Returned

I'm just not seeing the connection you're positing here. Hoid does not care about the survival of Roshar: yes, he says this directly (or, at least, he says that he would sacrifice Roshar to get what he needs). How does that suggest that he's stalling, rather than actively pursuing whatever it is that he needs? Or that Roshar's current war is so central to what he needs? Or that, even if I agree with what you're asserting, once the war ends and Hoid can leave Roshar that means that he's failed? I appreciate that this thread may not be the place to fully lay out all of these cases (and if you've described them elsewhere I haven't seen them, so I may be missing the details you're relying on), but all I see to support these specific ideas is your commitment to them. And they're very specific conclusions, which are then fed back into other speculations. That's not persuasive evidence. Why not? "I'd like some time off to try to start a business." "My brother is sick out in the Roughs town I'm from, I have to go be with my family for now. May I take some time off and return to your service later?" "Your last coachman was also named Hoid? What an odd coincidence! In Elendel, at least. Hoid is a really common name in parts of the Roughs. Parts you're not familiar with." "I know it seems odd to rehire me, but I'm the best horse-calmer and car-driver on Scadrial! If I'm available, you'll want me as your coachman." "Here is some magic you don't know anything about to cause you to rehire me without suspicion." Hoid is a master of misdirection and persuasion who has millennia of experience working people and has access to various arcane magics totally unknown to Wax (and us). He never (as far as we know) operated against Wax in any way, nor supported his opponents in any way, nor did anything at all that was contrary to things that Wax valued or wanted, and likely performed faithful service to Wax while working. It's a good observation that the time skip is a detail Hoid would need to work around, but the idea that he is 100% constrained only to continuous work in his disguise over that period is overdetermined. Your analysis could be correct, but given the setting and the character at issue it's not the only possible way things could have happened.

We don't know this at all. It's obviously a possibility, and as the various Cosmere series develop I think it's increasingly likely that we'll see Hoid fail in various objectives. Maybe this is one of the first consequential ones! But it's only raw speculation that Hoid's unknown, overarching goals were not served at all by his time on Roshar, as is guessing so specifically what the state of the Cosmere is going to be at the end of SA5. It's also absurd to think that Hoid can't place himself where he wants or needs to be on his own. He's managed to get himself positions close to important people and events all across the Cosmere over and over again; there's no reason to think that he needed a Shard's help to be named Elhokar's Wit, for example. But he can't get hired on as a coach driver? There's no way he could persuade, cajole, trick, or magic his way into such a job? A Hoid that could be accurately described this way flat-out doesn't match with what we've seen of him. We'll see what happens as the stories develop, of course. But the conclusion(s) you've asserted seem far, far from definitely true, and then using those conclusions (even if they are true!) to make very strong assumptions about what happened during stretches of time which we explicitly don't see on-screen in any of the books is untenable. I'm open to a lot of possibilities, including the ones you're advancing, but treating them as necessarily true based on the information we have is too far.

It doesn't strike me as that great of an advantage. Even if we agree that a child can learn, in a generic sense, more quickly than an older person, is that increased study efficiency enough to overcome the amount of time you have to dedicate to storing the youth? Like, if it cuts the amount of time you need to learn some concept from 10 hours' study to 5, but you have to spend several days storing youth to gain that advantage, it might be strictly better to spend the extra 5 hours studying over those days and not deal with atium Feruchemy at all. A recurring thing in the Mistborn books is that, while Feruchemist characters tend to have enough stored attributes to do what they need to do in the story, those needs are relatively rare and require a huge amount of time storing attributes to be able to meet them. If the effective rate of youth storage required to service one practical study session is low, it may not be practical to take advantage of such a trick even if it would work well. And all of the other concerns still apply, too: atium is expensive and rare, Keepers were a secretive group focused on staying alive and undetected more than developing neat Feruchemical tricks, they had other methods of working with knowledge, Keepers may not have had the opportunity to observe learning rate differences by age, zinc and copper may simply be superior in this application, obvious Feruchemy was incredibly dangerous to Keepers individually and as a group, and more. We also don't know a whole lot about the specific mechanisms, magical and otherwise, of Feruchemy like this. Atium Feruchemy might work just as you suggest, however beneficial or not it ends up being, or it might not work that way at all. "Kids learn faster" might not apply to Feruchemy any more than "sufficiently increased weight from tapping iron should crush a Feruchemist's own body" does. The reasoning is clear, but the presence of magic can arbitrarily preclude it.

I don't think that the specifics are going to change much. The pattern we've seen thus far on Scadrial is that governance tends to converge towards dictatorial/oligarchic rule and corruption, and that doesn't seem likely to change. Why would it? My specific guesses about how things will develop are below: Most people on Scadrial won't believe or care about the realities of what happened in Lost Metal. Most people, even knowledgeable ones, will have the same worldly concerns as they ever did, and those people will view the events as another political struggle (righteous on the part of the factions they are aligned with) which nearly led to substantial destruction because their own technology wasn't sufficiently advanced. Bilming-aligned folk will wish they'd had an adequate rocket, Elendel-aligned folk will wish they had better military equipment overall (and a lot more of it than they had), and Southerners will become much more tightfisted with their ettmetal, medallions, and related technology. As has been the case on Scadrial nearly 100% of the time, there will not be enough (perceived) common interest in general threats to bring groups together while individuals exploit and expand tensions to secure their own aims (power, wealth, or whatever). I don't see any particular reason for any of the factions in era 2 to change their perspectives or modes of operation at all. They will all likely go all-in on applied research and development, particularly with an eye towards military concerns, so that when those nefarious other Scadrians get out of line their own groups will (they presume) be able to fight them off. New developments will be jealously guarded with as much secrecy as can be managed, and espionage will flourish. Knowledge of Hemalurgy will ineveitably spread as the Set's unity is challenged following the collapse of its initial plans. Northern Scadrian governments are likely to try to push laws which forbid Hemalurgy broadly (to reduce violence towards and murder of suspected metalborn), but also produce and maintain their own stashes of spikes for "emergencies". This will form the core of the North's military contingencies for opposing the Southerners, as abundant metalborn are one of the only major advantages they have. There will be small splinter groups, exactly like the Set and the Ghostbloods, operating in pursuit of more expansive goals, but they will remain in the shadows as much as possible. Some groups will specialize in brokering resources from elsewhere in the Cosmere but these, too, will not be well-known publicly; limiting knowledge about Shadesmar and its potential will help ensure more stringent control over offworld technology and goods. Similarly, governments will try to control transit from offworld but will largely fail, in no small part because of interference from other governments who are seeking a special edge for themselves. The Terris (as a cultural, political, and social group) will rise in importance due to their near-monopoly on Feruchemy and the potential value of large-scale attribute storage and the potential represented by unkeyed metalminds. Their insularity will give them leverage that will be far harder for Allomancers to develop.

We don't know very much about Essence Marks or their implications and consequences, nor exactly what Shai is undertaking on Scadrial or anywhere else. It could be anything. Mainly I would guess that, if she did something like that, it would be to keep the Forgery from fading at an inconvenient time. It seems like it would be hard to guarantee your needs will be met within 24 hours as a being that may be hard to harness to your goals. It also seems hard to ensure that continued stamping happens reliably and regularly but only for a few days; that strikes me as an awkward feature of a personality and general life history. For all we know there are other considerations too. Some weird interaction with Forging an Elantrian identity? Maybe a Forged person (or some specific identities) would react badly to learning that she's an Essence Mark of a different, "real" person, and some cover is required to address the stamp lest the truth be revealed. It's even possible that there is a risk the Elantrian would be able to figure out what's going on and doesn't need any other impulse to stamp beyond self-preservation, so Shai didn't implant such a desire but the outcome could be the same anyways.

I'd be curious to know if the issue is amount of metals created from the process, not just the type. It strikes me that lerasium is more potent than atium (awkwardly phrased, but I couldn't think of anything better). There were always more beads of atium than of lerasium, as far as we know, by a huge margin. And while atium (or its retconned alloy) is pretty amazing in what it can do, lerasium can make anyone into a Mistborn (among other potential uses). Physically we would expect matter split into its components to have physically proportionate amounts of those components. But can we assume that with a godmetal? If lerasium is so potent (more Investiture dense, or something similar), maybe the operative mechanism is just that the most you can produce via the method used in the book and with the amount of harmonium involved is an incredibly tiny amount, generally too little to recover or use in any meaningful way. That wouldn't explain why Wax wound up with a useable amount, but maybe it's a factor. I also wonder if the process of splitting harmonium is just fundamentally a Ruinous activity. You destroy the harmonium by splitting it and cause a large, destructive explosion. Maybe such a destructive and transformative act is just conceptually not something that can generate a physical manifestation of Preservation on its own. Whatever Wax's last attempt did changed the equation (or some changes in Harmony had progressed far enough that new outcomes became possible) to make a tiny bit of lerasium, perhaps.

That's an interesting idea I haven't come across before. Big technological changes have a tendency to cause large displacements of workers, but I can see the angle that more advancements in a short period can lead to fewer periods of displacement. Umm... citation needed. Safer options exist today compared with the 19th century, but they're still more expensive than less safe methods. See circumstances like toxic waste dumping, children getting nicotine poisoning in tobacco fields, companies cut corners on safety requirements, etc. Even when manufacturers do comply with safer practices it's often due to regulations with legal force, and many manufacturers just move their operations to places where those regulations don't exist. I'll agree that improvements in material standards of living have benefited huge numbers of people, and as we stretch our assessments of those improvements into the unlimited future it's easy to say they outweigh abuse and exploitation of people that will live and die in any fixed location and time period. But that "effective altruism"-style argument has an awkward track record at best and is a much harder sell in advance compared with in hindsight. Bringing examples back around to Scadrial, skaa laborers in era 2 are much less likely to be outright murdered by a noble without consequences than in era 1, and they definitely enjoy a better standard of living (in Elendel itself, at least). But they are still frequently exploited by the wealthy and powerful, working frequent 12-hour shifts for less-than-amazing pay at demanding jobs. If people like Edwarn or high-ranking members of the Set had its way those workers would be even more dominated. I don't think that having better technology available would inherently fix that-- if everyone in Elendel had a refrigerator their position would probably still be the same. So in that dimension I agree with you: I don't think that more advanced technology would make the Scadrians any less cruel than they are.

There was also a mention of an old Koloss-blooded woman in one of the Roughs towns, though just a mention and so it doesn't add much! I agree that information on the Koloss were very thin in the era 2 books, and I felt that they were even more one-dimensional than they were in era 1. Though at the same time there weren't any plotlines that intersected with full Koloss or their communities and so it would be odd to give a lot of focus to them. We hear a little bit about Koloss communities which suggests that they are still violent-tempered and very strong, but that they also fit into society largely through their establishing their own communities. Tarson seems like exactly the kind of person that a violent gang would be happy to take on, and one who would do well in that environment. I, too, would like to see more of the Koloss in the future. But only if the story makes use of them. I don't generally like irrelevant detail just for the sake of completeness on everything that came before-- a situation which the Cosmere books have particular risk of reaching. I think that the Koloss are a difficult group to use, narratively, in anything other than a shallow way. I'd rather get less detail than more if the "more" is largely junk that detracts from a story instead of adding to it.

@StormingTexan is almost certainly correct that Wax disengaged the safety before throwing, as he threw, or after he threw the gun to Wayne. If Wax was using Vindication during the fight (I don't recall all the details just now) the safety may not have been on at all. Whether it's explicitly narrated or not this would have been trivial for Wax to do as long as he had steel. The safety Ranette built in can only be used to switch the gun between a state that will fire and one that will not. If the safety is engaged, no one can fire the gun without toggling it. If the safety is not engaged, anyone can fire the gun.

Used bookstores can be a goldmine for audio book CDs. The savings aren't always amazing, but they're generally cheaper than the list price for a new copy.

Question 1: Question 2: Question 3: Question 4:

The new identity can think very differently from the original, and it can be hard to keep a very different identity on track with the original's wishes. Shai may not want to be an Elantrian permanently, but Shai-the-Elantrian-via-stamp doesn't even seem to appreciate that she's a Forgery (though she might, and she'd need some reason to keep stamping herself which would be made easier with some shade of the truth). If the deception Shai placed in her Forged mind is that she needs to stamp herself daily or she'll fall to the Reod, permanently, Shai-the-Elantrian-via-stamp would certainly want to avoid that fate by stamping.

It could be as simple as maintaining as much intrigue and mystery as he can. Kelsier is a theatrical person, and uses those theatrics (as well as others' perceptions of him) very effectively. But more broadly I don't think that Kelsier particularly needs those powers. He's certainly more dangerous as a Mistborn than as a normal person, all else being equal, but he was also incredibly successful and effective long before he Snapped. Most of his biggest successes weren't due to his Allomancy alone. He's (more or less) immortal as a cognitive shadow, pinned into a body or otherwise, which seems useful. Kelsier has always been very capable and effective, particularly when running an organization. As a leader in the Ghostbloods he has tons of resources from across the Cosmere available to him, including rare and valuable ones. He has a lot of valuable information about things going on in places of note, and has good intelligence on people and groups that are important from local scale to galactic. He has highly capable people working under him to carry out his designs, some of them skilled and effective magic users from many different magic systems. Even though he's not Mistborn any more, perhaps permanently, I don't think it's accurate to say that Kelsier is powerless. I think that he's more influential, effective, and dangerous than he's ever been-- he just can't burn metals.

We don't know much about what Hoid wants, and likely won't until much closer to the end of the Cosmere books overall. The things Hoid is pursuing (whatever they are) seem like they can take a long time to develop-- he's working across millennia, and often isn't sure what he's supposed to do in a given location. Something we see Hoid do on screen may not pay off until the very last book in the set. If the time is right to do something somewhere, Hoid will go there, try to figure out what to do, and then do it. As for the duration, worldhopping seems like it can be pretty dangerous. Perhaps especially so for Hoid, as he is known to the Shards and is constantly meddling in their affairs, and can't harm living creatures. Travel is also inconsistently available. Getting to and from Scadrial and Roshar has been shown to be tricky and sometimes more or less impossible (at least by the methods Cosmere-dwellers typically use). If he had to leave Roshar to take care of some 30-minute task on Scadrial, it may be that seven years is the soonest he could return to Roshar even if he didn't have other tasks to take care of elsewhere. It's not the most satisfying answer, and I wouldn't assume that it's the case, but we can't rule it out. "A few days at most" seems unreasonably brief, given that Hoid has to get somewhere to transition to the cognitive realm, actually travel to a section of it that overlaps with his destination in another solar system, transition back to the physical realm, take care of his tasks, and then do the whole thing in reverse. Of course, with his letters to the Shards he may well have had access to other people who could carry his messages, so the timeline might not be especially unforgiving.

The only counterargument I can think of is that in one of the other era 2 books atium is titled "the lost metal". There are displays of all of the metals used in the Metallic Arts, and one of the display cases is empty and labeled as atium with the "lost metal" description. Atium is also what the Set was initially trying to produce with their harmonium experiments. But I like lerasium as the lost metal more. It's more thematic, it was always more rare, and there was still atium around just about to the end of era 2 (even if Marsh was the only one that knew about it or had any).

No reason to think that he did. As I said above, there may have been some alternative to testing everyone with the hardest-to-get metals. Indeed, if we stick to the premises that those metals are not accessible in the amounts needed to test for those Mistings, but those Mistings were found anyways, then some other method was used. And, of course, we don't even know that that happened. The relevant metals existed in functional quantities in the Bands, which means they came from somewhere. They wouldn't be easier to produce immediately following the Catacendre than later-- Elendel just recently got access to electricity. "Rashek made them exist with divine power" is at least as plausible an explanation as any, as is "Sazed made them exist with divine power". There isn't a reason to think that either definitely did happen, but there is a relative dearth of alternatives It's not circular at all. The Bands exist, therefore they were created via some means that would work to cause them to exist. Prior to Lost Metal we thought we had an idea how they might have been created, based on how we thought the medallions might be made, but Lost Metal suggests that those ideas were almost certainly mistaken. I don't mention Hemalurgy as the method, even as a possibility, (was the comment to that effect intended for me?), nor any method for creating the Bands at all.

I wonder where the line is between a Shard interacting with people and intervening more directly than they're allowed to. Shards aren't supposed to just smite people (Odium couldn't "harm" Wit at the end of Rhythm of War), but a lot of Shards' behavior when they want something to happen is almost ridiculously circuitous. An impossible-to-measure amount of that is probably related to futuresight, but maybe there is something prohibiting a Shard from just magically assembling a bunch of laser guns and fusion reactors on a planet for people to pick up and use. Shards' physical manifestations are in a lot of ways their least meaningful ones for the actions they undertake. Spiritual elements seem mostly covered in the magic systems that result from Shards' Investing in specific places, and don't seem to change much outside of interactions with other Shards' Investments. The cognitive realm is interesting in how it's shaped by mortals and not Shards, and seems to be the realm which the Shards manipulate the least (or at least the least directly). Shards seem to be bound by rules we don't know about according to principles we don't understand, and so much of their actions seem almost metaphorical (or otherwise freighted with complicating implications). I wonder if there are more pressing reasons for Sazed to have held off gifting more technology to Scadrians than just his view of what's the best way for people to develop.

Trustworthy in what sense? Wax was hard-used by Harmony, even though Harmony was working for the best possible outcomes for everybody (as he defined them), including Wax. Just because he doesn't do what one character or another wants doesn't mean that he's betraying anybody. I think he still has the right goals and motivations, and is doing what he can according to those. His becoming indecisive, maybe even impotent, may make it a less advisable idea to rely on him for specific things, but I don't think anyone has much reason to distrust him. I think he's still working for Scadrial and its people as best he can, while also learning that he has to factor the wider Cosmere into those considerations.

I think that it could be an educated guess based on general Cosmere-awareness. If you know the basics of how Shards work with their Vessels and Intents you would be able to extrapolate a lot about a situation like Harmony's possession of two strongly opposed Shards. Harmony himself talks a lot about how his Shards' opposed natures impact his ability to take action, and other observers have noted that the issue seems to have gotten worse over time. Telsin probably doesn't have poorer access to information than anyone on Scadrial, so I think she'd have the generally required knowledge to figure something like this out.

It's not impossible that Rashek would have created a cache of relevant metals, otherwise unavailable, for his own use during his time with Preservation's power at the Well. He may well have used those metals Feruchemically, even if he didn't want to use them for compounding. There isn't any particular reason to think that this is what did happen, but we shouldn't just rule it out. The ultimate cheat is that he could have accessed Fortune during his brief Ascension, causing him to do things with no relevance to him or surrounding events and for no clear or immediate reason. The powers used in making the Bands came from somewhere. While we obviously don't have the details on what happened, questions like "how and why would [x] do [y]" fall into the same category: for some reason we don't know, via some mechanism we don't know about. With what little we thought we know about medallion technology being undone in Lost Metal, I don't think we can brush aside any explanation which is at least technically plausible. We also have to account for our own imperfect knowledge of how the Metallic Arts can be applied. Maybe a clever use of malatium, gold, bronze, or chromium (via Hemalurgic spikes, as necessary) and a well-trained, experienced Metalborn possessing the right knowledge could elide the practical issues we have with finding Mistings and Ferrings who can make use of the rare metals. Sanderson's coyness about medallion-style technology, declining to give us essentially any new information at all, suggests to me that for answering these types of questions we're looking at something fundamental to the magic system ("with the right knowledge, any Allomancer could use their metal to do [x]") rather than some arbitrarily insurmountable hurdle ("nicrosil is virtually impossible to find!"). In the same way that making someone into a Mistborn is only one of, and the most basic of, many possible applications of lerasium.

I'd read that book! @Ati16 gave the right approximate timeline, so it seems unlikely that she would be. Marasi's abilities as a Pulser might give her enough extra time to make that work. But my bet is that she'll be like Spook-- a hugely consequential social and political figure whose influence extends far into the future, but not one whose influential period is shown while it's happening in the books.

I think that she probably will worldhop, though I think it's likely that she'll spend most or all of her time on or near Scadrial. She's pretty committed to her "serving the public" role, so I doubt she'll abandon the people of the Basin (or Scadrial more broadly). But after the events of Lost Metal it's clear that that role requires a higher-level perspective which incorporates the Cosmere. If nothing else she'll end up doing something like heading a division within Scadrial's governments that deals with offworld affairs and monitoring and policing worldhoppers. Her age, plus the timeskip we'll have between Lost Metal and the next book may keep her from being an active field agent during the events of the books, but she can still set up and organize a lot which will be relevant later on. I think that we're past the point of radical transparency. Marasi likes to color inside the lines, but she also has participated in lots of secret operations and dealt with important information which she doesn't distribute to the public directly. I think she'll end up working within a legal structure, like the Elendel constabulary but on a planetary scale, and will end up steeped in secrets (some of which she'll share within that structure, and others of which she'll be compelled to keep quiet).

It seems possible, but at the same time the martial focus of the Radiants (and of the warlike state they left behind in Alethela) seems like a foreign invasion of the type Autonomy prepared for Lost Metal would be a relatively low risk. At least less risky than stealthier approaches, like the one Autonomy seems to have initiated on both Scadrial and Roshar. Heavy Investiture, especially when there are active Shards around, seems to have a lot of consequences and complications. I think that your suggestion has merit and is probably correct, but not necessarily the main reason (or even one of the major) reasons Nale and Ishar were so opposed to Surgebinding coming back. If nothing else, access to the magic seems like it heightens conflict. But focusing on humans alone is a mistake in that regard; it seems to me that the concentration of Investiture among the Listeners who adopted Stormform was a significant factor in making the Everstorm a reality (in addition to the actual, proximate things the Listeners did to call it into being). Invasion from other worlds is one of many issues that concentrating cosmic power can give rise to.

What we know of Fortune is pretty vague, but seems to work like this (pasted from another thread): Cosmere Fortune is about putting you in the right place at the right time for a good result, and you yourself don't necessarily know why you're there or what the good result will be. Like, if you were in a casino, it might draw you to the roulette table when someone is about to win and, in their exuberance, give money to everyone nearby. It wouldn't tell you what the actual result (the number and color) of the roulette spin would be.

All fair. They're just the reasons I think that Sazed is more correct than Kelsier.