Duxredux

We learn from TSM that the reason The Night Brigade is hunting Nomad is so that they can kill him and create a spike that will lead them to the Dawnshard. I think a reasonable guess is that they killed someone close to him and are using the resulting spike to track him no matter where he Skips to in the Cosmere, which might explain why he is trying so hard to avoid people that he cares about. The idea I had while considering this is that perhaps most exploration and navigation ends up using Connection for navigational purposes. So here's the basic idea. Develop tech or find abilities that allow you to see Connection even on a planetary or Cosmere level. As said earlier, apparently The Night Brigade can make a spike to track the Dawnshard from Nomad even with him hopping from planet to planet, so one of the harder parts seems to be solvable at some future date. Learn to isolate what specific Connection you are looking for, probably starting with native Investitures. Ideally isolate it from any Connection to you or your ship. Let's start with Ambition assuming you're living on Threnody, but this idea probably would work for most Shards and planets, so feel free to swap out for another. Find some Investiture heavily associated with Ambition and view the Connection it has to all other Ambition in the Cosmere. Launch yourself into space or enter Shadesmar and walk far away from the planet (depending on which actually works and lets you take Investiture from the planet), and then use Aluminum to block off the strongest Connections as those will lead right back to Threnody. The idea is that if this genuinely lets you see the Connection that Ambition has with itself within the PR or CR, then the remaining strongest Connections should point to the largest or closest concentration of Ambition Investiture. I assume any significant source of Investiture will be a major point of interest and most of the time would be an Invested planet just based on the scale of these things. Don't forget to bring something that specifically Connects you back to your home planet so that you always have a reference point. Maybe even a crate full of things Connected to your home planet so that you can leave a "guidance beacon" of sorts. Once you arrive, collect something that is intrinsically Connected to the specific planet you found, leave a guidance beacon, and make sure you label your samples. Travel to the next place and you can see identify the 'unknown' Connections by comparing the lines to the samples you have taken from each previously surveyed world. The simple advantage of this is that you will always be going somewhere that has Investiture that is more likely to be compatible with your own tech or abilities, and where there is Investiture, there's a high potential for life and other interesting phenomenon. You probably could outfit other ships with IFF Connections and track your fleet that way or make sure the Ambition you're following isn't actually your buddy Adonalsium-Will-Get-Us-Off-This-Rock (Identification Friend or Foe tags are transponders military groups use to identify allied ships, there could probably be some safeguards installed to prevent someone from stealing one and tracking all of your stuff, but that's another train of thought). With analysis, you probably would be able to use the "width" of the Connection to identify how close you actually are to the target and stop nearby so you don't just ram into it while going FTL. Thoughts? Any problems or alternative applications anyone can see?

Basically the title, YatNP and TSM have Connection as a major plot element and focus, and we see the ways Connection can be utilized and some of the dangers it presents. Some of these notes are probably pretty obvious, but I'm going to list them off anyway and aggregate them into this thread. In YatNP we have a spirit serving as an astral projection cord between a human and basically a super-invested Cognitive Shadow. Notably after Design listens to Yumi's explanation of the hijo, she confirms that she is more or less in a similar category as the spirits (buuut, this is Design we're talking about, I'm reserving 10-20% skepticism that she really understood what Yumi was talking about). We also learn that when a highly Invested being with a strong Spiritual Aspect inhabits the body of another person they will warp the body to fit their own self-perception, the more strongly Invested, the greater the change - Fused anyone? Importantly, we learn that it is absolutely possible for two people to share a single body without the Identity of the weaker getting destroyed or subsumed by the stronger, but presumably there needs to be a barrier or gap between them. Unbounded and unregulated Connection is dangerous, and it left Painter outside of his body and vulnerable to anything that could feed on emotion or Investiture. Direct contact, even briefly, had Yumi and Painter strongly experiencing the other's emotional state - it wouldn't have surprised me if Yumi would have absorbed Painter if they had tried anything more intimate like hugging or if Yumi had somehow deliberately used Investiture while still Connected to Painter (RIP Aux, thank you for serving as a warning). And there's my segue into TSM. In TSM, we learn several things about Connection. Using tech available to future Scadrians, they were able to modify existing Investiture sources to allow the Cinder King to gain control over the Charred via Connection. We learn that it's possible to drain and give people Investiture through special forms of Connection, even completely consuming them as the Cinder King does. Apparently this contact can be a very intimate sharing of Investiture (Yumi and Painter touching each other while sharing a body?), but can also be done forcibly. There are natural barriers that are formed between different peoples, but being adopted into a group like Nomad can remove those barriers on transference of Investiture - allowing him to both gain, give, and be stolen from. A question that I'm not sure I had ever really considered was the fate of the Fused in the war of SA. What is their end state? Extermination by severing their bond with Odium? Conquest of Roshar then letting themselves pass into the Beyond (if Odium lets them)? Their life as of now requires them to destroy the mind of the host Singer, and that's not a great end state. A cool one that came to mind if they were ever freed from Odium's claim to their souls was if they could form a 3-part bond with Radiant Singers, the Singer, spren, and Fused in a similar format to Painter, hijo, and Yumi. Not saying that there's a tidy happy ending in store for the Stormlight Archive, but this seems like a possible solution for disarmament for the Rosharan Human-Singer war, particularly if some Fused don't want to lay down and die. We also have the Oathpact, Heralds, BAM, Deadeyes, and a whole lot of broken and frayed Connections in SA. Anyone else think we got a crash course in Connection so we can better grasp the resolutions to some of these Connections (hopefully, we get some in SA5, and not just a big old RAFO, wait until SA 6-10)? Anyone have any theories on Connections they'd like to add in the context of what we've recently learned and the big wrap up of the first half of Stormlight?

I think he's becoming more like Hoid/Wit/Cephandrius/Topaz/Lunu'anaki than he wants to. Realmatically speaking, his chosen name will influence the way he perceives his Identity and his Connection to the people of Canticle has Realmatic significance. Connection and Identity have real power in the Cosmere, and Sig's adoption clearly was not just a formality. It was during the name-gifting adoption ceremony that he gained access to their Invested abilities of absorbing and releasing Investiture even from the souls of other beings. As a sidenote, does Zellion sound like a portmanteau of zealous and Apollyon to anyone or is that just me? In my opinion, the real irony of handing out that name is that for anyone who reads TSM but not the postscript might go off and use the cool name for their username for games or forums and never realize that they just stole one of Brandon's standard internet handles. It's pretty cool that it hasn't happened yet on 17th Shard. So I don't just drown out @Oltux72, I'll keep this conversation going as well, though I've already said 98% of my core piece - that there are a lot of unknowns. Do you know how spacefaring navigation works in the Cosmere? How each of the different ships (Rosharan, Scadrian, Threnodite, etc.) achieves FTL or refuels or any of their other resource constraints? It seems unlikely that the first Zellion lead by force considering how unaggressive the Threnodites of Canticle are without Cinderhearts, so does the commentary on if Zellion should have been shot change at all based on if he was fully supported by his fellow refugee emmigrants or if he tried to manipulate them into following him? Do you know the proximity of Canticle in relation to Threnodite and the relative range of the emmigrant ships? Should every leader of a pilgrim organization who due to ideological reasons flees to an unknown foreign land be summarily executed for recklessness? Since you mention Jim Jones, I hope you won't mind me continuing in the same thread, groups leaving for ideological reasons to settle relatively unexplored territory describes the ancestors of several major religious groups and for some of them it worked - the U.S. celebrates the pilgrims every year on Thanksgiving for settling America while seeking religious freedom. I might add, Threnodites almost certainly take heavy inspiration from some of these religious groups, and yes, I do make a distinction between cyanide poisoning and the unfortunate condition of Canticle that makes Threnodite souls amazing battery packs. Even Nomad as an outsider saw the terrible logic and circumstances that led to the sacrifices that kept their cities outpacing the sun. Is trailblazing reckless? Absolutely, and expansion is built on the bones of the trailblazers, as discussed in SotD. Could Zellion be an utterly insane charismatic zealot who didn't have sufficient caution or foresight? Absolutely. Could the ideological difference that caused the nonaggressive-minded Canticle Threnodites to leave have been the formation of The Night Brigade with weaponized Shades? Maybe, even plausible. Could the stop at Canticle have been merely meant as a pause in their journey to try to figure out how to safely refuel using the Investiture from the sun but then was disrupted by I don't know, the fact that the planet's gravitational field follows a frankly unscientific curve unexplanable without Investiture and is far stronger than it should be from the visible size of the planet and maybe instead of smoothly landing they just crashed and damaged their ships because the gravitation and geology of this planet doesn't match anything we've ever seen anywhere else in the Cosmere? Okay, rant over, it just really bothers me when people say that someone is worthy of death when so little is actually known about them or the circumstances they were making decisions in. You might say the new Zellion came to Canticle in an incredibly reckless blind flying Skip for ideological reasons like "this planet-destroying group shouldn't be given access to a Dawnshard" and he resorted to consuming at least a couple of souls to escape.

The question remains why Adolin and Shallan's group didn't take a spanreed and check-in when they were traveling to Lasting Integrity? Even if CR to PR communication didn't work, Urithiru could have had a Radiant and scribe pop into Shadesmar to ask for a report CR to CR. Testing Spanreed operation in Shadesmar seems simple enough to easily test: One Radiant at Urithiru, the other transported via Oathgate to Thaylen City, they scribble something to validate PR to PR contact, one jumps to Shadesmar via Oathgate, they test. If nothing happens the Radiant in PR uses Oathgate to jump to Shadesmar to test CR to CR. Seems like something you check before a Highprince, his wife and a team of Radiants leave for a diplomatic mission with no reason to be incommunicado. You'd think Navani at least would have made sure to be able to get updates on Adolin and Shallan. This doesn't mean that no one thought of it, but this seems like pretty basic procedure.

I'll note that Nomad's entire story is full of him trying to repress his pain at losing his loved ones and doing a pretty poor job of it. At the beginning he continuously attempts to fight or use his Radiant abilities, despite the implication that he lost the Surges when Aux was nearly killed while his Torment grows stronger. We can see how much hurt, anger, and betrayal he feels at learning that Wit, his master basically used him and left for the wolves, and he still repeatedly refers to Wit as his master. Centuries after his time serving in Bridge Four and he tries so hard not to think about his friends - and then he immediately and reflexively thinks Wit is Kal. He performs the Chasm Kata ending with the Bridge Four salute still missing his friends. I'll also note that at one point he uses all of his Investiture stores to protect a ship from the sun leaving him a normal, Tormented, bonded man, meaning he can't be using Breath to store centuries of memories. Alternately he just lost those memories as surely as Elegy's memories were fully burned away while saving Rebeke. I'm no psychologist with experience dealing with grief, repression, or memory issues for multi-century aged Invested people, but I think a case could be made that maaaaybe Sig has a few screws loose in this department. Perhaps this is just a natural coping mechanism when he's literally been running for his life for however long the Night Brigade have been chasing him in their nice chairs on their FTL capable ships. Watching Nomad and figuring out that he was Sigzil felt like seeing Marsh alive again at the end of TFE. Glad my old friend is still alive, but horrified at how much our time apart had hurt and changed him until he was barely recognizable. Adding Aux to Sigzil's list of lost friends along with Kal and the rest of Bridge Four seems right and it looks like he'll keep hurting, running, and repressing because he's trying to stay alive, protect his loved ones by staying away from them, and keeping the Dawnshard away from a group that wipes out planets. That man needs a break, I hope he gets to sit down for longer than 3 hours soon and really process and recuperate, but I wouldn't count on it.

For discussion purposes, let's assume that all Dawnshards give the threshold boosts based on Investiture level that Nomad had and that Nightblood indeed has similar effects in play. That might explain a few things regarding Nightblood. Physical Enhancement / durability / healing Nightblood is way more durable than Steel should account for. Yes, there's Investiture density at play, and yes, Investiture resist's Investiture, and yes, most things that contact him get consumed, but this seems plausible. He blocked and damaged an Honorblade as we all know. Enhancement of Connection Nightblood can communicate to everyone he's in close proximity if he so chooses. Language is no barrier to him. Azure talks as if her blade can communicate, but I'm not sure if we've seen anyone other than Azure confirm this to be the case. I'm not really counting spren communicating with Azure's Blade, because Syl has conversed with Kaladin's spears and pointed out his limited understanding on the gender of his weaponry. Augmentation of external abilities (I'm iffy on whether or not all Radiants can augment the size of their Shardblade using Investiture, or if that's a Dawnshard boost) Again, tenuous, but Nightblood can even augment his Aluminum sheath to be weaponized, allowing the blunt metal to cut through skin and bone. That's weird. I guess fabrials can augment metal into Halfshards, but almost certainly not with Aluminum. Ability to use any Investiture (apparently Nomad could drain souls, so he now fits Lift's definition of a Voidbringer) Nightblood's hallmark. Interestingly this process can exceed his natural carrying capacity putting him in a supersaturated state. Skipping Haven't seen it yet, but... a teleporting Nightblood would be terrifying if he figured it out. He's definitely past this threshold in terms of raw Investiture. Not saying that this is at all definitive, but mapping out Nomad's Dawnshard threshold boosts onto Nightblood's known abilities isn't that difficult. From Nomad and Aux's discussion it seemed like Nomad's Oaths were workarounds for his Torment, so perhaps Nightblood's Command similarly could override similar restrictions (who knows). For that matter, Nightblood could "freeze up" and no one would know. Basically, it may be premature to assume that Nightblood is a specific Dawnshard, though presumably no one has figured out how to extract the thing so it's almost certainly not the Change Dawnshard or the one that Hoid and Nomad held.

Connection can Connect you to a region and location, but I'm guessing it would take a lot to brute force a Connection to a person that involves changing the degree that they trust or accept you, like unchained Bondsmith brute forcing. I doubt most Connection hacks allow you to bypass the natural protections and resistance that another person's Spiritweb undoubtably has to prevent such intrusion, since you'd have to overwrite portions of their memory and Identity. Sound anything like the Charred and the cinderhearts that we know are derived from tech available to the Scadrians in use by the Cinder King (some variant on the principles of using Hemalurgic spikes to control people and Connection)? It's definitely possible to force Connection, but I think it would take an incredible amount of power and finesse to brute force trust and acceptance without damaging the underpinnings of why people trust each other in the first place, their personal history with the person, how their own identity has been slightly changed by their association with the person. Without those components, it seems it would be very likely for people to try to break out of the "trust spell" made by artificial Connection. Quite a few components of TSM are about Connection and the distinctions between giving, receiving, and taking Connection. I'm leaning towards @Treamayne's interpretation that like becoming an Elantrian, the ability to access the particular powerset of these Threnodites required acceptance on their behalf. Up until Nomad finally got a powersource and Aux got his Connection up and running, he barely recognized anything about the Cinder King, Rebeke, or any of the people. Forming a Connection to the planet allowed him to speak their language, recognize the Threnodite heritage, maybe even understand the people and the planet better, it's hard to say how much was Connection and how much was being able to stop and pay attention while not being dragged around on fire or being shot at. My take is that people in the Cosmere have natural barriers, and 99% of the time if you need to get someone to trust you it's best using relatively mundane methods, being able to speak their language, understand their culture, try to form actual relationships with the individual. Connection makes it easier for bonds to form, in part because mutual understanding, communication, and recognition of historical background do genuinely make it easier to form relationships as opposed to the foreigner who speaks foreign words. If you think about it, and I am repeating myself a bit, in order to genuinely force someone to trust or accept you, you'll need to change far more than Connection. You'll need to write into their memories why they should trust you, otherwise it will never stick and probably would make no sense if they stopped to think about it at all. Yes, you can cheat and use Emotional Allomancy like Hoid almost certainly does, but creating new memories with they people by doing things that genuinely would help them choose to trust you is far easier and less intrusive then forcibly implanting memories and Identity modification. I'm sure it's possible to perform an alteration of a single person's memories to create artificial trust, but doing so for an entire community would take a tremendous amount of work and skill assuming you don't want the lies to be discernable. That's a lot of work when being the eccentric bard works almost as well. Side note, I'm kind of sad if this is the case, but I'm now wondering if one of the reason that Hoid spent so much time with Shallan, helping her to deal with her fractured mind and self-loathing, particularly when telling the story of The Girl who Looked Up, is if he needed the "Rosharan special invitation" by becoming sufficiently accepted by Shallan to become one of her squires in order to bypass a foreigner / high-personal-Investiture restriction on bonding Design the Cryptic. This is mostly just passing thought, there probably isn't anything conclusive since I don't think we know of another foreigner who has bonded a Spren and Hoid is the outlier in nearly every circumstance he places himself in. So devices that manipulate Connection to greater extent than simply Linguistic Connection are rare. That implies that either F-Duralumin medallions are rare devices, or (more likely in my opinion) that F-Duralumin medallions are incapable of such manipulation. Whether regular F-Duralumin would be capable of it is a question, though I think not. Same quote, different highlight, isn't this a known or suspected constraint of medallion tech, that either they can be filled or tapped but not necessarily both, or is that just my own internal interpretation? In this case Nomad wants to force an outward Connection that siphons from his soul rather than accepting a new inward one.

Hard agree. If there's anything we should have learned from Stormlight Archive it's that history's view on events, decisions, and people can be distorted almost beyond all recognition, particular if Brandon's involved. There are almost certainly elements of truth to the story, clearly they got here and managed to survive chasing the sun, which either requires existing tech or insane inventing speed when hours are the countdown to death. Who knows why the children of Threnody ended up on Canticle as opposed to another planet, we (at least I) don't even know why Nomad ended up there. Why is that planet even habitable (technically) to begin with? There's so much weirdness with that planet, maybe there's some Connection thing that draws Investiture to the core and it hijacked not only Nomad's Skip but the Threnodite immigrants. What I'm wondering is their talk of how they used to be able to survive in direct sunlight, since that seems like ancient tech that for some reason hardly anyone knows about. What's going on there? The echo of Zellion emerging from the sunlight probably means something, but who do we know that could survive that if that can kill the previous holder of a Dawnshard? There's just so many unknowns, it's like trying to predict Rosharan history just from WoK, but with less material.

Am I the only one that thought The Machine was built from spirits? At least in part? When Yumi summons the spirits the first time in the book, she asks some of the spirits to basically turn into a remote control aerial drone. So long as she could describe the function of the object adequately, just about anything could be made from a spirit. In fact we know that the prototype was powered by Hion - which is spirit. That seems like a pretty good indicator of Awakened tech, given it's objects with at least semi-intelligent Investiture operating according to a set of instructions (a Command if you will). In this case it's getting a lazy(er) yoki-hijo to sponsor some spirits with the promise that you are trying to build a machine to stack rocks so they can escape the life of a yoki-hijo. In fact I wouldn't be surprised at all if the whole fiasco with the Machine and the Shroud was caused by well-meaning friends and family members of one or more yoki-hijo that were disturbed by the life style they had been made to live.

I know this is roleplay and that I have stick-in-the-mud tendencies, but don't forget that many of you proudly proclaim that you are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in your signature. I'd hope that anyone that knows any of you would just laugh and know it's just fun and games, but I also know that the church is still periodically portrayed as a cult. I wandered in here from the "new topic" bar and quirked an eyebrow before I confirmed what was really going on. Anyway, for anyone who stumbled upon this scene of violence and bloodshed, consider this the obligatory statement that (hopefully) nothing here represents the opinions or practices of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or the 17th Shard. You may resume the stabbing or stab prevention. Thank you. Unless Edema Rue is genuinely traumatized by the prospect of so many of her once friends and associates turning on her for no apparent cause other than the cry for ritualistic murder, then maybe we need to rethink this, ideally not over a bleeding corpse when math needs to be happening.

You have been warned. I've been thinking about Yumi and the Nightmare Painter for a while now and have attempted several times to write down what some of the themes mean to me as I see them as echoes of my family. We'll see if the threads tie back together, but as of now it's a jumbled tangle and I'm not sure if they will. There's been several posts about elements of YatNP that people strongly dislike. My goal is not to persuade you or diminish your experience, but it would be very inaccurate to say that my thoughts didn't develop from reading your posts and pondering on why I didn't have the same dislike. This is me sharing my one data point, and I don't intend to diminish yours. With the introduction and qualifiers that are practically reflexive done, I'll set a reminder for the conditions we find Yumi and Painter at the beginning of their stories, because I think a reinforcement of their environments is worth the time. Yumi is a yoki-hijo. She is one of 14 girls in Komashi who have the power to bind spirits in a land where the ground literally boils water. Yumi travels from village to village performing ritual ceremonies to improve her ability to draw the hijo, spirits who can take the shape of just about any object if properly described. We first see her summon 37 spirits (undoubtedly her average was far lower 1700 years earlier) that she binds into items to provide the villagers with tools necessary to function and perform their professions - lights, lifters, fliers for farmers, etc.. One man had been without light for 6 years. This is Yumi's society where the yoki-hijo are integral to supporting the people. Think about the difficulties inherent to resource acquisition for mining, harvesting wood from floating trees, or watering crops when the ground would boil water. Nikaro is a Nightmare Painter. He is one in dozens if not hundreds of Nightmare painters, and his role is about as necessary as the mall security officer or the fire fighter. He reports to a foreman and walks his patrol looking for Nightmares to banish back to the shroud. His work is important, but dismissible. He can be put on probation or fired and Kilahito wouldn't suffer for it. No one would notice (so long as his patrol area was appropriately covered). I'll get to talking about Liyun, but first some personal family history. I'm Yonsei, or 4th generation Japanese American. My grandparents were Nisei, or 2nd generation Japanese Americans living in America during WWII. If you have ever been to Manzanar, Topaz, or any of the other Japanese internment camps that were established in the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor, you might begin to grasp what my grandparent's teenager years were like. If you haven't, then the conditions are a matter of public record, biography, video, and documentary, look up Manzanar. After the war, my grandmother was very strict when raising her four children, including my mother. She often cited her reason for her rules that "they needed to prove that they were good American citizens". My mother has... emotional baggage from growing up, and she made a point to not raise me under similar conditions. As an adult now raising my own daughter, I ask myself how I might have responded had I been in the situation that my grandmother found herself in a suspicious country following a world war. How would I have explained to my daughter that because of how she looks, she could be bullied and ostracized? That if we were to show hints of disloyalty to our country that we could be taken from our home and left in basically a prison camp? How would I explain to her that the choices she made as a child may impact far more than her but could impact the lives of all the Japanese Americans if suspicions arose that the Japanese immigrants were spies? In my family, through the grapevine with my point of contact being my mother, I heard snippets of how Manzanar affected the Nisei. There were many, many Japanese who were angry and bitter for years if not decades after Manzanar, but that was not my family heritage for two reasons. Reason 1: my grandparents said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did what he had to do. They saw and understood that terrible circumstances had forced President Roosevelt to make a difficult choice and they did not begrudge him for the one he made. Reason 2: my grandparents and their families sought for and found opportunities precisely because they chose not to be bitter. I had relatives who served in the war including the 442nd Japanese Regiment. My uncle Taira became an army medic by lottery and while he had little to no prospects before the war, he used his military training to become a medical doctor. I heard stories of how some of my family had been living in poverty prior to the relocation and that some of the younger kids were delighted to be able to eat 3 meals a day and would sometimes run as fast as they could between the 3 meal tents to get seconds and thirds before the lines closed down. My family found opportunities because of the stringent circumstances imposed upon them. Now let's actually talk about Liyun. Again I ask, how does a parent raise a child whose choices will impact your entire society? Liyun knew of the other 13 yoki-hijo, knew that they had reduced their standards, and that the average spirits summoned by other yoki-hijo was decreasing, yet the people relied on the summoning of those spirits to sustain their society's infrastructure. Liyun, held not only Yumi, but herself to an incredibly high standard to sustain the cities that needed spirits as they worked at a grueling pace, Liyun denying the visit to the festival to not only Yumi but herself. At Liyun's core, what she did was protect and care for the yoki-hijo. Please understand, I'm not condoning the way that Liyun raised Yumi, or necessarily the way my grandmother raised my mother, or even President Roosevelt's decision to place Japanese Americans in internment camps. I'm not condoning raising a child to adhere to a high standard at any cost, but I find myself being more stern then I want to be when I shout and jarringly grab my toddler to stop her from running into oncoming traffic. I know I don't give good explanations because I don't want to explain to a toddler in graphic detail what exactly can happen if she gets hit by a car. I have not yet found the knack for making fun games out of the rules I need to enforce for my own child's safety. I had known the pieces of my family history as it relates to Manzanar, but it was considering Liyun's motives that I now think that sometimes when parents hold children to high standards it's because they perceive harsh circumstances that will crush those who have not grown to those standards. This might be society, the job market, plague, or war. This is not always the case, sometimes forced obedience has nothing to do with helping the child grow or become a better person or more capable. Nor am I necessarily condoning forced obedience. Agh. Parenting is hard and I don't have good ways to explain it. I'll phrase it this way: Stormlight Archive spoilers: Liyun raised Yumi. (pretty sure) Liyun learned the principles of rock stacking and taught Yumi how to stack rocks. Liyun stayed with Yumi during the entirety of the first stacking we see (minus a trip to the bathroom) and was the one who would have brought Yumi home after she collapsed. I may be reading into it and extrapolating too far, but while Yumi bathed and prayed in ceremony, Liyun was presumably arranging passage to the next city and acquiring the necessary supplies to provide for Yumi's entourage. Liyun was training Yumi to be able to save her people, which she did. Yumi did what no other could have done because of how Liyun raised and trained her. Do I think that there are better ways to teach a child? Yes. Do I think there is emotional damage involved and that parents should not model Liyun? Absolutely. That said, raising someone to a high standard is not abuse, though the methods that people use can be abusive. I'm not a therapist, but the way I currently would check: is there a double standard that is not explainable by logical circumstance? e.g. Liyun cannot stack the rocks for Yumi, she is not the yoki-hijo and cannot summon forth the spirits. Is there an external stimulus that warrants adherence to the standard? e.g. mask compliance on air planes at the height of the pandemic. When someone is holding another person to a high standard these are some of the metrics I might use to try to understand why the standard exists in the first place. I also think that unless there is clear cause to believe that a person will have reduced autonomy (mental impairment for example), over time responsibility and the freedom to choose for themselves should be given to the person being raised. For me as a son, it means that when my parents give me counsel or impose standards on me, if I feel the urge to reject them then I need to stop and understand what the underlying reason for the standard in the first place. Kind of a tangent from the rest of this post, but I do wonder if many complaints about Yumi, and Painter's behavior come down to how much you believe that the yoki-hijo had an indispensable role in aiding society. Yumi believed it. Painter didn't understand it, nor did he comprehend that his behavior in Yumi's body could leave villages without light or essential equipment. In contrast, no one cared if Painter didn't show up for work. While his profession was essential, his employment was trivial right up until stable Nightmares started trying to kill people. Yumi didn't really respect Painter or understand or believe that he did dangerous and vital work until the stable Nightmare almost killed her. Even the other Nightmare Painters didn't take the job too seriously up until the horde of Nightmares walked out of the shroud, why would Yumi think that what Nikaro did was important and vital if no one else treated it as such? I think as they understand each others' similar roles in society that they begin to better understand and respect each other. Moving on, I'll address why I do think that Yumi coming back to life is a subversion of the trope, as well as why I'm glad it happened and why the trope gives me some concern in the first place. In many if not most religions, media, and stories we laud people who choose to sacrifice. We laud people who sacrifice time, energy, and resources to help the needy. We give honors and medals to people who sacrifice the lives in war or rescue situations. Media has hundreds if not thousands of examples of the heroic or noble sacrifice. In the Cosmere we have (spoilers of course): In YatNP, the singular act that made the escaped spirit choose to Connect Yumi and Painter was that Painter chose to risk his life to save a boy from a Nightmare. The same Nightmare that almost killed Akane, Tojin, and Yumi, Painter chose confront basically alone not once, but three times. I do think these choices to put the needs of another above your own are heroic, and are integral to some of the best people and stories we have to offer, and in no way do I want to diminish these people and the choices they made. What I worry is that heroic self-sacrifice of a life can be a subtle form of escapism. I worry that Painter's brand of disregard for personal safety comes from depression and passive suicidal ideation. As I heard described, passive suicidal ideation in some cases can be characterized by a person not planning out their death, but not being particularly upset if circumstances led to their death. I worry Painter patrols in solitude, "the lone warrior" consciously or subconsciously hoping to die heroically to prove he wasn't worthless to society. I worry that in other circumstances if he genuinely had been rejected from the Dreamwatch for insufficient skill he would have died trying to save that boy, or been consumed when he interposed himself between Akane, Tojin, and Nightmare Liyun. I worry that the reason that Painter so easily offers up his life in trade for others is because he believes his life is of little value, discolored copper coins offered in exchange for silver and gold. Yes, Nikaro hurt his friends deeply by his lies of omission (I could probably write a whole thread on how lies of omission and the lies we believe about others and ourselves are the real Nightmares, but I've rambled long enough). I'm not saying that Nikaro's friends had any responsibility to provide this, but by withholding their friendship and omitting their presence from his life they left Nikaro working a dangerous profession in isolation at times working totally alone. For this, I'm grateful for Akane who continued to keep tabs on him, even though she had been hurt by him. I worry too that perhaps too much focus is placed on the people who suffered the result of their heroic sacrifice and not enough on the decision they made to sacrifice. Two firefighters run into a burning building, one dies, the other lives, should we honor either any less for the decision to risk their lives? Like Kilahito, we don't provide that much support for the emergency responders that live. For me, Yumi's choice to break the shroud and risk dissolution is not in any way diminished by her surviving to eat noodles the next day. I worry that both Yumi and Painter (less so Yumi) suffer from passive suicidal ideation, and I'm glad that Yumi chose to find and seek a meaningful life. I worry too many media sources offer heroic self-sacrifice as an escape that allows people to remember the dead fondly but still ends up with the person dead. The decision to run into danger without worry of risk to self is lauded in media, but when I received training for emergency disaster response, we were drilled repeatedly to check scene safety, precisely because in the event of a disaster like an earthquake, there's the initial mass injury and casualty from the event, and then there are not infrequently a spike injuries and casualties as first responders enter dangerous areas or overextend themselves and die. More tragically, with some simple steps like remember to turn off utilities, those deaths could have easily been prevented. Don't get me wrong, I would probably give up my life for my wife and daughter, and therein lies the danger to me if I should ever need to stop and check to see if there was a way to save all three of us. If you're reading this, thanks for reading to the end. As always, I'm one point of data. My experience does not invalidate your own, I'm just speaking as a 4th generation Japanese American and deal with my own version of perfectionism, depression, and passive suicidal ideation. If anything strikes a cord, feel free to DM me. And yes, I already have access to my local suicide hotline, so we can pass on that. Thank you.

I feel like that this should be obvious but I haven't figure out where to find it. Where are the correct places, formats, and schedules to ask Brandon a question for a WoB? Particularly for his spoiler streams, I haven't figured out when and where to ask my questions.

This line makes me think Jasnah's lunacy is supernatural in origin. I can believe Gavilar might do something like this to Jasnah, but I have a harder time believing Navani would have forgotten this if Gavilar was at fault. Navani, who bemoaned that Jasnah withdrew from her and didn't really allow her to be her mother, does not remember this childhood illness as a factor for their emotional distance. The fact that no one in the royal palace but Jasnah remembers this period of her life has me leaning towards not just just glimpses unto Shadesmar or the beginning of bonding a spren, but maybe one of the Unmade was at work. Maybe one of the ones we don't know much about like Dai-Gonarthis or Chemoarish. Maybe it was whatever Unmade that was making House Davar weird and wrong. Jasnah is 17 years older than Shallan, so that's plenty of time for an Unmade to mess up the home of one of the most powerful families on Roshar before moving over to wreck another home and childhood. If it is the same Unmade that made Jasnah and Shallan's childhoods broken, there could be interesting some interesting relationship dynamic and conflict resolution bringing them to work together more closely again in Jasnah's book. Shallan has serious memory issues and perhaps not all of it is repression if memory alteration is present for Jasnah's case as well. There could be some cool story telling devices and role reversals ahead of Shallan has to teach Jasnah how to identify personal truth from falsehood.

Question 1; Question 2: Question 3: I do have two questions, though the original is almost a year old: Do you care at all about a poster's reputation when reading a thread? Do you find that you pay more attention to people with impressive titles like Shardbearer or Mistborn rather than a lowly Oldblood or Forerunner? I suspect there's an element of authority that comes from a high post count and high reputation - even if that post count and reputation was 80% posting cat videos and memes to followers (not disparaging anyone who does that). What is your opinion on the "most popular contributor" rankings? Do you like the system? Do you think it encourages behavior that should be promoted on 17th Shard?

I find that debatable. Elend had relatively little training and he was still fighting off Inquisitors with decades of experience. Elend was more powerful, yes, but he also was a prodigy with the rate he learned, just not on the same scale as Vin. Was Elend sufficiently Connected to Preservation to Ascend? Probably not, he hadn't had the attuning effect of the Well of Ascension. Vin certainly was, and she was as you say, the prodigy. I could be wrong, but Vin also seemed to get more intrinsic understanding of how to function as Preservation than Kelsier. Kelsier who only had a tie to the Cognitive Realm and only could Ascend using borrowed Connection. That said, I don't think just adding more Connection to a powerset will improve Investiture efficiency any more than I would expect Szeth and his group of Windrunners to gain a greater inherent understanding of Roshar just from Ishar Connecting them to the ground. Clearly there are different kinds of Connection as emotional bonds don't physically glue people together, though Bridge Four at times have been more united most glue bonds. Well, I don't think that is acutally the case. The only Invested art where more Shards Investiture leads to some knowledge of Invested Art is Awakening. In no other Invested Art do we see anything like that happening, nor anyone mentions it. More Connection or more access to Shardic Investiture? Those are two separate concepts. In most cases this could simply be a matter of scale. Returned are some of the more highly Invested beings in the Cosmere that we see, and they don't have access to the Instinctive Awakening available to the 6th Heightening. In fact, they need 1.75 times more Investiture than what they current have to obtain the 6th Heightening (5th: 2000, 6th: 3500). YatNP spoiler: I think the Trusk'our's idea still has potential merit, but to obtain that degree of Investiture is extremely difficult for nearly every magic system that we've seen. Maybe a huge amount of targeted Connection could create a similar effect to 6th Heightening instinctive Awakening, but until Bondsmiths get out more we may not see how exactly this all shakes out. A few cases of individuals with apparently greater than average Connection to a Shard and the Shard's Investiture that were unusually fast at learning: Raoden who learned AonDor and was tracing incredibly complicated formulas with less than 3 months of training while performing a benign take over of Elantris. He was the one who would start glowing as the Dor tried to force it's way through him like an Aon. He gets injured, goes Hoed, gets tossed in a Shardpool and gets a mental visualization of Elantris and the connected cities forming a giant Aon Rao. Coincidence, Connection, or just epic Sanderlanche? Vivenna who not only had a decent amount of Breaths but also had the blood of a Returned in her, was progressing faster than she should have by Vasher's experience. Vin, the prodigy and chosen Vessel to Ascend to Preservation was one of the most skilled Mistborn. Ever. Leras complemented Kelsier on his fight with a single Steel Inquisitor and that fight wasn't on the same scale as Vin fighting an entire Murder of Inquisitors solo.

Not all Returned have the Royal Locks. Yes, Returned with specific training and effort can alter their size and appearance, but this is a separate yet related trait to the unconscious color change connected to emotion seen in a person with Royal Locks. In order for Vasher to change his hair color he has to deliberately frame his self perception to be the black-haired scraggly miscreant we usually see him as. We don't see his hair bleed red with anger when he goes into a berserk rage when rescuing Nanrovah's daughter. We don't see Blushweaver's hair go white with terror when her throat was slit. We don't see Susebron's hair change when happy or passionate. We do see Denth's hair run a large range of colors from brown to red to yellow to white as he loses control while dying. That color change directly tied to emotional state, not self-perception, is the defining characteristic of the Royal Locks. As seen with Vivenna and Siri, that color change can be controlled so long as the individual retains control. If all Returned had the Royal Locks, I would expect to see color changes any time a Returned loses control, which I don't. Edit: Actually, the inciting incident for Warbreaker is the contract that required Idris to send a daughter to be married to the God-King because the Royal Locks are the mark of legitimacy of the Idrian claim on the throne of Hallendren. Susebron, God-King of Hallendren and no other Returned in the Court of Gods had the Royal Locks to make a more legitimate claim on the throne.

Yup, that's a logical issue to question. You're not the first. Slightly over a decade later, and we're still waiting to Read and Find Out, and it might be when Brandon writes Warbreaker 2, but at least a decade ago this particular question was on the list of things to be addressed in the future. I believe Warbreaker 2 will have more information on Arsteel and Yesteel, particularly with that plot hook at the end where Yesteel has devised a more potent form of ichor alcohol. Brandon has said quite a bit on plans for Warbreaker 2, so if you want to know what those are, that's already been pretty exhaustively researched in another thread (https://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/147947-what-do-you-want-to-see-in-a-warbreaker-sequel/), if you're avoiding those, I'll leave it at that. My current theory is that while Vasher doesn't remember who he is, Denth had the Royal Locks. It wouldn't take too much effort on Denth's part to look up the Royal Locks and the royal pedigree to try to figure out who he used to be. If for some reason the royal pedigree was obscured from him, presumably if Shashara was truly his sister, she would presumably also share the Royal Locks (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/117/#e1681). If two people with inherited color-changing hair indicative of the royal family meet each other, it isn't too big of a stretch to assume they're related. There of course could be more going on, but these two at least I can come up with a logical chain of events with known facts for them to figure this out. I'm far less sure on how Arsteel and Yesteel knew they were brothers, so there's still more for Brandon to reveal. Actually, it could be something as mundane as Arsteel and Yesteel died asynchronously and told each other their relationship after each death. Basically like if Lightsong had survived, Llarimar got killed and Returned, and Lightsong decided to just throw the rules out the window and told Llarimar that they were brothers. It's probably not that mundane, but there's plenty of non-magical means to figure out who you were prior to death. If one of you happens to be a world-class duelist before death like Arsteel could have been, that may be a matter of public fame and record too.

If you're talking about an actual physical prostheses that can be sold and marketed, then it becomes a question for why the prothesis is necessary in the first place. For any prothesis need that arose from a recent injury, get them to an Edgedancer, Truthwatcher, Regrowth Fabrial, or hand them a Unsealed Goldmind. If it's a long-term injury, with enough practice you might be able to give them a single Breath and have them store all of their memories of having to adapt to and adjust to life without the missing body part to remove the cognitive blocks on Invested healing and then heal them to full fitness. If the deficiency is congenital, then these workarounds to just heal the condition probably won't work short of infusion of a Divine Breath and that's unlikely statistically speaking. Okay, Shardic intervention, dying heroically on Nalthis and hope to be Returned, and a visit to the Nightwatcher probably could do the trick, but don't count on consistent results. Added this in later, but for theoretical purposes, we have Kandra prosthesis, which you yourself posited last year. Have a kandra take a bite, grow a new body part using spare bones, graft it on. In fact, if this is anywhere close to how Ulaam operates as ship's surgeon and can genuinely swap out eyes and kidneys, then get a Kandra surgeon to operate and we lose the need for a prosthesis, it's just called replacement surgery. If Kandra limb replacement is out, congenital cases may be the few circumstances where prostheses are the only viable solution if you have access to the varieties of Investiture systems. Then it depends on what exactly they need the prosthesis to do and where they live. If the goal is to provide the patient with as close to an analog to the missing limb as possible, that's separate from giving the patient the ability to perform Activities of Daily Living (ADL), the list of activities that allow a person to independently care for themselves. AonDor has a lot of solutions, but until we know for sure how to overcome the geographical constraints it has limited application. Awakening could do it, but for sheer versatility, giving a person a bunch of Breaths, a long sturdy rope with tassel cords on the ends, little cloth dolls, a glove, a stack of colored handkerchiefs, a jug of dye to recolor the handkerchiefs, and a crash course on Awakening would probably give them far more flexibility to perform ADL then a single Awakened limb replacement could. It might well be cheaper too, depending on the complexity of the Command to Awaken the prothesis, and give them all of the other quality of life improvements that a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Heightening would provide when they are not actively using Awakened Objects to do jobs for them. Hemalurgic spike through the eye socket granting Steelsight is one of the earlier "prosthetics" we've seen in use in the Cosmere, but that has nontrivial ethical constraints on acquiring the spikes. Depends on what you're going for, but one of the most straightforward and versatile prostheses is to become a Roseite Aetherbound. Silajana can see via the Roseite and describe what is going on to you if visual assistance is necessary, and Roseite can provide all sorts of quality of life improvements, almost certainly including limb replacement. Being able to form utensils, dishes, pen nibs, glasses, etc. from Roseite means the person in need of a prothesis may not need to move to acquire tools for activities of daily living as frequently. Being able to create a chair on command to use to sit down also can be very handy for toileting, bathing, or just resting. The fact that the Aether vanishes after use means you don't even need to clean up after yourself. Someone mute could just write with Roseite as a communication method. With water as the only maintenance cost, locality and maintenance on the prothesis isn't even a concern if you were planning on surviving with accessible water anyway. It's a bit telling that the first Roseite Aetherbound we see is a geriatric and is still highly capable. Again, it depends on what exactly you need the prothesis to do, where the recipient lives, recipient's pertinent medical history, acceptable production and maintenance costs on the prosthesis, and probably more. Overall though, Invested healing is generally preferred, then surgery with a Kandra expert, while prostheses are pretty low down the list.

@ThatRedHead717, Excellent logical deduction, though as Hoid notes people favor novelty and timeliness. I for one am in favor of when people independently come up with cool ideas, even if other people have thought of it before. In this case, people generally agree with this idea and have done so for at least 8 months. I personally made a thread that tried to extrapolate further on what this could mean on a larger Cosmere scale as Taldain interacts with Lumar's resources. At any rate, good reasoning!

Related ethics question to confiscation. Hypothetically if you did have a Koloss group that was expanding their numbers by forcibly creating new spikes and Koloss, how exactly would you recommend that Elendel conducts this audit and confiscation? Such a policy would by necessity have enforcement procedures. To my view the ethics of this question should be separated into different categories. 1. Legal consequences of Hemalurgically spiking an attribute out of person without their consent. This can be separated from straight murder, but those often go together. 2. Legal consequences of transforming another person Hemalurgically without their consent. Severity based on the effect on the victim and reversability, e.g. giving someone A-Pewter vs turning them into a Koloss vs turning them into a chimera. 3. Determining culpability for crimes committed when reduced cognitive function is confirmed and the possibility exists for a third parry to have been in control of the perpetrator(s). As an example, I knew a guy in his twenties, mentally handicapped, and around 6' 6" and fairly strong. The neighborhood kids talked him into going into the local bakery and stealing the cash register. I was walking with a couple of friends and one of my friends talked him into taking the cash register back. As far as I know, no charges were pressed so I don't know how a judge or police officer would have handled that, but it serves as a possible real world example of what we're discussing. Particularly if strength enhancement and mental handicap was offered as elective surgery. Control of Hemalurgy might be a hot topic in Era 3 and 4, so discussion of ethics can include more than just the current situation seen in Era 2. Do you put safe guards up in the event a group of Soothers comes and tries to rob a bank with a group of Koloss they commandeered? Do you hand out aluminum hats or coats to Koloss and remove one of the better ways to non-lethally stop a Koloss? I don't know the answers, but the questions are far deeper than just cultural preservation of Koloss.

Thanks! Also, thanks for giving the seed for this idea. Digging into it a bit further, duralumin has a pretty low melting point, only 350-380 C and is easily malleable. I'm no metallurgist or blacksmith, but I think this would let you take your bead of non-duralumin metal, dip it in molten Duralumin, let it partially cool, then press shell halves of the next metal on as the new layer. Dip in the molten Duralumin again, repeat until it has enough charges for what you want and can still be swallowed. Where this doesn't work is for metals that have a lower melting point that duralumin which I think includes tin, zinc, bendalloy, and pewter. However, as mentioned earlier, duralumin is quite malleable and can be rolled into sheets. Encase these softer metal shells in a sheet of duralumin prior to dipping the bead in the liquid duralumin and let it age harden. Hopefully should work? Might need to sand down the duralumin between layers, but I suspect later on it wouldn't be too difficult to mass produce these kinds of beads, fine tuning the charge in each layer by weight. Someone like Ranette could invent the concept, but once the techniques are known it should be relatively easy for any metallurgist to produce these. I could see a few options working there. with how you describe layering alternate metals without the duralumin sandwich. That might be a simpler method - with the caveat that sandwiching with a burnable "blank" metal like Duralumin is necessary to fire an enhanced burst of Allomancy and then get near immediate access to the metal that just barely was consumed. I'm making an assumption that as the body burns metal beads, it starts at the surface of the metal and works its way in. If you had a iron nail stuck in a chunk of lead, I would expect that you would burn the head of the nail first and then the metal itself burns down the shaft into the interior of the lead, but I'm going off of that WoB at the top. Duralumin burns at a constant rate, so I assume it would burn the surface of a sphere equally up until it exposed the next layer and the Duralumin rod. That's how I'm visualizing it, but I'm open to other interpretations. I would be interested to see what everyone's preferred loadouts, especially if they figure out how to work around Identity contamination with Hemalurgy and Compounding becomes a thing again. Say... if we were building a loadout for Marsh. Compounding and storing the compounded attribute takes time. Hypothetically if Marsh had a steel/duralumin bead, in a pinch if his Steelmind was running low, I think he could store Steel into the bead, burn it with Duralumin, and immediately recharge his Steelmind before getting access to A-Steel again by burning the sandwich layer. Duralumin while compounding: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/34/#e5901 I agree with most of these in isolation, but you can do some cool things when added together. For example, I imagine that Duralumin enhanced Allomancy is LOUD to a Seeker. Adding some copper to each of your layers would let you generate an enhanced coppercloud at the exact moment you used your enhanced Pewter, Steel, or Brass. Unless you want every Seeker in the city currently burning to know exactly where you are and what you are doing, adding in Copper will help. If Dumad had bothered using Duralumin with his Leeching attempts on Wayne he would have figured out a lot earlier that Wayne had way more stores than he had, rather than trying to burn away his stores in stages. Leeching with Duralumin would let you shorten the necessary contact time but still have dosed charges. Cadmium in isolation is probably a bad choice - unless you also have Bendalloy. Before chucking Cadmium out, I'd check if you can do a modified version of the stunt that Marasi and Wayne did where Marasi froze a group of baddies and Wayne could drop sections of them back into real time. What I don't know is if you need to have Savant level Bendalloy control to pull this off, or if the time bubble diameters allow you put up Bendalloy bubble, walk to the edge, put up Cadmium, and then walk out through the normal space created by the intersection. Making an asymmetric shield of frozen time could be VERY useful. I'm sure there's some useful combat applications to effectively putting a section of space into isolation for a week. Think running away from pursuit, run through a door in a bunker or down an alley and then pop up a frozen time shield isolating the entrance for a week. I think the shield would just stay up even you walk away, but I'm iffy on that one and open to alternative outcomes. That said, having access to Bendalloy does reduce the overall coolness of this bead design since Bendalloy gives you a breather to replenish your metals anyway unless fighting another speedster.

TLM spoilers: Mistborn SH spoilers:

Keep in mind that Raoden doesn't have all the answers to what's going on. There can be a massive hole in Raoden's logic without a massive hole in the world building. Yes, this can be frustrating at times, but not infrequently Brandon will reserve a section of underlying magic theory for sequels. I don't know if this actually how it works, but I imagine Elantris as a giant computer that is actively powering and sustaining the Elantrians. At the Reod the throughput of power and processing got crippled and the city is now trying to maintain all AonDor with scant resources. Ever used a really, really slow computer that takes forever to do anything, particularly if there's a bunch of background programs that run on startup? I think it's kind of like that. The Shaod has enough power to start the Elantrian transformation but not complete it. It has enough power to begin to heal the original Elantrian's wounds but not finish. Furthermore there's already a bunch of Aons targeting each Elantrian and there may even be a resolution priority tree. In the same way when you try to do something to an application that's frozen on a computer, even if it's closing it, sometimes it can't process the request and you have to manually end the processes associated with that program, something similar might be in place that prevented Raoden from using any Aons that directly targeted an Elantrian. We do know that AonDor is basically a magic programming language, my analogy could be spot on including the limitations, or it could be off, but it's how ai thought of it while reading the book.

You're talking about a process that a Shard is personally involved in and possible limits to that Shard's abilities. That's a probably RAFO right there. At least with organ loss we have this WoB: 2 logical range caps I can think of. Low end, the state of the body requires the body to be in a state healable by a Returned using their divine breath to heal another in a similar circumstance. In essence, the idea is that when Endowment sends down the Returned in their new state as Cognitive Shadow she goes with the most direct and cost-efficient route of using the transferal of the Divine Breath itself as the method to heal the body. Whatever the cutoff point is for a Returned healing an injury may be the same for Endowment causing someone to Return, with the additional qualifier that the body will be warped to fit the Returned Ideal complete with 5th Heightening health as seen with Lightsong's revival. I could be wrong, but if the body is in a circumstance where it is likely to die immediately (i.e. still in an industrial meat grinder), then that may impose further complications on the decision process. There's an element of volition on the parts of both the Returned and Endowment that may have them choose not to have someone Return even if it would technically be possible and very temporary. Upper end, we know that when a Vessel Ascends the body is vaporized. Somewhere that body is left as information within the Shard that allows it to reform and spit the body back out though no volition of the Vessel when the Vessel dies as seen with Leras, Vin, Ati, and Rayse (which honestly seems weird to me and worth exploring on a different thread). That said this doesn't happen with Kelsier who did not have a body pre-Ascension and did not get one back when descending. It seems totally plausible that there is sufficient information remaining either in the Spiritual aspect prior to passing to the Beyond or the Cognitive Shadow for Endowment to just build a new body and she almost certainly can meet the power requirements. Notably Heralds can recreate their bodies even after complete dismemberment, so if this is a restriction on Shards, then it implies that there's something special about the Heralds' circumstance as setup by Honor and Cultivation see https://wob.coppermind.net/events/360/#e10880. Not much more to say, since I answered with two more unknown ranges, what can a Returned heal and what can a Shard heal. I think it's quite possible that if Endowment wanted to she could recreate a body using a template taken from the Spiritual aspect of the deceased, but I don't know if she would be bothered to if she doesn't have to. I will note that we have a WoB that gives at least one way to interfere with the Returning process: