Gilphon

My assumption is that they've discovered something that's more practical than 'keep the spike in blood' thing. Like a way trick the spike so that it thinks it's in a body no matter what's actually happening. Or maybe you can do something weird with Intent or a bind point or the spike itself where the decay just doesn't happen period. 

If we assume that Bone Spores are indeed White Sand, I don't think it's truly a 13th Aether- that's comparable to how Rosharans would be see a Seon, I think. Seons are cognitive beings that form bonds with humans and the humans get a magical benefit out of that, so a Rosharan might be tempted to call them an 11th variety of Radiant Spren, but that's not really what they are.

Similarly, I think White Sand is similar to Aether because it's operating on the same underlying principles, but it's not quite the same thing. Like White Sand relies on an external power source but recharges quite easily, while an Aether spore seems to having an internal but finite amount of power. 

About the stains on Mraize's pants- At one point in Tress it's mentioned that if you let dead spores just lie there for long enough, they leave behind stains that are hard to clean out. I would imagine that's similar to what happened to Mraize.

I don't see why Autonomy would have to specifically purify the Investiture for the shardpool- if Radiants can use Voidlight and Returned can use Stormlight, why shouldn't Allomancers be able to use 'raw' Autonomy investiture? I think the shardpool is just a result of whatever mechanism she was using to make Trellium

I feel like there's a fairly obvious theory here that wasn't brought up- When Kelsier says that the Ghostbloods have put something into motion, he's referring to the Herald's death. (Which does of course make me think of a certain place where we know there was a Seon and Ghostblood agents and suspect that there was a Herald, but it doesn't have to be there; there were a bunch of Heralds around Kholinar and therefore within Thadiakar's reach, and the Ghostbloods might have other Seons.)

But regardless, it would make the timeline feel a lot less coincidental. A Herald did just coincidentally die the same night as Gavilar set a dozen plans into motion, she was killed by one of said plans. 

I've always thought that Trell the craftsman exists to show the origin of the name- The idea is that Trelagism originated from contact between Scadrial and Taldain, so their god ended up getting a Taldain name. And then that somewhat tenuous Connection made it the easiest religion for Autonomy to shape their Scadrian Avatar to match. 

I just wanted say that the scenario they gamed out this episode- where Moash gets overwhelmed by guilt and tries to sacrifice himself, but Kaladin saves him anyway and then they toss him in jail- strikes me as an entirely plausible one. 

Like I think that's a story that absolutely has room to happen within 10 days- the fact that his guilt is being supernaturally suppressed by a person who could choose to stop doing that at any time really helps to move the timeline forward.

And I don't know we'd even need to have him continue to be relevant in the back five after that. Like Kaladin's gonna be less important in the back five, so I'd expect a lot less Moash in the back five to.

And also think that it's entirely plausible that he's gonna look pitiful by the end of book five.

On 2021-03-09 at 4:22 PM, exilarchy said:

The "silver-nickel" alloy that you mention is used to house the gemstone. It's definitely possible that this metal is nicrosil, but I'm not certain of that. First off, IRL nicrosil isn't an alloy of nickel and silver. It's an alloy of nickel with chromium, silicon, and (sometimes) germanium. If the Fused don't make the alloy themselves, it's possible that they don't know the composition and are only assuming that it's an alloy of nickel and silver.

This is my assumption, yes. Or at the very least, I'm assuming that Raboniel doesn't know that it's not silver. Her expertise isn't exact metalworking, and Nicrosil isn't exactly an otherwise common material. I quite simply not buy for a second that an unknown silver-nickel alloy that's never been referred to before is going to turn out to be super-important for the future of magical technologies. Not when Nicrosil is right there and conducting Investiture is a basically perfect match for how it behaves in all three metallic arts.

And yes, it is clear that the dagger does use Raysium for something, but I think it's almost as clear that the 'silver-nickel alloy' is not as non-functional as Raboniel claims, so we're left without clarity on what metal does what. Though I think the biggest clue lies in the assumption I'm making that the stormlight-sucking are not using Raysium. Which leads me to the speculation that the Raysium is being used to make sure sentient beings like spren and heralds can't resist. That Nicrosil is good enough if you're just moving around stormlight, but not if you want to move a spren.

I'm sceptical that it's actually Raysium that's being used to the conduct investiture. Like the spears the Fused wield are made out of the 'silvery' metal, and the herald-killing dagger has what Raboniel claims is a 'nickel silver alloy' around the gemstone. 

So I think that it's actually Nicrosil that they're using. So they're not gonna have to rely on a Godmetal when it comes time to make Fabrial computers. 

On the differences between how Radiants and Fused Surgebind: my impression is that a Radiant in theory could do everything the Fused can, and vice-versa. But the 'internal' versions that the Fused use seem to be have a much lower Voidlight cost for them, so it's not necessarily a good idea for a Radiant to imitate that, and the Fused generally try to avoid the external versions in combat because energy efficiency is their main advantage over Radiants. 

I'd just like to give a shout-out to Ian for that point about the Deadeyes not appearing in Shadesmar while the Blade is summoned. 

Really, it gives a narrative purpose to that plot point of them not knowing how to bond blades at first- it meant that it took a lot longer for the Spren to figure out that Deadeyes were a thing. Which is why I'm convinced he must be right

A thing is that I've never really trusted Cultivation's intentions. I trust that she wants to improve Roshar in the long term. And I trusted that she saw Rayse as an enemy. Those two things were enough that she could be considered an ally to our heroes in the broad sense, but now that Rayse is no longer relevant, well, I really don't know if fulfilling her plans is in our protagonists' best interests anymore. 

What she sees as good for Roshar as a whole could very well be a bad thing for individual good people. That's very much the mindset her manipulations instilled in the man she hoped would become Odium; and it seems entirely plausible to me that her goal was to make Odium into someone who would be willing to cooperate with her.

I agree with the theory about Formless being a child, by the way.

Consider the case of Allomancy- Brandon's talked before about how the molecular structure of the metal acts as a Key that tells the investiture what to do. I would argue then, that for Allomancers, the Command is in the molecular structure, rather than any words.

And, to narrow my focus to Copper specifically because that's the best example what I'm talking about, the only decision a Smoker makes is whether or not to burn their Copper at any particular moment- that's the only place that Intent has a chance to be relevant. They Intend to use their Allomancy, and then they get Investiture from Preservation, and then the structure of Copper gives the Investiture a Command. 

And I think that's generally how it works- on the mortal scale, Intent usually just means 'choosing to use your magic powers', whereas Commands are where you get into the specifics about what your powers do. Radiant Oaths might be an exception to that, but I don't think Awakening is- if you were practicing commands and vizualization, but had no actual intention to give your Breaths away, I don't think anything would happen. Awakening, I think, is just a magic system where you have an unusual amount of flexibility in the Commands. 

But when you get into the levels of power not normally accessible to mortal, you start needing more sophisticated Intents- 'I'm using my magic now' is only good enough if you only have one form of magic available- at the relatively low end, this means a Radiant distinguishing between their two surges and summoning a Blade, or a Mistborn choosing between their metals. But Shards and other high-end beings have a lot more freedom than that.

My theory is that the sphere Gavilar gave to Eshonai contained Ulim, the Voidspren who claims to have spent years talking to Venli.

So. Brandon really knows how to toss grenades at the fanbase. That's a much more 'sit up and take notice' title than Wandersail, isn't it? 

Excellent episode, guys. Y'all came up with a bunch of really interesting and new to me ideas. Like the entire concept of Internal Awakening is a very plausible theory. Though... you came up with plausible examples of physical and cognitive Internal Awakening. So the raises the question of what Spiritual Internal Awakening would be. 

On 3/14/2020 at 0:28 PM, Naurock said:

But I wonder how they forced him to break his bond...

It's possible they didn't, his bond was just repressed like Shallan's was. Which would explain why managed to get a Highspren's attention so quickly- he's always been bonded to that Highspren.

Some notes: The linguistic groupings imply to me that the Horneaters have been a thing for significantly longer than the Herdazians. Like, modern day Herdaz being mainland Resher in the Silver Kingdoms era suggests that the Reshi who didn't live on islands intermarried with Singers and became Herdazians- so they're probably a thing that happened after the Oathgates were built. But Horneater being in the same family as Shin implies that that happened very early on.

Veden mixing with Horneater means that Shallan has some distant Singer ancestry. Which is makes me think of her multiple personalities in the context of Singer forms. Like they change forms when they need to change skill sets, and Shallan switches to whichever personality she imagines has the skills she needs at any given moment. Could they be her Singer blood expressing itself, or am I thinking too hard?

I wonder what happened to the Rock novella. Like surely Brandon doesn't still intend to write and release it before Rhythm of War, right? So surely either he's folded that content into Rhythm of War, or things have been rewritten such that it no longer 'needs' to happen before RoW. 

So... theory. Bavadin is inhabiting Taldain's sun, right? And spreading her investiture through the sunlight? 

This implies that her Investiture is radiating throughout the Cosmere; landing everywhere that Star is visible. Not enough to be particularly noticeable, and not enough to do much of anything, but it's still gonna land everywhere. Nobody's gonna be using that Investiture, so over the course of thousands of years, it would just gradually build up more and more. 

And when you leave that kind of power alone, with nobody holding or using it for that long, it tends to gain its own kind of sentience, as we've seen elsewhere and has been referred to in a few WoBs. So eventually you'd get a sentient and powerful piece of Autonomous Investiture pretty much everywhere. 

So on Taldain, where Bavadin's Investiture is obviously a lot more plentiful, this process happens a lot faster, and the Sand Lord manifests pretty quickly. But Trell and Patji and whatever avatar is forming on Obradai take much longer to reach significant amounts of power, so nobody realizes what's going on until they're pretty well established.