Stormtide_Leviathan

I don't think that would be too much of an issue honestly. Large amounts of Investiture can gain sentience, after a large amount of time. However, I don't think that spikes implanted into someone would run into this problem. Cause I think, in this case, the spiked person's own sentience will fulfill whatever property of investiture it is that tends toward sentience. Investiture doesn't always become sentient, if it has someone to direct it already. The biggest example of this is, of course, shards which need Vessels but if they could function sentiently on their own probably wouldn't. I'm also not sure you even could invest a spike enough that you'd run into this problem. There's a limit to just how much investiture a given piece of metal can hold. [Band of Mourning]

If I understand correctly, they're talking about normal koloss spikes, just implanted into a Lurcher (ie, someone who would have the ability to burn iron) rather than a normal human. the spikes are the same. The point is basically just a Koloss being able to burn their own spikes. [Band of Mourning]

Odium is hatred incarnate. Odium is passion. Odium is fervor, rage, divine wrath. And it's also unfathomable power, the power of a god. It's not going away. One way or another, odium is gonna be around at the end of the series. Now, there are of course a few ways you can make that fact less of a problem. The first is, of course, shattering Odium, like honor was shattered. I could certainly see that being the way this ends up being resolved. But there's another way to resolve this problem, too, and imo this resolution is a better fit for the themes of the stormlight archive. Someone takes up Odium who will channel it toward something good. Hatred and rage aren't inherently bad things. We like to think that hate is bad and love is good but in reality it's just not that simple. Love can cause you to excuse and overlook things you really shouldn't. To put up with abuse. And on the other hand, hatred can be justified. Sometimes, people do things that truly deserve to be hated, that the victim simply can't forgive them for. And sometimes, systems are built on the backs of people for whom hatred is a completely logical response. Systems like slavery, and dictatorships, and racism. And not even just hatred for the people on top of those systems (though not not for that either), but also for the systems themselves and the conditions that led to their creation. Odium can be channeled for good; for giving Passion to the downtrodden and oppressed. A force for change, a fuel to the fire within. Personally, I think someone taking up the power to use it for this purpose would be a more fitting resolution than simply shattering the power. Cause stormlight archive is a story about a war against odium, yes, but it's also a story about oppressive systems and the horrors they create. Shattering Odium may be a thematic ending to the first of these, but not to the second. Now, onto the question I know a lot of you have: Moash??? Yes, moash. Now, big disclaimer: This is something I'd expect to see at the end of his character arc (at least within this series- if he becomes a shard, we'll presumably be seeing him afterwards) which means he is absolutely not there yet. If he took up odium right now, it would not go well. But we still have one to six more books for him to evolve and grow. I see this coming after a long redemption arc. Stormlight is a series all about redemption and second chances, afterall. Right now, he's a character consumed by hatred, but I think a much more interesting resolution than learning to let go of that hatred is learning to channel it for something good. Cause honestly, he has all that hatred for a very good reason. And I think that Moash taking up Odium could be the force for change that roshar desparately needs. Now, there are other characters who could fill in this role as well. Chief among them, Kaladin. Kaladin has had very similar feelings as moash- they are narrative foils after all- and has every reason to personally hate oppression. He's currently in a much better emotional position to be able to do good with the power of odium than moash currently is. And at the end of Rhythm of War, we saw his eyes turn golden as he attacked the Pursuer, which is clearly setting up something, some kind of connection to odium, which means he might be in a good position to be able to take it up since you do have to be aligned with a shard in order to really hold onto it. I'll be honest, if Sanderson does go down the path of having someone take up Odium as a force for change, I fully expect it to be Kal. But I'm a moash girlie and in my heart of hearts I want it to be him, so here's my flimsy justification for why it should be. Kaladin's character arc has been more about leaving behind his hatred, and moving toward protecting people. Basically, he's been moving away from the parts of himself that are aligned with odium, while Moash has been running full force into them. And right now of course, that's really not going so well for himself or anyone around him. For Kaladin to be "odious" enough, his character would have to go backwards from where he is now to get him in a mental state more similar to the first book, whereas Moash could make forward progression and become a better person while still holding onto the odiousness that he has now. TL;DR Having someone take up Odium and channel the power to be a force for social change would be a good resolution to multiple plots, themes, and problems presented by the books, and moash's arc could take him to where he'd be in a good position to be that person.

It seems that the divine breath just needs a certain amount of investiture, and it doesn't really matter what kind. So you could almost surely fuel it with allomancy or feruchemy, yeah. Basically, if you burn a metal, you get a big burst of Investiture that normally is channeled for a specific purpose (like pushing on metal with steel), but if you know what you're doing you could channel that investure for something like fueling divine breath (or nightblood). Same with tapping from a metalmind. So yes, it would take away from the allomantic effect of the metal cause you're basically diverting the power to something else.

I'm guessing it has to do with perception. Feruchemists generally see their metalminds as External, something separate from themself. Kandra might see bones as part of themself, at least while they're using them (and almost certainly see their spikes as part of themself, while we're at it). They're shapeshifters, so having a fluid perception of their body doens't seem too weird

They still used some investiture, at least among the rich. The Alethi had a bunch of soulcasters for example (and other nations had a couple), and fabrials were were all over. (For example, there were mentions of "half-shard" shields that were fabrials that could block shardblades, and those are probably stuffed with a decent enough amount of investiture to block shardblades)

Could be, but don't forget Arsteel was a returned which means 1) it's probably unlikely anyone knew where his original Breath from when he's alive is in order for it to be used to awaken him and 2) turning him into a lifeless might already be funky since you're lifelessing a returned body and not a normal body

While that may be what happens, I wouldn't take the adventure game as proof of that. it's not considered strictly canon, so stuff in the books might contradict it I'm sure there is a way to steal memory with hemalugy. I dunno if it's this specifically; it could be though, i dunno. What does happen if you spike someone with a metalmind?

Kaladin is gay because I want him to be and because of the gay things he does. Hope this helps <3 (More seriously, several of the things I pointed out about Kaladin and Moash were said by Kaladin. How he talks about how he "opened his heart to this man", how he talks about his relationship with moash being different than his relationship with the rest of bridge four, just the vibe as a whole. Not to mention other vibes not directly related to moash, like some of his past romances. I have seen a lot of gay and/or ace people relate to the way he talks about women to their own experiences when they used to think they were straight. And sure, some or all of it could be chalked up to his depression, but it it also doesn't need to be. Gay people can be depressed after all.) (And the other thing is, I don't need to prove that Kaladin is gay. If that's how I read him, I'm free to do that. I don't care what brandon might think, the author doesn't get to control how people interpret their book, they can only control what they put in there. The author isn't inherently right, cause art is subjective. If he didn't want me to think Kaladin was queer, he shouldn't have written him so queer, whether he intended to or not.)

Speak for yourself, this is my dream. Like there is absolutely no way you can convince me that there's never been anything romantic between them, at least just feelings for eachother. I mean have you seen the way the talk about eachother??? "Mostly unchained" yeah okay gayboy. I mean seriously, "someone's mind controlled but there feelings for their love interest are strong enough to break through" is a trope about as old as mind-control tropes themselves. (And yes what moash has going on isn't "technically" mind control but it's close enough for these purposes).And then there's lines like "Kaladin had opened his heart to this man" and a distinct separation drawn between his relationship with Moash and his relationship with the rest of bridge four. And then of course there's teft's "storm you moash at least kaladin loves me". Like they're dynamic makes sooooo much sense when you look at it as romantic. (tbh, brandon is way better at writing romances when he's trying to write friendships than he is when he's trying to write actual romances imo.) Now, they've both done a whole lot to hurt eachother and I think it's entirely possible that there's too much between them for them to ever have any kind of healthy relationship in the future even if moash does get a redemption arc (which he better), but in my heart of hearts i just want them to kiss and make up. Thank you for coming to my ted talk. (And remember, it's pride month so you're legally not allowed to disagree with me about this, i don't make the rules)

I think that's prooobably unlikely, just given the way Breath works, since it's not exactly "unkeyed" but rather, it's keyed into the identity of whoever it's given to (this is why only you can retrieve your breaths from something you awaken, unless you do actually blank your identity beforehand somehow). So I would think that things stored in the breath would be too. Or at least, it's a very simple matter to make it so that they are, as simple as using the right command. I'd imagine there's a limit to how much can be stored in a single breath (just like there is with metalminds and spikes), but if you have enough breaths then probably, yeah!

There is more you can do with breaths than just using them to awaken non-sentient objects. In Warbreaker, we see Vasher help a girl forget a traumatizing experience somehow, using breath. Probably by teaching her how to store memories in breath since, furthermore, in Rhythm of War we see that Wit does just this uses his breath as a storage system for memories. But one of the most fundamental aspects of breath is that they can be given to someone else. So what happens if you give a breath that holds some of your memories to someone else? To me, it would make sense that they now have access to those memories. Probably, it would require the right Intent to let them- maybe you need to modify the Command a little bit. " My life to yours, my Breath become yours. See what I have seen" or something. But I simply refuse to believe that if you can store your memories in Breath, and share Breath, that you can't allow other people to access those memories. (And possibly you could even make some kind of projector that can be Awakened to display memories in the Breaths it has, given the right Command, but that's extra speculative and probably we won't see anything like that for a while). We don't know exactly how how storing memories in Breath works, so maybe I'm completely off-base here, but I'd like to speculate further- why does it have to stop with memories? If you can store memories, could you store other things in breath? Strength? Speed? This sounds a lot like feruchemy and in many ways it is, so it's possible Brandon might not have made it work this way simply to keep the systems separate. But what we know of the memory thing does sound a lot like use of copperminds, so I also wouldn't be surprised if there were other similarities. Now, even if you can use breath to store strength, I doubt you can use it to give yourself super strength like you can with feruchemy. There's not multiplacativeness. You can store 10% of your strength in a breath, which means you'll be at 90% strength until you retrieve it and you're back up at 100%. You wouldn't be able to ever be at 110% strength like you can with feruchemy. But what you could do with Breath is to share that extra 10% of your strength with someone else. If you allow someone who's already at 100% strength to access your 10%, they could be at 110%. But that means you'll be stuck at 90% strength unless and until that person gives it back to you. I just think it would make sense if Endowment's magic system allows you to endow others with your own attributes, and this theory seems to be consistent with what we know so far.

Personally I think you would see lingering remnants of your own goldshadow that never fully goes away, at the edges of your vision half-formed

In the cosmere, there's normal dna like we have in the real world, but also spiritual and cognitive "dna" as well that plays by different rules. Probably shardblades affect spiritual dna, cause we do know lighteyes have those eyes because they're descended from shardbearers.

If you're using lightweaving, there's no real reason it would be just a "screen" like we have them, probably a hologram would be just as easy to make (kinda similar to the map dalinar and shallan can make). And that does seem to be the direction the cosmere is headed eventually, with sci-fi esque tech so it would make sense

Yeah I think this is exactly how it works honestly. We know that hemalurgy works anywhere in the cosmere, you just have to know and have Intent. But if some rando on roshar knows about hemalurgy and wanted to steal something, all they need is a spike of the right metal. So I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't have to be a scadrian to burn a godmetal, since we know you don't have to be an allomancer to burn lerasium and we saw Hoid burn some and he's not even Scadrian (but he has all kinds of other funkiness on so who knows). The atium retcon also makes this more interesting. I think the way pure atium now works is that any allomancer can burn it, so it might be that you have to be an allomancer to burn most god metals. But hard to say before any of this makes it into the books

Personally I'm *really* not a fan of this pairing, and their dynamic kinda weirds me out lol. I think they work way better platonically than romantically

To me, multiple copies seems most likely. It would be vaguely useful for the ability to save knowledge for later while still holding onto it now, but where it would really shine i think is when identityless metalminds come into play. That would let you share memories with people, lots of people at once which would be quite a useful ability. in fact, you may even be able to do some particularly tricky stuff with identity to limit who can access the metalminds. For example, you might be able to do something like "store most of your identity away completely, except for your identity as a member of your family". Then, only people who are part of your family could access the memories (or people who consider themself part of your family, given how cosmere magics work). Or instead of "your family", you could do "membership of some secret organization" like the Set, or the Ghostbloods, or the Sons of Honor. Being able to share memories with people, and to control who can access those memories, seems incredibly useful and exactly in line with how brandon seems to work by introducing seemingly simple abilities and combining and iterating upon them.

(I know you were probably just being a bit facetious, I just find it funny that there's an explicit answer to this lol)

Even with lifeless, it's not "used up" per se, it still exists, it's just not accessible to you anymore. It's basically like you're giving that breath to the lifeless, and its close enough to a human that now its the lifeless's breath instead of yours, so you can't retrieve it

You're right that Breaths are actually already physical, that's my bad. So it would be, as you say, more akin to transformation than manifesting something non-physical. However, I don't think that really changes much of my overall point. I don't think that in order to command a breath and make it change, you'd need a second breath. (So I don't think the resistance would be an issue there). Cause my point was that, the way awakening works, you're already commanding breaths without needing a second one. My assumption is that the way awakening works is that you command your breaths to do something, using the object as the medium by which they act on the world. So if you command a rope to "hold things", you're actually commanding the Breaths to "hold things" by way of the rope. Breaths are the thing you have control of here. I'm assuming that a breath is just a bundle of investiture that acts out your will. And normally, in order for that to do anything physically useful, you have to make it go into a physical object. Cause if there's no physical object, there's no way for it to act on the physical world. But what I'm saying is that there's another way- rather than having the bundle of investiture under your control possess a physical object you can have it become a physical object. (Or, since apparently breaths are already physical, a more useful form of physical object, like changing the state of matter). You wouldn't need to use a breath to awaken another breath, because the awakening is necessary to allow you to control an object by filling it with breaths you already control. But if you control them, then maybe you can do something other than just awaken with them, like have them turn themselves into metal. Does that make sense? (Now I admit, some or all of those assumptions may not be entirely accurate. We don't really have enough evidence to say for certain one way or another. And if not, then this whole thing may not be possible. And if not, then yes maybe using breaths to awaken other breaths would be another possible way of going about this. But as you mention, that has a lot of issues with it, like the bowl-of-water issue and the investiture-resists-investiture issue. But we have seen there are other things you can do with breath than just awaken, like memory stuff, so I do think this is possible personally)

Shardic intent has more to do with how the magic is accessed than what it does. ie, in this case, you get breaths by having someone give them to you. Or for knights radiant, you have to make oaths (honor) and grow as a person (cultivation). So while it's probably possible that Edgli purposely changed the magic to prevent this somehow, I don't think that would be a natural part of it. And I don't see any reason why Edgli would want to prevent that, though again it is possible.

Actually, just fyi, it includes quite a major spoiler for the ending of Rhythm of War. So just be forewarned of that, anyone reading this thread. (Also, here's the link to the trellium page for anyone that didn't feel like looking this up.) https://coppermind.net/wiki/Trellium

So as I understand it, the way awakening works is that you use breath to fill an object with investiture and give it extremely limited sentience (as investiture does), and then that object will act out whatever command you made it to do. But the investiture is the key here of course. The object is just the physical medium that gives Breath the ability to act on the world. So is that medium actually necessary? I don't think it is. We've seen that investiture can manifest in the physical realm as metals- shardblades and shardplates and ancient fabrials, atium, lerasium. So why not breath as well? I propose that you can command the breath directly to "manifest as metal", and it would do so in the form of Edglium, endowment's godmetal. Furthermore, I propose that this is how Azure's sword was made. "Manifest as metal and be as my blade". We know that originally, nightblood was an attempt to recreate a rosharan shardblade using Breath. This was done by taking a normal steel sword and loading it chock full of breath, and giving it a command. "Destroy Evil". But this isn't how shardblades are made. They're made by getting a spren to manifest in the physical realm as metal. And so, if you're trying to recreate one using Breath, then I would probably try getting breath to manifest as metal. If Azure's sword is a second attempt at this same experiment (which certainly isn't confirmed, but we at least know that the sword is "somewhat related" to nightblood). So what do you all think? Can you command breath directly, and manifest it as metal? What else interesting could you do with that? And what do you think of my theory on Azure's sword

This definitely isn't "evidence" but I do think that metanarratively it would make sense if this were the case. I know brandon's said that aethers are the last of the main magic systems for the cosmere that we haven't seen. And it would make sense for at least one of the major magic systems to originate from Yolen imo, since that was the planet where everything started. Additionally, originally aethers were going to be pre-shattering though it's unclear whether that's still the case.