Cocoa

Taking this WoB and WoP together (and I'm sure a few others I can't track down), we can see that Brandon thinks all god metals should have been burnable by anyone in the way Lerasium was. The fact that Atium could only be burned by Mistborn or Oracles was a result of Cosmere rules not yet being fully fleshed out yet, and might retroactively be explained by a Shard tinkering with things at the time. Likewise, we know that both Atium and Lerasium work as spikes (for given value of 'work,' in the case of Lerasium) in hemalurgy, as does Trellium. So since we can see that god metals can apparently freely interface with Ruin's metallic art, and they at least should freely interface with Preservation's, what's to prevent them from freely interfacing with their shared metallic art? What's to prevent someone with the right Intent from storing their youth in an atium nugget, then drawing it back out again later?

Fantastic. So either 'I foresaw this' was meant in a more mundane sense, with the Truthwatcher having pieced together it would happen, or else...

Yep, though pretty much all the metals interface with the spiritual realm in some way, even if it's just pulling power from there when burned. Gold, Electrum, Copper, Bronze, and maybe the enhancement metals just seem to do it moreso than the others. One other big roadblock that's occurred to me since making this post is that, if you group the metals that way, Hemalurgy stops making sense, because the metals that can be used to steal powers all line up to the existing quadrants.

Just for fun, I gave some thought as to the hows and whys you'd go about making mechas with the different invested arts. Allomancy: Use Southern Scadrian mechanical allomancy to push and pull on the appropriate parts to move the mecha around. Additional coinshot weapons systems can also utilize mechanical steel burning, or even cadmium bubble grenades like Marasi used in BoM. Unfortunately, it would be hard to scale up very far unless Southern Scadrian technology can store wight from an inanimate object in an iron-mind (or perhaps reinforce the material strength of the mecha in some other way). Awakening: This might actually be the single most intuitive invested art for mecha to arise out of. Thanks to the Law of BioChromatic Parallelism, shaping a gigantic hunk of metal into a humanoid form would actually make it more effective than it would otherwise be (or at least less resource-intense to create). The major hurtle would just be getting enough breaths and finding the right command. AonDor: While it probably can't do everything, AonDor is one of the more versatile invested arts we've seen. Beyond just finding the right Aon and modifier combination to reinforce and animate the mecha, I also imagine you'd also need some sort of 'power core' to fuel the whole thing, possibly incorporating AonRao. One of the obvious downsides to something like this is that it wouldn't function very well outside Arelon's borders, if at all. Dakhor: Instead of an inorganic mecha like other arts, I actually imagine Dakhor making an (at least partially) organic, 'living' mecha from a heavily modified human. It feels like it'd fit Fjorden's general vibe, plus we've already seen Dakhor modify and reinforce skeletal structures before; this would just be taking that existing principle further. Bloodsealing: "Hey, what if we stuck a whole lot of skeletals together into one really big skeletal?" "Duuuuuuude, that would be rad!" - two bloodsealers after partaking of a particular Dzhamarian swamp plant. Surgebinding (and fabrials): With either a radiant or fabrial capable of using the surge of gravitation, you could lighten the mecha enough to get around most square-cube issues as long as you had enough stormlight. I can pretty easily imagine various fabrials being used to make all the parts move in a motion-capture-type way, especially now that Navani's figured out a trick for magnifying an applied force between two parts of a paired fabrial. I also think that, rather than going for a humanoid look, Rosharans would probably take inspiration from greatshells and make animalistic mecha. Rosharans also have the advantage of already having the basic idea of powered armor in widespread circulation, which lends itself well to making the mental leap of "what if we made shardplate but bigger?" Sand Mastery: Possibly the most 'low-tech' mecha type. Build a light frame, probably out of wood, that sand masters can then wrap their lines of sand around and through. Make sure the mecha caries plenty of water with it that the operator can use to rehydrate.

Between these two quotes we can see that Smokers and Seekers should both be able to affect the rhythms of Roshar in the same way they're able to dampen/detect allomantic pulses. And in the first quote, Brandon explains that the rhythms are tied to the spiritual realm, not so much the cognitive. So what I'm thinking is, copper and bronze being treated as 'cognitive' metals is one of those "Scadrians don't have a complete understanding of the metallic arts, there's some errors in the provided information that will clear up as the timeline and in-universe research progress" (heavily paraphrased) things that Brandon's talked about before. I would almost suggest that the proper grouping for copper and bronze would be with gold and electrum, since all four seem to tie to the spiritual realm more directly than other metals, except that would throw the whole internal/external division of allomantic metals into question since all four are internal metals.

Is it ever explained why Aons only need a single extra line to function after the Reod? I could understand it for Aon Aon, but since all the other Aons are made up of Aon Aon repeated and sometimes rearranged, it feels like the chasm line should also be repeated multiple times in each Aon.

I'd originally been trying to shape it so that the letters formed a santhid shell as seen as above, since that's the part sailors would see, but in the end I accidentally wound up making it look like the shell above water with a big eye and tentacles trailing below, which I thought was a pretty cool coincidence. Comments and critique welcome.

If it's not any trouble, could you point me in the direction of those WoBs? I'd love to read them.

We know from RoW that in order to 'reverse the polarity' of Investiture and turn it into anti-Investiture, at least in the case of Lights, you need to separate it from its normal tone and then make the next thing it 'hears' that same tone with different intent. Now, Navani accomplished this isolation using vacuum tubes. However, I think that with access to allomancy, there's an easier way. So we know that, besides muffling allomantic pulses, coppercoulds interfere with Rhythms. Therefore, I think that if you put a Light inside a coppercloud* and then exposed it to its proper anti-tone while it was still in there, you'd get anti-Investiture. *It's possible you'd need a copper savant or multiple overlapping clouds or something to fully block out the tone, since we know that with enough juice a coppercloud can be pierced, but maybe not. I want to say just taking scale into account that Shards' pure tones would be pretty good at piercing copperclouds, but looking back it feels like the tones are actually pretty difficult to hear outside certain special conditions.

So, what got me thinking about this was Spook's observation on how well a-Tin and a-Pewter pair together, sort of like they're two halves of the same whole (not his exact words, but that seemed like the gist of it). Now, I know that's certainly not the case for all push/pull pairs, but I think for a-Gold and a-Electrum it is. a-Gold, on it own, is a very disorienting metal to burn. Your brain isn't equipped to handle existing in two self-states at once. However, we know that Atium enhances your cognitive abilities to be able to process the information you get from the atium shadows, and as near as I can figure a-Electrum would have to do something similar with your own electrum shadows. So if you burn them together, I think the enhanced cognitive abilities from a-Electrum would let you process the increased information coming in from a-Gold.

Rust and Ruin, but Kalad's Phantom is a close second for me.

Right, probably should have clarified "could Regrowth fix savantism, within other Cosmere healing limits?" Whoops. Does it have to be purposeful, though? I understand that it requires a measure of Intent to use investiture, especially the amount necessary to become a savant, but I think there's a difference between "I'm going to purposefully use a lot of investiture, whoops there's side effects" and "I'm going to purposefully break my Spiritweb."

We've seen that Stormlight in general is capable of repairing damage to a person's Spiritweb, and Regrowth seems to be an amped up version of standard Stormlight healing. With that in mind, do you think Regrowth would be able to purge the excess investiture from someone's Spiritweb and repair the damage done by savantism?

In some traditions it's both the bride and the groom, in others it's just the bride, and I didn't particularly pick any one irl tradition and stick with it when looking for inspiration. In the case of ShahTand, it's considered a feminine right/tradition/duty, so its use is focused on the female relatives and the bride herself. That could be for predominately cultural reasons as opposed to something hard-coded into the system, but then at that point you get to deal with fun things like Intent and whether or not it would even work on the groom with the people drawing it expecting it not to. Partially, I was influenced by the fact that ShahTand is a heavily Devotion-slanted invested art, and seeing as we know Aona was a woman (and Skai is usually presumed to have been a man, from what I've seen), it felt natural to make ShahTand something that 'belonged' to the bride.

ShahTand is an invested art from Sel which uses plant-based wedding stain/makeup as a conduit to manifest its effects. The makeup is worn by the female relatives of the bride and groom, as well as the bridesmaids, and is applied in special geometric patterns on the hands and feet the night before the wedding. Sometimes, the stain is also used to dye the hair of both the bride and the groom (as well as the groom's beard, if he has one), though this has no bearing on the effects of ShahTand. The most basic effect of ShahTand is to increase the rate at which inter-personal Connections are formed and strengthened during the wedding, and this effect is especially pronounced between the bride and the groom. After the wedding ceremony is completed (including one or several traditional dances that follow certain geometric patterns) and the marriage is consummated, an investiture bond forms between the newlywed wife and husband. These bonds universally confer enhanced emotional fortitude to both parties, with additional effects determined by the exact patterns used in the bride's makeup, called "blessings." These blessings encompass a variety of good fortunes wished for the couple, including but not limited to faithfulness, good health, safety, fertility, and success in business ventures. While the benefits conferred by blessings are real, they tend towards the subtle. Extreme care is taken when applying the bride's ShahTand makeup, since it is believed that poorly drawn patterns will not only fail to work, but actually call down misfortune on the couple. These beliefs are held strongly enough that it's considered perfectly acceptable and reasonable to delay a wedding entirely to give the makeup a chance to wear off entirely and be reapplied if something disrupts the application process and results in poorly-drawn lines. The bond conferred by ShahTand and any benefits it offers can be weakened or even break entirely if the couple's devotions to one another wavers enough. The bond also weakens the further you are from ShahTand's land of origin, though in this case its effects will return as you draw back towards it. ShahTand is inspired, in part, by the various traditions from around the world that use henna dye.

I like all of these. I think they'd fit very well. Another possibility I can think of is that, since the fourth idea was about accepting you can't protect everyone, the fifth ideal will be about what you do after that failure. Something like "where I cannot protect, I will rebuild," or "where I cannot protect, I will heal."

Regardless of all the specifics, via multiple WoB, Harmony is leagues more powerful than Odium. So, while Shards are infinite, this is a "some infinities are bigger than other infinities" situation.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what Brandon does with Lift over the timeskip and in Stormlight Era 2. She's a character who's largely defined by her youth, to the point that when she was introduced she was convinced she'd pulled a Peter Pan. As we've seen since then with Edgedancer and RoW, that's not the case, and we've got a 15-ish year timeskip coming up, which will leave her in her late 20s/early 30s. So, yeah, I'm excited to see how her characterization evolves (or pointedly fails to) in light of that. Also odds are that if the Stump survives Book 5 she'll kick the bucket over the timeskip due to old age, so we'll get to see the effect that has on Lift

When explaining to Lirin about why surgeons are still necessary at Urithiru, Kaladin tells him that they only have about fifty Edgedancers, and only three Truthwatchers, who are the only two orders orders with access to the Progression surge. Now, this was well before Rlain bonded Tumi, so we know he's not one of those three. Two of those three we already specifically know about; Renarin and Stump. Now, it very well could be that Brandon just picked a very low number as a worldbuilding detail to show how rare/scattered the Truthwatchers are, but I do find it a bit curious that we know a fair amount about 2/3 members of the order (or 3/4 now) and virtually nothing about the last one, and I think there's a chance they'll be significant further down the line. What are your thoughts?

Looks like @Quantus beat me to the points about gloryspren, emotionspren, and decayspren xD My personal guesses for the Truthwatchers are either awespren (just since they're sort of misty and awe seems like an appropriate match thematically for people trying to discover things), concentrationspren (good for an order of scholars), or anticipationspren (again, discoveries). In regards to us not having seen or at least heard of all the cousin spren yet, it's a possibility, but there is this WoB: Which isn't totally conclusive, of course. He might have specifically avoided pre-planning the cousin spren for some orders to give himself wiggle room later, and according to other WoBs mistspren weren't even originally intended to be the Truthwatcher spren, so there's plenty of room for things to change as the series gets written.

There's a lot of people here guessing concentrationspren for Truthwatchers, since logicspren are spoken for. I think that's a solid guess, but there is one other possibility I can think of from the spren we've seen; awespren. They're described as a rippling ring of blue smoke, which brings to mind the idea of mist for me, and the idea of being awed seems like it would fit an order of Radiants devoted to seeking out and discovering universal truths.

Yep, that tracks with what I've been thinking. That sounds neat, I'd love to see what you come up with if you do.

So, I've been looking over a lot of things related to the Truthwatchers over the past few days, and I think I may have stumbled on an intriguing thread. Up to this point, I (and so far as I can tell, most other readers) have chalked up Renarin's foresight visions as being the result of Glys' corruption/enlightenment by Sja-Anat, since predicting the future is regarded as being of Odium in-universe. And I do still think that's part of it, but I don't think it's the whole story. Remember way back to WoK, what Honor said in his final message to Dalinar: Emphasis mine. 'Cultivation,' the growing of things in a certain way, is also an Intent that lends itself well to predicting the future, and we know she was at least skilled and confident enough in her abilities to gamble on the creation of Todium. Taken together I think all this goes to show that the in-universe attitude of acting like future prediction 'belongs' to Odium is a false assumption that fails to account for Cultivation's affinity with that ability, and this is what the rest of my theory ultimately hinges on. Now, moving on, let's take a look at the radiant order/surgebinding chart: If you look, there's a couple dichotomies between the top and bottom halves of the chart, which I believe indicate that the two halves are mirrors of each other with the top weighted towards Honor and the bottom towards Cultivation. On the top we have all male (like Honor) Heralds, and on the bottom we have all female (like Cultivation) Heralds. Where we have the Windrunners (bound to Honorspren) above, directly below we have the Edgedancers (bound to Cultivationspren). Where we have "Honor's truest surge" of Adhesion above, below it we have Progression (which, while as far as we know is not purely of Cultivation, seems to be the closest of the surges to her thematically and was one of two usable radiant surges during the occupation of Urithiru). And while it's not on the chart, we have a WoB saying that Truthwatcher spren are closer to Cultivation than Honor. So, with this in mind, I think the Truthwatchers are the Cultivation-aligned mirror of the Bondsmiths, being capable of using their respective Shard's 'truest surge' and mimicking their Shard's abilities, and using their surges in more Spiritual ways than their neighboring orders. And as we've seen, in Dalinar's case that affinity with the Spiritual Realm tends to manfest itself in the creation of visions for himself and others. It was at this point that, to me, Renarin's visions looked less like a product of Odium's influence, and more like something that was already there and tweaked by Sja-Anat. Before i get to this last bit, I'll freely admit I think this is the flimsiest evidence I have in support of this theory. There's a lot of potential for unreliable narrators and missing or corrupted pieces of history and all that. The quote from Mythica would seem to indicate that the corruption of radiant spren is a new phenomenon, or at least that the ancient radiants didn't seem to know about it if it was happening. In that case, there wouldn't have been any spren like Glys around, and there wouldn't be any precognitive Truthwatchers if Sja-Anat's corruption is the source of that ability. Now, take a look at that recorded quote from the Urithiru gem archive. While the speaker could be speaking in a mundane sense when they say they foresaw something (probably the Recreance or the side effects of bonding BAM), the fact that it was included in the book makes me think it's more significant than that. If this unknown Truthwatcher really did have foresight, then that leaves two potential possibilities I can think of. The first is that their Mistspren (and possibly other radiant spren) had become corrupted, but that between them probably not wanting to advertise that fact and it being so close to the Recreance that fact was lost to history. The other possibility is, as I've said, that Truthwatchers don't need to be corrupted to have precognition. Like I said at the start, I do still think that Sja-Anat's corruption/enlightenment changes how the precognition works somehow. It's possible that, in normal Truthwatchers, the precognition is far more subtle, circumstantial, difficult to get working, etc., which could be why we haven't seen or heard mention of, say, Stump seeing the future. I think there's a good chance that the corruption makes it stronger or more accessible, possibly at the cost of 'flavoring' the visions, making it more likely that you'll see painful things or worst-case-scenarios. But I think it is a change to an existing ability, not creating a new one altogether.

Actually, that's a really good point I hadn't considered. We saw with Lerasium and the Well of Ascension and the Mists that they were all the same power of Preservation in different forms, so if it were always as simple as Investiture A + anti-Investiture A = Earth-Shattering Kaboom, then Raysium should have reacted to the anti-Voidlight. That it didn't must mean we're missing something, either in terms of how Investiture and anti-Investiture play off each other or in terms of how Investiture behaves when it's condensed down into a god metal.

I sadly don't have a copy of RoW in front of me to compare since I just borrowed it from the library, but I'm currently reading back through Warbreaker and thought of a possible interaction between the perfect pitch granted by the second heightening and the way different Shards' investiture works as revealed in RoW. Provided that they knew the Shard's rhythm and pure tone in the first place, I think that being of the second heightening or higher would make someone better at manipulating investiture with sound in the way we saw in RoW, especially Endowment's investiture since being of second heightening would mean you have a lot of her investiture in your system already. I doubt you could steal Breaths from a person with it and might not even be able to move it from one object to another since they seem to be a much 'stickier' type of investiture than stormlight is, but being able to perfectly match different pure tones using perfect pitch would make creating hybrid and anti-investitures significantly easier, once you know how. With that in mind, I think that by the times of Mistborn Ears 3 and 4 (and whatever else is going on in the Cosmere during that time), we're going to see a Nalthis that's become the Cosmere center of meta-Investiture production. I doubt Roshar can keep the secrets of meta-Investiture from getting out indefinitely, and we know the Ghostbloods are working on a way to transport loose investiture between worlds. Anti-investiture would probably still be easier to produce than hybrid-investiture, since it just requires the intent to make it (and a vacuum) rather than an 'emulsifier.' I don't want to go on a whole tangent about it but now I'm also wondering what the second heightening would do for a Seeker. and whether the process for splitting Ettmetal back into Atium and Lerasium has anything to do with tonal manipulation, like a reverse of how Warlight is created