asmodeus

I do know the difference between unkeyed and unsealed minds, but even then, I don't remember the books or wobs ever explicitly stating the process for making even unkeyed minds. And then Identity is such a weird attribute, and the fact that it requires aluminium as well, makes it very... open, to having nuance. Add to that the fact that we don't really have distinct examples. Both the Bands and the Medallions (which both have different properties) are unsealed minds, not unkeyed ones. The only real example is the Wayne one, but again, we are not privy to the details of its creation, to the best of my knowledge.

And then there's also the problem of giving people the feruchemical ability to store Identity in the first place. Where are they getting aluminium ferrings from? Are people giving them to each other through hemalurgy (which would require bendalloy spikes, iirc)? Wouldn't that add some Identity contamination of its own? Does it even do that, or is it just not a problem? A lot of what happens in Bands of Mourning is speculation, which leaves it very open to being wrong, when we get to Era 3.

There's just lots of... details, surrounding how this is happening that while this seems simple in concept, too much around it is unknown, and when Brandon actually gets to writing it, it could be written in several different ways.

These are all great points, except we know nothing about the process that leads to these unkeyed metalminds/medallions being made.

Until we do, sure, we have a good picture of what "unkeyed" means but we're still assuming that it is a simple removal of Identity from the person creating them. For all we know, the process could be a little bit more involved.

And for all we know, even if it's a simple removal of Identity, maybe there are further challenges to overcome.

I'll just posit that logically, there are two problems here. Assume that every person has their own individual identity. Which means Vin has Vin's Identity and Sazed has Sazed's. And... assume, also, that an allomancer can't burn another feruchemist's metalminds because there will be an identity mismatch. Vin's soul will try to reach for the power in the metalmind, and the power will be rebuffed by it, and VIn's soul will recognize that it is not something that belongs to it, and it won't be able to burn it.

Now, sure, in this situation, if Sazed "blanks" his identity, somehow, whether through hemalurgy or feruchemy, the power he puts into his metalmind will not contain his signature. So, when Vin's soul tries to reach for this unkeyed power, it won't have Sazed's stamp on it, and so that won't be a problem. But, it is worth considering that it also doesn't have Vin's stamp on it, right? And I don't know if this would create any issues. Would Vin also need to be "blanked," in order for there to be a complete match? Would Sazed's need to take on Vin's identity first? Would you also possibly need to "blank" both Connection and Identity?

I'm unsure, and we don't understand medallions or purified Dor nearly enough to know what kind of purification they go through.

And then you put these on your sofa:

And there is that moment, when your guests wonder if they've accidentally stepped into the house of a serial killer.

How do you think allomantic speed and slow bubbles work? Considering they're ignoring red-shift and such.

I'm not gonna lie, if we're really looking for broken perpetual motion machines, our ye olde Terris Wheels, with two Iron Ferrings just tapping and storing weight as they go around, work.

So does Awakening.

And if you really want some perpetual machine stuff on Roshar with fabrials alone, you can do that by hanging rails that go all the around Roshar, and then hanging moving sail-trains off it, that have gemstones. The setup then lets you constantly have a set of gems in the highstorms as they go all the way around Roshar, which you can then pull using your tuning fork method, in some capacity. If you put conjoined fabrials here, then you would constantly be generating force using the highstorms, that you can use for other things. So... yeah, while I do agree that this idea of moving a conjoined spren into a differently sized gem is big, I also don't think it's going to break physics too much just yet.

Cosmere physics is broken as is .

See, the thing here is, Kaladin isn't merely freezing in this scene.

This has been a consistent throughline to Kaladin as he has grown; each of those things you mention, where he has been a man of action, exist, sure. But... Kaladin as a character isn't being framed as a man of action vs one of words in the books, Kaladin as a character is being framed as someone who struggles with the idea cost-benefit analysis.

See, Kaladin, as a person, has always been idealistic. This is also one of the major things that make him "Honorable" (Honor, as is presented in the Cosmere). This idea of him looking up and seeing the potential for a better world, where people... just do the right thing. They look out for each other, they help each other, they lift each other up. A world where there are warriors that stand tall, in gleaming armor, to defend the innocent.

And a consistent theme of his character is him having to deal with the worst of this world, in almost an Odious sense. The soldiers in this world aren't glorious warriors in gleaming armor that fight for the right things, they are fodder for the games of warlords who thirst for power. And... Kaladin has always struggled with facing this world, that's a huge portion of his arc.

And the idea here is that he tries, time and again, to do the "right" thing. When Tien goes, an idealistic Kaladin goes with him, to protect him, but also to join the ranks of thpse great soldiers. When Tien dies, despite the promises of those above him, Kaladin loses a lot of that light that kept him going. And from that point on, he tries to hold on, to build something that makes him feel that what he's been doing has helped, has been worth it, but he repeatedly fails. Every "team" he tries to build? It breaks apart. People he tries to protect? They die.

Kaladin starts in the books at the point of not just depression, but suicidal ideation. One of the first things we see him do is try to make poison to kill himself; he is saved only by Syl's innocent intervention. It was the presence of Syl, that made him try one more time with Bridge Four; Kaladin was not a man of action then, he had already given up, he was looking to die. This is actually one of the big things that make him connect so well with Moash, and why Moash became his second, that early on. He and Moash were both in some incredibly dark places, the difference is only that Kaladin is able to scrounge back from that place because Syl was present, as a force, around him. He is able to do that because he had Teft and Rock, and because he had his oaths to guide him.

But... everything he built with Bridge Four? It was always a stopgap. He never got over the fact that he lost Tien. Building his crew in Amaram's army, building his crew around Bridge Four... they were always... replacements, for Tien. Something he could do, in lieu of his failure to protect Tien. Consequently, every time he fails to protect a crew, it's like that original failure, all over again.

So when Moash, and Sah, and Khen.... all members of Kaladin's crew, fight against Elhokar; another replacement for Tien, Kaladin... is lost. This is the absolute worst situation you could put him in. This is a man that has been running on fumes for years, being made to confront the worst situation you can present him: that of two groups that he sees individual, idealistic value in, opposing each other, hating each other so thoroughly that a middle ground between them feels impossible. That's why he freezes. Because he's facing failure all over again. A failure that he has been trying to turn into a success, and has failed at, again and again. This is just like all those other times; when Amaram murdered his crew, when Tien died, and no matter how hard he tries, he cannot stop it from happening.

That's his problem. He's... worn down. Tired. Barely functional already, being made to face the absolute failure of that one thing that he's been holding on to, to keep going.

added some things to the original post, specifically more of a breakdown of "Prasanva," and plugged everything together to form one potential reading of Twinsoul's name. I could be completely off-mark here, or I could be well on my way.

@Oltux72 any opinions on "Suna" and "Prasanva"?

"Suna" makes me think of "to listen," but... it could also go towards "barren," and some other esoteric places.

"Prasanva" is something I'm having a lot of trouble with, because it almost fits things but isn't any of them.

Using placeholder blanks for it, TwinSoul's name turns out to be;

"Lord Mountain-son _____ (of?) Earth and Stone, King of the Coriander Court"

37 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

I suspect Brandon of getting a copy of the Rgveda. There you'll find the Vishvadevas or Allgods, as it is usually translated. The root itself can be reconstructed to go back *weik'- (more or less settle). You find its modern descendants in "-wick" in place names. The world sense probably comes from a shortening of the "settled world".

Stonebirther would fit what his aether does. "Stoneborn" would also fit. It is linguistically closer. The name seems to be an adjective.

 

I was thinking something along those lines too, where maybe the name refers to the whole interweb of the aether than just the entity?

I was thinking of going more with "Those of stone" but yeah, "Stoneborn" sounds about right.

I'd say that you're thinking of the Selish magics as still being more distinct than they actually are. AonDor isn't different from Dakhor, isn't different from Forgery. They're all... basically subsets, that people remember from the past, or have discovered along the way. But they can all be unified into one big system.

So even if you did manage to tattoo aons into skin and make them work, you're still probably better off trying to figure out and use a symbol set that was more specialized to work as tattoos, trying to work out from the fundamentals that lead to these various magics in the first place.

Quote

Is it correct to assume Unkalaki is a V-S-O Language?

Dunno about this one, kinda curious to hear your thoughts.

I'd wait on the SP questions, as you're bound to get answers for both those questions soon enough. Either they will be directly and unequivocally addressed in the books or in their Ars Arcanums (if they get them), or you will have a chance to sit down and ask these after the books come out with much stronger impetus.

Secret Project spoilers:

That being said, these are just my thoughts, you're of course free to ask whatever you want during spoiler streams or on reddit threads.

Might want to post this in the Cosmere Discussion section, or maybe ask a mod to move it.

I have two main thoughts on this. Brandon's answer to that question is hilariously annoying, because it does nothing to answer the original question. This is partly on me, I could have phrased the question better too. While his answer of there being common themes across magics, or the same "physics" leading to different manifestations in different places based on local factors makes sense, it does nothing to address the problem of dealing with something like hemalurgy, which has no actual requirement, other than the intent to do it. Unlike Allomancy or Feruchemy, which requires you to be able to trace some lineage back to a scadrian soul - or even something like Singers being able to hear rhythms anywhere in the cosmere, which requires you to be a Singer (similar case to being of Scadrian descent) - all you need to perform hemalurgy anywhere in the cosmere is a soul to perform hemalurgy on, a piece of viable metal, and the intent to do it. So where is the dependancy on the existence of Scadrial in this? Brandon didn't really answer this (not that there needs to be a reason).

Second, regarding the different manifestations in different places, I kind of think of it as terraforming or geo-engineering. Take Mars, for example. If all I do is just dump enough oxygen (by mass) so as to double its atmosphere by mass, then... well... that oxygen will do oxygen-y things. A lot of it will maybe straight up get eroded away into space due to solar winds, but a lot of it will start interacting with local elements, and we will get all sorts of oxides and such, interactions with other elements and radiation unique to oxygen. We will get fire if there's enough hydrogen and heat naturally present, to maybe make enough water to cover some surface of the planet. In a 100,000 years, a lot of the oxygen might even cycle, by natural processes like plate tectonics and such, into mineral oxides deep beneath Mars's crust. This would be analogous to a shard just willy-nilly investing in a planet. All planets in the cosmere will have all sorts of interplays between things physically, and the souls of things cognitively and spiritually. If they have life, this interplay will only be more complex, as creatures will be born with souls, perceive things around them, and then die as part of their natural cycle of life. If a shard just throws their investiture into the mix, with no real control or shaping, well... over time, it will seep into things, and start affecting things according to its intent. We will get a shardpool or two, and magic will start manifesting by natural processes of physics and realmatics, magic that will be strongly influenced by the intent of the shard, but manifested through natural processes and interactions present locally.

But you can also do something else. If you want to terraform a planet by intent, you can also have an endgoal, in wanting to do something like... say, wanting to make Mars habitable, specifically. And then you would do specific things, like introducing a specific kind of life to the planet that generates its own oxygen, you will set up technology, and maybe even specific elements so that you get a habitable, green world a thousand years from now. And in the Cosmere, a shard could also do something like this. Instead of just investing by blindly dumping their essence into a planet, they could also shape things, such that the end magics created are of a specific kind or work in a specific way, like maybe wanting to introduce lightweaving to a world that didn't naturally have it, or changing the natural lightweaving present on a planet to work differently based on the preferences and intent of the vessel-shard entity.

That's at least my take on it.

... bloody hell, never thought about that. Awesome question!

They should be able to, given the right circumstances.

What exactly are you imagining?

There's... a little bit of a fallacy here.

Feruchemical gold does not store active healing. When you store in gold, feruchemically, what is happening is that you are storing your baseline level of health. This doesn't hurt you or make you sick; it makes you more likely to get sick, and slower to recover from being hurt. You being sick, or you not healing an injury or wound... these things are are not in itself a requirement for storing in gold, they are only side effects of storing in gold. So... if you're a feruchemist, and you start storing within gold, then cut yourself with a knife, and then someone with stormlight comes in and heals you, it will simply heal the wound, without really redirecting the flow into the metalmind. Those streams are not crossing, as they are both unrelated, even if similar, things.

But even by this logic, there are caveats, because not all wounds and sicknesses are the same. While feruchemically storing in gold, you might be more likely to get cancer from smoking, but... whether stormlight healing can heal this or not is a different case than healing something as obvious and sudden as a knife cut.

Now what stormlight healing would be good for, and how it can help feruchemically store in gold, is by making that storing safer. If you are a radiant, or if you have access to a radiant, then you suddenly have much more room to take the risk of massively reducing your baseline level of health and correspondingly increasing your passive rate of storing into gold. Becuase if you do catch something severe or something that's causing you discomfort or pain, or has a chance of having long-term consequences even beyond your temporary reduction in health while storing, then you can immediately heal that off. Heck, you could even go so far as to cause catastrophic failure in some part of you or another, leading heart attacks or liver failures or whatever, and then immediately heal yourself off of those things.

So it will help build up your gold stores significantly faster, just... more indirectly than crossing streams.

All of this holds afaik from what we know right now, but it's entirely possible Brandon just thinks this is a cool idea and throws this special interaction in as you say, because... "why not? It's cool!"

If we're thinking of designing or using fabrials, why are we limiting ourselves to traditional firearms?

With iron and steel fabrials being able to pull/push on things directly, we're not limited to imparting a force on a bullet indirectly by generating explosive force, we could have a magic railgun fabrial that, instead of using electromagnets to accelerate the bullet, directly pushes a piece of metal or bone or whatever.

With the discovery of anti-investiture, and Navani being able to create plates that with intent can generate anti-investiture without her own involvement, we could have a gun that takes the stormlight (or any of the lights, really) from a reservoir gem, splits it two ways, converts one stream to anti-investiture, and then recombines them both at the tail end of a specialized bullet to generate the explosive burst.

If investiture stays in the picture, and Rosharans remain the centerpiece shadesmar crossroads civlization, then we could also be using other means of achieving similar things. Why limit yourself to throwing a physical piece of metal or bone or stone at you? You could maybe do something more radical, and replicate the effects of Aon Daa in some form, firing bursts of pure explosive energy at things.

And then there's also a completely wildcard field that we have barely explored, and that's the halfway soulcasting that was used to create the sibling's forcefield, where you had air being only half-way soulcasted to glass. There could be a lot possible here, if we start halfway soulcasting between other essences, like metal being half-way soulcasted to fire or something.

I think the answer to this can change drastically, based on what particular definition of a "spiritweb" you go with, and we don't really know how Brandon thinks of it, beyond some select specific WoBs.

One way I think of it as more that your spiritual ideal, the most true, perfect form of you? The definition of that is your Identity. It's what uniquely defines and identifies your soul, differentiating and separating it from any other soul.

This way can then be expanded to define your Investiture as what constitutes your soul/ideal, your Identity as the tone your investiture resonates to, your Connections as how your soul/ideal ties and relates to other souls/ideals, and your Fortune as a representation of how your soul/ideal has changed, or can and will change in a realm where all times - past and future - are compounded together into one perfect form.

But... again, we don't know for sure, and there's easily many ways to think about this right now.

While I agree that having this happen would be... rather problematic, and has its issues, as you stated, I do agree that this happening has the potential to be really awesome.

Gavilar is a great character to circle back to fir Navani as well. In her prologue, we saw Gavilar holding back from her, not telling her about anti-light and his own fabrial experiments that he was overseeing, and in general feeding her imposter syndrome.

Now that Navani has proved and has been recognised for her scholarship, now that she has proved that she was perfectly capable of discovering the secrets he wanted to discover all along, and could have actually helped him in his goals, and now that she is a Bondsmith in her own right (something he was on the road for, but never actually accomplished), and has domain over Urithiru (where the contest is meant to happen), Gavilar showing up could be a great way to bookend her story as well.

53 minutes ago, Invocation said:

I'm just imagining sticking a charged spike in a jello cup.

lmao

Now I'm imagining a modern era scadrian propagonda poster saying "Don't forget to butter your spikes when not in use!"

Ishar is a little bit... interesting in this sense. This could be nothing more than Brandon saying just how good Ishar is at combat, with the sheer amount of experience he has, which is totally fine. But... there's more weird stuff about him that may or may not paint a bigger picture.

First of all, consider that Ishar was the first Odium managed to tempt into experimenting with the Surges, way back on Ashyn. Which means Ishar, at least at one point, had some void associations (I'm not saying it was voidbinding, just... he had enough Odious elements to his personality at some point, maybe ambition, greed, I dunno, some seed of darkness, that Odium was able to use to begin to tempt him. And that road eventually did lead to the destruction of Ashyn, even if Ishar eventually became firmly opposed to Odium.)

Second, Shalash mentions that Ishar (and Jezrein) are actual scholars of realmatics.

Third, Ishar has been called with the moniker "Herald of Luck." Take that in for a second. They call the prime Herald, the guy who is the patron of the Order that literally heads the Knights Radiant, the guy who is - according to some - literally responsible for sealing away the Fused, the Binder of Gods, the guy who forged the Knights Radiant... they don't call him the Herald of Bonds, or some name that evokes Connection as a spiritual attribute. Nope. They call him Herald of Luck. Luck, a word intricately tied to Fortune, which itself is associated with or the underlying mechanism for futuresight. Which is... interesting, considering how a significant portion of Roshar is firmly opposed to futuresight and considers it strongly of the enemy, of Odium. Herald of Luck is almost a benign version of that, where they almost want to say, "look, this guy does some weird futuresight fortune shenanigans, but we can't say that, because you know, that'd make him evil and all, so let's call him lucky instead."

Luck has also been associated with Fortune on Scadrial, where people consider Fortune feruchemy to essentially be manipulating luck.

There's other potential fortune shenanigans going on with the Heralds and the humans of that time (which is kind of okay, considering Odium's influence at the time), if Shalash was indeed named Shalash after the Aons Shao - Ale - Ashe. That literally means that her name is "Transformation - Beauty - Illumination." Which is crazy, because that's literally what Rosharan Lightweaving is - expressions of art and beauty arising between and from the blending of the Surges of Transformation and Illumination. If Shalash was named such at birth, with deliberation and intent, then she was named Lightweaver before there was a lightweaver Honorblade, and before she was given or had taken on that role and place, making her name almost a prophecy.

(Incidentally, Ale, the Aon for Beauty, is also the Aon of the Seon Shallan is given by Mraize).

So... I don't know if this is supernaturally relevant or not. It's interesting that Brandon went with describing Ishar fighting like that, because you have to assume that he was aware that that's exactly how he would describe someone fighting with Atium. None of the other corroborating pieces are actual facts we know, just things we can read into.

If the spikes only have to think they're inside a body, and they're not particularly good at it (as evidenced by the fact that one can keep them in blood and that's fine), then maybe what we should be asking is how far can this be pushed.

If blood is okay, then what else is? Would animal products derived from the body work? Would carved bone work just as well? What about the skin, or even tanned leather? Because then, something as simple as leather, maybe specialised with added blood or something, could work. Like a leather sheath, or a leather belt that you "spike" with the spike.

lookee what we have here 

Brandon has kinda literally already pulled force lightning into the Cosmere right under our noses.

Stormform comes from the power of "God's own Hatred," and grants lightning powers that are really hard to control, and yet, give a euphoric sensation of power.