Light In the Darkness

Oh, that’s an interesting thought. Though I don’t see why the others would do it after summoning blade and plate if they could do it without, except for a very limited number for show/demonstration.

Oh I just meant it’s general properties; he’s well acquainted with the importance of aluminum and it would have been a valuable tool for them to have.

Yes it does! Thank you! Ok, so that WoB seems to imply that when the blade is lost, eventually the deadeyes return to the CR, because when a bearer dies or releases their blade, the blade is summoned. Which means that all blades, when lost, are physical, and the deadeyes would be missing. If they end up wandering the CR when lost, then they must fade out of the PR eventually, somehow. Which is cool, but raises the problem of how could they be healed, and the interesting thought that there are shard blade fossils, in effect, wherever they were buried in crem for enough time for it to be in a stable portion of rock (where the storms don’t break rock along the weakness caused by the hollow).

Ah thanks! My bad. They definitely should be doing more of that then. Wit should have told them earlier; I hope they fix the tunnel shielding under the tower soon then. Don’t know that I agree here; I think fundamentally if the boulder had been solid gold it would have behaved nearly the same on screen, regardless of the knowledge or perception of the caster. When Radiants soulcast, they have to contact the cognitive aspect of the thing they are casting; they would find out what it is before they could change it, and Aluminum would resist heavily, perhaps nigh impossibly, similarly to a very full metal mind. Otherwise a lot of Scadrian future tech would be easily brickable by any radiant or fabrial soulcaster, which I figure probably would not be allowed by Brandon. Granted, ship hulls might still be changeable that way, so I wonder how the Scadrians will protect against that.

So, I’ve always seen this as them following wherever their bonded holder goes. It says, if I remember correctly, when the blades are summoned the deadeyes disappear, making it very hard on the spren family and friends of those who are still actively being used as blades, since they just disappear from there and then reappear in the CR when dismissed wherever they were summoned to. I swear I read about it in the books, but I don’t have a reference. This would make a lot of sense, but when Brandon was asked about the numbers I thought that the first thing he referenced was that the blades get lost over time (the WoB was quoted in the thread about the disparity between blade and plate amounts), which would still imply the existence of many deadeyes that would be stuck in the physical realm. Syl, as far as I know, doesn’t have a self that mirrors her in the CR, and while a blade for Kaladin she can’t be flying around separately - she is the blade; it’s made of her essence. A deadeye only would exist for dismissed blades because the blade are the entirety of their substance, unless they eventually fade/transition to the CR when forgotten. So, while this does address the problem of how many deadeyes we see vs. active blades, it still implies the greater tragedy of the lost blades, whose numbers would be smaller but which would be rather unrecoverable.

So, deadeyes only appear in the cognitive realm when their blades are dismissed, since a blade is their corpse/physical form, and they have lost most mental existence. However, we know they appeared en masse in RoW at Lasting Integrity. We’ve explained the number by saying that a lot of blades have been lost, also explaining the equalizing of the amount of plates and blades, but if they were lost their physical forms would exist somewhere, and the deadeyes wouldn’t be visible in the CR. Option 1: Over time, as knowledge of the blades and perception of the spren as swords faded, they were released and the blades dissolved, allowing the deadeyes to return to the CR and making their blades potentially completely unrecoverable and then unhealable. This would make the lost blades the most dead of deadeyes, and would be really sad unless a bond to help them can be formed without the help of the physical blade and that whole process. Option 2: There are thousands of undocumented shardbearers in hiding. This is not exclusive of option 1, but implies it has a chance of being false, but is frankly the more terrifying thought. Thousands of shardbearers would be lurking somewhere with unknown agendas and unknown allegiances, with complete capacity to blindside every plan in the book not made with foresight. They could be in the hands of the Ghostbloods, the IRE, the Seventeenth Shard, Silverlight Scholars, or anyone else. Thoughts?

Uhhhhhhh…. You can’t soulcast Aluminum? That’s why it’s a barrier to the fused? For Emperor’s Soul Dropping the rock over the camp isn’t a horrendous idea; a rock big enough to squish a whole camp would probably not be very movable by a high storm, and Windrunners could pressurize the air to be cast to prevent shockwaves, but it would take a lot of skill and effort. Perhaps forgive the obvious, but wouldn’t it be easier to just have a Bondmith make light and use that instead of the highstorm? Or open a perpendicularly?

So, the lines parallel to the spears seem most likely to be other spears, that are just out of focus, so to speak. If the ring is representing the edge of a chasm or cliff, then they could also be representing the cliff face, but that seems less likely to me. In a battle with the sun behind them, this would look like Kaladin rallying his men and them raising their spears in a cheer or salute. That banner seems to be the oddest piece; Kaladin has never, that I remembered a banner when leading his men; kinda useless to him. Which to me is the strongest evidence in support of this theory; the glyph is too obscured to make out right now, but it might be sideways? Like it was a pennant-type banner hanging vertically, like a lot of commander banners, originally, and Kaladin just tied it to his spear and so now it waves in the wind sideways, because the o.g. banner pole got destroyed. That by itself implies that whoever held it is now dead or something, and Kaladin stepped into the power vacuum. That’s the main piece that hasn’t occurred solidly in the book from the icon, and seems strong evidence to me of the tie from the death rattle to the icon and Kaladin.

We have gained some more info on Silver from Tress, and I think from the Lost Metal. It seems to be related to the more…universal investitures, things that existed before Adonalsium, including Aethers. Shades seem to have a similar relation. But as such, it definitely seems to interact inconsistently with current magic systems. It would likely be very painful to the spren in the Fabrial, and might reduce their potency? By nullifying some of their essence? I guess we’ll eventually see. With the WoB on the metals that work in fabrials, though, it seems likely that all 16 allomantic alloys have an influence on them (we saw steel and iron each in the rain-gatherers in WoR iirc) along with steel and the God Metals and their alloys. Interesting thoughts. Tress is supporting evidence for that by the way; no details to avoid spoilers.

We have five more books. And it might be poetic/symbolic that the symmetry is broken.

Interestingly, this clash is related to a very old religious and legal debate: Letter vs Spirit of the Law. Not much that you could do would prevent this from ever again coming up, especially with less mature members of each group. I think that integrating the two orders into teams of both could have helped, but it likely would have caused factionalism, as @Returned said. Perhaps companionships made up of one from each order that would periodically rotate under the direction of superiors would have made a better difference and encouraged greater respect, but that organizational structure would likely be foreign to them unless it was introduced by chance, say from one from each falling in love with each other and superiors taking notice, which seems unlikely with how those orders tend to run themselves. Another possibility is war games. Seems a bit stupid, but if everyone can heal, having a mock battle with the least mature of each group fighting each other probably wouldn't be that dangerous, would let them get out aggression or irritation, and would help build mutual respect (easier to respect someone who can stab you). If it was done with oath one and two radiants, with an open perpendicularity nearby like from Dalinar, it would be practically impossible for there to be fatal damage - Skybreakers don't have access to destruction at that stage, and neither set has blades. If you did that and then had the oath 3 ones you could trust work closely with someone from the other faction for long periods of time, maybe starting as sparring partners with the most hot-headed ones and then going to something like CIA partners for more mature ones, until oath 4 or later, as judged by a superior, could have possibly mitigated the damage from the way their Ideals are so different.

"The Tales of Numuhukumakiaki'aialunamor"

Acknowledging that broken-ness is not required, it is a definite trend in the series and in the Cosmere as a whole, with the obvious parallels being that (spoilers for Warbreaker) and that (spoilers for Mistborn) We do have counterexamples in the form of the regular soldiers who get chosen - it definitely doesn't seem like everyone who becomes a squire or Knight in the Windrunners is damaged like Kaladin, with PTSD and depression and so forth. Heck, everyone's favorite (formerly) one-armed Herdazian wasn't very damaged in that way either. But the mechanics of the order seem to gravitate (ba-dum-tssss) towards those who are, perhaps in part because shared experiences like that create bonding experiences, allowing the surges to flow over more easily into the others to create squires, Knights, and general groups of friends and allies, which is core to the order. But Shallan's trauma was fundamentally different: it was isolating. In that way, she wasn't aligned with the order of the Windrunners, and people with similar traumas, who had made grievous errors that they deeply regret but that they did for what seemed like good reason, would likely trend toward being Lightweavers. So I think you do end up with different kinds of traumas ending up in different, mm, availabilities for the Radiant orders? but the way they approach moving forward will also determine which suits them better (Dalinar's trauma was more similar to Shallan's, I think, though the mistakes were less well-judged and intentional, but he approaches it by finding a way forward - he doesn't hide from it behind lies, but behind drink and forgetting. So, he ends up a Bondsmith instead of a Lightweaver.) So I think classes of Trauma, with the second classification of responses to them, end up in the same orders, but not everyone in those Orders has experienced the same kind of trauma and responded the same way, or even had the same magnitude of experience. I would hazard a guess that the Windrunners would not have helped Shallan grow in the ways she needed to; she wasn't ever really committed to "honor" and "protection" as much as to family and joy, I think, with her family. She wouldn't have been able to progress as a Windrunner; she didn't care for the ideals, and they wouldn't have helped her heal like they have for Kaladin. But the Lightweaver ideals were something she wanted; she wanted to be honest and stop living in the complications created by her lies, but she told lies routinely to help people that she loved. Lightweaver ideals would actually help her heal and grow, and actually stick back together the pieces of herself that were broken. So frankly, I don't think she would have gotten to 5th in Windrunner Ideals, but if she had, she wouldn't be nearly as healed from her traumas as her Lightweaver 5th-ideal-self. On the higher level of "is trauma necessary" I think it just ends up being that growth provides its own trauma, in a way; using investiture will break things in a person's Spiritweb and help reform them in different ways, leading to natural growth in the same way as going to the gym. It just becomes evident much faster if there is already significant damage done, and the power goes straight to repairing, which is necessarily more likely to happen at the re-beginning of bondings like this. See nuclear fission for example - Plutonium has a high spontaneous fission rate, comparatively, but Uranium has a slower one. When starting a power plant reactor, the reactions that happen first are necessarily the higher-potential-energy ones in things like Plutonium, but eventually the energy is around enough that lower energy ones start happening too (yes I know that was an imperfect comparison, there are other examples in chemical reactions but none were as easy to explain or came to mind quickly enough). In the same way, the initial bonds the spren made were likely to be "high-energy" - lots of potential for growth and change, allowing for quick ability to defend yourself and quick development towards stability, which can then shelter/shield "low-energy" bonds that take longer to develop and become sturdy enough to be self-reliant/self-sustaining. They can probably both progress to similar power levels, but the "high-energy" bonds will be more common when the bonds are returning, and may be able to progress faster/more dramatically than "lower-energy" bonds. With the core question here, though, I don't think so. In RoW, I think some people confuse her scene where Veil's role is resolved and she fully remembers what she's been hiding from with her swearing an Oath. She didn't; she is still only at the 3rd ideal. Radiant and Veil are her baggage from that, so to speak; they are both fallout from swearing the third ideal that she needs to deal with. So if it seems like she is swearing Half-Oaths, that might be why - her oaths haven't progressed, she is just dealing with their fallout more slowly than the others, similar to how Kaladin knew the 4th ideal for a solid amount of time from why back in Oathbringer, but he needed a lot of time before he could say it and mean it. Her Oath just preceded her grapple with it, in some ways.

Interesting thoughts on manipulating investiture like a fluid, though the spiritual effects of adhesion are probably very impacted by intent. Dalinar's may also be heavily changed by the influence of tension. Surface tension and intermolecular tension are exceptionally important in fluid dynamics, and the bonds that can spontaneously form in matter are critical to their melting and boiling points - hence why ionic substances, such as salt, which are very polarized and have strong intermolecular bonds, have very high melting and boiling points. This would impact Dalinar's use of spiritual adhesion, lending it to manipulating Bonds instead of the way it manifests in Windrunners: Windrunners use spiritual adhesion in creating squires. Not intentionally, but their alignment with adhesion is one of the major reasons they gather in such large groups, have so many squires, and bond strongly as teams. This is likely also an SR manifestation of gravitation, though the strength of the interpersonal connections likely comes from adhesion IMO. This would mean that when aided by gravity, adhesion tends towards pressure, like glue, but when aided by tension, it tends towards the creation of bonds that are of real substance, like welding. Thoughts?

38. Blink a light and sound alarms that mean something has gone horribly wrong, when in fact everything is fine. 39. Oppress the real occurrence of the previous item. 40. Use a spren to map and then examine a microscopic computer component; i.e. visually checking for shorts in an integrated circuit. 41. Play a theme song for yourself in various moods. Who says your life isn't a movie? 42. Instantaneous projector from a small screen and speaker. No need for a movie theater. It's even REAL 3D!!! 43. Insta-microwave. 44. EMP. 45. Smoke and sound grenades, with or without physical requirements. Cheapest gemstones could power it with a lightweaving set to release on a trigger of some kind. 46. Embedded spy creating artificial success/findings in an enemy research core. 47. Dead men walking. Or Ironeyes. Or Thaidakar. Or Hoid. any of them would be quite distracting. 48. Sonar scanning, like ultrasound? Maybe capable of detecting Kandra or Hemalurgists? 49. Signal flares. 50. Fake campfires for ambush decoys. 51. The pulled-the-chair-out-from-under-you trick. Except without a chair. 52. Whoopie-cushion tricks. Without woopie cushions. 53. Making someone look like they wet themselves in a very embarrassing situation. 54. As a spy: making it look like someone else is a spy/making your target look like an enemy so someone else kills them for you, with the convenient benefit of potentially faking the person the illusion was of's death. 55. Confetti that doesn't make a mess. 56. Firecrackers and Fireworks that don't make any mess and don't cause forest fires. 57. Wilderness survival: hiding from wild animals via some of the tactics above, though ones that don't rely on sight to find you might be harder. Dogs are pretty smart. but loud noises are scary, so probably decently effective. Enhancement of earlier idea: sound magnification with no delay and excellent clarity, like better speakers at stadiums of various types. 58. Do the work for your math problems without taking up any room on the page. Don't know how mell it would work, but it might. Similarly, write on invisible and fake walls, desks, etc. 59. Radiant Heads-Up-Displays. 60. HUD rear-view mirror, so you can always see behind you and it doesn't have to be out away from your face or from center view very far.

I need to reread this thread because I couldn’t figure out how to respond right, but I think that’s a great idea!

I don’t know that Threnody helps us much here. Prior to the Evil arriving on Threnody, there may have been great technology created. The kind of disaster and decline that the Evil would have caused when it arrived, with the shades and all, could very well have destroyed or obscured that technology and/or Cosmere awareness on Threnody, while any technology that had already left the planet/system could have stayed in use by the Ghostbloods, IRE, or the Seventeenth Shard. Granted, it’s been a bit since I’ve read Shadows for Silence or Oathbringer and I don’t remember recognizing Threnodian technology in Oathbringer or The Ghastly Gondola, so I may be wrong, but I don’t think the technology standards of Threnody are much indication of time when they experienced such a large disaster, likely the equivalent of a desolation in terms of technological destruction.

Might this be the end of book 5? Has there been any Desolation where Odium's forces "take the day"? I find the Rattles fascinating, it's like hey do you want some straight up foreshadowing? Well, here you go, have fun. I think that is more from Oathbringer, with the army turning and Dalinar refusing to give up his pain, and all of the stormlight used up on the battlefield.

just wanted to note, somewhere earlier someone said that coins being Pushed didn't have momentum after, and that Is flat out false; easy evidence: after a mistborn pushes off metal, they retain their momentum, and in order for the conservation of momentum to stay true, that means the metal they pushed off retains momentum as well. I think there are a couple things being underestimated here; one, bendalloy. If you're in a speed bubble you have a major advantage, because you can take a breather and move somewhere unexpected. Two, steelpushes and ironpulls; as Kelsier demonstrated fighting in TFE, a fully trained mistborn would be able to manipulate several dozen jagged, speedy pieces of metal at once, skillfully. They could keep that in a cloud around the radiant, blocking visibility and causing hundreds of tiny hits to the plate per second. Third, bullets; if Wax was to throw a bullet, wait until it hit the radiant, and then pushed the explosive pin, it would blow up outside the gun, which the radiant would A) not be expecting, stunning them, and B) The radiant would take major damage from. It might not destroy plate, but it would crack/damage it significantly. Last but not least is the Harmonium Grenade; if a mistborn had one, they could set up a slow-bubble, and position themselves to kill the radiant immediately as it is released, maybe with duraluminum, or using raw harmonium could blow them up. It could also do weird things with the radiant powers, if it just stores and re-releases stormlight, which could catch the Radiant by surprise; e.g. a stoneward making a barricade, then suddenly the ground swallows their feet. granted in that particular case, the cube might disappear too, but similar principles apply. A soulcaster turns the air to oil and blows it up; they find the ground slicked by oil they didn't make a second later, etc. So, I think the mistborn would have a better chance against a 4th oath radiant than your giving them credit for, especially with a gun. Additionally, in a battle like this, where they were the only Allomancer, would mean they could wear metal too, not just cloth. Bronze might give an advantage to them too, since it would let them detect lightweavings and not be fooled by them, or else locate the only real person in an illusion. As they became more adept, with more practice and better technology, some of the Radiant disadvantages would disappear, but as the two series currently stand (and last I checked they are not chronologically synced, and all this is ignoring fabrials) I think the Mistborn is more powerful than you think.

That's true, but it also has to do with maintenance of the connection allowing the magic; in Honor's case, at least, you can't break your oaths and keep your magic, so cowardice might be a similar "magic stopper" and Lightweaving could possibly be seen as cowardice. Edit: yes, I realize it has nothing in common with the scadrian or nalthian systems, so it stands on weak feet. However, various shards are attuned to different uses; Ruin's system accelerates entropy, Endowment's endows things with life, Cultivation's helps things grow, etc. Neither system has a form of lightweaving that we know about, except the Returned having control over their appearance, so clearly certain investitures lack certain magic forms.

Perhaps gauntlets or trials for the initiation? it doesn't need to be gladiatorial combat; it could be like the gate ter'angreal from Wheel of Time, or the trials for the Cartouches from Magic the Gathering (Amonkhet), or like Special Ops training in modern militaries. I Agree with this, and that will likely be the main moral restriction on the magic system. I also had the thought that if combined with Cultivation, the two would make an interesting combination, since both seem about personal growth; perhaps the dual-shard Growth, Betterment, or Achievement? I agree; this doesn't seem the kind of shard to have Lightweavers, but it might be possible, since you could use it in combat for distractions and such.

Pretty sure the Aons came from before Arelon even existed; their symbols are completely different from the others they use in their language, and I remember reading that they were tied to the Shards before humans had even gotten to that world. Likely the meaning have been preserved along with the symbols, possibly because Dominion or Devotion taught them to the first humans they brought there, but the pronunciations have likely changed over time, and the language could have changed much faster between the fall and restoration of Elantris. As the Elantrians taught magic, though, the meanings would have been preserved because they indicate what magic it does. Edit: as the Aons are geographic, they may not have been from before Sel was a Shardworld, but they probably existed before the kingdom of Arelon.

We definitely will eventually get how to make an unsealed metalmind. Now I know I called this thread "Problems with Nicrosil" but I would also love to talk about some possibilities, since we've beaten the problems we started with to death. Per the above WoB, we know we will get that answer eventually, and per another WoB: We know that the variable storing is different from what I proposed; the only remaining mystery is how a soulbearer would get their power back after storing it, if F-Nicrosil was their only power. Compounding was suggested, but I think the mechanism is probably something else, and a bit more complex, because else no one would no that non-twinborn ferrings with F-nicrosil existed; they would accidentally store once, maybe, and then they would never use any feruchemy again and likely go undetected. So, since we have all been able to get those out of our system more or less, what are the possibilities and implications here? I believe I read a WoB that said that the investitures could be converted through nicrosil, like stormlight to breath or other forms of investiture. That sounds pretty dangerous to me; think of a Nicrosil compounder, who then converts it all to stormlight and uses it to surgebind; the devastation they could wreak would literally be infinite if they had enough Nicrosil. What other applications could you guys see?

I agree that it can't be that simple, and likely will fundamentally change many of the alloys. However, the resulting effects might still have an internal/external flip. For some of them, part might be a temporal delay between your decision and it happening. So, you burn Atium-steel, making yourself push in all directions in, say, ten seconds. but when the push happens, you aren't actually burning metals, so a seeker wouldn't see you. The affect, making you, in effect, steelpush, could be considered internal, since it is changing you, while also being temporally altered. However, there is also the push-pull flip seen with atium, so maybe Atium-steel would have the effect of an ironpull, similar to what I described above. True.

That's an interesting thought; I hadn't thought of that application.