Returned

I wonder how effective it would be for a spren to change form mid-flight. If you start with the momentum of a bullet (however achieved) and then turn into a thin blade mid-air you could have an on-demand horizontal guillotine. With the light weight of Shardmetal they could even glide for a good distance with the right shape. I'd also find the prospect of facing Shard bolas on the battlefield pretty terrifying, especially since you can just summon one back to your hand in an instant. Though the spren's timing on dulling the cord seems pretty high stakes for the thrower.

That's not what I mean. Harmonium always could exist, but for a very long time it didn't. When it suddenly did exist it had specific properties which derived from the specific circumstances of Harmony's existence, and we know that those properties did not need to be the same as what they actually were (whether or not that would affect Harmonium's properties I'm not sure we know). The specific Shards of Adonalsium that exist always could have existed, as well as countless ones that don't, but it would be absurd to say that the properties of Honor are identical to those of Odium, or that either would be the same as some totally different Shard that wasn't created in the Shattering. Bound by similar principles and limitations, sure, but very different in the specifics of each one. The specific properties that anti-Investiture actually has is exactly what this thread is about, and to say that "whatever those properties are is possible within the laws of the Cosmere" is tautologically true but uninformative. This is off target for what I'm describing as well. It's clearly true that Investiture has specific forms which are not directly interchangeable, as in the many WoBs about fueling magics with forms from different planets-- all Investiture, but with different specific properties as it's manifested here rather than there. Stormlight isn't Voidlight, even though they're both Investiture. Anti-light is neither. Something causes them to be different, even though it's all made of the same stuff, and those differences matter in at least some applications. Even two forms of regular Investiture, such as those contained in Harmonium, can annihilate in a manner similar to what has been described for Investiture and anti-Investiture. And in different realms Investiture has properties which it does not in the Spiritual. There is no location in the Spiritual realm, but the Stormlight in a sphere does have a physical location in the Physical and Cognitive realms. If you carry a sphere of Light from the Physical realm to the Cognitive, you have brought some Investiture to the Cognitive that wasn't "there" before. Even though spiritual energy is everywhere, a Radiant can't just drink Stormlight from arbitrarily far away (as far as we know, for now), so those additive properties have real impacts and consequences for how they interact within different realms. So my suggestion is that Investiture in the Physical realm isn't exactly just "raw" Investiture, but Investiture that has a specific form and specific properties. Some of those are innate (what Investiture "is", at a fundamental level), some of those are Shard-mediated (how a Shard Invests that power in a location), and some are elements inherent to a given realm (like physical location being a necessary component in the Physical realm, though less so in the Cognitive). Anti-Investiture also has at least some of this additive characteristic, as evidenced by Sanderson's description of the form of anti-Investiture causing different reactions (in scale, at least) with specific forms of Investiture. And since the only instance we've seen of anti-Investiture was created by mortals in the Physical realm alone via mechanical methods, it's not crazy to think that anti-Investiture might have some local properties influenced by those factors. Souls exist in multiple realms at all times, just as you say Investiture does. So if the connection is constant, how can anti-Investiture exist at all without immediately annihilating, as it's constantly connected to the all-Investiture Spiritual realm? We obviously don't know the specifics, but the answer is "somehow", since we've seen it happen. If it can happen in one application, then perhaps it could in another. Severing all Connections might indeed be a necessary part of any method that could even potentially succeed, if such a method exists at all. Or perhaps some mad Cosmere scientist builds an anti-soul from scratch for just such a purpose, housed in a Raysium bodysuit or something. And all in a setting dominated by magic, which makes the impossible possible through mystical means. It's obvious that we have virtually no information about anti-Investiture, and what we do have is a bit fragmented, so we can't be very precise in our guesses about what it is like and what it can or cannot do. Any specific guess is probably unlikely to actually come to pass. I really appreciate your posts and the work you do with bringing citations to the board, especially your deep pulls of WoBs and intricate analyses of published material. But I think that in this case you're overinterpreting what we already know to be incomplete, fragmented information about something we've barely seen. I respect your opinion that anti-Investiture is and will little more than an antimatter analogue. To me, that sounds like a dull, one-note magic-dampening-super-murdering plot device, albeit with explosive potential. Just an arbitrary MacGuffin. I think that the books will be more imaginative and surprising than that. We've got an awful lot of pages to go for anti-Investiture to be so... limited.

I'm also curious about other properties of anti-Investiture. It seems to me, at present, that it is something like a cognitive/physical twisting of something that, in itself, doesn't have properties like "ordinary" or "anti-ordinary". By which I mean that anti-Investiture isn't a thing that existed before the theories and processes which first produced it-- it has qualities derived from what qualities people think it should have based on how they made it. It's all the same stuff (Investiture) which comes from the same source (the Spiritual Realm) and then is changed (cognitively? physically? both?) while it's wherever it is (a distinctly physical concept with cognitive mediation). In any case it is sort of a category error to presume that it has many characteristics beyond what we've seen specifically in text and WoBs, if only because we've seen such narrow instances of it. It annihilates Investiture on contact, particularly if the Investiture/anti-Investiture components are in the same form (mediated by Shards' influence). So beyond that the sky's the limit for what we think anti-Investiture could do. I'm warming up to the idea that the conversion from ordinary- to anti-Investiture is going to be a pretty big deal, even beyond being an implicit limit on how and when characters can use their "ordinary" Investiture-derived powers. If converting Investiture to anti-Investiture is something that can be generally done, as Navani's and Raboniel's work suggests, then why couldn't a soul be converted to an anti-soul, which could then make use of anti-Investiture forms for magical effects? Would those effects be the same as the ordinary magics, their opposites, or something completely different? Could an anti-soul be riddled with anti-Hemalurgic spikes, thereby gaining access to Fullborn powers but beyond Harmony's control or influence? It would be interesting to have an axis of conflict that isn't just Shards squabbling, especially since we've reached a kind of plateau on magic power escalation. Anti-Investiture provides a possible avenue to that: power which is on par with Shards in nature but removed from the state of conflict that has existed since the Shattering.

Yes, I could do that. More seriously, I think that it depends on the particular details of how such immortality is achieved, and I'm not sure we know enough to speculate with much confidence. Youth is meaningless to an ageless immortal, and in the mode of a zen koan can we even say that such a concept exists for them? Most other immortals (or "immortals") we've seen still show signs of wear as ages pass. The Heralds suffer mental problems, Rashek dealt with some kind of weariness along with diminishing returns on his atium use, we know that Hoid has some special trick that shields him, Kandra show signs of physical change (if not outright degradation). Maybe they would have some youth, in some sense, to fiddle with Feruchemically. But Returned and people with 5th Heightening or greater? I haven't seen enough to feel like my intuition is all that reliable here, but Vasher seems pretty hale. For that matter, Elantrians might also be able to escape the ravages of time, though they might also just have a constant influx of spiritual energy de-aging them just as it heals their bodies. I would be very interested to know how similar the Nalthian agelessness is for Awakeners with enough Breath compared to the nature of the Returned .

Not to beat a dead (though not Lifeless!) horse, as the above posts cover the details pretty well, but I also think that there is an element of the nature of Awakening and Breaths. We've seen some cool things with Awakening, and we certainly don't know even the theoretical limits of what it can accomplish. Nightblood is... minimally competent at fulfilling his Command. What if he had more ability to move and act on his own, had a more achievable and precise Command, and was good at fulfilling that Command? Such an Awakened object might be very difficult to deal with for any Cosmere magic user, depending on how much latitude you want to grant in how powerful and flexible an Awakening can be. But no matter how cool and flexible the application, there remains a fundamental problem that Awakening involves giving your power away in order to accomplish anything. Breaths take a while to accumulate, and sending a bundle of them off to do their best at following your instructions can be a pretty high-risk situation even if your Command is solid. An Awakened object could stolen or destroyed, for example, leaving you permanently weaker. Other Cosmere magics are both more self-directed (you do what you want with the power that you access when you want to do it) and more direct (you don't have to create an entity that you hope will accomplish what you want in the way you want it accomplished, nor do you have to guard or recover that entity). That's a sharp contrast to needing to have some metals around, or a way to mainline Light. Awakening is cool, and the passive kit of powers from a solid Heightening has a lot of nice features. But in a serious showdown with other powerful Cosmere dwellers, Awakening requires a lot of risky investment of dear resources in order to, hopefully, indirectly accomplish your goals. And so far the goals we've seen that are very achievable are also kind of modest. I may revise this opinion when we've seen more Awakening in future books, as I think that we're going to see some really impressive things from it. I find it especially noteworthy that most discussion of Awakening focuses on efficiency of Breath use and not what could be done with a lot of Breath, efficiently used or not.

I agree with your overall assessment and share some of your concerns. I don't mind the connections between series; I generally love them and have fun trying to figure them out. But where they once felt like a reward for reading attentively, I feel they've been getting both more explicit and less organic. Some of that is probably unavoidable-- as the different series develop there is more and more information to keep track of, and it shouldn't be necessary to formally study the books or to read a wiki just to be able to follow at all. Not necessarily my favorite thing, but maybe the best that can be done. And eventually we definitely will need strong inter-series knowledge because the stories are going to converge in one big meta-plot, and that will necessarily break the silos each series could be in earlier in the publication schedule. A new reader might be a little bit confused, depending on where they start, but I'm not sure it's much worse in itself than earlier in the Cosmere novels. Continuing with TwinSoul, we know a bit about what he can do and a tiny amount about how and why he can do it, but I don't know that we know less about those things than we knew about Allomancy or Radiant powers early in Mistborn and Stormlight. Some details of those books stuck out specifically because they were hints about the Cosmere that we didn't have the information to decode them. We knew they meant something and couldn't figure out what. We've gotten a bit complacent in knowing more about the Cosmere, so it's jarring to be flung back into being teased with that sort of thing, and more so when the hints are more obviously jammed in. What I like a lot less is when the connections don't really have a point except for making the connection. TwinSoul is a great example that I've commented on in other threads: he's a cool and interesting character, but we learn very little about him or the part of the Cosmere he comes from, and what we do learn is just stated in expository dialogue. And, the most serious of all, he doesn't really matter to the plot of TLM. I wonder sometimes how much we (people that pore over details at 17th Shard and elsewhere) drive the issue. Our constant demands for more details, especially about connections between series, probably make subtle hinting a lot less worthwhile. How much extra work should Sanderson put into a subtle clue that can develop over several years and books when he will immediately be asked to explain it definitively so that we can record a new WoB? And to satisfy fans he gives us as much as he can, mainly just avoiding specific spoilers that will be central to future book plots. It's probably very difficult to balance secrets and mysteries revealed subtly and organically in books to a casual reader, or a new fan entering the series at some later point, with giving information to super fans who will coordinate questions at book signings and listen to regular podcasts/watch Youtube videos for hours just to get one extra nugget of new information. But honestly, I think that the biggest issue is the scope and pace of what Sanderson wants to do. He is a prolific writer, publishing a lot of substantial books and novellas each year. He has a pretty well-defined writing schedule that he sticks to pretty well, but writing to a such a brutal schedule must have some impact craftsmanship, and I don't recall it being quite like that in the past. As the Cosmere overall becomes more complex and more details are canonized by being published it becomes a bigger task to manage it all while also focusing on the current project. Some of that feels, to me, like it's showing in books being a bit more formulaic, a bit rougher around the edges, and some pieces being jammed in because things just need to fit together and there isn't any more time to do it more smoothly. Finally, I acknowledge that I'm pretty spoiled by Sanderson's attention to his fans and have high standards. I'm used to very high-quality writing and books from him, and even his worst Cosmere book is still better than an average fantasy or sci-fi novel. But for whatever reason my mind won't give up the idea that every book will be on par with The Final Empire and Way of Kings, and I react to new books accordingly even though I don't think that that's a realistic or fair standard.

Exactly my point, though maybe not clearly expressed. There isn't much reason to think that balance will persist between Shardic entities. Even Shards of equal power and very well-balanced (in opposition) Intents like Preservation and Ruin won't necessarily stay balanced. That would make a situation in which some new arrangement of Shards is balanced at that time an unlikely ending to the Cosmere series, in my estimation, since such a balance is obviously not an ending to the conflicts that have driven many Cosmere novels and most of the meta-story between novels.

I've long thought that reunification is the end game of the Cosmere either as one thing (a new Adonalsium) or as nothing (the "identity" of the power that makes up the Shards, such as Honor, Ruin, etc. become so small and specific that Shardic power is evenly dispersed through everything in the Cosmere; sort of an Anti-nalsium). Anything is possible, but we've already seen promises among the Shards collapse and lead to enormous conflict. It's hard for me to see the conclusion of so many novels being some few Shards (combined or working in agreement) "winning" without a promise of that balance collapsing in short order. We could see the power of Adonalsium being incorporated as some other forces that would balance out, like Good and Evil, but the Cosmere has avoided any sort of moral tone with Shards. Not to mention that Preservation and Ruin were presented as very evenly balanced, and their agreement certainly didn't end conflict.

I seem to recall a couple of examples, but the only one I can specifically reference at the moment is: I'll try to recollect better and offer citations later, if I have a chance before someone else beats me to it.

I'll agree to both of these for sure, though the other difficulties seem difficult to get around to me; more plausible doesn't necessarily bridge the gap all the way to realistic. But someone sufficiently skilled with Forgery could potentially do it, and I think that all aspects of Forgery will become easier as the Cosmere timeline progresses. If I got to hack together my own age-defying scheme across all of the Cosmere through Forgery, I'd Forge compounded atium and then Forge/actually obtain a lot of Breaths. Though I imagine that would be even harder!

I think that the difficulty in Forging your age derives mostly from: The situation of having been in a time bubble is itself pretty unusual Being in a sufficiently intense bubble for long enough is largely implausible for more than a few gained/lost minutes at a time The time-distorting effect is achieved 100% through constant use of Investiture The circumstances that would satisfy all three of these are going to be hard to come by, even impossible. You'd need a Pulser or Slider, with access to huge amounts of cadmium or bendalloy, and who wants to use their powers frequently and for extended periods. And you'd have to Forge being near them, them wanting to use their powers in that way, them wanting to include you, and outside circumstances allowing the time distortion to progress undisturbed for long enough to make more than a few minutes' or hours' difference. It's a lot more intense than "what if this table had been made really well by a mundane craftsman".

I don't think that the right way to interpret Hoid's comment is that he arranged for Kelsier to do anything. Hoid needed something, and Kelsier did it-- those aren't necessarily related. I also don't think that we have enough information to answer this question definitively, so it's all speculation. My top guesses are threefold, in ascending order of how likely I think they are: Kelsier set events in motion to save Scadrial from utter destruction on the slimmest chances via the most dangerous avenues Kelsier set events in motion that caused a very dangerous Shard, which had largely overridden its bearer, to be relinquished and taken up by someone more stable Kelsier made the Well accessible by setting in motion the events that freed Ruin, which (arguably) allowed Hoid to get a bead of Lerasium for himself Removing the Lord Ruler doesn't seem like it was all that relevant to Hoid or his plans, save perhaps accessing the chamber where the Well was located. Further, it is strongly implied that the Lord Ruler's fall was orchestrated by Ruin, and that was in turn part of a future-sight-related play by Preservation to ultimately escape his and Ruin's agreement and preserve Scadrial. It's not impossible that Hoid had a hand in that, but I don't see much reason to believe it beyond it being possible for someone like him to attempt if he wanted to. I do believe that Hoid prefers people to survive rather than die, though he isn't an absolutist about it if necessary. On balance he may not have cared much about Scadrial, but he does meddle in Cosmere affairs pretty regularly and is generally an encouraging presence for the Cosmere's heroes (and an obstacle for its villains). That's item 1 on my list. Item 2 involves some Cosmere spoilers: Item 3 also includes Cosmere spoilers: I'm sure other possibilities exist and other posters will have thought of them. And we know so little about Hoid's schemes that we might all be wrong no matter what! I'm on record as thinking that Hoid has substantial access to Fortune, so the specifics might not be anything we have insight into from text so far.

The value of a Breath is going to be highly contingent on an awful lot of factors, as @Duxredux described above. These include how many there are floating around (retained within Awakeners), how many can be collected (call that the birth rate on Nalthis, more or less), the wealth available to the would-be purchaser, the intended application (are you stockpiling Breath to stop aging, and don't intend to Awaken things?), and the skill of the purchaser (Vasher can do a lot more with Breaths than most Awakeners, and more efficiently to boot). Some of those relationships aren't so clear, either. Is Breath more valuable to Vasher because he can do more with it, or is it less valuable because he already has a lot and can use a Breath very efficiently? I think that there are two big factors in terms of the relative value of a Breath for Awakening a Lifeless vs. some other purpose: Not all Lifeless are created equal. This is addressed pretty well above, so no need to rehash the details, but a generic human Lifeless is going to be well below a prime Lifeless soldier as the Returned maintained. Depending on your needs this may not matter, or it may be critically important. Research into Awakening is ongoing, and there isn't a clear ceiling on how good it can get. Vasher is an ancient Awakener and specifically a research scholar of the art, and even within Warbreaker we see him refining Commands to eke out better performance (which seems like a flip side to better Breath efficiency as well). So if one is a scholar working to actively improve their Awakening, or has access to developing knowledge in the field, then an irrecoverable Breath has a really high opportunity cost. Whether it's used to create a Lifeless or is simply lost, an Awakening performed next year could probably require fewer Breaths, do more things, and do them better than an Awakening performed today. For an immortal, like a Returned or person who has reached a sufficient Heightening, the opportunity costs of losing a Breath permanently are high-- inestimably so. I think that item 2 is the big one. Vasher and Vivenna lead dangerous lives, and so I'm persuaded by Vasher's comment that it's better to lose all of your Breaths and survive danger than to cling to them and die. But those situations aren't obviously ones in which having a Lifeless with you is better than having some other construct. Cosmere powers generally seem to be best when the user is flexible and creative, and permanently investing your Breaths into creatures which require some degree of ongoing maintenance seems inflexible and narrowly focused. Compared to Awakening a straw poppet or cloak, at least. An Awakener who has the resources to create and maintain high-quality Lifeless minions probably has the resources to deal with a squad of enemy soldiers in other ways as well, so even at one Breath per minion the Awakener can almost certainly do better. If I had either option and was forced to choose one or the other, I would choose the phantom every time.

Interesting question! My instinct is to say no, that Forgery can't separate nor re-assemble something as you describe. The main reasons are that a stamp needs to be on a thing to change it and damaging a stamp's imprint interferes with the Forgery. So if you stamped a table top to separate it from the table's legs it seems as though it wouldn't be effective because, once the legs did fall off (if they did at all), then the stamp wouldn't be able to continue influencing them because they are not, themselves, stamped. I don't recall any examples of a stamp's effects being permanent in the sense that they persist after the stamp is removed. So I think that such a Forgery simply wouldn't work. For the same reason I think that the glued wood pieces example would not work either. You could, however, stamp things such that they were easier to break (Forging the joinery to be weak or poorly done, maybe, or the glue to be inferior or badly applied). The puzzle example faces the same issue. Stamping one piece isn't going to influence the other pieces, certainly not if they aren't assembled into one complete puzzle. I think that Shai's description of the table seeing itself as one thing is mostly about a single stamp being able to influence all the different components of a discrete object, as we would consider it, rather than needing to stamp every individual component to achieve the changes. And it also has Realmatic implications which may or may not be mechanically relevant to Forging itself. All that said, we don't really know a whole lot about Forgery. I wouldn't rule out possibilities like you describe completely, since many things in the Cosmere become possible with extensive knowledge and enough spiritual energy.

Well, to a point. An argument can be made that any meddling in events such that they turn out differently than someone else is trying to achieve is impinging on that someone else's free will. The incredible knowledge and foresight granted by Preservation and Ruin only turbocharges that, practically and abstractly. But more concretely, Harmony wasn't keen on letting Autonomy do whatever she wanted, nor Bleeder. So I'd say Harmony cares for free will a lot, but isn't an absolutist. Depends on what you're up to. For the most part, probably. Unless he needed something from you that would overwhelm his desire to honor your wishes, in which case your preference will probably matter a lot less. From direct contact with Harmony? Maybe. Someone would likely only choose to remain spiked in exchange for the power it grants (situations like Penrod's aside), and that power comes from a manifestation of Ruin. I imagine there are lots of tricks one might be able to use, like sitting in a perfectly sealed aluminum box, to some effect. But I also suspect that the tension between harnessing Ruin's essence (for lack of a better word) within yourself, while also blocking off Ruin's ability to talk to you via your harnessing of its essence, is probably not going to favor the mortal. As for avoiding madness... that's a fuzzy goal to start with, and one I think it would be hard to reliably avoid while making use of Cosmere magics.

A fair clarification, though I'm not sure how that would interact with Awakening either

It's easy to overinterpret how much "much of the system" actually indicates, as well as "dictated by the planet itself". How far do those go? What do they even mean, exactly? The form of magic? What the magic can do? How the magic operates? We also don't know very much about how a given magic system could vary if fueled by different Shards. The systems we know the most about are poor examples for the reasons @alder24 pointed out. The only real mixing of magic systems we've seen or gotten WoBs about have been between the three Metallic Arts, and Forgery/Aon. And, perhaps, the imitation of Rosharan Shardblades. If Honor were on Nalthis, would Awakening be about making oaths to the thing you want to Awaken, or might an Awakener accumulate power by making and keeping multiple oaths, or might an Awakened object have a fundamental oath it needs to fulfill? Would the magic even be something we would recognize as being like Awakening, or would it look like Rosharan magic but have a Nalthian implementation (whatever thath would mean)? We're really grasping in the dark, for now. I imagine we'll see much, much more in the future, especially with late-era Feruchemists moving around the Cosmere.

Edited in: My post is already really long (I am trying to cut them down, I promise), so I thought it might be good to add a more concise summary of what I'm trying to get at: all that we know about Sazed's divine actions with gross effects are what he did and didn't do, at least at a very broad scale. We don't know that, for the latter, he didn't do things because he couldn't (whatever the mechanism for "couldn't"). Assuming that the reason he didn't was because he generically couldn't strikes me as a very strong assumption with very weak support, especially when "magic with more or less infinite power" is the explanation for so much that we know he did do. I don't think that it works very well to chop up discrete elements of his (non)interventions and then throw around "didn'ts" and "couldn'ts" for each, then roll them back up into a generalized theory of didn't/couldn't. Especially at this point in the publication schedule, as a lot of what's going on with Sazed and Shards in general is explicitly undefined and mysterious. As ever! That's the fun of the discussion forum. I'll only say (since we're already a bit off topic to the thread) that people tend to favor theories they like by strengthening assumptions because they support the theories they like. My position, outside of my pet theories, is that something changed between his ascension and Sazed's current state, or that we are simply incorrect in our assumptions about conditions during/immediately after the ascension. I don't want to shut down discussion of any theories, but I think that people are generally overinterpreting their assumptions while also not examining them very closely. We don't know precisely how or why Sazed is so inactive in the most recent Mistborn era, how much of a departure that is from earlier periods of his divinity, etc. Theorizing is great, and fun, but generates possible answers, not answers (at this stage in the Cosmere books' publication). For example, it seems likely that the final statements in the quote above is true, but I'm not sure that the scale and conclusion are necessarily correct. Even though I broadly expect them to be. All possible, of course. But I'd argue that the reason this was such an issue for Rashek is that his divinity had a severe time limit. Sazed's power didn't disperse, and it's unclear how much his capacity to act so dramatically changed between the first five minutes after ascending vs. the next five. We simply don't know. "He could have missed the long term consequences" is true, but that does not equate to it being true that he did miss them. Plausible, but as above, overinterpreted as an explanation rather than a possibility. I was referring to the scale and intensity of changes Rashek made, not what he did to that group-- he did change the DNA of Northerners. Sazed made similar changes where he thought them good, such as re-working the Koloss. He was doing all of that stuff anyways. Either we presume that he could do so with knowledge of the likely results, or we don't. Sazed nailed all of those details with respect to the Elendel Basin, producing something unusual and stable but nevertheless exactly what he envisioned. It's hard to square that with the fact that the Southerners got a catastrophe and nothing good. I'll believe that there was a reason the results were what they were, but not that we know what that reason is (for now!), nor that the reason is automatically a lack of power, knowledge, or precisely placed limitations on what uncertainty in future events is acceptable. The specific items I listed were just examples of possibilities, every bit as achievable as all of the other things Sazed did successfully when we throw in Shardic powers and knowledge. Constructing a just-so story about how he achieved the absolute maximum that he could, and then throwing in varying arbitrary details to explain why that maximum level was what it was, is the death of discussion and theorycrafting, not the beginning of it. I mean, if that's the theory you like and find convincing then great, I don't want to dissuade you. But I still don't see a reason that the position of "Sazed could radically remake one continent but couldn't move another" should be persuasive to anyone.

That's been my impression too. My doubts have mostly come from the most recent Mistborn novels, in which we see that the tension seems to be greater and different than what the earlier books implied. The original theme had an element of "together, they can do anything, like create a planet and people and balance is less important than choosing to cooperate". More recently the limitations on Sazed seem much more constraining. Either something has changed or our original impressions are off in some way. This I find less convincing. The changes Rashek and Sazed made involved knowledge they definitely didn't have before ascending, and were also pretty far-reaching (as was the knowledge). They'd need to have at least some capacity to predict the changes their meddling would cause to even consider undertaking them. Plus we know that Preservation is fairly good at peering into the future, which would be helpful when making decisions, and Shards provide a complete knowledge of their own historical use (so Sazed would have known what Rashek did with the Southerners to survive the heat). We've seen Shards be ignorant of things they might have known, or at least deduced, and knowledge of the unintended consequences of Rashek's meddling were apparent to Sazed. Ignorance seems clearly possible here too, but moving the Southern continent to somewhere warmer, or plopping it on top of a geothermal hot spot wouldn't have caused the same type of physical butterfly effects that changing their genomes would. And it's not like Sazed didn't fiddle with the world-- the question is why he stopped here, and I'm not satisfied that we have enough information to approach it with any confidence yet. Rashek's interference wasn't bad because it was rapid, it was bad because it was sloppy. And, to a lesser extent, because he became more prone to preserving things on Scadrial, including his changes, due to the Shard's influence. But more broadly I think that Sazed's stated situation is probably true: the balance of Ruin and Preservation in him makes it hard to do much, and being compelled to maintain a parity between them leads to many actions being a zero-sum situation. At least, I see no reason not to believe that explicitly stated item. Sending a person is much easier, since it doesn't demand so much of that balancing property, and humans explicitly can choose to preserve or ruin even in unequal measure. But we still know that Sazed is up to something unclear, and perhaps not as balanced on the Ruin side of things. That's where I've been thinking that he's effectively stuffing ruin into the future to get a bit more edge for preserving now, and (maybe) hoping for people to be able to resolve that balance in a way that he cannot.

I think that there are far too many books yet to come for the ultimate villain to be anyone we already know who seems clearly situated to be the big villain. Of the characters who are important on the Cosmere stage that we know, I think that Kelsier and Autonomy are the top contenders. It wouldn't surprise me for Kelsier to take up Autonomy, for that matter. They seem like a good fit for each other. Hoid is also a contender: he already operates on the right scale, has few friends but lots of enemies, and we don't know much of anything about what he's doing or why. But he's sure becoming powerful along the way, snapping up every magic system he can. But if there is an overarching villain, it will have to be someone that can involve (if not necessarily unite) all of the groups, characters, and worlds we've seen so far plus all the ones we haven't seen yet. I'm not sure any of the characters we know are well situated for that, outside of just being menacing or aggressive, which isn't a lot to hang the conclusion of dozens of novels on. My prediction is that we'll have a rotating cast of aspiring villains who are increasingly consequential to the Cosmere, but the ultimate issue will end up being a people vs. nature (even human nature) sort of struggle. Something along the lines of arrogating the power of divinity into the hands of mortals who are lacking in the traits needed to wield it without wreaking havoc. The power of Adonalsium is too great for mortal ken, and the only ways that mortals can have or use it involve being broken in some way, which in turn leads them to cause problems (intentionally or otherwise), and those problems are amplified by the power their brokenness allows them.

That's a nice find, somehow I've not come across that one. I'll be digging through the archive later! Unless I'm missing something concrete about the geography of Scadrial (scadrogoraphy?), I'm still not sold that that effect is necessarily enough to make such a huge difference (compared with the extreme, but survivable heat they experienced, free movement of air, convection in the oceans, and so on), or would apply so meaningfully to the Southern continent. But please don't think I'm demanding that you throw out further evidence-- it's clearly possible, with magic everything, to get the final result you're describing whether that's the specific mechanism or not. I like the theory, in any case. Come to think of it, I'm not sure we ever got much idea of how long the survivors huddled in the caverns. Surely they'd have some way to estimate it if it were longer than a day, as they'd have lots of regular tasks to accomplish regarding food distribution and waste disposal. That seems like information that would have been recorded in the Founders' books. Rashek certainly did a lot very quickly, a few minutes (I think? It's been too long since I've done a re-read of the original trilogy), including moving continents and flattening and raising mountains. No one needed sheltering during any of that, or at least an empire's worth of people survived anyways. I am curious if there was a Shardic tension that Sazed had to deal with during the Catacendre. I've never been able to develop it quite well enough to justify a thread about it, and I'm sure it's not so novel anyhow. But preserving the Northern section of the world and its people seems to have gone alongside more or less ruining the Southern section and its people. The Southern experience seems unnecessary, or at least seems so so far. And Shards do have an unusual relationship with time...

Almost agreed; the book only said he was keeping the caverns safe. It did not say that he only kept the caverns safe. From what's been written since we know that Sazed was doing more than just what was explicitly stated in the passage you cite (see re-making the Koloss, fiddling with DNA, etc.). At that time he's got unfettered divine power. It seems inconsistent with what we know so far of Shards to suggest that he could only protect people if they were in big stone bunkers. But certainly the plot explicitly focuses on efforts to get as many people as possible into the bunkers during the final cataclysm. It seems safe to suggest that the people undertaking those efforts couldn't know that Sazed was about to ascend, so the caverns were the best option they knew of to survive. So I find your second clause more persuasive: there were few-to-no people left outside the caverns by that time. It could work either way with the ash, I suppose. It seems difficult to contrive a constantly shifting mass of ash in the sky that would not disperse over the entire planet (I think it was Grímsvötn in 2011 that definitely did not keep its erupting ash only over Iceland), but Shard-magic, etc., so I wouldn't bet much on it. I'm very curious about how the Southerners survived Rashek's world of ash-- didn't the seas around their continent boil due to heat in their region? That seems severe enough to need a non-mundane fix, whatever it was that he gave them, but maybe not. The scale of changes Sazed made seem like they would have had consequences similarly severe and proximate for the Southerners as for the Northerners- tsunamis, the Ice Death, and who knows what else? A Shard can fix those with magic too, but then we're right back to Sazed being able to protect people anywhere they might happen to have been when the Catacendre started. The lack of information on Southern Scadrians makes it impossible to draw specific conclusions, so your guess seems as reasonable as any given that we know they did live, somehow. My main point in mentioning them was that we have no reason to think they were huddling in bunkers but would still have been at risk of consequences of Sazed's actions, not unlike the Northerners, and still survived. But that's all pretty in-the-weeds and tangential. Given his temperament and values, I think it's safe to say that if Sazed could protect people from dying during the Catacendre, he would and did. His unopposed divine power seems sufficient to do that regardless of other factors, so I would lean towards thinking that he could do it. I agree that, given the lack of any mention at all of Northerners besides the Founders (and any Scadrians besides Northerners and Southerners), it's most likely that there were either no people living during the Catacendre outside of the caverns and Southern continent, or so few as to be irrelevant to the population became re-established. I don't see any reason to think that people outside the caverns both existed and were or sacrificed by Sazed/beyond his ability to save.

Almost immediately after: Bah, and here I thought I'd found a tidy, natural example. I've even read that WoB before! Then I guess my only surviving (and not from being in a bunker!) idea is that without Ruin's active opposition it might have been easily within Sazed's power to save, or at least not kill, those not able to make it into a bunker. Though we only hear of the bunkered Founders as people surviving the event on the one continent, that's hardly conclusive. It does make the Southerners' situation more mysterious, as if they weren't mysterious enough already. I've been increasingly getting some Sixth of Dusk vibes from their history and current state on Scadrial.

Hard to say for certain, but the only element I can think of that suggests an answer suggests no. I acknowledge that the element is weak with respect to the specific question asked, but here it is: at least some Koloss survived the Catacendre, were only present in Northern Scadrial (as far as we know), and certainly they weren't hiding in the storage caverns/bunkers along with the Northern Scadrian humans and Kandra. Since we know that at least some survived (and were changed by Harmony) to exist in era 2, it stands to reason that Sazed could protect them during the event because it appears that he did. I'm not counting the Southern Scadrians as evidence because we have no idea how they lived or how many died before the Catacendre, but it's notable that the Ice Death seems like it killed a lot of them (at least from the history we've gotten on it so far). Sazed probably had the power to preserve people whether they were in caverns or not (he wasn't actively blocked by Ruin, which is what frustrated Vin with the coastal city wiped out by a tidal wave), and also the interest in doing so. But I'll agree with previous posters that large-scale death was the fate of most people in Northern Scadrial, and it's not clear how many there were outside of the caverns to save or doom.