashbacks to these important scenes, from a whole new perspective? In short, we know so little about Renarin that my opinion of him is not strong. His lack of presence is conspicuous enough to me that i dare hope we will one day have cause to reevaluate everything we thought we knew about such scenes as that first chasmfiend hunt.

It caused one gem to crack. The Oathgates could be powered by eleven gemstones. Why not a Soulcasting fabrial powered by twenty-five enormous Gemhearts? Even if your guess that Radiants have Gemhearts turns out to be correct, have a non Radiant operate it, like Navani.