Argent

True, much is unknown. But Blades are useless of you keep them hidden - and the people of Roshar don't strike me as THAT subtle. A single Blade could not give you a very high political tank, but also the means to defend it. No, I believe the Blades have been either hidden or lost.

Dalinar sees hundreds of Radiants (which is still only two orders) drop their Blades, and then comments that there are fewer than a hundred the world is aware of today.

Not only that, but he has done something else with it. Combined with the "like my own skin" comment, I am pretty solid on the mini spike theory.

I proposed a similar thing a while back, but I no longer think it could work. Nohadon, during one of Dalinar's vision, shares his regret that "not all spren as discerning as honorspren," in reference to Alakavish (who, as I understand it, was a Surgebinder - bound a spren other than an honorspren - who started a war against Nohadon shortly before a Desolation). This suggests that honorspren are either the only, or one of the few, spren concerned with some form of morality in their Surgebinders. If half of the spren were of the honorspren supertype, I doubt Nohadon would've been said what he said. I've since decided that Wyndle mentions honorspren and cryptics specifically because they are special in some way. Maybe they are the only spren whose Investiture comes entirely from a single Shard. Maybe the two are so different, Wyndle mentions them as a way of saying "look at how diverse of an audience my sculptures attracted." Or something else entirely.

This is relevant,

I thought the reference suggested that he had burned the bead... But now that we think about it, don't we have a WoB that he hasn't?

No, Lift can touch Wyndle - the spren remarks on it as well. Though I agree that as she gets better, she probably won't need him for climbing, not in the crude way she is using him now.

Kaladin's mini-explosion happened as soon as he spoke the the Words of the Second Ideal. In fact, he had been holding the Stormlight from the Parshendi's beard gems for a few seconds with no significant effect. Long quote inbound:

Uh, there was an explanation somewhere about how exactly the Basic Lashing works... Only I can't find it. From what I can remember, a Basic Lashing - as well as the other surges and their specific Radiant manifestations - affects the Spiritual Realm first. Everything there has a set of... properties, laws, and equations "written down," and one one those is the gravity vector, or possibly its direction. The Basic Lashing "pushes" against this vector in a way similar to how two forces acting on the same physical object interact with each other; this "push" results in the physical aspect of said object to "think" that gravity points in a different direction. Of course, maintaining this drains Investiture, as the Lashing is resisting a the natural force of gravity, and once this Investiture runs out, things go back to normal.

Makabaki people are dark of skin. Not pitch black (I believe this is reserved for the Aimians), but dark brown.

This Article of Faith #11 actually sounds very similar to how the Devotaries on Roshar work. They are supposed to be equal, and each one allows you to worship the Almighty in the way that is best suited to your own talents.

It is possible (though I don't necessarily believe it) that the Three Lashings refer to the most basic things Windrunners can do - the atoms of their powers, so to speak. Everything else is is just the Windrunners being clever about how they use those basic atoms.

As a redeeming factor of the theory I thought you would advocate (and the one I actually kind of support), the Dor was described to exist in a place of high pressure, pushing against the rifts Elantrians create with their Aons. This supports the idea that the Spiritual Realm (where the Dor, like other Shardic powers, likely "resides") in a pretty dense place.

The Ten Essences table provides many of the unifying factors. The (Alethi?) numbers correspond directly to the Heralds' names, so this is what we use. Jes is the number one, so we give Jezrien 1. Now I wonder how we are supposed to pronounce Palah... All of the other numbers are "perfect" in their symmetry, which is a perfectly sensible thing for a Vorin culture to do. Palah breaks the paradigm though.

The second half is my experience with the matter, but it was intended as an afterthought, not a topic for discussion. The first paragraph deals with one of the things that make the cosmere work, and in an interesting way nonetheless. I think it's far enough removed from our own world to be a safe idea for a chat.

The one thing that seriously differentiates fantasy Gods from the Earthly ones is the fact that the former are natural. Yes, they have access to unspeakable magics - but so do people. The difference is usually quantitative one, not qualitative, though the fact that Shards hold so much more power makes them seem like their power is fundamentally different from what people have access to. I believe this to be false - Allomancers and Preservation are really using the same powers, but because Preservation is so much more powerful, the effects it can produce sometimes look different. Changing a planet's orbit might sound like it has nothing to do with Allomancy, but for someone on Preservation's power level, it could be as simple as a Steelpush or an Ironpull (against the planet's metallic core). This is one of the reasons I haven't been able to just "have faith" in some invisible God - even discarding the standard arguments (lack of evidence, no testable hypothesis, no need for a deity, etc), I take issue with how disconnected this God's powers are from my everyday experiences. People from the cosmere have no issue believing in the supernatural, because to them there is nothing super- about it. It's how their universe works. I often wish ours did so too...

I wouldn't put much stock into this. This is all still coming from a worldhopper, not from an authentic source (e.g. pre-Recreance chapter). The fact that Galadon, for example, believes the original Windrunners called their powers "the Three Lashings" doesn't mean they actually did. Maybe he spoke to Szeth and was misguided by Szeth's confidence that he has the whole thing figured out. Maybe both of them were misled by a third party.

Or that's what they are called because the magic is still coming back and is not yet fully understood. The Mistborn: The Final Empire Ars Arcanum was nowhere near complete, after all.

I just checked, the hint is still where it was originally. I am running out of creative ways to provide hints on this question

Fair enough, it makes sense.

Maybe... but the vast majority of the Parsh people are still Parshendi. Maybe only some did that.

I addressed the "we should just kill them all" thing somewhere else, so I'll recap my points against this only briefly: The Heralds said we won. The last Desolation was the Last Desolation. Why kill the Voidbringers when we can make them our slaves? People are often power-hungry. Maybe if we keep a small enough population under our control we'll be able to tap their powers for our own use. This is a genocide - a xenocide even - you are talking about! People might be bad, but they are not that bad. Hey, maybe we thought we did kill them all, except for like 20 that we kept for vanity - and those 20 were obviously harmless. Even if they turned all Voidbringery, regular Shardbearers could slay them. Not that this would happen, of course. Those hundreds of thousands of Parshendi living in the former Natanatan? I dunno, we thought we had killed them all.

The same applies to Kaladin, and maybe Shallan, as well. I believe this is unique to Stormlight, however. Burning metals, for example, is described alongside a warm sensation, I think.

Damnit, I came here expecting to see the following: