Zibus

A good point I have seen that's slightly different from your theory above is that Aons are also written top-down on Elantris, and that metallic colored skin/hair is the primary physical marker of Elantrians. Together these may suggest that the Iriali were on Sel before Lumar, and even that Sel is "land 0" and the Iriali's homeworld.

Now that would be a fun twist. Fain aethers vs "norm" aethers.

I really want to see how they manipulate the hion lines. I think this is going to be very interesting.

The Cryptics are so rad. Definitely my favorite type of spren we've seen - though the Mist and Ash spren are great too. Yeah, Design is great in this! It's so cool to see another Cryptic other than Pattern and how their personalities differ. I love that Design asked to be a voluptuous woman because it reminded her of a math equation.

So we know this story takes place post SA part 1, because Design and Hoid are together. From context clues I'm pretty certain this story is being TOLD at an extremely late date in the timeline, since Hoid just casually name drops elements from basically every world we've seen (except SotD?). If YatNP takes place roughly immediately after SA 5, then that would put the shattering of Virtuosity a few hundred years after the Recreance, to give a relative idea of the timelines. However, its possible the story doesn't take place till after SA part 2, in which case we don't really have a good idea about its timing. My guess, however, is that Virtuosity is NOT the survival shard mentioned in WoBs. Instead, I think it lines up closer with the "wisdom" shard mentioned here: If that's the case, then there's no requirement that Virtuosity shatter herself around the time of the SA part 1. It could be at any point in the timeline before that and Hoid could still show up now post SA part 2. Also, it is my duty to remark that the timing on Painter's planet could not match up with timing conventions in the rest of the Cosmere, so there's always that wrench to deal with.

Originally I thought of Liar of Partinel, but that doesn't quite feel right.

In no particular order. Hoid the coat rack! I don't know why this tickles me so much, but man, imagining the self-important Hoid being used as a coat rack for decades just tickles me silly. This is obviously a reference to Ishar and his experiments, and possibly other experiments we don't know about yet. I'm glad to know we won't have to deal with physical spren monstrosities walking about in future Cosmere. I love love love Yumi's world - I'm going to call them Light and Dark world for now. The rock stacking is such an awesome and unique expression of art and calling to the Spren. I love the visually idea of this planet where everything floats above the ground - planets, buildings, people just tenuously connected to the burning earth. I love the foreshadowing of connection between the worlds. The Light world spirits always splitting into two separate but related parts. The hion lines that are tied together in the Dark world. The benevolent vs malevolent spiritual (probably invested) entities on the two worlds. I'm so excited to discover the mystery of how these two worlds got tied together and how our protagonists are going to set things right. Speaking of which... Virtuosity! which means "of great technical skill". I'm so stoked we got another unknown shard. I hope we get some ideas about how/why she shattered herself. I wonder if any other places have been affected and how their arts may have been changed. Obviously this is somehow related to both the painting and rock stacking which are both art and used to contain or draw on the spirits of the two worlds. I imagine Virtuosity is particular associated with Adonalsium's creative power - theoretically she could have been a particularly potent Shard. So much else! I love both our main characters and their opposite but similar responses to their duties. I can't wait to watch them bounce off each other and interact. I love the mystery and the visual story-telling of the world. I'm excited for what seems to be a pretty future timeline Cosmere story. I love all the visuals too. I thought I was excited for SP1, but this story has me beyond excited! I hate that we have to wait till July 2023 to read the rest.

Something interesting, he specifically says "lgihtbulbs as are common on many worlds." Lightbulbs have JUST been introduced on Scadrial. This is therefore definitely later than Era 2, probably a good bit later so that Scadrian technology can be spread to other planets. Definitely someone familiar with both Scadrial and Roshar, though.

Alright, who is Hoid - - talking to? 1.) Rosharan, or at least someone extremely familiar with Roshar. 2.) This is being told a good ways into the future of the timeline. Given how many modern things he mentions - like planets, schools, firefighters etc, this is getting pretty late timeline wise. Lightbulbs have JUST been introduced to Scadrial during Era 2 and are not "common on many planets." Definitely could be someone we've never met before - in fact quite likely. 3.) They ate marbles. 4.) Scadrian or extremely familiar with Scadrial. Also, Design is here and I love the world building in this! So freakin' excited for this one. Any guesses? Any clues I missed?

Dude, I literally stopped to come and do the exact same thing. This is huge! This gives us 15/16 Shard names, and I wouldn't be surprised if we get another in one of these secret projects. I've theorized about there being a Shard like this, in my own personal ideas about what I'd do with a world like the Cosmere. But all my ideas were very different from Virtuosity being the Intent of the Shard. I wonder what we might glean about her reasons from this work...

This is some really detailed theory work. To throw a wrench in things though, we have this WoB: Obviously this is going to be most relevant on Sel where we have most of the power of TWO dead shards hanging out in the Cognitive realm. This means the events on Elantris are massively "slowed-down" relative to the rest of the Cosmere. We have no idea about the severity, but theoretically you could have decades or centuries pass on Sel and only a few years pass on Scadrial or Roshar. Which also brings up planet years. So far I think Brandon has said basically every planet has years that roughly correspond to earth years - and therefore roughly correspond to each other, but we don't know for sure that's the case for every planet, and we know nothing about the relative length of a Lumarian year. I don't think we can actually rule all of these out. There are beings on Roshar who have existed for thousands of years, though it does probably rule out most of our main characters. Same argument concerning Nalthis and Scadrial - lots of Breath can extend your life pretty far, as can Hemalurgy - though again it limits us to a handful of characters. Anyways, lots of intriguing possibilities.

I always figured the Evil and the shades were separate. They just had the bad luck to flee the Evil to shade-land.

Osmosis. For sure. I wonder where you find salt on Dayside?

You could say the same thing about our world, but just look at what's happening right now in Ukraine. Even when trade is better, many powerful people will choose war instead. We very well might end up with different sides using very different sorts of FTL tech, like in the old game Web and Starship. One side can travel space quickly with FTL ships but can't move big armies effectively, while the other has gates that can move big armies but has to set up gates on each world they want to visit. More info here if you're interested: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php#webstarship From a military perspective because space is much harder to defend than the Cognitive realm. The Cognitive realm will eventually function as a parallel battlefield, I imagine, with each planet careful defending its "cognitive" borders. We know there's already a whole city (Silverlight) that exists primarily in the Cognitive. Once large scale cognitive travel is developed, you're going to have armies trying to move through it. On the other hand, millions of light years of space are much harder to control so if you can develop FTL ships that travel only (or primarily) through the Physical Realm it could be a huge advantage.

So after some thinking this seems interesting. Silver makes some sense as being useful at destroying investiture since it is used to combat shades on Threnody. That potentially ties these planets together, since we haven't YET seen magical applications of silver on other worlds. In another thread someone (I think Pagerunner) suggested that silver might be useful specifically against corrupted investiture and that since these are spin-offs of the og Aethers they might have been corrupted or affected by alien investiture in some way. But why salt? My first thought is that if these Aether spores are some conjunction of an organic and inorganic matter, then perhaps silver kills the spores by affecting the the investiture, while the salt kills the organic portion. There are parallels in the real world where salt is used to preserve meat or in the pickling process - killing off or at least retarding the growth of microbes. Some salts can be used to kill weeds. Thus the salt portion may suggest this is how the spores are formed. This makes a lot of sense for something like Verdant which grows vines, but how not as much sense for other Aethers. Especially something like Amberite which creates rock/crystal. So that might count against the theory. Another possibility is that its not salt in general, but the specific form of salt found in/near the Rock. This might explain why the King has to order people to stay there, and why a war hero was assigned this place as duke. He wants to continue mining the salt and using it without letting other kingdoms know whats going on. This might tie into how even the air near the Rock is salty enough to kill the spores, which seemed really strange to me when I first read it. If its something other than the salt involved, perhaps even some form of investiture, that might explain how this works. I have trouble figuring out how salt can be used to negate investiture, since its such a common and easily obtained substance on every world. Someone else would have figured something out by now if this was a general rule. Therefore there must be something specific about either the spores or the salt that allows this.

Unfortunately, today's livestream seems to have quashed this theory. Brandon stated they needed 3 new stars for these books. So unless book 1 or 3 visits two separate worlds, book 4 won't be located on Ashyn.

Very interesting thought. Since the og Aethers seem to predate the Shattering, then perhaps the Aethers can "bond with" or align themselves with the various shards. Perhaps this group of Aethers, or someone with connection to these Aethers has aligned themselves with Autonomy. Perhaps eventually we might see Aethers used by/aligned with by many different shards. This could foreshadow their role in future space-age stories and conflicts. Given that this story has been stated multiple times to be a good jump-in point for the cosmere and is a relatively self-contained story, I really doubt we'll get this deep into realmatics and intent theory in this book.

I take "big enough to fill a full third of the sky" to imply that they fill up to that, but probably there are some places on the planet where they do not appear that large. Just most/a lot of places. Hoid is almost certainly emphasizing their size for dramatic purposes. I don't know a huge amount about astronomy and how orbiting works, but imagine however we end up slicing it they moons are going to have to be unrealistically close to the surface simply because we get spore fall on relatively localized areas at a pretty constant rate. Course, there very well might be a different delivery mechanism than just falling, but given the description I imagine we're talking dramatically close orbits.

It does say "burst" so probably such a dramatic outcome only comes from inhale/ingesting a large number at once. Since they don't seem to constantly wear protective gear, perhaps the air itself around the rock is generally salty enough to kill them? And the occasional stray spore you breathe in isn't too bad? I imagine when you're actually on a boat you'd definitely want to cover up. Boats get water from the island which has to be dug up from underground, so I imagine its any water source. Don't think we get any explicit idea that salt and silver are effective after sprouting, but I would imagine they are.

The story does mention that the ships bring waste for the compost.

Oo! Interesting idea.

And given we have no idea about the timing of the spore fall - if its a recent development or has been around for along time - we have no idea how long this world has had this tech level. The Iriali may have left before gunpowder, industrial mining, and masted sailing ships became a thing. Even if, that doesn't tell us a lot about the timing. I don't think we know much about how long the Iriali have been on Roshar. This could have been their stop before Roshar and the story might still take place post SLA. Also remember there are still people on our world who don't have electricity or use any tools/metal working more complicated than blacksmithing. Parts of this world might be much more developed. This world itself might be really hard to get to cosmere speaking. As far as we know, the Aethers are no longer associated with a specific shard - so there is no reason to think there's a useful perpendicularity. Which might lend credence to this taking place a bit further in the timeline if Hoid has been able to travel here - assuming there is no perpendicularity for Cognative realm travel.

That's my biggest question. If they're not that old, or at least the spore fall isn't that old (cosmologically speaking) that could explain why there are so many animal metaphors and things. Perhaps most of these animals are extinct and remembered through stories mostly. If the spores are incredibly old, then what is disposing of the spores? Even the inert ones would eventually become a huge problem - filling up the world with dust.

Midnight sea immediately makes me think of Night Aethers. No hints in this chapter of why the sorceress is so hard to fight, but being able to teleport would sure be annoying. Also, she does seem to rule over something, since she "sometimes sent ships to raid the border of the Verdant Sea." If each sea is associated with a different moon/aether/color, I wonder what this planet would look like from orbit? Do they form sorts of rainbow bands around the world? The animal points are really interesting. I wonder how large landmasses might get on the world. While Diggin's Point is called "the rock" its large enough to have a "fair sized town" and the manor seems to be a good distance away from everything else - so I imagine its actually a pretty decent size. Theoretically wherever the king lives might actually be pretty large. I also wonder how long the aether dust has been falling. If its been a development at some point in the past, its possible some/many of these animals are extinct and have been passed down in stories. Finally, there's gotta be some way the dust is being destroyed/disposed of. Even if you have efficient ways of killing the spores with salt/silver, the dead spores are still going to be filing stuff up. If your planet is getting a constant space dust dumped on it at a fast enough rate that its formed oceans - you need to find some way to dispose of it before the entire world gets covered.