Argent

I can't say I have seen the connection between the Double Eye and a reptilian eye, but it's an interesting one. Maybe it will end up being important, maybe not. Brandon has said that it was at least party inspired by the Kabbalah, however, so take that as you will. As for Szeth's belt, my impression is that the Double Eye is present in more, if not most, cultures than just the Alethi and/or the Shin. Many nations on Roshar believe in the Almighty in some way (though they don't all revere him as much as the Alethi, I think), so it would make sense for many of them to have some variations of the Double Eye.

We're chilling But more data is, in theory, better for resolving issues. Yeah, I noticed that I only got about a dozen unread threads, verses the usually 30-40 or so. When you say that things should be back to normal, does this mean that I will get the rest (soonish), or are those unreads lost and I should check on each forum manually and see if there's anything I am maybe interested in? I'm not saying I already reported this in the second post of this thread... <3

@Chaos, save us from this madness!

Other things seem broken too - when I submitted this topic it took me to the same error page (though obviously the thread got submitted); also, when I was posting a reply to a different thread, I kept getting a "kept post so quickly" errors, even though my replies were getting submitted (so I had to hide duplicates).

Having a little bit of a problem opening my custom unread stream.

Sure, it comes from here.

I took this test years ago, so I don't remember any oddities - but I probably wasn't paying attention anyway.

I did a different test for work some time ago, and it was amazingly detailed and accurate. I think I can share that later (though I think you would have to pay if you want to take it).

I was randomly going over the transcript document (like one does...), and noticed a comment clarifying one of the questions - that I don't think we've talked about in here. Specifically:

I don't know, man. Something's weird about it. Normally I'd be all over a theory with this much science in it, but something bothers me about this one. And I can't figure out what. Something about subatomic particles made of investiture, maybe? It's not good feedback, but I don't have better, which is why I tried to downplay it a little bit until I figured out what bugs me about it.

I saw it a little earlier (independent of this thread), and I thought it would be a far more clever theory than it actually turned out to be. Or, rather, it delivered far less of a punch than I expected. It's really clever, and I like the Connection connection (let's see how many times we can make this pun) a lot, but I thought it would lead to something far more grand than "Honor's secret weapon is a doorstopper."

This theory makes me uncomfortable, but I can't find a problem with it...

I've always liked this version of the test.

I think this is really about Wax's specific case, or maybe double power savants in general. I don't think Era 1 will be affected either way.

It's less about comfort and more about Brandon being uncertain he do them justice. Better stay away from non-cis non-heterosexual PoVs until he do at least a reasonable job at portraying them. Or so he thinks, I believe.

I thought along similar lines, but saw a WoB recently that swayed me strongly in the direction of what I wrote up there. It's a sensible way of doing things. It plays nicely with the idea that people who have been in contact with (a lot of) investiture throughout their lives get to stick around in Shadesmar a little longer. Combine that with the knowledge that (in the context of savants) using a lot of investiture causes some of it to "build up" on one's Spiritweb (a little like plaque on teeth...), and I can imagine a universe where even non-savants accumulate enough investiture to make their cognitive and spiritual aspects stay together a little longer after the death of the body. I am having a "There is no spoon" moment right now... Right. Forgot about that one. Still, Kelsier gets steelsight similar to the Inquisitors', so the spike is not just for decoration. I was going to address the Heralds, but then I forgot They might be a special case though.

As has been the case with most threads I've started lately, this one is not a complete theory, but more of a dump of my thoughts on a topic in the interest of finding out where the conversation will take us. I've been thinking about cognitive shadows - in part because they are fascinating, but also in part because we now have a couple of examples of cognitive shadows that have managed to come back to life, so to speak, which means we can start theorizing about how those things work. Specifically, we know that the Returned are cognitive shadows shoved back in their bodies and kept there by virtue of a Divine Breath. There have been a few WoBs about this recently, and so I am pretty confident in this interpretation. Someone dies, their Realmatic aspects separate, Endowment shows up before their cognitive aspect (a cognitive shadow) and offers them a chance to Return; some do, at which point Endowment uses a bunch of her investiture (or creates a Splinter on the spot) to re-knit the separated aspects and put the mind (the cognitive shadow) back into its body. The soul, presumably, follows by default since it is the one aspect that gets a chance to look into the future. If I am correct in this, it is possible that some Realmatic shenanigans can ensue (stuff related to Identity, for example); more on that another time though. Kelsier almost definitely engineered his own resurrection by way of Hemalurgy. It is not unreasonable to believe that the Sovereign's eye spike carries Kelsier's cognitive shadow (or was at least instrumental in putting his mind back into a body). It also looks like the body he is using currently (or was using a decade after the Catacendre) has the same scars as his original body did; which, given that his original body was eaten by a kandra, means that he either manually modified his new body to have the scars, or the new body underwent a process similar to what the Returned's bodies experience - a physical change. So what are the interesting takeaways here? The thing I am most interested in is that it takes investiture - a Splinter-level amount of it - to put a cognitive shadow back in a body. This is obviously not a problem for the Returned, as Endowment herself is doing the Returning, but it's a barrier Kelsier would've had to overcome. Furthermore, I am reminded of Wax's death, and how it took the Bands (and maybe Harmony) to bring him back to life and heal his body. Considering that Kelsier himself probably wouldn't have been able to do much, it would've had to have been Spook who secured the investiture needed for Kelsier's resurrection - which makes me wonder if it wasn't Spook who created the Bands in the first place. There is also the topic of memory loss. I don't know the proper terminology here, but Returned seem to lose all memory of events, places, and people, while retaining their... muscle memory, but it's more than just muscle memory. I don't know if Kelsier suffers from a similar problem. We see very little from his perspective, and it could be interpreted either way - Wax notes that an image tickles Kel's memory from a long ago (which could suggest that he has these memories, or that he is trying to recall something and fails to). The "Survive" command he speaks fits him thematically, but it could've been something Spook told him (i.e. "Look, here's this religion that people made for you, it's all about surviving"). I am reminded of how kandra lose memories without their spikes too, and so I have to wonder if we are looking at different manifestations of the same cause. I think that's enough rambling for now though. Let's see if someone can take it from here

I pinged him on Dec 19, which was only a few days after the ETA he gave me. I wanted to give him more time before I pinged him again.

I suspect it was more of a convenience double kill. Maybe Odium went after Dominion and figured he could (or had to) take Devotion with him. Or, alternatively, he could've been worried about Devotion - it's a thing that can inspire people pretty strongly.

Shard. He said so in Chicago earlier this month - he went after Ambition, and only after failing to find it went after Devotion and Dominion.

This makes sense. It looks like life itself can be considered to be investiture, or at least closely tied to investiture, so magics that drain life really drain investiture. It's the source of all magic, after all. I just wonder if a Dhakor monk will be able to utilize the Breaths of someone with more than one - the might just get lost in the process.

Honestly, Yolen is probably mostly fine. I don't think the Shattering cause a genocide there or anything like that. So yeah, I imagine people who can live a long time, did. That, and dragons.

That may not actually be the case. So, aluminum doesn't interact with investiture (I think Brandon called it "magically inert"), but that doesn't mean it is not invested itself. A little bit like the non-reactive elements in chemistry - they are still elements, not much different from the others, but they don't act in chemical reactions (generally speaking, let's not get technical about analogies). Plus, Ruin and Preservation created Scadrial - and, presumably its aluminum - from scratch, so that everything on the planet, everything in the planet, was made up of their investiture. So in this context, the reason aluminum can't be Pushed or Pulled is simply because it doesn't interact with the magic.

So there is a signing going on right now, and I don't think we have a thread for it. What's up with that?

I've always liked Vengeance for Honor + Odium.