Argent

Here is the full information on the Trelagism, taken from The Final Empire and The Hero of Ages. I am not sure what the takeaway would be.

Graphic Audio's version of the book has Endowment being a male - at least according to the voice. Quite distinctly so too. Just adding that to your post, it's probably not encyclopedia lore.

I think you misunderstand me - at least partially. I could make me a signature, but since I've read all of the books, that would be effectively telling "you can't spoil anything for me." Moreover, the idea was to have this thing for everyone - but I think you got that. On the spoilers though. Imagine going to a new thread made by somebody who has just finished, say The Hero of Ages. The user asks a question that deals with the Cosmere, the user clearly knows about the concept of the Cosmere, but you can't be certain just how many of the books he or she has read. Of course, you could ask and hold your response until they answer. Or you could look at their signature and hope it's up to date. But yea, I assumed it would be a little time-consuming. No biggie.

I think there may be a way to circumvene the Investiture donor's death. If the Spiritweb - or Spiritual DNA, as we've been calling it for a long time - is part of a person's Spiritual self (where the other two selves are the Physical body and the Cognitive mind/personality), it may be possible to access that without the whole messy spiking process. Imagine, a few books down the line, a scientist entering the Spiritual world, finding his subject's projection there, and taking whatever is needed from his Spiritweb. He could then store it inside some medium, walk to the recepient of the DNA "segment", add it to their Spiritweb, and go back to the Physical world. The donor would suddenly lose the ability to manifest this particular Investiture, and the reciever would suddenly gain it.

I see no reason for that though. As far as we know Syl, she has only encountered two Blades - the one Kaladin won and forfeited, and the one Dalinar uses. Though, now that I think about it, she must have been close to Adolin's Blade too - but she and Kaladin never even mention it, so we can't draw conclusions here. As for the first two, I seem to recall that Syl approves of Kaladin's rejection of the Blade, much like she approves of Dalinar losing his.

Marasi. Both are highly intelligent, which is a massive plus in my eyes, but if put in modern terms Marasi would be a geek, which Steris falls under the "heavy nerd" category. Note that I mean neither word as an insult. I often describe myself with both.

Inspired by a random Muse, I had an idea that could potentially make some threads less spoiler-y. I am thinking of a setting / selection screen somewhere in the profile, where users can select which of Brandon's books they have read. Their selection would appear in a small box, either around the avatar or in the signature somewhere. I envision this as an array of thumbnails, where each thumbnail is the respective book cover. I think it will be more aesthetically pleasing if all of the book covers were displayed at all times (let's say in the signature, because it's more spacious in there), but the ones the particular user hasn't read would be grayed out. Alternatively, you could make it so only the thumbs for the books marked as read would show up. There are additional enhancements to this feature that could make it a little more intuitive to somebody who takes only a brief a look at it. Thumbnails tend to be terribly hard to see, especially if you try to fit a big piece of art in them. Here are some of my solutions to this. Adding a mouseover tooltip (with very little delay, say 1 second) to every thumb. The tooltip will obviously contain the respective book's title. Cropping the book covers down to something unique and easy to see on such a small scale.A similar solution, but one that may look a little better when downsized to a thumbnail, would be to replace the whole idea of book covers being the core of the thumbs. Instead I would use a symbol specific to the series at hand (e.g. one of the metals' "names" for Mistborn, or the Windrunners' sigil for the Stormlight Archive), overlayed by a more brighly colored roman numeral to indicate the book number.[*]A spoiler-like tag that shows and hides the list of books is yet another, although not so elegant, solution. Its only real benefit is the fact that it would allow for more detailed and clear images for each book, since the thumbnails wouldn't eat up space and bandwith by default. That's all my sleep-deprived mind was able to come up with at this hour. I could whip up some Photoshop mockups if there is interest. Also, there is a poll, just so we can have a basic idea about how the community feels about something like this.

It could be Hoid. In fact, it makes a lot of sense. I've got this crazy thought though - perhaps because I am not a native English speaker. The word "investiture" is not one I see used often. In fact, the only times when I have seen it used is when Vasher talks to Vivenna about the different types of Biochromatic entities. Perhaps we'd get lucky and see Vasher join the Seventeenth Shard?

I can't give you a good explanation to the first question, but the second one is a little easier. Allomancy is about preserving your own power, so to speak. You use external resources (metals) to fuel your own magical powers. The external fuel is the key here. Take Feruchemy on the other hand. Here your own traits are constantly changing (you are "ruining" your health in order to "preserve" it in the future). It's a little handwavy, but it kind of works.

To me, it seems like the Radiants' glowing eyes have to do with Stormlight. You draw the Blade, it infuses you with (Storm)power, and your eyes are the most "transparent" outlet for that power to manifest.

Desolations, unless I am mistaken, are not events whose beginning can be clearly marked on your local calendar. One of Dalinar's visions (the one where he encounters the Midnight Essences) mentions that creatures of Damnation start showing up more and more often whenever a Desolation approaches. So while the Essences he and the two Knights fought were almost a clear sign that a Desolation was coming, one of the Knights was pretty sure that it wasn't there yet. This being said, assuming the thunderclast theory is right, that thunderclast could be just a harbinger.

I tried making one a while back, but I was just not good enough. I would like to see this done too.

The Parshendi may have known they were still around. And all communications with them has been non-existent until about 6 years ago.

I think this is one of the more interesting theories I've read. It certainly fit. The Parshendi wanted the Alethi to know that they had killed Gavilar. They didn't originally live in the Shattered Plains (though they were close, just a little to the south), so maybe their retreat to the Plains was strategic - they wanted to get Alethkar's armies there, close to the chasmfiends whose gemhearts they wouldn't pass on. Gavilar's sphere that shines darkness doesn't sound like an artifact of Honor, so maybe they he was a convenient target in more than one ways - the Parshendi stopped Gavilar from messing with something that potentially comes from Odium, AND they got their help with the chasmfiends issue.

I'll go ahead and play the party pooper here, and say that I think this is too far-fetched. While this is theoretically possible, I don't think it's plausible to assume anything. Taravangian most likely has spies in the Shattering Planes, and there are probably some women among them (so they can write down any death quotes... though getting them out of the battle will be a little hard). I don't think Adolin's women are among them though. I just don't see any solid evidence or foreshadowing.

I am not sure how Stormlight infusion would work. We know that moneylenders have some sort of "safe houses," where they infuse dun spheres. There is a scene where Gaz goes out after a highstorm to collect his freshly-infused spheres, and Kaladin notes that he is collecting them from baskets. Considering the scary raw power a highstorm has, leaving the basket open would be an economical suicide - it would need to be secure in place AND closed in order to prevent the storm from just blowing the spheres away. So I am going to assume direct exposure is not mandatory. There are problems with this though. First, if a basket doesn't stop gems from being infused, why does a building do? The only thing that comes to mind is the amount of "stuff" between the highstorm and the gems. And if this is true, a chasmfiend's skin is probably thick enough to be considered wall-like for the purposes of this example... And second, why do chasmfiends need to climb out of their chasms? We know plenty of rainwater falls inside the actual chasms, the wind blows there as well, and with the neglibible exception of the permanent bridges, nothing serves as a real roof over them.

It is possible that the Shardblades are an imitation of the blades the Heralds (or the Radiants?) used. Plus, they always seemed a little Odium-ish to me, with the eyes of the victims burning when the Blade takes a life.

I don't think this thread will be terribly spoiler-ish (at least it won't spoil any of the main events of the book), but if you don't like those, you know how to get out of here. This being said, let's go. I have this nagging suspicion that the world of Roshar has gone terribly wrong after the last Desolation. I don't have a very clear explanation why that might be the case, so let me give you a (not necessarily logical) list of things that seem related to this: Winning a Shardblade may turn a darkeyes into a lighteyes. This has not been confirmed, but it hasn't been rebuked either. Syl, presumably a creature that has something to do with Honor himself, doesn't like Shardplates and Blades. Taln is described as being a darkeyes. In addition to this, Dalinar mentions that The Way of Kings has passages that indicate that during the time the book was written, the darkeyed people were the more respected faction. All this makes me think that Shardblades (and possibly Shardplates) are either weapons of Odium, or have been corrupted by him at some point of time, possibly when the Radiants gave them up. To explain why the Heralds of the Almighty use them, I could point to the Oathpact. It is the thing that binds the Heralds to this cycle of Desolations in Roshar and torment in some form of hell. Maybe I am seeing Odium a little bit like Ruin, but it feels like he would be willing to give his enemies (Honor & the Heralds) some sort of power (Shardblades), as long as he got to torture the Heralds for, more or less, eternity. Rayse was described as a pretty clever guy after all. Maybe this is what the Oathpact says. I am yet to get to Dalinar's visions (I am re-reading the book), so I don't know if there will be stuff there, but I'll make sure to update this thread when I get to them.

I thought chasmfiends climbed up the plateaus to "recharge", but the evolution theory makes more sense than that.

I am re-reading The Way of Kings right now, and just noticed the similarities. I am only on Book II for now, but I came up with pretty much the same theory for pretty much the same reasons: Both thunderclasts and chasmfiends have purple blood. Could be a coincidence, but Brandon doesn't have a whole lot of those, being the outliner he is. Both have arrowhead-like faces, which I think is a big hint. Kalak describes the thunderclast he sees in the prologue as being of skeletal shape. While chasmfiends aren't exactly skeletal, their forms with all those legs/claws could be similar. Finally the gemhearts. One thing I noticed just today was that the great chasmfiend Dalinar and Elhokar kill has a giant emerald for a heart, and its eyes are described as being of pure and uniform green - no different shades, no iris, nothing like that. The one Kalak sees has red eyes, but I believe this could easily be due to it having a ruby heart (which is a speculation, it doesn't actually say that). My theory is that since thunderclasts were brought up from stone, possibly by Voidbringing, they need a giant gem (gemheart) as a focus. There seems to be a relationship between certain types of Surgebinding/Voidbringing and the way fabrials work, the two being natural and artificial manifestation of the magic on Roshar. You need gems to hold the Stormlight you use for Soulcasting (and possibly other forms of Surgebinding), so it could be possible that you would need a ton of Stormlight to create a beast as massive as a thunderclast. In addition to all that, we have those spren people can only see around freshly killed chasmfiend. They made me think of fabrials and the spren people trap in them to make them work. Maybe when a chasmfiend dies, the magical energy that kept it going, its spren, goes away. There is obvious some handwaving here, but it feels like puzzle pieces fitting together - we just don't have all the pieces.

Wasn't he one of the Ten Fools?

I am afraid I may stomp this theory =\ We know that Szeth's Lashings do, in fact, work both ways. I can't give you anything on adhesion, but during his assassination mission in Kholinar (?) he: Changes the direction of the gravitational pull (irrelevant) Increases the strength of the pull. When fighting against Gavilar, he Lashes himself several times in a quick succession to gain impossible acceleration; later, he Lashes the terrace multiple times, to cause it to collapse due to abnormal gravity. Decreases the strength of the pull. I am not sure if it happens during this battle, but I know he uses half Lashing (or quarter Lashing?) to make himself fall slower. In addition to this, Windrunners fly by changing the direction gravity pulls on them, or so I speculate. They don't "fly", per se, they just fall in the wrong direction.

I don't see how that theory makes them more or less likely to kill Jasnah. If she is another natural Soulcaster, I would imagine their first course of action would be to recruit her.

It could be that he got mixed up with the Voidbringers, which brought that punishment upon him.

Yea, I wondered whether I should that to the list of arguments, but it seemed like the shabbiest one of them all, so I decided to keep the size a little down and leave it out.