Oudeis

The Well of Ascension had an interesting restriction. It was first located at the north pole, and when Rashek moved it, it actually literally dragged magnetic north across the planet with it. Is that a "geographic restriction"? "Wherever I am, it shall be the planet's magnetic north."

You all know that every single example given so far takes way more than one Breath, right?

Where else in the Cosmere could Tears of Edgli grow?

This thread suddenly makes me want to make an Adonalsium pun about, "To all Intents and purposes." I can sorta see what Edgedancer is saying... "Emotions" versus "Goals" might be a better classification than "Internal" versus "External." I can sorta see what you're getting at, but like Edgedancer says, they're sorta all Internal, and they're sorta all External. Odium simply is hate, and doesn't hate any specifically, he just hates it all. Just like Ruin wants to ruin everything, but again, it's not directed at any one thing. He doesn't want to Ruin one flower more than another, the urge to ruin everything is coming from inside him. I dunno about Honor... it's a pretty nebulous concept, I feel like no one can say, "This is the definition of Honor, it means all of this and nothing else." I think there are parts of Honor that are internal, but as Edgedancer said, you can make the Oaths to something external, and your actions in upholding those oaths are external. I suppose there's at least one version of honor where you only pledge to yourself and your duties to uphold are all internal... but that's surely not the sum total of all there is to know of Honor, and not really how we see Tanavast act.

I feel "Survival" needs an asterisk, as we don't actually know it's name. (That I know of; have we learned anything more about it than the bit Mr. Sanderson wrote in someone's book saying, "there's a shard that just wants to survive"?) It's Intent might end up being something external that simply results in it wishing to stay alone and survive, like Fear. ...this whole concept is starting to make me think of Princess Tutu...

A form needn't be voidform to be "not innocuous." Warform brings power, strength, and the ability to fight and kill, yet we see it plenty and it never give an indication of being voidform. ...Though I suppose this is more a commentary on the fact that Prometheus seemed to be saying that a form is either Voidform or innocuous. I guess it depends on if you define innocuous as "not powered by Odium" or whatever makes the voidforms unique. Compared to something like Stormform, Scholarform doesn't really seem all that bad.

With many thanks to the intercostal Kurkistan, without whom I'd prolly never find the links to half the rust I'm sure I've read. Source

How many Breaths does that take? How much would someone really pay for something like that? I guess if there were an apartment building or something with enough people that a water pump would be worth running constantly, and enough people could all contribute to the cost, it might be worth having, but considering that leaving something Awakened too long uses up the Breath (there's WoB on that somewhere I will attempt to find) you'd have to be making the equivalent of thousands of dollars every increment that the object wastes a Breath. All for something that can be done with a simple windmill, or a waterwheel in a stream.

Actually I'm fairly certain the "Dot" is the well in the palace that leads down to the river. The secret room is at one edge of the city and give access to a tunnel that leads to the Shardpool, which is up the mountain and quite some distance from the city/Aon Rao. They're also both different from the actual very large lake in the center of Arelon which repesents the "dot" that you must draw to make the Aon Aon, which would be many (possibly hundreds) of miles away.

That would be exactly the same thing, and again, it's unreasonable and illogical. Before it even happens, how do you see it working? What pressing threat of "Evil" exists in the world that needs to be destroyed? Crime? So, you expect the robot to... kill all criminals? As Marasi said, economic investment is a far more effective means of removing from men the impulse to commit crimes in the first place. Is institutionalized racism a crime? So the robot would somehow eliminate all white CEOs? How about the exploitation of women in comic books? How do you see a robot going about that? You don't need to wait for Nightblood to go wrong to know beforehand that this is simply a terrible idea. The Command was too vague from the get-go, which is a problem with your robot just like it was a problem when they forged the sword. What "evil" existed in the world? Seriously. At the time of the Manywar, please give me a clear, concise defintion of what Kalad and Shashara would have considered "evil" at the time, and why making a sword was a reasonable way to achieve the goal of ending it, and what precisely they thought the sword would do once the immediate threat was eliminated. And lastly... yeah. In the scenario where, in the real world, a research scientist in robotics programming writes in a scientific journal about his plans to write a program telling his robot to "Destroy Evil" and then asks a grants committee for money to make it happen... you truthfully believe that the general consensus of the scientific community would be, "Sure, that sounds quite reasonable, here's money to continue with your very logical plan."?

I do not know how much clearer I can be... you are addressing a point I agree with you on, and it is absolutely ancillary to the point I am trying to make. If you think you are responding to me, then let me try to be as clear as possible. You are mistaken when you think you understand what my point is. I know the Command went wrong, and why, and I agree that this whole mechanism is a good plot point for the story. The point I am addressing is exactly this: Even without hindsight, at the time, "Destroy Evil" was an inherently silly Command to ever give. There was simply no way for it to ever go right. The fact that other, better Commands would also have gone wrong is entirely irrelevant. Basically you're saying, if a man sets my house on fire, and a few minutes later a plane crashes into it, that the plane crashing into it wasn't the man's fault. I agree, and that much is obvious. But the point I'm making is, regardless of the plane, it was still a bad idea for someone to set my house on fire.

Your question pre-supposes I agree with the underlying premise of, "I want a weapon which slays my enemies." First of all, just no. Second... to put myself in the shoes of Vasher and Shashara? Because "what I would do" and "what I could plausibly believe Kalad and Shashara would do" are vastly different things. Hrm. I dunno. What would their driving goal had been? Frankly, we don't know terribly well, since it was a very tumultuous time in their lives and we've got only the vaguest notion of at what point in this time they made him. I guess, for the sake of a thought experiment, if we assume they made it shortly after the Manywar started (which is a HUGE assumption, outlining exactly how little we know about the scenario), in their shoes I think it would have made sense to give it a Command along the lines of, "Protect Hallandren." And just to be clear, I fully understand that this Command would probably have gone just as haywire as Destroy Evil. I'm not arguing against the premise of, "A Command made with good intentions went haywire because a metal sword cannot understand human concepts". I'm arguing against the premise that "Destroy Evil" was ever a logical, reasonable Command in the first place, regardless of how it turned out. First, if I may be so bold, may I ask your qualifications as you claim to speak from the personal experience of a scientist on the cutting edge of technology? Second, you have misunderstood my initial point. I'm sorry that I didn't make it clear. I'm not arguing the morals of what they did. I don't personally agree with the morals but that's entirely beside the point. Morals aside, the experiment was simply an objectively unsound idea. To follow your example, these two weren't engaging in genetic research that might have good or bad outcomes. They issued a Command to destroy something vague which was an entirely non-pressing threat. To follow your analogy, I'm not saying it's a bad idea to explore genetic research. I'm saying it's a bad idea if a scientist submits a grant proposal because he wants to research a serum to "Destroy Evil." Does that seem like a sound scientific basis for research to you? As a scientist, how do you quantify "evil"? How many units of evil exist in the world? What physical or chemical properties does Evil have? Genetic research is a sound scientific principle that will be a tool like any other, with possible positive and negative outcomes. It is both logical and reasonable under certain circumstances. "Destroy Evil" is illogical, and unreasonable. There was no clear threat which could be classified as "Evil" that the sword could be made to combat. How was it to be tested? Did they have a vat of "evil" to see how effectively the sword destroyed it? Were they prepared to see what waste materials were created once "Evil" was broken down into it's component parts?

Nightblood was made around the same time as the Manywar, 300 years ago. I still say it's preposterous. Forces of nature are not evil, and relatively few people are actually evil. There were no supernatural forces that could be at all considered evil. If you had this one chance to spend a lot of an incredibly precious resource, would you really think it was "logical" to waste it making sure that your device had an incredibly limited scope to perform an action done much better and more easily by other means? In order to attack something that is, itself, comparatively rare in the world? How often, in your random walking-through-the-day-ness, do you stop to look at something and think to yourself, "man, that thing there is evil, if only there were a way to destroy it"? Do you constantly feel a pressing need to reduce the amount of evil in the world in a violent manner as opposed to, say, holding the door for a stranger or making the conscious decision not to get upset when a car cuts you off? What evil existed for Shashara and Kalad to want to destroy? They must have had something specific in mind. If their real only sense of "evil" was, "Y'know, there are some people in the world who occasionally do things we disagree with" I fail to see how that leads, logically and reasonably, to "let's craft a weapon to kill all of those people." Even if they didn't know the form Nightblood would end up taking or his potential to harm the innocent, they were still obviously making a weapon and telling it to "destroy." They didn't want it to mitigate evil, or absolve evil people, or show the evil the error of their ways. Evil requires choice, choice means people, and Kalad and Shashara used their hard-won knowledge expressly to tell a bit of metal to destroy people. I do not understand how that's logical even if you think a sword CAN understand what is evil. Side-note: I wonder who made Nightblood, as in the actual sword-vessel itself. There must've been a sword for Kalad and Shashara to Awaken into Nightblood. Were the scholars themselves blacksmiths? Or did the honor go to someone else? I'd be amused if Nightblood ran into a descendant of that blacksmith and called her his niece.

Vasher, thinking to himself one time, mentions that the Command he and Shashara gave Nightblood seemed perfectly reasonable and logical. But, well, it wasn't. Was there actually any "evil" around that needed destroying? Was this Buffy the Vampire Slayer where soulless demons ravaged the countryside? Was it Roshar, with it's threats of Voidbringers and Desolations? Even Scadrial has some monsters, in the form of Mistwraiths (more the ones everyone believes in, rather than the real ones) and at the time of the book Elantris, Sel has an empire that has taken over most of the known world and is threatening to squash every other culture. This is the sort of thing that could possibly be seen as "evil". In Nalthis, at the time Nightblood was made, Hallandren WAS the all-encompassing culture squashing other nations. There were no monsters to fight (Lifeless don't count, they're products of science and obviously not what Vasher or Shashara would consider evil). There were no mythic terrors humanity might need defense against. I guess the case could be made that in war, even when you're the giant bully, you fight by convincing yourself that the other people aren't even human, and are thus possibly "evil," but that seems like a huge justification and stretch. And frankly, the man Vasher is now prolly would not still think of that as "reasonable and logical" thinking. It's the type of thinking that makes wars happen, and Vasher doesn't currently believe wars are logical or reasonable. Why on Earth would two of the five best Awakeners in existence waste a thousand Breaths and perform a totally unique action, and then design it to do something so needless and, frankly, silly?

The force "driving" Taravangian to save the world might be best expressed by a line from a commercial for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy movie. "Why do you want to save the galaxy?" "Because I live in it!" Or, to quote Terry Pratchett, the thing about "saving the world" is that it inevitably includes the bit of world that you, personally, are standing on.

Non-spoiler bits: Vahr had something in the neighborhood of a thousand Breaths. His aura, and the color change, would be great. That, combined with the current ~25 Breaths Vasher had, explain the color change. Even then, note how it's phrased: To Vasher's eyes. Mistborn spoilers: A phenomenon can be perfect, but that doesn't mean people observing it see it that way. We know, thanks to science, that snowflakes are symmetrical and beautiful and unique; if you had never been told that and looked at a blizzard, your eyes wouldn't be able to pick out enough detail to notice. If Investiture showed up one day and made literally every snowflake in a given blizzard into the exact same shape... you, personally, just by looking at it with your eyes, wouldn't notice that. WoR spoilers: Vahr's skin is a perfect, exact tan... but without Breath of your own, there's no way to know. Just like the painting, the Battle of Twilight Falls. Someone with the Third Heightening made it. It was a masterpiece. And if you personally didn't already have the Third Heightening, all you saw were a bunch of red curves.

Adopt-a-God... Siri mentions at one point that an Idrian Returned. If this man's family had immediately bought a horse and sent him off to Hallandren before the first week was up, how would T'Telir respond? Would the accept him as one of their Gods, giving him a name and a palace and servants and, most importantly, a Breath a week to live? Or would they decide that they only want Hallandren Returned?

Still WOR

Interesting math. I like how you brain works. I'm personally more interested in comparative economics; trying to decide how much a Breath would be worth on Earth is a fun thought experiment, but I find myself wondering more how much it costs in relation to the things in T'Telir. How many Breaths could you buy for the amount of capital you'd need to start your own business? How many Breaths is a dye plantation worth? A herd of sheep? How many poems would someone of the Third Heightening have to translate to recoup the cost of 600 Breaths? Lastly... the specific quote about the First Heightening (50 Breaths) costing as much as feeding a peasant family for 50 years... it did come directly from Vasher. I'm hesitant to discount his expertise in the field of BioChroma, and as a being who literally must consume one Breath a week in order to live, I wouldn't be surprised if he does know for sure the current value of one. Recall the trick he used to kill Arsteel, and how it was he manner he planned to use on Denth. Not to mention, he might have to draw his Breath-eating sword. He could, at any moment, find himself having sacrificed all of his Breath in order to survive, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had a couple of deaddrops around the city, each with enough money to buy a single Breath, and another week of life. I'm not certain I buy the feasibility of making and selling Lifeless for profit. You need the body, you need the ichoralcohol, and at any moment an accident (or some vandalism) could cost you a TON of money. I'm not sure that you can really charge so much more than the Breath itself costs for a Lifeless that the margins really make it a viable market, nor do I think there's actually as much demand as you think. As is pointed out with Clod, Lifeless are relatively rare in the city. Ideally, you'd have several of them work dye fields or other menial, repetitive tasks that they can do 24/7 without sleep or food, yet don't actually require any intelligence or training on the part of the Lifeless. It's still a big financial investment on the part of both yourself and your buyer. I'm not certain that realistically plantation bosses would pick it over cheap labor like Idrians. And as for artists being unable to "compete" without the Second Heightening... that's pretty rare, actually. It's a little like saying that subway performers can't exist because we've got Lady Gaga. If everyone had the option of a live performance by Yo yo ma for their commute, they would take it, but he isn't everywhere so we give a dollar to the guy near the escalators with a guitar. Performers en masse aren't going to stop performing just because they aren't the best, any more than that happens in the real world. Not to mention, as we see when Parlin and Vivenna visit the Court of the Gods for the first time, anyone in the audience not of the Second Heightening themselves can't even tell the difference. Having perfect pitch is useful, but once your instrument is tuned or once the first note is sung, all you need is relative pitch, which is way more common. If two singers are singing next to each other in a chorus, and one has perfect pitch and the other simply has relative pitch, they will each sing literally the exact same notes all song long, and no one, not even someone with perfect pitch, could tell which of them was which. I'm sure there would be some rich people who insist on 3rd Heightened Art for their house, just as I'm sure there's a thriving industry of people selling knock-offs at inflated prices, knowing full-well that their patrons can't tell the difference.

Just read the whole "Find Tunnels" bit before bed last night. It... really raised more confusion than it answered. Vasher himself was crawling around on the ground looking, then he makes the straw men with the explicit command, "Find Tunnels." They wander around, and then start jumping on one spot where there is a trap door "hidden by a thick layer of dirt." It's also expressly stated that this is a bolthole with a trap, so it's not a common entrance/exit, so it's not like they could have found footprints. The door itself isn't described all that very much. Was there a cloth handle sticking out of the ground? Did they find it by "feeling" or "hearing" where the ground felt more hollow? Would the soil have been looser packed? Was there perhaps an outline of the tunnel where it was supported so the ceiling wouldn't collapse? The three of them split the Breath from his cloak, which had been Commanded to Protect Me; would a third of that one single Command grant strong enough lifesense for them to be able to say, "hey there's a hole below us where worms aren't digging"? If so, wouldn't Vasher have felt grass at a much lower Heightening than it apparently took? Also, if he was going to do it like that, wouldn't keeping all that Breath, tripling his ability to sense life, make it go much faster? This is totally going on my personal list of questions to ask Mr. Sanderson...

Basically, yes. I don't think necessarily by default. I think that senses are something people don't usually think about, so by default they subconsciously gift to the object whatever senses it needs to get the job done. For example, Protect Me would require sight to notice incoming arrows which wouldn't trigger lifesense. Find Tunnels prolly required, what, touch? To notice when the ground felt different? I would not be surprised if you could properly conceptualize the mental intent and grant senses not strictly necessary to the Command. I wonder if you could restrict them? Could you make a doll, tell it to walk across the table and pick up a comb, but deliberately give it touch, but not sight? So it would have to crawl along until it felt an object and was able to determine that it was a comb? I suspect this COULD be done explicitly, with the Awakener giving the object senses he chooses to give, not just default ones.

Ancillary topic, my apologies to the OP if I'm stepping on toes, I don't feel like this really warrants a new thread. How exactly does one MAKE money as an Awakener? What jobs are there in a pre-industrial society that someone with Awakening could do to earn as much money as Breaths cost? An obvious one is, anyone of the Third Heightening can get paid to turn poems into the Artisan's Script to be presented to the Gods. When Lightsong sees petitions for the first time, he comments that one of them must've been a peasant who paid for a basic transliteration, so it can't bring in all that much money, though perhaps exorbitant prices could be charged for the fancier version where the colored patterns are turned into pictures. Though really, that's only worth it if the Awakener is also an excellent artist, independently. What else? You could Awaken small objects to perform simple tasks... but what tasks are so simple and repetitive, yet worth being paid for? I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything. I open this to group discussion.

Jewels's one Breath fed her family of eight people for "almost a year". 49 Breaths to reach the first Heightening is listed as "enough money to feed a peasant family for fifty years". I'm not sure if there are other mentions in the book of how much a Breath is worth.

Hrm... this makes me wonder about allomantic Electrum. There's some speculation on why electrum shows you a cloud, even when no one else is burning atium to provide the feedback loop. What if you, yourself are the feedback loop? Electrum, by default, shows you only a single future... however, seeing that future potentially changes it, splitting it ad infinitum. Since you cannot see the future without seeing the future, even though electrum technically shows you only a single vision, in practice it always works out to be an electrum cloud. Just a random thought. I can get behind the idea of it working like allomantic electrum. I'm not giving up on my own idea as plausible, but yours is, too. Another thought on the book as a whole: I was sorta disappointed to find out that the entire point of being a trapper on the island was nothing but an Aviar hatchery. There was literally no point in hunting for anything else, and barely a point in hunting for Aviar, once you built up your breeding pairs. No one wanted the pelt of a nightmaw or the succulent meat of whatever killed that guy at the first Patji's Finger. There was no call to bring back a colony of deathants for the parasitic power they possessed. It felt... I dunno. Incongruous. I'm all for tradition and competition, and you do need to find those additional wild Aviars, I guess, but it seems to me that "tradition" is the literal only reason trappers don't just set up all of their "safehouses" a quarter mile inland and die a lot less often. If the point is to keep your skills sharp, why not have your tradition be, "once a month, make a pilgrimage to the emerald pool at the peak, then return safely," rather than, "let's all try to kill each other all the time,"? It just strikes me that having a far larger group of only mostly trained Trappers, all working together, would make for a stronger society than a fraction of that population marginally better trained and constantly working at cross-purposes.