Windrunner

Unfortunately you're not going to find a working cite. Tor has the rights to it now, as part of Arcanum Unbounded. It's no longer sold on its own because Tor bought the rights to the whole collection. So for the foreseeable future, you can't buy just Secret History anymore. I'm not sure what your opinion on Stormlight or the rest of the cosmere is, but if you have an interest in either, I'd recommend Arcanum Unbounded. It's an excellent book.

Than we are in exact agreement on these matters. I am responding to one specific line of discussion more than I am the OP (which is intended to be a jumping off point for discussion), which is that the Stump is a worldhopper, particularly the idea that she is Vivenna. I do think my response makes my stance quite clear on the other ideas offered. I don't believe that there's reason to think that because painted pebbles are present that it is because of some sort of cross-planet knowledge. I would like to apologize if I've been too animated or dismissive in my posts in this topic. That's why I spoke to Chaos and had him take a look at the topic, to get an outsider's opinion. He thinks, and I agree, that I came off a little too strongly. Theorizing that characters are worldhoppers based on small pieces of evidence is one of my pet peeves, and I think I let it show a bit. I do want to say that I've been wrong before, and I'll surely be wrong again before the cosmere is finished. It is entirely possible that there is more to this game than meets the eye. There is no part of me that wants to stifle new ideas or discussion, I simply intended to add my perspective and I think I overdid it in this case. My apologies.

I have a lot of questions about how a Herald could go to a gas giant though. There's not even a solid surface on a gas giant. I don't see how that would work at all. In addition to that, Kalak's thoughts in the prelude suggests a singular place all the Heralds go to, rather than an individual world.

I have no doubt that a Scadrian, or anyone from any world for that matter, could become a Surgebinder. I'm saying that I think it would take some serious planning on their part to get it done, similar to the preparation required to use AonDor on another planet. I've seen the quote you mentioned before, and like I said, the process outlined there requires a lot of preparation and work (and I think might be overly complicated, I'm virtually certain that there are simpler ways to become a Surgebinder than the one outlined in the quote). I don't think its just as easy as someone from another planet simply acting in accordance with the spren's ideals. As Djarskublar so rightly mentioned, one of the reasons Hemalurgy is notable because it can be used by anyone, anywhere in the cosmere. This indicates that universal ability access to a magic system is uncommon. Is it possible that any worldhopper can stroll over to Roshar, act honorable and pick up a spren? Absolutely! I think that Surgebinding is a system that very possibly is open to use by people from other planets. Is this definitely the case? Absolutely not. It's possible that some preexisting connection to Honor or Cultivation is required as well. We don't know. I would like to point out though, that in the unlikely circumstance that a spren was attempting to bond with Vivenna, the situation would likely be further complicated by the fact that she probably has at least some additional Breath on her (which may not necessarily be evident, see Hoid's use of perfect pitch with no mention of odd colors on Kaladin's part). Investiture interferes with Investiture. That is just one more reason that Vivenna would be unlikely to bond with a spren by accident. If she were to want to become a Surgebinder for some reason, she would not be displaying the confusion that the Stump shows upon being confronted with her Radiant abilities. Lets move past this argument for a moment though, because we could go round and round on it and I think we are neglecting a larger issue. We have a tendency here to jump at shadows a lot of times. This reminds me a lot of when it came out that the constellations on Sel are in the form of Aons. Many people jumped at that, assuming that this had some deep magical implications, when in reality it was just as simple as people looking at the stars and correlating them to something important within their culture. Lets take a step back from the question about the possibility of a Nalthian bonding a spren and look at the evidence. I think we should approach this really rationally, which some people here have already started doing. What indicates that the Stump is Vivenna? Does she behave or speak similarly? Is she described similarly? Does she have any indication of a mysterious past? Any hints at her being royalty, perhaps a mention of her hair color changing? As far as I recall from my reading there is none of that, although I welcome someone to present any evidence. Taking another step back, what evidence is there that the Stump is from Nalthis? The single piece of evidence that has been presented is the use by children at her orphanage of painted stones in playing games.This is not a bad hint, Brandon often drops small hints, but typically there is more evidence once you begin to dig into its implications. Does the Stump even seem like a person that would teach children a game? Is there anything else that even hints remotely at a Nalthis connection? Not from anything that I saw, (although again, I welcome further evidence). So the question becomes, what is likely? Is it likely that the Stump is secretly a Nalthian princess, teaching children games from her home planet that accidentally bonds with a spren? Or is Lift's explanation more likely? I apologize if I come across as a buzzkill, but the answer needn't be a worldhopper with a secret identity every time something that seems odd an coincidental. I think we need to be more rigorous in our theorizing. Sometimes a pebble is just a pebble.

I don't think you can simply assert that. Unless you have a quote for me that says otherwise, I don't think there's any reason to believe that it could just happen. I'm open to the possibility that it could happen to anyone, but I need evidence.

Or painted pebbles are just a common game pieces, especially when you are an orphan that cannot afford real marbles. I don't think there is any evidence that the Stump is Vivenna aside from this one random thing. I don't think a Nalthian could even become a Radiant without some serious finagling on their part, which belies the Stump's confusion about what is going on with her.

One of the things Brandon's highlighted in discussions about Ascension is just how incredibly rare its occurrence is. For me, it stretches the bounds of plausibility to have one person Ascend to become a Shard, give up that Shard willingly, repair a different Shard, and then Ascend again. It seems needlessly complicated to me. I think we might be creating complex explanations to cover a simple error. Brandon's misspoken before, Autonomy is female, and I think she always has been. I also don't see why the Set's mathematical nature need have anything at all to do with Dominion. There are no parallels to this in Elantris.

All right everyone, get used to looking at this featured article, because we should have it changed to a new one by the time Stormlight Five comes out. In all honesty everyone, we do appreciate people wanting the featured article to be changed regularly, but we have high standards for what we want on the main page, and are more concerned with actually creating content for people to read than we are with regularly changing the featured article. I will try to get it changed more often than previously, but writing an article like this takes hours and hours, and is honestly akin to a small research paper.

Yeah, of course. I just got done talking to Eric, and we had a bit of a miscommunication. Marked spoilers for UA are fine, but if they're not in a marked topic they must be in spoiler tags. There were quite a few components of that previous conversation that needed to be in spoiler tags, and as we agreed that the conversation is redundant, I'm going to leave it hidden for now and direct you guys to the already existing topics on this subject in the Cosmere Spoilers board.

Reminder everyone, Arcanum Unbounded is only to be discussed on the Cosmere Theories boards (Except for Edgedancer or Secret History, which can be discussed in their own spoiler sub-boards). It does not matter whether or not you have a spoiler tag, it's not currently permitted to talk about it elsewhere. The conversation you are having here has been occurring over there already, so please no further discussion here.

Double post to assuage everyone's fears: So we may be getting this sooner than the next short story collection. I personally though he should have done it in Arcanum Unbounded and put it with a little excerpt from Warbreaker advertising that its free to read on his website, but the past is the past.

Nice, I know Brandon's been teasing writing a short story about this for a while, so I'm glad to see the rationale behind it all.

Mmhmm. Try to remain positive though. Next time maybe we'll have essays on Braize, Ashyn, Nalthis, Vax, Yolen, and maybe a few more. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're getting these books relatively quickly on the scale of fantasy writing speeds. If someone who wrote even a little bit more slowly than Brandon was trying to pull off the cosmere alone, I'd say they were crazy.

All right, I think this tangent is played out. Maxal, you are well within your rights to be disappointed by Adolin's page count but I think we're done with this discussion. Its not going anywhere productive. Everyone, feel free to continue discussing this update from Brandon, but the debate about Adolin's page count is over. If you all would like to continue this discussion about Adolin's POV, feel free to take it to PM's. Thanks all!

Yeah. He was going to try to find time to write a Nalthis short story but there wasn't enough. I'm sure we'll get a Nalthis essay with the next short story collection.

Got it taken care of for you.

Eh, I think several hit close to the truth. Austre is not too far off from Endowment. Domi and Jaddeth are two pretty clear stand-ins for Devotion and Dominion. Even the Southern Scadrians are pretty close with their gods as well. It's a bit too early to tell with Roshar, as we don't know much about the early history, but the Almighty is clearly based on Honor, and Jasnah claims that the western people have a goddess that seems similar to Cultivation. The Terris got a lot of things right, but someone has to be the closest.

I think that this isn't necessarily as complicated as its being made out to be. The various symbols and forms of Selish Investiture were not designed, they existed independently of humankind. Prehistory indicates that there was no written language, but that does not mean that there was no spoken language for the Shards to influence. In my mind, people gradually discovered these natural symbols, and correlated them with words that they already spoke that seemed to have a shared meaning. It would not have been a written language yet, simply pictographs. We already have an example of something like this occurring later in history from Brandon's Aon descriptions. The original Arelish people that discovered Elantris had a written language very similar to Duladen. However when they discovered Elantris they incorporated these symbols into their preexisting language and even went so far as to retroactively change names in accordance with these symbols, such as King Rhashm to King Raoshem. Devotion is still influencing language from beyond the grave (not directly, I might add. I am not a proponent of the Cognitive shadow theory). This is obviously later than the time period mentioned in the essay, but very similar things could have happened in prehistory. These essays are fascinating, but they are still brief overviews. I'm sure more will become clear in time, with the Elantris sequels.

Hey, thanks for your interest jofwu. I agree, the White Sand articles are in a pretty sorry state currently. There's a lot of reasons for that, one being that it's a fairly recent release. We also only have a handful of dedicated editors, all of which have jobs and lives and school outside of this, so it takes a long time to get anything done. And thirdly, White Sand as a graphic novel is much harder to search through for facts and information than a traditional book. We have to describe images ourselves rather than rephrasing Brandon's written descriptions. The only thing that I would say is pretty important is citation. When you add facts about White Sand make sure you cite them. Our citation tag is in this format {{book ref|book|chapter}}. So if you wanted to cite Chapter two of White Sand it would appear as {{book ref|white sand|two}} This currently makes a redlink as there's no summary for White Sand, but that's fine. If something's not working or its too much trouble let us know. I'm not sure about the whole CAPTCHA thing. Do you have a profile on the wiki? We've had some spam problems in the past which we managed to take care of for now, but I can't recall if regular people on the wiki always have a CAPTCHA or not. As for your image, I appreciate the work you put in for that, but we use pretty specific image types for those icons. As far as I'm aware we use SVGs pretty exclusively for those as they are easily resizeable. Some staff member who knows more about image file types feel free to correct me. I believe a lot of those icons are going to be changing soon anyway, as we make them match the symbols from Arcanum Unbounded. Thanks so much for wanting to help out on the wiki, we always need more volunteers! Do you have any more questions?

If I recall correctly, Peter's done some work on the orbits of the moons, and says that they are stable on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions, which Brandon is fine with. Peter thinks that this may indicate that these are not natural satellites, but he doesn't know for sure.

Well, in many European countries, which is where Brandon primarily visits, English is a very common second language, so that's unlikely to be an issue. In places that are further afield, like Dubai, I assume he makes use of a translator for the signings.

From my understanding, it's just their preferred binding company, they can and will go elsewhere if need be. We can expect the story to be trimmed down during revisions, but Brandon won't cut anything that is important to the plot.

I never noticed that in the white space. This symbol also has the benefit of looking like a wave too, which is apt considering all four of the planets in the habitable zone have water as a dominant feature to them.

I've been watching it rather eagerly. I'm curious where the questions they're asking are going, especially since Game of Thrones has lost my interest lately.

Brandon has confirmed that that is not a moment of divine inspiration, rather Straff had Elend take fighting lessons in his youth, and this was a piece of advice that floated back from then. I'll try to find the explicit quote.