Returned

I think we can say that the bonded owner does not need to be touching the Blade. When Dalinar brings Oathbringer to Ialai in Oathbringer, he still hears the screams even though he is the only one touching it and Oathbringer is not bonded to anyone at that time. (That was a weird sentence to type, with all those Oathbringers!).

Of course the punctuation of the line might make this irrelevant, as the description is of the gods with a colon afterwards, suggesting that what follows is a list of those gods. Those were simply the things the Singers revered. I think that there is still more to Roshar than we've been shown. In the stele, spren seem easy enough, as there is a line somewhere about humans providing more for them than the Singers could (I believe it was more intensity of emotion, which was more attractive to the spren). So the spren associated more with humans than with Singers. Stone and wind being Cultivation and Honor could fit, especially with the reasoning provided by @Treamayne. Spren associated with those gods might also fit, like the Stormfather and the Nightwatcher, but the association is less clear. Besides which those are already spren, so that would redundant. If I recall correctly the Singers existed on Roshar before Honor and Cultivation ever arrived there. If so then there may be other powers at play than just the Shards we're so familiar with in the Cosmere. We also know that the Shin revere stone to the extent that they won't even walk on any that has been cut and worked, which has always been a detail that has lacked context. And there is an epigraph in WoR that says I believe that the conventional interpretation of this is that the Ancient of Stones is Taln, also called Stonesinew (the timing and context are right for that to be the case), but we've also had a WoB saying that Taln never broke. Either Taravangian is wrong about Taln breaking and ushering in the Desolation (which is certainly possible), or that interpretation is off. And if the Ancient of Stones is someone or something we haven't seen yet it could be a reference matching the stone mentioned in the Eila Stele.

The metalmind rounds would also only be useful in a handful of situations, most specifically when the target is aware Wax is there and will shoot at him from a specific angle in a somewhat predictable window of time. We see a fair number of Allomancers deflecting bullets, but Wax himself doesn't rely on that ability. He does have his steelpush bubble, but that's something that seems mostly unique to him and his skill (savantism?) with the ability, not something that most people would be able to replicate even if they wanted to. Maybe having one stored in the secret, Allomancer-accessible only chamber of his gun would be useful, but it still seems over-engineered compared to a ceramic bullet (or something else Ranette could cook up). And Wax has found better uses for his Feruchemical weight than expending it in this way anyhow, though I suppose if he really wanted to he could work harder during his off-hours to produce these bullets in a reasonable amount of time.

Welcome! Some of these have clearer answers than others, and some are still mysteries. The only planet that we know was created by Shards is Scadrial. More are possible, but we don't know how they came to be or how their populations came to live there. The original planet in the Cosmere (or at least the first we know of) is/was called Yolen. We don't know much about it, including if there were dogs there. Presumably there were, but Hoid's comment is about Rosharans calling axehounds "hounds", so the dog reference could be as recent as Ashyn (where the Rosharan humans came from immediately before Roshar). Something bad happened on Threnody when... certain events took place (I'm not sure how open to spoilers you are, or what would be a spoiler for you, or even if spoilers are allowed in this subforum). We don't have a huge amount of detail about it, though gold having a divine, Shardic property is probably a good guess. I think it's unlikely that the Spiritual Realm is overlapping the physical there (as opposed to the Cognitive, with Shades being Cognitive Shadows), but I don't think we have definitive information on it. If we do, I'm sure someone will post it here soon enough. EDIT: Dunkum corrected that it is silver, not gold, that repels Shades. We don't know a ton about the precise differences, but inhabiting Singer bodies is something that is more about the Singers themselves than the Fused-- Singers have gemhearts, and take spren (and, apparently, spren-like things) into them to undergo dramatic changes. We have no reason to think that Heralds even could do something similar, let alone would want to. There does appear to be a substantial difference in the nature of Heralds and Fused. Maybe, though I would doubt it. It also depends on what you mean by "off-world". Heralds and Fused alike can go to Braize, but we haven't seen any capable of leaving the Rosharan system overall. Anyways, the reason I doubt it is that the Fused are heavily permeated with Odium's essence, and highly Invested individuals in a given locale often have a difficult time moving around the Cosmere. Some can do it, though, like Vasher and Vivenna, plus Ghostbloods and 17th Shard members, so I wouldn't rule it out completely. There are also ways to travel that neither we nor characters in the books know about, so the future might look very different. Lore, almost certainly. Investiture... maybe. In examples we've seen Investiture seems to come from Shards in some way becoming connected to the worlds where they settle, which makes it difficult for them to leave themselves (avatars are a different story). This may be what happened to Odium in becoming trapped in the Rosharan system. Though we have seen Seons travelling between systems, so who knows? And magic from one place should work similarly in another (per a WoB), so maybe the magic would remain even if a Shard did somehow extricate itself from a planet/system. I think they'd get along. Lopen does his own thing, and Wax has lots of experience dealing with a Lopen-like character from Wayne. Lopen and Wayne would get along famously, I think. Maybe. We don't know a whole lot yet about what's going on at the Cosmere level, and have only begun to get a peek at the groups operating that way.

Maybe. I mean, it's all magic anyways, but it's as possible that the Splintering can't be reversed as that it can. The Investiture still exists either way.

I think that it's an interesting spot, because a Truthless is not supposed to have any agency and so they don't have any moral properties outside of obedience (or so the Shin seem to think, at any rate). If that's true then the moral properties of his actions would belong to the people holding the oathstone. It's not clear to me that the mass murder with superpowers is an example of what we could typically expect here, but they're so rare (and it's implied that existence of a Truthless is bad news anyways) that it's hard to say. I mean, if they didn't want him to fight they wouldn't have sent him with an Honorblade... So I think that he was being a "good" Truthless in regard to his dedication to obeying anyone that held his oathstone, but it's strongly suggested that Truthless are thought to be fundamentally bad people. Warriors and killers seem to be thought of similarly in Shinovar. Szeth lived up to his role, but that role was being the worst person possible-- he was a "good" (dutiful) Shin according to standards we don't know for reasons we don't understand. The question is then "does it matter that he wasn't really Truthless?". It's hard to evaluate a Truthless subsuming their moral capacities when we have no idea why it might be done and what we should expect from it. I certainly wouldn't endorse dozens of unprovoked assassinations, which destabilized the world, for no particular reason. But since he wasn't actually Truthless he doesn't get the excuse of having no agency, even though in Shinovar it was everyone but him that made the mistake of labeling him a Truthless in the first place. So, "honorable" in that he did everything he could to fulfill his obligations to his best ability, but probably "wrong" in a moral sense both because the conditions under which he slaughtered weren't the ones that made it "ok", and because Truthless are in some way inherently "bad". And we don't have enough information to evaluate whether or not following the Truthless rules has much behind it even when they are correctly applied. I'd lean towards saying his time as a presumed Truthless was not good, but I think that arguments can be made in the absence of sufficient information.

That's true, but his answers suggest to me that he's got at least a solid idea for it. So I guess I'll hedge and say it's likely to be really important or really unimportant

That's an interesting idea. Since ettmetal is Harmonium, I'd assumed the buzzing would if anything be like other Pure Tones, like those of Cultivation, Honor, Odium, and Preservation, rather than the distinctive pulses of Allomancy. I don't recall anything about the frequency being written yet other than characters observe that the buzzing is happening. I bet we'll find out in November! I'm no engineer, but I'd use it for validation and error prevention in Allomantic machinery. Like, a device won't operate if the ettmetal will produce a steelpush when the machine is supposed to do something else, especially if the steelpush would be dangerous. A sixteen-state gate might be useful in some applications, but I'd be more concerned about using Allomancy to do the work. It's just so much easier and more accessible to use an electronic circuit. Especially since ettmetal is so unstable.

Unity (capital "U") is definitely something, but I don't believe that it is at a level above the Shards (so, not Adonalsium), nor that it's a fundamental element of the Cosmere like Connection or Identity. The idea that it's a Dawnshard is intriguing though. I think that it's a possible "form" of Honor's Shard, in the same way that Sazed became Harmony when he could have become Discord upon taking up Ruin and Preservation. Honor is already all about binding things, hence his enthusiasm for oaths. Unity is another angle on the same idea: not on binding things together via promises, but on things being bound together into one thing. We know from WoB that the Shards of Adonalsium that exist are not the only ones that could have existed, and that there could have been fewer or more Shards than 16, and that we could have had 16 totally different Shards than exist in the Cosmere. My suspicion is that Honor being Splintered would make it easier for someone to shift to another manifestation of the Shard itself if it were reconstituted, and when Dalinar briefly ascended he channeled that Shard's power in that way-- as Unity, not Honor. So I agree with you 100% that Unity is probably a Shard, but not a "new" one; rather, it would be a replacement for Honor. You're definitely on to something that the capital "U" is significant, but I think that the significance isn't clear yet. Passion is often capitalized when Odium says the word, and once when Ruin said it, but that's not a Shard (maybe a Dawnshard?). And across all of the Cosmere we are starting to get flooded with words that are officially capitalized. It's confusing! Also, welcome!

I recall that one too, but that could also be in line with an "ordinary" coppermind. The event I referenced above is the only time I recall us seeing that incredible memory in effect, and what differentiates it from Sazed's (at least that we see clearly) is the immediacy and depth of detail he recalls. The immediate recall could easily be compounded zinc, but the detail is less obvious and I'd bet it's due to copper compounding in some way. I'd be disappointed if copper compounding was as limited as perfectly recording a memory without removing it from the Feruchemist's mind, but your idea has a bit more meat to it which is exciting. It's unlikely that the Lord Ruler would be bothering to dump every moment of every day into a coppermind and also doing the rote work to also have the information in his mind, and only modestly less unlikely that he's constantly tapping his copperminds like an all-encompassing external storage device. Even then, the sheer volume of information he'd have to sift through would be an irritation, more so with each passing day. That it's consistently been a RAFO suggests that copper compounding has a substantial effect which will be meaningful in a plot at some point.

Permanent, clear, and easily accessible, maybe? Sazed's copperminds probably hold far less than the Lord Ruler's, and even he needs to store things like indices to be able to reference them well. The Lord Ruler's memory is quick and amazing, like recognizing Kelsier immediately and remembering details about his failed theft and Mare. Of course, he could be doing some workarounds with compounded zinc to achieve that same effect.

This is a good question. We know from Navani's research that knowledge of how to use a gemstone to bond a Blade came some time after the Recreance, and as far as we know it's the gemstone-driven bonding of a Blade that causes it to appear next to the corpse of its (former) wielder. So I don't think that Testament would definitely appear next to Shallan if she were to die because her bond to Testament is direct, not just some person holding an arbitrary Blade with an attached gemstone. She certainly didn't keep Testament with her for the requisite period to bond a dead Blade. I also think it's more likely (though I wouldn't say it's definitive, given how unreliable a narrator Shallan has been) that her Soulcasting of the goblet to blood was from her developing relationship with Pattern rather than a lingering effect of her broken bond with Testament. It's also possible that Shallan was Surgebinding without a bonded spren, which seems possible (though we know nothing about it). As for the Recreance, my impression was that the summoning of Blades and driving them into the ground was more of a dramatic, symbolic statement, and not necessarily how every Radiant rejecting their oaths would have done it. The Radiants summoned their spren as Blades, then broke their bonds as they walked away from the keep. This left the bodies of the spren manifested in the physical realm rather than the cognitive, so they wouldn't be manifesting in Shadesmar as deadeyes at that time. Between the Recreance and the discovery of attaching gemstones to Blades they would be much harder to keep track of, and harder to even keep on hand (they're so unwieldy and obvious when carried!). For example, look how long it took to find Oathbringer after Sadeas' death. Shadesmar itself is huge and mostly covered by the bead ocean, where we know many deadeyes spend a fair amount of time. We also know that spren can be hurt and even killed, so maybe some of them were destroyed by dangerous spren (like angerspren) while unable to defend themselves. So I don't know that we can say there are too few of them there. And a spren whose bond was broken while in Shadesmar might never physically manifest, given how hard it was to get to and from the realm after the Recreance. So in summary I don't think that it's all that suspicious that there are so few Blades known on Roshar, and so few observed deadeyes in Shadesmar. Of the remaining physical Blades, many may just be lost in the physical world. Many are known to still be around and are in active use. Some are probably in the hands of the Skybreakers (they may not use them themselves, but Helaran's Blade came from somewhere, and was given to him by the Skybreakers). I think that it's a good guess that at least some are in Shinovar, though I am not convinced that it's as many as you suggest or for the reasons you suggest.

It's hard to say for sure since we have so few examples. Kelsier lasted quite a while despite not even knowing about duralumin, while Vin passed on to the Spiritual Realm pretty quickly despite having burned a lot of it. Becoming a cognitive shadow for real (like a Returned or a Herald) probably involves more than just high Investiture, even though that is a very important element in the process.

Also in no particular order: Vin Vasher Kelsier Sazed Steris Wow, that's a lot more Mistborn heavy than I would have expected!

Maybe? Szeth was (and is) an extremely competent fighter and freely used the Windrunner Surges, which the Kholins didn't have experience dealing with. Even without Surgebinding Kaladin held his own against two Shardbearers in Plate in Adolin's duel, at least until his Stormlight ran out. I wouldn't say his performance was likely to have been worse if he'd had his Blade and was using his powers.

That's an assumption that Vin and Elend made, I don't recall anything actually indicating that it's true. The Kandra were (largely) very loyal and devoted to the Lord Ruler even though he wasn't directly controlling them all the time. Given how restive they were and how manipulative they became (like the efforts to discredit Tevidian and take over formal control of the Steel Ministry), it seems that the Lord Ruler was not controlling them even as they tried to serve him (like through a "better" Steel Ministry). And while Vin and Elend proposed the idea of Allomantic control as a sort of an emergency measure, we as readers know that it's just a property of hemalurgic spiking-- the Lord Ruler didn't "create a weakness" in the nonhumans he made, he made nonhumans who happened to have this property as an inherent effect of what they were. They extrapolated that Inquisitors were controllable, but everything more was just speculation on their part. Sure, but he was certain of his victory and the incipient deaths of Vin and Marsh at his hands anyways. There was just no need to control Marsh, from his perspective, so it would be nonzero risk for zero upside. The only opponent that he felt mattered at all was Ruin; if you were going to step on an ant, would you jump up in the air as high as you could and make the effort to thrust your legs down as hard as you could at just the right moment so that you would maximize the force you apply to crush it? Or would you just step on it casually and then get on with your day? Those seem plausible, too. In any case my position is that it's not necessarily an oversight on the author's part, there is more than enough space for these events to be consistent with the book. And I suppose we always have the ultimate cop-out that Ruin was influencing him in ways that would lead to his defeat.

I think that your guesses are largely correct in both cases: The Lord Ruler's mass-soothing is very unfocused, affecting thousands of people at once, which may dilute what he can do to any given individual with it. Breeze has a similar tradeoff to make when he's working with crowds compared with when he's influencing fewer people. This might be enough to protect OreSeur from being casually taken over, especially since his presence unknown to most and he appeared to be just a corpse. As for Marsh, Vin was flaring her copper to resist the Lord Ruler's soothing, and if she felt the need to do that it's not unreasonable that Marsh would have as well: I don't think we ever see anyone but Ruin directly control Inquisitors with Allomancy. Vin almost does in Hero of Ages, but is rebuffed by Ruin, so all else being equal it was almost certainly possible for the Lord Ruler to have controlled Marsh during his final battle. We don't know how much influence the copper might have in rebuffing the attempt to take control, but it's plausible, even likely, that the Lord Ruler wouldn't have made the effort anyways. The ability to directly control Inquisitors, Kandra, and Koloss was a very tightly-held secret which would have been revealed to a definite enemy if he'd done so. And why bother, especially given that risk? He was absurdly powerful, well beyond what Marsh or Vin understood at the time, and had no reason to think that the others in the room were any danger to him. Indeed, had Vin not channeled Preservation's power directly to fuel her Allomancy while also suddenly realizing the secret to his immortality, the Lord Ruler would simply have killed her and Marsh like all other opponents over a thousand years.

I've had this happen to me, and it seems (in my case, at least) to be a pretty standard case of merging details that seem similar. Once they're combined my brain reinforces the supposed connection and it becomes what I "remember". Nothing mystical or even unusual, just memory being imperfect (and sometimes really imperfect). If it were my fuzzy memory I would imagine somemthing like a blended recollection of Wax moving the lifeboat (he holds onto straps attached to the floor while using Allomancy to move it), or the description of how the airship might have been transported to the Set's facility where it was researched, to combine with his using Allomancy to keep the Set's ship from escaping.

Good find! That's a solid enough piece of evidence that the duralumin route can work, and I think it tips the balance the other way from how I'd thought about it before. Unless something changes, using duralumin is a route to becoming an Allomantic savant.

I've always liked Awakening just because of the passive effects of the Breaths you hold. Awakening itself seems like it could be hard to use effectively in many situations, but it still gives some nice options as long as you're practiced and creative.

We don't really know, so it could be more like you describe. There are a couple of catches to the physical enhancement theory that I can think of, though. Spook, after becoming a savant, doesn't seem to have elevated senses without his tin-- instead, he can't feel anything. His normal senses aren't clearly enhanced but rather his capacity to enhance them with tin is increased (maybe; it's certainly possible that his body has enhanced senses also but the additional effect of tin is so strong that he can't perceive them). And mental metals don't have an obvious physical change that would correlate them, although that doesn't mean that such a change doesn't exist. I definitely think that you and @cometaryorbit are right that flaring is a big piece of the puzzle, and if that's the case then duralumin having an effect seems possible. The best piece of evidence I've found that supports my interpretation is this WoB about the Lord Ruler. He's a Lerasium Mistborn, so Allomancy is as strong in him as it gets, and he's a compounder, and yet his savantism is described as a function of time and metal use rather than raw power. This is certainly not definitive, though; his long life may be referenced just to indicate that he's encountered enough situations to drive savantism even for unusual or niche metals. I don't think it's the quantity of metal burned that drives savantism, exactly, but rather the amount of time spent burning within a given period. Spending several days doing a pewter drag doesn't necessarily make someone a pewter savant, for example, despite constantly flaring the metal the whole time. And I don't think that it's along the lines of "once you've met the quota of one pound of metal burned over the course of your life, you are a savant in that metal", though again, we just don't know. Otherwise we might expect someone like, say, Straff Venture to be a savant given how often he used his tin and how good he was with it. But he wasn't anything like savant-Spook. And Wax is very likely to be a steel savant despite having Allomancy centuries weaker than anyone in era 1 (though he's also got a resonance with Feruchemy, which has not been described fully). Brandon has definitely stated that he's considering backpedaling on what we know of savantism, especially with Allomancy, as he isn't happy with some of how it's played out with Wax, quoted in my post above. So you're right, what's out there, even officially, may not be as reliable as we'd prefer. Nonetheless, most of the references I see refer to using the power a lot, rather than channeling a lot of power, and so I think that the balance of current evidence very slightly favors my interpretation for now, at least on Scadrial. But we'll see, maybe as soon as November!

My impression (I don't have a ton of evidence in mind for this) is that savantism comes from continuously burning a metal, especially flaring it, and not from the actual amount of power released by allomancy. We don't, for example, have much reason to think that stronger allomancers (like Elend compared to Vin, or Spook compared to Wax) were more likely to become savants despite the effects of their power being stronger per unit of metal burned. Spook basically never stopped burning tin for a while, if not necessarily flaring it all the time. Wax frequently burned steel (lightly, certainly not flaring it) for extended periods, but he didn't do it anywhere near as often as Spook. Sazed, as Harmony, says that many Seekers become savants without knowing it. They may be constantly flaring it, but we don't know. We have very few examples of same-metal savants, so it's hard to judge the degree of savantism, and even fewer examples of people using duralumin with other metals (never mind becoming a savant with those metals!). So I suspect that getting all the power out of metal at once, via duralumin, isn't the same as burning the metal, on its own, over time in terms of becoming a savant. It seems to me more likely that you get savant effects from engaging in the act of using allomancy more so than from the scale of the result of that allomancy. As for the Lord Ruler, it doesn't seem like he was using duralumin for his mass soothings. The effects described in the book don't match what Vin accomplished with Straff when she duralumin-soothed him but instead seemed like a constant effect. Besides that, I think that the Lord Ruler had several things going on: he had a great deal of experience using his powers in public settings and could probably cover ingesting metal if he wanted to; he had feruchemical options to help quickly and discreetly ingest metals if needed; he wears a lot of metal, so could easily have it available at any time; he was a maximum-strength allomancer, having gained the power directly from burning Lerasium; he was extremely practiced at using allomancy, and so very skilled (savantism aside); he probably was a savant with several metals (and brass would be a good one for him to have extra ability with, and clearly was a metal he used often); and he could compound pretty casually, potentially allowing for spectacular allomantic effects even given the above: EDIT: I dug up a couple more WoB quotes that suggest to me that becoming a savant is about using Investiture frequently, rather than in great quantities. It's not 100% clear, but in each quote he talks about becoming a savant as using Investiture a lot, rather than using a lot of Investiture.

As I recall (I can't find the interview or WoB that I think established this, so take it for what it's worth) the concept of it was introduced because Brandon thought that it would make for a more interesting story to have the arbitrary class division in the mix. The scenario followed that interest, and I don't think that the way that Alethi, Vedens, and Thaylens think of eye color is less arbitrary and meaningless just because it's based on something the Alethi don't remember very well. It's arbitrary based on a basically irrelevant detail that the culture doesn't even remember outside of the tradition itself; pretty much anything else associated with the Radiants is a thing that their culture opposes. Eye color not an indicator of capacity in the same sense that, say, a glowing, silver-skinned Elantrian indicates someone with specific traits in Elantris. Kaladin is a great leader long before his eyes lighten, while Elhokar and Roshone are less talented. That's what I mean when I say it doesn't matter-- it's how things are in-setting, but may be following a narrative desire of the author's rather than a meaningful detail with deep, plot-significant relation to the setting. BUT WAIT! @Erklitt's post made me think of one analogous detail that might be relevant. The Herdazian fingernails remind me a little bit of Ryshadium's stone hooves: a meaningful physical change in what was previously an ordinary creature. The Ryshadium are horses bonded with songspren, and we don't know if they breed true (though it kind of seems like they might). I doubt that whole nations of humans are bonded with spren in any real way, but what if ancient human groups did something similar but later stopped or lost the ability, and these traits are just vestiges? We don't know much of anything about Surgebinding without Radiant-style bonds and Honorblades, other than that it exists. We do know that using a Soulcaster changes physical features too... well, I guess this is all going to be a RAFO anyways, so we'll have to wait to see. @Duxredux Maybe you're thinking of allopatric speciation? It doesn't require the population to die off, just to become physically separated, which would suit what you're saying. <4,000 years is kind of quick for it, though of course magic, etc. But I think that you're right and we shouldn't rule it out. The reliability of the traits in specific nations is a significant detail.

I'm not sure it would necessarily work that way, given the magic involved, but it could. The closest example I can think of is Preservation's power: we see it as a mist, liquid, and solid under the same (or at least similar) conditions at the Well of Ascension. Certainly the solid Lerasium and liquid power were in the same environment at the same time. But on the other hand, we see that the Preservation's mist may have been influenced by heat and sunlight: it was suspected to evaporate indoors (though this might have been an assumption based on ordinary mists), and Rashek moved the whole planet closer to the sun in an effort to burn the mists away (but this was during his earliest moments with the power, when he was least knowledgeable and experienced, so he may also have been working with incorrect or incomplete knowledge). So maybe Breath could have different physical forms depending on real conditions like temperature and pressure, but my gut instinct is that even if it can be affected that way by circumstance, the circumstances need to be more than just physical.

I've always assumed it was something similar to Herdazian fingernails being rocklike or crystalline, and that those features are related to some unknown details about things Heralds did in the ancient past. This idea was mostly formed after reading the Makabaki creation myth about Parasaphi and Nadris in WoK and the story about the Natans' blue skin (in Oathbringer? Anyways, the story referenced by Kvothe, above); the mythologies in Cosmere books have usually been moderately true so far. At the same time, Brandon has also liked to introduce novel, potential sources of social and cultural distinctions that don't actually matter for anything else, like eye color in the Vorin kingdoms. It wouldn't be terribly surprising to me (though less interesting) if they were just obvious markers characters used to make assumptions about other characters' nationalities and cultures. They do seem tied to Epoch Kingdoms, which makes me further suspect Heralds' involvement or influence in some way, but that wouldn't necessarily mean that they matter. The Horneater-specific traits are somewhat reliably tied to the perpendicularity in their peaks, but the other places with characteristic physical traits don't have something so obvious: red-headed Vedens, rock-nailed Herdazians, long-eyebrowed Thaylens, pale-skinned, round-eyedShin, particularly dark-skinned Makabaki, and golden-haired Iriali.