Gilphon

Invention isn't particularly close to Prudence, but that was a name Paleo provided. But Invention does imply knowledge, and study, and ingenuity, which gets at stuff that's pretty conceptually close to Wisdom. Close enough that before he settled on the name 'Invention', Brandon could've plausibly being thinking of it when he said that there was a Shard with an Intent similar to Wisdom. Plus the way Harmony talks about Invention makes me think of the survival Shard.

I'm of the opinion that the Shard being referred to in that WoB is Invention.

Certainly possible. It also might just be something that takes centuries of practice before you can pull it off reliably. Or just something that Shallan hasn't quite figured out yet.

I think the force fields are just a more advanced application of Lightweaving. Like we've already seen that Shallan can imbue her illusions with a little 'weight'.

Other way round makes a lot more sense to me. A Rosharan worldhopper who's visited Scadrial. Like he's making references to things from all over the Cosmere, and at one point implies he's on Scadrial, but the metaphors are Rosharan.

(Side note: Virtuosity isn't the same thing as Virtue; Virtuosity refers to artistic skill and ability. Which we've seen is a thing that's very important in both magic systems on display) My assumption is that this a thing Hoid does sometimes when he can sense that he's not going to need to do anything important for the next few decades/centuries- if how he ended up like was really important, it wouldn't have been spoiled for us here.

So this one's a lot clearer than SP1, in terms of both timeline and Hoid's audience. Design alone makes it very obviously in the future, and we get references to lots of Cosmere things, but primarily Rosharan stuff used as touchstones- he at one point refers to money as 'Sphere'- in ways that wouldn't happen unless that's where the audience was from. But definitely not Roshar as we know it- he wouldn't casually refer to Scadrial or Virtuosity or light bulbs with anyone living there now. And he's presumably telling this story sometime post-coatrack. So the overall picture I'm getting is that he's talking to a Rosharan during Era 4

"We can all agree". He's not talking to a group, not an individual. But. While it probably implies that the audience doesn't worship their moon, I think otherwise he's just being snarky and sarcastic.

Autonomy's crackdown appears to have happened a fair bit later- Certainly it happened after Khriss left the planet. I don't really think anything is particular needs to have happened here; worldhoppers just don't seem be doing much to spread tech around in general. Scadrial's tech boom hasn't affected Roshar noticeably, for example. And Khriss comments that Scadrial is still behind Silverlight. Like the Iriali as people would, but they left this planet centuries ago, and would've forgotten anything they brought with them during the desolations.

Nightside seems to have a similar tech level in White Sand, and that's also really early. Not Silver Kingdoms levels of early, but still

Okay, so: I think it's officially safe to say that we're indeed looking at Aethers here. He'd hardly say that introducing people to Aether was one of the goals of this story, and then repeatedly refer the ocean as 'Verdant' if it wasn't supposed to be Verdant Aether.

Musing on Hoid's audience: Only directly familiar with the ocean on their own world, so not a Worldhopper Would understand the phrase 'her planets had 12 moons is a very low geosynchronous orbit', and so can be assumed to have a reasonable amount of astronomy knowledge Must be from a planet with earth-like ecology, given how many earth plant and animals Hoid references. Knows Hoid by the name 'Hoid'; wouldn't be surprised to see him insert himself into the story. So this is overall looking like somebody from Nalthis or Sel. Somebody who's Cosmere-aware, but isn't a Worldhopper themselves.

I can't help for why the butterfly might be an Aether, but This thread is a pretty good explanation of what Aether magic does, and it's been gathered from other sources that Aether are, in aggregate, sapient beings, like the Sleepless. I was initially sceptical, but after reading up on it, the pollen in this story sounds a lot like Verdant Aether. Given that, it's probably safe to assume the 'Midnight Sea' the Sorcerer lives in is made of Night Aether.

I suspect that this planet had normal seas at one point. And maybe still does somewhere. But I think there is rain- Tress treats even dead spores with caution; people think of them as an ever-present danger, and although there's talk about importing food, they don't seem to have any shortage of water.

It seems a lot more likely to me that this a planet they were on before Roshar- they were on this planet for long enough for their disappearance to be considered mysterious, and left 300 years ago. We'd be looking at a bare minimum of 500 years post-Stormlight, probably a fair bit longer than that. Which is further in the future than even Mistborn era 4 seems likely to be- so then this story would be then be the very last Cosmere story chronologically, which would be an odd decision on Brandon's part. And then we add in the issue about the tech level being below what we'd expect from a group that left from Roshar, the fact that we don't actually know if Hoid will survive that long, that we don't know if the Iriali are actually going to continue their journey... It's not impossible for this story to be in the future. But you need to make a lot of additional assumptions to make it work.

The detail with the cup that shows the butterfly over a sea. Tress points out that that doesn't make sense as a thing to depict when the sea is made of deadly pollen. Either that cup's from off-world, or it's quite old and this planet had normal seas once. Also, the Iriali. They've been on Roshar for quite a while- much longer than the 300 years figure Charlie gives. So this is either the far-flung future of the Cosmere, past even where we expect the space-age stuff to be, or this is a planet they were on sometimes before coming to Roshar, which would probably mean this story takes place around the same time as the Desolations. Or even earlier.

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.

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

You're splitting hairs here, I think. Magic in general is a natural outgrowth of the functions of the Cosmere. There are, I think, two useful definitions for what can be considered magic in this context: Would Khirss consider it weird enough to be worth researching? Is it only possible through the use of Investiture? I think the Singers forms unambiguously meet the second definition, and while we don't for sure about the first, it would surprise me if Khriss had no interest in all. Whether or not something is a magic system is a harder question. But really I wouldn't call the Old Magic a magic system either. That'd be a bit like calling the Thrill a magic system. It's just a weird thing that a very powerful spren can do to people. And that a Shard can imitate when she's so inclined.

The distinction here is that Nohadon is complaining about Surgebinders, not Radiants. Our understanding is that people were bonding spren for quite some time before the Radiant orders were established. And then eventually Ishar got fed up with that and made the Orders be a thing- which presumably happened after Nohadon's day. Like in the first post-Nohadon desolation, perhaps. What we don't know is if Ishar used some crazy Bondsmith stuff to actually change the way the magic works, or if he just wanted them to be better organized. The wording of the First Oath implies the former to me, as does seeing just how crazy Ishar's powers are, but it's also possible that the First Oath wasn't worded as strictly before Nohadon. Like we already know that what's important is the idea behind the Oath, not the words themselves, so maybe all Nohadon did was articulate the First Oath particularly well.

To wildly speculate on this: The magic system Khirss brings up right before this line are Surgebinding and Voidbinding. She then speculates that it may be the Old Magic, but dismisses it. And then she launches into a big analysis of Fabrials. So she's not talking about any of those things. But- what paradigm is she referring to, that surgebinding and voidbinding fit into but fabrials and the Old Magic do not. Well, we often think of Surgebinding as being a combination of Honor and Cultivation. And we don't know a lot about Voidbinding, but it's 10-centric, which suggest there's Honor in there, and it comes from the Unmade and has Void in the name, which suggest there's Odium in there. So, perhaps it's an Honor/Odium combination magic system. If that's the case, the third magic system that completes that paradigm would one made using a combination of Cultivation and Odium. So perhaps the 'even more esoteric abilities' are the Forms of Power? Or perhaps they're something that was purely theoretical until Venli happened- which would be a better fit for the WoB; it's not quite a magic system, because Venli is the only one who could do stuff with it, but in theory if Radiant Regals became more common it could blossom into a new magic system. Hmm. The purelake fish had occurred to me, but I mostly dismissed them as 'well, they probably just have a spren-bond. That's not that strange at this point.' Forgetting that we don't know what they even get out of the bond. So they is something there that we still don't know. I'll not totally convinced that that's something we've been promised an answer to, though. We wouldn't even know for certain that the fish were magic if it wasn't for WoBs. For the sake of completeness, I tried to avoid to making too many distinctions between 'things where we have a pretty good guess' and 'things where we just have no idea'. Shallan's memory definitely seems supernatural, so that's a good guess for the Lightweaver resonance. But we don't actually know that that's what's going there.