Returned

There's also an element of theatrics to that scene between Rayse and Taravangian, I think. What Taravangian saw during Odium's display struck me more as a representation of Odium's future-sight powers rather than a tidily organized summary of what Rayse knew about the future. If so, then the piece about Renarin that drew Taravangian's eye showed a gap in Rayse's knowledge of which Rayse wasn't properly aware. Sort of like if Rayse had a complex tattoo on his back based on a picture he showed to a tattoo artist: he might know what he expects is in that tattoo, but it's beyond him to actually look at it directly and know that some element or other is different from the picture. We could look at the tattoo on his back and know things about it much more easily. Maybe not a great analogy... But more broadly we have seen repeatedly that future-sight isn't decisively effective or reliable in the Cosmere. We don't know how deterministic the future is, how much future-sight allows the future to be changed, how aware Shards are of their own ability to use future-sight, nor how much various Shards depend (or depended) on future-sight for their plans. I would bet that Taravangian is aware that some of his information can be wrong, or at least that he can be mistaken (hard to avoid, given that he saw what happened to the preceding Odium). But he's not slavishly following some recipe for the future-- he expects that he has the intelligence, power, resources, and will to win in any conflict whether he has foreseen it or not. Future-sight is a tool with nontrivial limitations and we don't truly know if overreliance on it or overconfidence in it were really what caused Rayse's end. Taravangian already has first-hand experience with exactly this issue: the Diagram was amazingly predictive, but not only did he know he lacked the ability to fully understand or interpret it, he also had to make adjustments in the world and their suppositions about the Diagram so that everything would stay on course for what his best guesses indicated the Diagram meant.

Since you stated you were interested in the questioning itself, OP, I'll challenge you and others a bit more broadly to define "good" and "evil" in the Cosmere contexts (or more generally). Please feel free to address any, all, or none of the below, as they interest you (or do not). I'm interested in discussion more than conclusions here. I intend to lean way back in this thread, so I hope that no one chooses not to participate because I've popped in. Many people, and a lot of the posters I see here, tend to implicitly assume or ultimately converge on a consequentialist framework: they consider whether or not the outcome is "good" by whatever definition they're using, and if so they ask if that good end was "worth" individual events along the way. This stance presupposes that actions can be bad in themselves but still be good ones to take, and the ultimate evaluation of those actions is whether or not the good outcome actually occurred. "The end justifies the means" is, when evaluating the "goodness" of those means, self-justifying and self-rejecting: if you don't get the ends, then those bad means cannot have been good, but if you do get the ends, then they are retroactively transformed into good actions. Do you agree with the general consequentialist framework for evaluating actions as ethical or moral? Why or why not? If you do agree, how does uncertainty play into your evaluation? Someone upthread presented Sazed's treatment of Wax as (potentially) a gamble: 95% likelihood that it was unnecessary, 5% that it was necessary and catastrophic to avoid. If one cannot guarantee an outcome, can one be ethical/moral in taking actions which they consider terrible unless the outcome is achieved? If you do agree with (1), and the uncertainty of (2) is removed (say, future-sight is known to be reliable for a Shard), and there are multiple possibilities for actions that will lead to a good outcome (so there are costless choices between options which lead to the same end), can we assess one possible action as better than another? If so, why? If the outcome is decisive in rendering the actions "good", what makes one choice more ethical or moral than another when that outcome equally blankets both in "goodness"? Future-sight is a poorly defined item in the Cosmere. It exists, and works, but to an unclear degree. We don't know, for example, if Leras knew his plan would work because of the future-sight, if he hoped it would work but couldn't know because the future is deterministic but future-sight itself is unclear (we know Ati was not great at it), or if the future is unwritten and so future-sight gives information which is unreliable to an unknowable degree (there is some in-text evidence to suggest this, but we can't distinguish between that and future-sight itself being imperfect). How well can Shards determine the quality of their own future-sight? Can they assess how reliable it is (for them, if not in general)? How sure do they need to be about the future for choosing a "bad" action that will be justified by a "good" outcome? Can they be sure at all? People tend to approve of Leras because (I believe) we know his plans worked, and a lot of that is credited to future-sight. They denigrate Harmony because his plans are still unfolding, and so can't yet be justified by an outcome, but wouldn't the more internally consistent decision be to hold judgement of him in abeyance, since we still haven't seen the ends? Bonus question: since we don't know how far, exactly, future-sight can go, should we be attributing at least some of the "badness" in Harmony's actions to Leras, as Harmony's ascension was part of Leras' plan? We tend to talk about it as the culmination of Leras' planning, but on what are we basing that assertion? We also have to consider how we are deciding whether an outcome is good or bad. People have already discussed comparisons of different outcomes (10 dead people vs. 100, 10 people from group A suffering vs. 10 people from group B suffering, etc.). But more interesting angles have come up in this thread. Can an outcome be the best available option without being good? I have found that people, in general, desperately resist this idea. If you have a few choices, all of them abhorrent, but one less so than the others, people often seem to upgrade that choice to being actively good. How do you feel about this? Is the best available (or, perhaps, the least bad) option (however we define that) always, perhaps by definition, good? Should a person be ashamed to choose a bad-but-best-available option, because they did a bad thing by acting on that option? Or comfortable because other options were worse? If the latter, can a person be morally comfortable no matter which option they choose, as long as it's not the worst one? Is inaction morally acceptable, particularly in the face of a menu of only bad options? How much responsibility do we assign to people to know all of the options available in order to choose an acceptable one, whether or not it's the best? Does Harmony have more responsibility, and less leeway for error, due to his expanded knowledge and abilities than Wax does? Does Harmony have less responsibility, and more leeway for error, than Leras did, because Harmony has had so much less time to gain experience with Preservation? Does adding Ruin to Preservation make Harmony the most ethically accountable actor in the Cosmere because he has more Shard-ness than anyone else? Do we feel comfortable that we know enough about what is possible for a Shard to do that we can imagine what their set of options even contains? Are they so different from mortals that we lack the capacity to place their behaviors into any context we can understand? Do mortal conventions and ideas about ethics and morality apply to beings so far beyond our own capacity to know and do things, and which exist in such a fundamentally different way? If you're not convinced of the consequentialist framework then we have to deal with determining how to identify actions as good or bad in some other way. We can probably dispense with divine provenance: the Shards themselves are what they are and the Vessels that hold them started as regular people (probably as flawed as anyone else), and the Vessels themselves are subject to change through the Shards' influence. Plus, the Shards are often at cross-purposes with each other. So it's probably not going to be the case that we define things as good because (a) god wills it to be so. But then what? Consequentialist tendencies aside, people generally, and here as well, seem to me to often make the decision based on affinity for the actor and "gut feeling". For example, I'd wager that many people imagine Kelsier's treatment at the Pits to be bad, because he was a good guy (despite being a career thief and longtime bigot). Sure, he did some bad stuff, but he did it to bad people, so he's still good. But when Kelsier directed that Camon be mutilated and abandoned to beg on the streets for survival it was good, because Camon was a bad guy since he exploited and hurt Vin, who was a good person. So Camon's suffering and ultimate slaughter were good, or at least acceptable and appropriate, while Kelsier's suffering and death sentence were bad and unacceptable. This, despite both Kelsier and Camon being treated to torturous physical violence at the hands of someone they couldn't hope to resist. Is this sort of flexibility with violence ethically permissible? Is violence OK, or even desirable, based on the identities of the person inflicting it and the person receiving it? Whose evaluation of the goodness or badness of a person counts? Is there room for differences in perspective? If Kelsier is generally viewed as heroic, and Camon villainous, is that enough in itself to answer these questions? Is there a possibility of making a decision on this, but making an error? If so, how does that change what we demand a person inflicting violence do to make an ethical choice? A good example of this is Vin's assault on Cett's position in Luthadel in Well of Ascension. She was deliberately misled into targeting the wrong person to produce exactly that outcome, but was what she did good because she sincerely thought she was attacking the right person? Would the attack have been ethical if it had been against the true perpetrator? Was it OK because Cett was a bad person, even though Vin was mistaken about the specifics? Was it bad because she chose the wrong person to trust, which allowed her to be misled? Was Vin responsible for any "badness" in her actions because she certainly might have been wrong, but felt that she wasn't, even though she was mistaken? For a being like a Shardholder, do they get any slack, in ethical evaluations, for the constant pressure of the Shard(s) upon their minds? Do we think about this differently for mortals who experience similar effects, like Rashek or Vin dealing with Ruin? Ethics of violence and evil are tricky, obviously. I think that we have to make allowances for the fact that this forum is for enthusiasts of a set of fantasy action novels, where combat and lethal struggle are common and we have a nearly omniscient perspective on the events and most relevant character moments within the stories. This causes broad ethical assessments to be easier to make, or at least move towards: there is only so much detail to characters, far less than for real people, and many (though not all) groups and individuals are tidily sorted into heroes and villains. But I am nonetheless struck by how common it seems that people's effective stance is that violence is morally awesome, perhaps even the ideal moral tool, as long as it's directed at the "right" people. And I rarely see much reflection or hesitation in deciding that characters are deserving of that violence. People seem generally to think that physical and emotional suffering Wax experienced at Harmony's hands was bad because he himself was good, but whatever Telsyn experienced from Autonomy was appropriate and good because she herself was bad. Many people appear to accept that they might make an error in those judgements, but that doesn't seem to suggest to them that they should exhibit any restraint. I really like Kelsier as a vehicle for thinking about these last items especially. He's very complex and well-drawn, and we see enough of him to give some good context to most, if not all, of these questions.

I'll have to disagree with you here. Accessing Fortune is things going your way via magic, whether that's the "gut feeling" or knowledge of the future-- it's not necessarily having either of those things, it's the method of access that matters. The magic. The core argument is Taravangian's Diagram: lots of knowledge of the future but generated through mundane means (even though those means were, themselves, available only because of magic). Odium flat out states this to be the case. What Vin did was know the future through mundanely observing Zane, and her specific method involved timing (too late for Zane to see or change his behavior) and reflex (no thinking or planning of specific actions which Zane could then perceive in advance). Vin did not access Fortune in that event, though she did gain information by watching Zane, who did. But the broader point I'm making is that neither knowledge of future events (seeing the atium shadow) nor magically taking favorable actions (perfectly moving to avoid being hit) is sufficient to be a guarantee of an outcome, and it's not about the amount of magical foreknowledge you have nor its intensity. There's no way to spin the Zane/Vin fight that papers over Zane's Fortune-based advantages being absolute over Vin, who had no more Fortune than anyone else (as far as we know). And if you can oppose the magic successfully without bringing your own magic to bear then there's no reason to think that Fortune is ever not being interfered with, constantly. It's a "Fortune isn't the killer advantage people often assume" take. Information traveling back in time such that it changes the information's original context is always bizarre, and I think that getting too attached to any mechanical explanation for how it will work is a mistake. Its details are arbitrary, even for magic. Totally possible. One issue I try to avoid with Cosmere magic is using an analogy as a way to understand something and then using the analogy to justify something different. It's one thing to say that storing Fortune is like storing physical speed in some ways (which I think is unarguably true, as that's what Feruchemy is), but it's a different thing to say that storing physical speed and Fortune are the same in every way. The spiritual attributes are pretty bizarre compared to the physical and mental ones and are the most magical/dependent on Cosmere properties/not necessarily intuitive. It's sensible to see "more physical strength" as "less physical weakness", and the inverse of "more physical weakness" is equivalent to "less physical strength". Some people are stronger than others, which is relevant to how much strength they can store but you can't really have zero strength or negative strength (in a general sense, I'm sure there are ways to parse those out if someone really wants to). But "luck" doesn't seem so clear cut to me because it obviously has a... I'll call it "polarity", which is different from degree. You can have good luck, bad luck, or no particular luck in a given situation. Something good happening to you is good luck, and something bad happening to you is bad luck. Something good which might have happened to you but didn't is bad luck, and something bad which might have happened to you but didn't is good luck. That makes it problematic to suggest that someone who is storing as much Fortune as possible in a metalmind has siphoned away all of their favorable outcomes only and is now luck-neutral: there is no place for bad luck to exist in that framework. How would you explain a non-Feruchemist experiencing bad luck? They aren't storing any Fortune. If I'm missing your point, I'll ask: what, exactly, does "neutral luck" mean in the framework you're advancing? Is there such a thing as bad luck? Is there a difference from getting a favorable outcome, like finding $50, and avoiding an unfavorable outcome, like a pickpocket choosing to steal $50 from someone other than you? There might be some explanation that satisfies everything, but with what we know of F-duralumin at present I don't think we should be so certain of this. F-duralumin specifically deals with connections between the Feruchemist and others, and (perhaps) must influence those others. If it influences others so directly then it can't be the case that it's purely an internal effect (again, based on what we currently know). Maybe it makes someone so personally magnetic that others can't help but feel connected to them, but that suggests that the magic could simply fail in some cases-- some people find gregariousness annoying while others find it very personable and pleasant, for example. If F-duralumin can't affect both equally then that would be similar to saying that strength from F-pewter could allow someone to lift a Honda but not an equivalent Toyota; if the strength is conditional on the object to which it is applied, in what sense do you have "strength"?. Connection, at least, can't really be 100% internal, though I could be persuaded by an argument along the lines of "the Feruchemist is connecting themselves to others, and not others to the Feruchemist" (and probably lots of other arguments, too).\. I agree with you that there is no division between Fortune regarding one's self and others, but the Allomantic metals very specifically impose that division. You don't see your own atium shadows nor your own electrum shadows, and there is no crossover between . The internal/external piece wasn't meant to explain Feruchemy (I'm aware that that metal grouping system is specific to Allomancy). My curiosity about F-chromium is if it only influences what you yourself do or if it can influence events around you. Imagine that you are supposed to go to a specific place, and are free to move around. If you tap some extra Fortune, maybe you find the safe path to get to where you want to go. But if you're in a slave wagon (like Kaladin in WoK) but unable to interact with the slavers (unlike Kaladin in WoK), and the slavers don't want to go to your destination, could your tapping Fortune potentially get the wagon there anyways? Maybe, even if we haven't seen anything like that yet. Fortune at minimum appears to scan through all of the information in the Cosmere, it's not obviously wrong to think that it could influence something other than the Spinner as well.

I don't disagree with the scale of Shards' plans, but if Fortune is so great then it shouldn't matter. Shards aren't like Spinners who can suddenly run out of the attribute, and they arguably already have the mental enhancements that atium provides. Using Fortune doesn't need to be like starting a ball rolling down a hill because, if you're still around and active on the scene, you can keep using it in service of what you want. A Shard can, essentially, keep looking a few seconds into the future forever, while also constantly checking that they remain on the branch of outcomes they want. Odium might have done this (it's shown that he has access to knowledge Fortune grants, but I don't think we know how much he relied on it). Preservation is the only one we know of that operated under a "lots of time for things to go wrong" approach and, notably, was still successful. Unless it's a writing kludge (which I suppose we can't rule out), Fortune has properties we don't yet understand and which either stop it from being so devastatingly effective as we imagine or otherwise makes it a poor tool. We can't rule it out. Elend's experience with duralumin-fueled atium seemed to produce an interesting degree of calmness and certainty in him. I don't think that the strength of futuresight can matter that much with regard to interference, though. Vin vs. Zane should be enough to put that to rest-- she didn't even have futuresight (properly, at least), nor did she have the mind-enhancing properties of atium while Zane had both. Fortune does seem amazing in its potential, but it also seems like what we've seen of it is largely as a gimmick in high-contrast situations. I don't think that we should be surprised to find Feruchemical Fortune be more like aluminum than being a Twinborn in terms of its useful applications. We'll see, of course, and I still think it will be interesting. My feeling is that the answer is likely to be that Fortune among people does experience interference constantly but rarely comes into direct zero-sum conflict, such as a fight between atium-burners. The 1,000,000x thing explicitly doesn't work: Sanderson has said you cannot do this with Feruchemical attributes (I think the specific one he referenced was physical speed, but it should hold for any attribute). As for simply losing your "good" luck and being neutral, I am very skeptical. The ars arcanum entry for F-chromium says that: You are actively unlucky while storing Fortune, not just less lucky than normal, if this is to be believed as written. That would match with what we've seen of most attributes in that there is a cost to storing it which can't be easily and casually mitigated (in the sense that you really do have to experience the time with less of the attribute to store it). If Fortune really is so amazing then I think that this is likely to be more prominent for it than for other attributes, suggesting that it would not be as easy as "I just won't do what I feel any urge to do while storing". That would promote storing unlimited Fortune for free, any time and all the time. Otherwise F-chromium is going to swamp every other power and situation in the Cosmere, in which case it will almost certainly be cancelled out by other Fortune-manipulators so as to leave some story to tell. Or Fortune turns out to not be so amazing (due to interference or any other reason). I'm hesitant to conclude that the "gut feeling" theory is definitely correct and the only way that Fortune works (futuresight aside), if only because we have so few observations to examine. I'm also curious if the internal/external divide might apply here, similar to Allomantic atium showing others' futures to you while electrum shows your futures to others. Nicrosil and aluminum seem to deal with "internal" matters: your identity and ability to access Investiture seem to be about the Feruchemist themselves and their own properties. But duralumin's effects seem like they operate primarily on others, causing them to be more aware of and positive towards the Feruchemist. It's hardly evidence, but perhaps Fortune's mode of action also operates on the world external to the Feruchemist rather than internally, in which case the gut feeling would be more of an ancillary effect rather than the main one. So much of it would be easy to test, too. If only Khriss could spend a week with a Spinner and tell us about it! More and more I'm wondering how much a wise Cosmere-dweller would rely on Fortune at all. Futuresight only produces information which we know, for certain, can become outdated really quickly. And outside of that its main function seems to be that it just works, sometimes, which you can't know is the case until it's too late. Setting Fortune at the center of your plans seems risky and difficult to evaluate or work with, a move that is favorable only when desperate.

I suspect that there is only one "Fortune", as we've currently been organizing things. That we know of, we've only seen applications of Fortune through the lens of knowledge of the future: be in place X at time Y to get closer to something that you want, be in place Z because you will be needed for something or other, these chains of actions will lead to specific outcomes so choose the one you want to pursue, that sort of thing. But this is all a view from inside of the cave of ignorance: we don't know enough about Fortune to render much judgement on its properties. I'm thinking that tricks with Fortune will end up being very hard to use effectively and that conscious vs. unconscious knowledge of the future will not be a meaningful distinction. Scadrial's Fortune Feruchemists are going to give us an awful lot of that information soon! For some definitions of "soon", at least. But I'm not convinced that being able to stockpile Fortune in large amounts as futuresight will be so impressive in the end. Broadly, it seems like Fortune is a very, very difficult property to make good use of: Futuresight is the application we know the most about, thanks to atium, but I argue that it's the least useful and impressive facet of Fortune. Atium is cool, but its real value is that you can directly use the knowledge of the future in an effective way. Yomen was no athlete and Elend a Mistborn, yet Yomen could avoid Elend's attacks effortlessly. Hoid claims he doesn't get any information on when or why he'll be needed somewhere but he actually ends up in the right place at the right time. Just knowing the place and time would be a lot less useful than finding a way to get there punctually. Taravangian knew a lot about the future without any special access to Fortune (per Odium's comment), but effectively using that information took a huge amount of work and infrastructure. Preservation was very successful with it (despite losing his cognition to use it in the process) but Odium was not. If a Shard, possessed of infinite* power, unlimited access to Fortune, a radically expanded mind, and deep knowledge of the underlying mechanics of magic and the Cosmere universe generally can misfire, how much juice is a Spinner going to get out of any amount of Fortune they manage to store? It's not totally clear what competing uses of Fortune accomplish at scale. In a one-on-one fight between people burning atium the effect is effectively nullified for both. Can your stored Fortune be similarly ruined if someone is opposing you with any amount of their own Fortune? Is the "distance" into the future you can see helpful when that futuresight is spoiled like that? Even in ideal conditions it's not perfect. Just ask Zane! What is the period of storing Fortune like? If we accept that using Fortune allows you to approach the outcomes you want, passively or actively, what does an equivalent failure to get those outcomes cause to happen to you? Maybe you could allocate your Fortune so that you choose one goal to give up and another to be more likely to get, but it seems at least as likely to me that storing Fortune will move you away from all of your goals in a way that tapping would not be able to overcome. All told, more futuresight seems to me to be something you don't want to rely on. It's too easy to perturb, even the greatest (strongest/most magical/most knowledgeable) characters have trouble with it, and in a direct contest only one Fortune-user is going to prevail. And futuresight or not you're going to have to count on being lucky enough, which you wouldn't know you aren't until the last moment. The only character that seems to consistently get what they want out of Fortune is Hoid (if that is indeed how he operates, which I don't believe has been confirmed in sufficient detail), and I don't know if that's down to a novel or clever use of the property or something else.

I'm not sure I'm sold on Connection as the lowest-level piece of Investiture, but it does seem more foundational than other aspects. Like, being an Allomancer is about your Connection to Preservation, right? Burning Lerasium greatly increases that Connection, but the power you gain by doing so is still filtered through Allomancy and so you can only get the effects Allomancy offers in the way that it offers them (burning specific metals to produce specific effects). But if you could, generically, Connect to other Shards you should be able to access their powers as well. If you could manipulate Connections between other people and/or places you could probably do things that otherwise seem impossible now. I'm thinking of Surgebinders being unable to leave Roshar being related to Connection to that planet in some way, and the migration from Ashyn as an example of "cheating" that limitation by changing the population's connection from the former to the latter. We have a fair number of examples, especially in WoBs, that suggest that a lot can be done with Cosmere magic that depends on the amount of power you can draw, with enough power compensating for less-than-ideal mechanisms for doing things. If F-duralumin could be used to increase Connection to a Shard, maybe more stuff becomes possible. I'd bet that current knowledge of F-duralumin limits what can be done, but that clever applications, coupled with more raw Investiture, will show it to be nearly as powerful and versatile as we imagine F-nicrosil to be. The Feruchemist just has to be sufficiently knowledgable and precise, and I'd imagine there are a lot of connections that would need to be finessed to get a useful, dramatic result.

I think that they're all kind of dumb, because they remind me of when authors try to create slang to make their settings distinctive but end up using 1:1 word substitutions and mimicking slang patterns that happened to exist when they were paying attention. A non-Sanderson example that stuck out for me was a character calling someone she thought was cool "the slam" in a Brent Weeks book: it's so obviously the same as "the bomb" as to not seem creative or original at all, but even "the bomb" was fairly dated by the time that book was published; lazy and pointless, given that all of the characters were already speaking contemporary American English anyways. "Deevy" might be a similar Sanderson example. It's not that the real slang isn't dumb, too, but at least it exists organically-- it became popular because enough people liked something about it. I think that the Misting/Ferring names are intended to sound aesthetically interesting and still be related to the powers they describe, but it's still arbitrary and doesn't fit with the settings and characters' speaking patterns. It's about filling out a list of names which must exist to describe each category that we know exists, but who in the Mistborn setting would even know what a Spinner is, let alone pick the definitive name for them? (I know, it's Khriss, but still). I can't help but get a real "this paper is due tomorrow and I haven't even picked a topic" vibe for some of them. It has to be something, and absent sudden inspiration it's probably going to end up being good enough at best. At least for a few out of thirty two. They all seem overwrought to me, but back in the old days when there were only eight types of Misting to know they didn't feel so... forced. At least "coinshot" described something characters actually did on Scadrial.

She also soulcast her illusory fighters to have some degree of substance in the battle at the end of Oathbringer. At least potentially, if I remember correctly it was guessed at as a possibility but not explicitly confirmed, nor was the feat repeated.

My major piece of evidence in this regard is Sanderson's comment that Sazed isn't managing holding both Shards very well, coupled with the obviously non-harmonious state of Scadrial. A couple of characters specifically mention Harmony's dual nature by one component or the other (TenSoon and Wax at minimum both refer to Wax as Harmony's Ruin, though how knowledgeable they are on the topic isn't clear). I've got a pet theory on the development of Scadrial through future books that relies on Sazed trying to suppress Ruin more than he can manage, with the excess seeping out into the world to various effects. Not that that's evidence of anything! We might still learn new things about Autonomy's actions on Scadrial, but as above I don't entertain the idea that she was invovled with Tan any more. Some pieces fit really well, most notably the similarity to Paalm, but now that we know what Autonomy's plans were I can't think of a way that Tan would have been involved for any reason. And we'd also have to explain why no one bothered to recover Tan's Trellium spike (unless perhaps it was Paalm, immediately after Wax shot him?), or why it wasn't mentioned at all in BoM or LM. I suppose Harmony could have noted the sorts of things Tan was doing and formed his own plan around them, bending Autonomy's efforts to his own purposes. I feel that I can't totally rule out that Autonomy was influencing Tan but it's too thin a reed for me to support. At least, not when there are other explanations that are at least as plausible and don't require so many assumptions.

"Controlled or influenced" is pretty broad, and the whole tableau seems unreasonable with only Lessie being controlled. We do have some suspiciously cryptic utterances from Tan: Death is clear enough, with the "nails in his eyes comment", and the Survivor is also pretty clear (even if it's not clear how or why Kelsier would interact with Tan or tell him anything about Harmony's modes of action). But to whom is Tan referring when he says "God"? Plenty of characters refer to Harmony that way, but what interaction with Harmony would lead Tan to his conclusion that "someone else moves us"? Before Lost Metal I'd thought that perhaps Tan was influenced by Trell one way or another, not unlike Paalm. The idea was based on how similar Tan's rantings were to Paalm's singular focus on freeing Scadrial from Harmony's manipulations. I no longer think that that makes sense. We saw too much of what Autonomy was up to and how she worked for Tan's scheme (or even involvement in events) to fit. The similarity of Tan's observation to Paalm's obsession does remain troubling, though. It's so specific and technically accurate (if biased to a specific perspective), and Tan was already on the game board long before Wax and Lessie's assault on his hideout. Perhaps it was Harmony's ruinous side that interacted with Tan in some way short of spike-imposed control? I can't shake that the similarity means something, but the WoB stating that Harmony wasn't controlling Tan rules out so many options. But we know that what happened with Lessie was intended by Harmony by her own testimony, testimony which Harmony did not contradict or deny (and tacitly confirmed, by my reading as I recall it). So random chance doesn't really fit, nor does any other "just so" story that doesn't involve divine intervention or Lessie herself making the movement. Lessie communicated with Wax for the timing of the shot via blinks and intended to be shot. I don't see how Wax would be able to tell the difference between Lessie being yanked by Tan versus her lunging just slightly to the side, especially when he wouldn't imagine that she would intentionally move into the path of the bullet. But at least she could have done it. The only other plausible explanation I can think of relies on Harmony making use of Fortune to see a sequence of events leading to the shot striking Lessie and then choosing to make that sequence happen. We've seen other characters do things like that, most notably Preservation, so I think it's a reasonable (if unsatisfying) explanation that doesn't rely on explicit control of Tan or Lessie maneuvering to be struck by the bullet.

I agree with Treamayne. I picked "Influenced by Harmony" from the poll choices as it's the closest one that fits what we know.

I want it to end cleanly, that's all. Given its scope and the way projects/releases have been approached I fear there is a real danger of the series being overstuffed one way or another, like a TV show that started out great but prefers running for as many seasons as possible rather than telling a tight story. I don't think there is much risk that Sanderson will totally lose the thread or write pure filler but I could see the metaplot getting so complex that either the writing suffers just to explain it. As for a plot conclusion, I have no idea! There is so much yet unwritten that if I tried to choose an ending it would probably end up being invalidated by the next ten books anyways, so I'm trying to not get too attached to any predictions right now.

Interesting! That might be exactly what he's after. Or maybe a variation on the same idea, like a way to exist primarily in the physical realm rather than being fundamentally of the cognitive, which seems to be the Heralds' current situation as cognitive shadows. I'm still unsure, just because we know so little about Ishar, his condition, and his mind. His goals and actions may not even be coherent. I don't have any textual backup for it, but my intuition is that Ishar is looking for something bigger... something beyond the Rosharan conflict. Pulling things from other realms into the physical is a big deal and only happens in limited ways. Being able to do that at his own discretion would be an enormous deal, nearly Shard-level in implications and Cosmere-wide.

I'm late to the thread, but I also think Kelsier's sacrifice in Final Empire has a lot of thematic elements driving it. Even with his adaptability, determination, daring, and power, Kelsier's greatest strength was really his charisma. He could inspire others to do things for grand reasons, but ultimately that was a result of personal connections he managed and it led to others sacrificing themselves for his causes. Being killed, defiantly, by the Lord Ruler inverted that: a final, powerful application of his charisma by way of his own sacrifice which then inspired others he never met to actively participate in their own cause. I don't think that replaces anything other posters have said or anything that is in the text (plots and narratives should happen on the page), but is an angle on the event that I've been thinking about.

You'll always be a torturer of Heralds to me, @Argenti.

We don't know enough about the underlying mechanisms for how Metallic Arts are inherited to assess how successful a matchmaking and breeding scheme might be. It's not impossible that it could work. What little evidence we have suggests that it would not work very well, though. We don't have any evidence suggesting that two Allomancer or Feruchemist parents are (at this point) more likely to produce an Allomancer or Feruchemist child than one parent with a normal Scadrian, which is one of they key concepts behind such a scheme. And a Mistborn doesn't seem to be any more likely to produce another Mistborn than a Misting, while a Misting obviously can produce a Mistborn. We have excellent evidence for general heritability of Feruchemy but the WoBs regarding the dilution of that trait seem to relate to interaction with Allomancy, not necessarily mixing with non-Terris people. If that's true then the change might not be recoverable through matchmaking alone. The nobility, pre-Catacendre, did at least some matchmaking along Allomantic lines but the population still lost Allomantic strength pretty quickly over a thousand years. Skaa apparently didn't (don't?) have the ability to maintain Allomantic lines at all, absolutely requiring a noble ancestor within five generations to yield an Allomancer (The Final Empire, p. 292). The only people for whom we even know that modern Allomancy (what we see after Lerasium was given by Rashek) is consistently heritable are nobles, and we know that Rashek changed them in some way from what they were before. It's possible that the heritability is more due to those changes than the Lerasium, if not the Allomantic strength. At this point in Scadrial's history noble ancestry might be pretty well distributed through the overall population, but how much noble background does someone need, and could that background be reconstituted into a stronger trait? Maybe. But it's not a sure thing. Overall, the evidence we have suggests that Allomantic strength and heritability come from two angles: being descended from those Rashek transformed into nobles, and being descended from people that burned Lerasium to become Mistborn. The latter piece seems to dilute with each generation, and even at its strongest point (the immediate descendants of the original Lerasium-burners) we don't have any reason to believe that all of the next generation were Allomancers, while we do have good evidence that each generation was weaker (Allomantically) than those that preceded them. We don't know how noble lineage affects things other than that it seems to matter a lot, somehow. Allomantic strength seems like it has some relationship to matchmaking, but it also seems like the main effect of that is to slow the degradation, not to reverse it. The changes in expressed Feruchemy over time don't have those same considerations and so a matchmaking scheme might be more effective there, but it's notable that we don't have any evidence that the current Terris efforts have been at all effective in that regard. So, from what we know now, the idea of a matchmaking program to strengthen Metallic Arts powers across generations is a maybe, at best. But medallion technology (never mind raw Hemalurgy) is so much more reliable, effective, fast, and scalable that I think it would be hard to get enough people on board with a matchmaking program to even make the effort. Regardless, there is clearly more to this for both Allomancy and Feruchemy than simple heritability and we don't have enough reliable information to make very confident guesses. Yes, I think so. Mistborns' Allomantic strength weakens over generations just like Mistings' do, and Mistborn don't appear more likely to produce Mistborn than Mistings or vice-versa. And neither is all that likely to produce an Allomancer at all. But Allomantic potential does seem to be preserved, in at least some cases. Kelsier notes this when he is describing Vin's father, though how precise his knowledge is is unclear. But it seems like the difference is in potential strength of an Allomancer child, should one be born, and not necessarily the likelihood of such a child being born. "Seems" being an important word there-- we have very little reliable information from which we can develop guesses.

I de-upvoted one, but it seems that wasn't enough.

How about this one: any small device which requires some electricity but not a whole lot at once is built with as little metal as possible, and/or the functional components are surrounded by an aluminum case (making them Allomantically undetectable and uninfluenceable). There is then a small cartridge which can be slid into the device, and the cartridge contains a reciprocating metal element which can be pushed/pulled within a track (probably against a spring) or which is mounted on a wheel and so it can be spun. Either way, the cartridge's metal element is designed on the same principles as a wireless charging mechanism and the motion of the metal element generates electricity. The interior of the main device is designed such that the cartridge, when inserted, either transfers power to the aluminum-encased components (perhaps via magnets) or directly conducts power through aluminum channels. The Allomancer can, at need, power the device directly or potentially charge a small power storage system in it (like a big capacitor or a more complex rechargeable battery-like structure) by Pushing and/or Pulling on the metal element in the cartridge. What the devices do obviously will matter, but I could imagine a small noise-generating machine (low-frequency pulses, maybe able to distract Seekers?), lights, a radio transmitter, or lots of other small-draw equipment. It's probably easier just to carry standardized batteries in an aluminum case and power things that way, but the idea of converting Allomantic power into electricity on demand seems like something that would have some valuable applications to an infiltrator, spy, or assassin.

Really interesting line of thinking! I'm not sure of all of the details, but my thoughts are: Soulcasting doesn't appear to preserve the details of something's original material, aside from physical shape. As an example, when Jasnah transformed a human into smoke or crystal they weren't living smoke or living crystal (as far as we know, at least). They became what the were cast into, and that happened to be unliving. I'm sure that others can post corrections for me, but Soulcasting seems to actually convert one thing into another and forsake its original properties (again, except for shape in some cases). If that's accurate then a corpse Soulcast into some non-flesh material won't be a corpse any more, so the normal Lifeless elements seem like they wouldn't apply. Or at least wouldn't necessarily. Soulcasting an object which could easily be made to resemble a humanoid body should make it easier to Awaken afterwards, even if transformed into a harder-to-Awaken substance. It's easier to make a wax figure in a human shape and cast it to tungsten than it is to carve or mold tungsten. So in that sense it should be easier than Awakening a non-human-shaped piece of the same material, but I think that the difficulties with Awakening metal would overwhelm that. Think, but don't really know. I could easily be mistaken but I think that Soulcasting something which has been Awakened has a real chance of ending its Awakened status. We don't have any examples I can think of to compare with though. It just seems like too much of a cheat to Awaken something and then supercharge it by transforming it into a material which could never have been Awakened with so few Breaths. And that's assuming that the same visualization and Command would translate to the new material, which won't always be a given.

I, personally, think that the effects of swearing the fifth Oath as a Radiant won't provide a ton of dramatic or flexible new powers. It's a given that such a Radiant will be able to work with more Investiture and direct it more efficiently and effectively, since we see this improve with every Oath already it seems likely to continue. I don't know how much more powerful Radiants can become while still being characters that we can see participate in the plot without breaking the story just by their presence. We haven't seen much in the way of Surges changing through further Radiance, though we also haven't seen many people actually develop. Shallan may be a good counterexample, being able to Soulcast her illusions to some degree, but I don't think that that's something along the lines of "Soulcasting like an Elsecaller". Maybe their resonances become more pronounced and flexible, rather than individual powers? I don't think that manipulating essences will come up, nor making use of spren to cause changes in the physical realm. The former encroaches too much on Elsecallers and Soulcasting in general while the latter is what fabrials do already, and figures old enough to have known the Radiant Orders in the past seem ignorant of and surprised about captive spren fabrial technology. I don't think that Radiants will lose agency or be inherently constrained from making "bad" choices-- human freedom to choose to keep an oath or betray it seems like too much of a theme to be permanently taken off the table, though I do think that the depth of understanding required to reach the 5th Ideal will provide a lot of insight and guide a lot of decision making support. So more Investiture and possibly better/fuller resonance between powers seem to me to be the most likely effects swearing the 5th Ideal produces. There will be more effects but I expect them to be more personal and philosophical in nature than additional superpowers. A 5th Ideal Radiant will have a much fuller and deeply-held understanding of their Oaths and the view of the world they engender (such as Kaladin's perspectives shifting in ways that make him a fuller Windrunner but less capable as a soldier). They'll have the cracks in their spiritwebs (if not minds/souls, necessarily) filled in with... Investiture? The nature of their bonded spren? They'll have confronted the worst of their issues, though I'm not sure it's a guarantee that they'll overcome those issues, necessarily. Their spren will be more fully present in the physical realm, with expanded intelligence, personality, and understanding than they'd had previously. That also suggests expanded abilities with manifesting as different types of objects.

Moash may die, but discussions around him never will. He's a reasonably well-drawn character (Moash, not Vyre!), who gets more depth and clear, consequential decision making opportunities that we readers observe than most characters do aside from the series' core protagonists. That extra complexity gives a lot more weight to individual choices he makes (since we see him making them) plus a lot of context for why he might be making the choices he does. But he's also decidedly a villain, and readers are unlikely to forgive killing Teft even if they'd be open to giving him a pass on killing Elhokar. That makes him polarizing. With a window into his mind and decision making process we see him doing things that are very difficult to justify and then we get people breaking into groups: some sympathize with him and want to forgive or excuse his behaviors (to at least some degree) because they find his choices understandable though not good. Others see his decision making process and assess that it is not good enough to drive the choices he makes and so despise him even more than other villains in the series whose minds and choices to become villainous we don't see (cremlings like Torol Sadeas and Amaram, for example). I really do think it's primarily an emotional response thing which people often try to fit into a broader (often sketchily defined) moral outlook, and people have their motivated view of him whether that view is to excuse or condemn. That he personally betrays and harries one of readers' favorite characters in the series just casts the stakes of judgement into sharper contrast.

It's definitely a cool idea, and I think you could muffle the chamber with the spring to keep the noise down. My idea with the springs was to allow the kinetic energy of one being released and moving a metal plate to give more force to Push or Pull against, allowing things like on-demand Allomantic mobility even when anchors are unavailable, without needing to haul something heavier than your own body. The spring gun is definitely a less awkward and more generally usable idea though!

I've been trying to think of cool ideas, but my best ones have come out half-baked so far! Hopefully I'll come up with better ones than these two, but here are mine for the moment: 1. A reversible cloak with a metallic element on both sides, sort of like an emergency blanket. On the one side, a thin metallic lining (or bits of metallic thread, like embroidery or stitching) and on the other side aluminum thin enough to still be flexible. The edges of the cloak are weighted and stitched into the non-aluminum side in key places, and the whole cloak can be folded up with either side facing outwards. But as long as the non-aluminum side is facing the Mistborn they can push and pull on those edges to move the cloak in interesting ways, snapping it, spinning it, etc. But the idea is that the Mistborn can unfurl it quickly, push it forward like a net to trap others, flip it around and cover themselves. Tactics would develop quickly to counter, but a net that blocks Allomancy as it approaches could be a handy tool. And a large-ish piece of fabric that could alternately be Allomantically manipulated or provide a barrier against same could be a pretty versatile item. 2. A metal box with multiple heavy springs inside, compressed by metal plates and held by metal latches. The box itself is reasonably heavy, but the springs can contain a solid amount of energy when compressed. The Mistborn uses Allomancy to release the appropriate latches and then the spring extends, pushing its metal plate forcefully outwards. The Mistborn can Push or Pull against that motion while the spring is extending and gets the effect of working against greater weight than the box or plates actually offer, even if the box itself is in midair. A bit bulky, and troublesome to reset, so not an ideal tool and maybe a bit disposable (of necessity). But I like the idea of carefully engineering of the springs and weighted plates to allow for emergency maneuvering or extra force at any time.

I like the chulls. They seem relatable, in their role in life on Roshar (natural and otherwise) if not personally.

That's a good point, though I think it's worth mentioning that Ruin's influence on Kelsier was enough to make him a poor Vessel for Preservation regardless of his well above average Connection to the latter. There may be some fuzziness there though, as aspects of character may be relevant beyond actually directly interacting with Shardic powers.