Underwater_Worldhopper

I think it's purely geographical and political borders do not affect the magic at all. The magic is tied to the land, not the people there. A Scadrian couple could come to Arelon and have a child, and that child could then become an Elantrian separately from any Scadrian powers they may have inherited. Perception, so far as we have seen it, only ever affects what you specifically can do, in terms of Invested Arts. People thinking about magic a specific way just doesn't change it the same way perception changes other things. If you wholeheartedly believe you can no longer draw Aons for some reason, then you will be unable to even if you try. But if a large group of people other than you believe you can't draw Aons, that doesn't make a difference to your ability at all. The only way I can see perception changing the magic systems would be if everyone had such a warped perception of what the land looked like for so long that the entire Cognitive Realm shifted and the Dor moved around, effectively having the same effect as the Reod but instead in the Cognitive Realm. If the Fjordell empire invaded Arelon and the Aonic people of Arelon wholeheartedly accepted the Fjordell identity and culture and began calling themselves Fjordell rather than Aonic, even that would have no impact on AonDor or the Elantrians so long as people are still being born in the land to have the necessary Connections to be taken by the Shaod.

They cannot, as we understand them right now. They are either just Investiture stamped with the personality of the person they're imitating or they're the person's soul that's been allowed to remain indefinitely through an injection of Investiture. In either case, they'll have lost the ability to perform any magic until certain conditions are met, namely a true physical aspect, beyond just Mistborn:

Granted. Your salary is raised by 1 penny I wish for the ability to shapeshift.

My mistake, I misterpreted that. Ohhhhhhh, okay. You're right, that checks out, the Intent itself might reject it. But I still don't think that should stop it. Allomancy is powered by Preservation, yet it can still be used to kill. The Intent stops mattering when it's used to fuel an Invested Art. Awakening a sword with an Odious Command should still Awaken it and Corrupt the Breaths. I believe so. Your Spiritual Apsect is tied to your Physical Aspect and your Physical Aspect tries to constantly match the Spirtual Aspect. Just by developing a larger brain or other physical changes required to produce the necessary Cognitive complexity needed for sentience or sapience, your Spirtual Aspect, the Spiritweb, will need to grow more and more Connections will need to be made first, or at least at the same time, which increases your ambient Investiture. Less sentient creatures have simpler and less Connections making up their Spiritweb. Note though, I say Connections here, but we don't know for sure what exactly is coding for things in your Spiritweb, so Connections are just my stand in at the moment. Conversely, removing Investiture from a Sapient Entity has devastating consequences. Drabs are far more susceptible to not only illnesses but become irritable and can become victim to depression much faster as well, and that's only in people whose souls were literally made to be detachable. Imagine the effects of surviving Hemalurgy without regrowing your Spirtiweb.

That could play into things, but I doubt that's the root cause. Nightblood wasn't supposed to be sentient, that happened outside of Vasher and Shashara's control, and that's what I suspect Endowment had a hand in, since she was also involved in its creation. It does make me wonder though, what effects woukd an Awakened Sword of other Allomantic Metals produce? What parallels can we draw between what we've seen Steel do in the Cosmere vs Nightblood and its effects?

Ah, that makes more sense. Still though, just because it's aligned with their Intent doesn't make it any different. Nightblood was Awakened using Endowment's Investiture, and it ended up killing a Vessel. A Shard wouldn't want something like Nightblood existing, regardless of what it's made of. Rayse wouldn't have liked Nightblood, given that that's what he ended up dying to, but he had no power over it. But if Nightblood were made of his Investiture instead, he might have been able to control it. If I were a Shard, I'd take the chance of me being able to control a weapon of mass destruction over not being able to control it at all. All this to say, something powerful is being created. At that point, whether it's made of your Intent or not shouldn't make a difference in how you view it, beyond the possibility of controlling it.

I don't think that works that way. Odium won't be sharing his Investiture, but rather Breaths would be being Corrupted to his Intent. Odium doesn't even need to be aware its happening. If anything his power is being increased, since he can now control Investiture that previously was not his. That's true. He might just pose everything but those original 1000 Breaths.

Reasonable, but what effect would losing all that Investiture have on him?

That could be the case, though it doesn't change much in terms of functionality. What I want to know is, if I were to unsheath Nightblood and leave him on the side somewhere, would he eventually just leak all the Investiture in him away?

Aneurysm

Here's something weird I just noticed. I had thought that the whole test and magical destruction/Corruption thing was the Command, and Nightblood (the personality) was just a side-effect of having so many Breaths in one place. I had speculated that the personality would be influenced by the Command, but not wholly dependent/resultant from it. But, rereading Warbreaker, it does indeed say that the Command lay the foundation for Nightblood's personality, which neither Vasher nor Shashara knew the cause of, as nothing about the Awakening would have caused it to become sentient. The only other Type IV Awakened Entity we've seen, Vivenna's Blade, doesn't seem to be nearly as sentient. When the Honorspren draws it on the ship in Shadesmar in Oathbringer, all she reports feeling is a "Tingl[ing]". No voice, no personality, nothing. And that's after it's been drawn half an inch or so out of its sheath. Nightblood can talk to people right through the sheath, and even to people not currently holding him or having drawn him. Either this is based on some rules about Commands, Intent, and Awakening that we just don't currently know about, or this is what Endowment did through her meddling; create a consciousness beyond what should have normally been possible for Nightblood. He implies that certain things could indeed cause Hemalurgy to stop working, so maybe certain criteria need to be met for things like that to happen. You may have a point here. Awakening works by giving a fake soul to an object and giving it a Command, which becomes the Awakened Construct's Intent. It should theoretically be possible to Corrupt Breaths into other Investiture just by giving it a Command, given that it would mean stamping an Intent onto Investiture, but the extent of what Nightblood can do shouldn't be possible with only a human giving it a Command. Shashara and Vasher, two of the most capable Awakeners, couldn't understand how Nightblood became cognizant, so something is clearly unusual about him. I'm thinking Endowment supercharged his Command somehow, or something of that nature. Still, creating a Shardblade that has extra abilities due to the Command it's trying to follow should be possible without Shardic intervention, as evidenced by Vivenna's Blade, even though it doesn't have a true mind of its own. The extra abilities would essentially act like Resonances, since it's an imitation of another magic system by Awakening, so something like a weak after-effect attached to a Shardblade. I imagine that would be doubly true if the Command was close to a Shardic Intent, so long as at least some Investiture gets Corrupted. The other Type IV Shardblades won't have minds or be nearly as powerful as Nightblood, but I think those Shardblades would still be superior to Sprenblades, save for the fact that Sprenblades can be dismissed and also change shape.

Domino effect, I'd imagine. I came up with his one because all the other ones inspired me to finally write this idea down, so they also probably saw one and did the same thing. I doubt Shashara even wanted Nightblood to absorb Investiture in the first place. All she wanted was a Shardblade, which was already such a massive undertaking that wanting to go beyond even that wouldn't be practical for a first experiment. She just chose a bad Command for it, and the rest is just side effects. And as I understand it, all this Intent stuff is separate from the personality and consciousness of Nightblood when it's sheathed. You could be right in that after the person/object is dead Nightblood doesn't care about the Investiture, but I had thought that the sword was just trying to complete its Command to the best of its ability and trying to wholly destroy the entities it kills, but since Investiture can't be destroyed, it just does the next best thing and tries to keep it out of the Investiture systems for as long as possible. Eventually, he leaks it back out, as per WoB, but it does try to keep it out of them for as long as possible. Or not, like you said, but that's how I had originally thought of it. This is a point of some contention, I think. It depends on what you think is going on with Corrupted Investiture. My first instinct is to say that the Investiture is at a base level still what it was pre-Corruption, so it would return to its original Shard; i.e., the Corrupted Breaths are going to Endowment, not Ruin. However, we see with Navani's Anti-Investiture experiments that for Corruption to be possible, you need to first erase the original Rhythm and Intent of the Investiture and then replace it, so the argument could be made that the Investiture is being changed at even the most base and fundamental level, in which case it would go to the Shard it's been made to match with. Still, Corrupted Investiture often takes on a red hue, so there is some difference between Investiture that was Corrupted as opposed to regular Investiture of the same Intent. It could go either way, but for now, I personally believe that it would return to its original Shard. It near definitely wouldn't be based on Metals. All three Scadrian Invested Arts use metals as a focus, so It's pretty safe to say that the hell-bent focus on metals is a feature of Scadrial and not P&R themselves, even if they determine what the actual Arts are and do. And yes, it wouldn't be based on something so similar to Breaths, it was just a neat parallel I was making since Awakening and Breaths are such a consent-based system. I don't think it's a rule that he can't settle alone, but for practicality, he never would for the exact reasons you outline. His Intent isn't very conducive to civilization and growth. There's a reason that Rayse thought he would implode. But it isn't as big of a problem as it seems to be at first glance. He can Invest in a Shardless planet with humans or other sapient life on it, then either actively destroy it himself or let the natives use the magic system that arises and have them finish each other off. After the planet is barren, he can just destroy it, releasing all the Investiture he Invested in it, then move on, skipping through planets and leaving destruction in his wake. It's not hard to unInvest yourself from a planet, it's just time-consuming (Or at least that's what I've assumed in the past. As of writing this, I'm a little unsure, but a cursory look through the Arcanum hasn't shown me anything contrary to it, so I'm still sticking with this idea. If you have any ones that say or imply otherwise, I'd love to see them) With a Command similar enough to Preservation's Intent, it should indeed Corrupt the Breaths into Preservation's Investiture. It probably won't do much though. The concept of Preservation is clear enough, and what is and isn't alive is apparently pretty unambiguous in the Cosmere (despite the fact that all things have a Cognitive and Spiritual Aspect) because Shardblades can apparently tell the difference easily. So it wouldn't do anything too crazy. It would probably act as just a Shardplate-like version of a shield, with a "Robot-Spren" consciousness like that of Nightblood when he's sheathed. I think most Type IV Awakened Entities with Shard-like Commands would end up this way, Nightblood is most probably just an outlier due to the inherently destructive and unchanneled Intent of Ruin. It probably wouldn't interact with other Investiture. Vivenna's Blade seems to act just like a regular Shardblade, so its Command is probably just something like "Serve Me" or "Be As My Sword/Weapon and Do As I Do". Not the most creative of Commands on my part, but you get the gist of it. Something that doesn't require much of anything from the sword and just lets it be an Invested Blade that someone (or maybe specifically only Vivenna) can use. That is, most likely, what Shashara was trying to do. If Shashara had chosen a Command that wasn't in line with a specific Shard, it would just act like a regular Shardblade that has a quirk or extra ability based on its Command. Actually, I'm pretty sure she would have ended up with a nearly normal Shardblade if she had used any Command that didn't emulate Ruin, even if it mimicked the intent of a different Shard. Some would be quite compatible: Devotion or Dominion would have been good choices, Devotion to make the sword loyal to you, or Dominion to make it want to best other people, which would be a good quality for a weapon. Preservation would make it want to defend you to preserve you, Cultivation would make it want to help you become your best self, Honor would make it want to help you do what is right and honorable, and this one I think would be best because like Nightblood the sword itself wouldn't be able to tell what's right and wrong, so you could use its full capabilities however you wanted with no nightmarish side effects. Valor could work really well too, similar to Dominion. Some Intents wouldn't be all that good or bad: Ambition might make the sword turn on you if it feels that you're not a good enough master and that it could do better, although the number of things it could do to sabotage you probably wouldn't be that numerous given that the sword can't do much on its own. Endowment works similarly, where the sword would probably want to be gifted and given around, though what the sword could do to achieve that is beyond me. Autonomy could make it want to either help you in battle to protect your autonomy, which is good, but it might just as easily make the sword want to sabotage you and any other master in a bid for its own autonomy, though what it thinks it could do on its own is once again beyond me, although given that Nightblood can perform some Rioting-like effects, I'm sure neither Endowment, nor Autonomy, nor Ambition would be very good Intents to instill your superweapon with. Whimsy, Virtuosity, and Invention don't really have anything in particular that sticks out to me in terms of what they would make a sword do, so I'm putting them in this category. There are some Intents you really don't want to use though, unless you want something really specific: Ruin, obviously, because that ends up with Nightblood. Odium wouldn't be very good either, but I think that would be one of the hardest ones to make work on a sword since Odium is an emotion and the sword won't really know what that is from the outset, but if it does figure out and manage to express the Intent, it would be very bad. The final known Shard also goes under the bad Intents, and that is Mercy. You might end up with a Shardblade that can cut through all inorganic matter as easily as a regular Shardblade, but one that doesn't hurt anything living at all. All in all, other than some specific Intents like Ruin, it won't really affect the Shardblade that much. The most important part of the Awakening would be the visualization to make it work like a Shardblade, and the rest is just extra things on top of that, like Nightblood's Corruption of Investiture and his test. You could make super cool Shardblades that have extra powers on top of acting like a Shardblade, but that would take specificity.

O h

I'm pretty sure he's just joking

So, I've noticed a lot of Nghtblood-centric threads on this forum (as there well should be, given that Nightblood is the singular most Invested object in the Cosmere and one of the most unique), and it got me thinking about how it works and what it really is. After leafing through some other theories and looking through the Arcanum, I think I have an idea. So, a quick refresher on how Nightblood was created: So, Nightblood is an Awakened Steel sword with the Command "Destroy Evil" Now, take a look at this WoB: Nightblood, a regular Steel sword that was mined, smelted, alloyed, and forged on Nalthis, and then imbued with Breaths, which is Endowment Investiture, has Ruin's Investiture in it. Why? Well, my theory is as follows: The Breaths in Nightblood were given a Command, which became the sword's Intent: "Destroy Evil". And what happened when this Command was given to Nightblood? Does that ring a bell? The Command breaks down into two basic concepts. "Destroy," and "Evil". I think that, upon receiving the Command, the Breaths were corrupted with Ruin's Intent, that of Destruction, which essentially makes the Breaths part of Ruin's Investiture. All of those Corrupted Breaths, now being forced into a single sword, oversaturated it with Investiture, and so it started leaking it, letting those Corrupted Breaths dissipate. However, here's the problem: Investiture can't be destroyed. The closest it can come to being destroyed is when it's exposed to Anti-Investiture, where the Investiture simply becomes energy, which can presumably be turned back into Investiture. So, how can the Breaths follow their new Intent? The closest it can come to 'destroying' Investiture is Corrupting it and keeping it stuck in the sword, forcing it to stay out of the Investiture systems for as long as possible. Nightblood is, functionally, a prime manifestation of Ruin's Intent, doing its best to destroy Investiture by Corrupting it and trying to keep it compressed within the sword. This is why Nightblood has grown in power over the centuries; it absorbs the Investiture from everything and everyone that it possibly can. The "Destroy" half of the Command essentially dictates the method by which the sword works. All this is separate from the "Evil" part of the Command. That part forms the basis of Nightblood's 'test'. If you want to use the sword for personal gain, extortion, killing your enemies, etc, you will be drawn to kill others with the sword, and then yourself. If not, you feel nauseous. Use the sword and you become Bonded to it, and you become immune to the test. "Evil" determines the test by which the sword decides whether someone is evil or not, and the "Destroy" part ordains how it will kill someone who is decided to be evil. The fact that Nightblood-inflicted wounds cause blackness to form on the corpses through its Aluminum sheath just goes to show how powerful it is. It suggests that Ruin's magic system could have been far, far darker than Hemalurgy. Had Ruin settled on a planet other than Scadrial, alone, it could have resulted in a magic system more like a twisted, nightmarish version of Breaths and Awakening: A world where you can kill other people and suck their Investiture out as they die, with more Investiture gained the more the agony the victim is in as they pass. Collect enough Dying Breaths and you can create creatures or constructs out of Midnight Essence. Infect someone with Dying Breaths and you can possess them through an Entropy Bond, controlling them like a puppeteer, their eyes leaking black smoke all the while. Each use of Dying Breaths expends Breaths in a way that they can never be recovered, always driving people to kill more to gain more power. The more Dying Breaths you have at any given moment, the more sadistic and masochistic you become, reveling in pain. Luckily for the denizens of the Cosmere, Ruin never gets a chance to truly express his Intent, beyond wanting to destroy Scadrial. Nothing we see him do is unique to him; Any other Shard could recreate those effects, Intent notwithstanding. Nightblood is a tiny window into the truly destructive power Ruinous magic systems can have. Thoughts?

You're totally right, she could have just created life on Nalthis instead of the whole planet herself. I don't think P&R's bargain is that complicated though. They decided for some reason to create a planet instead of settling on one somewhere, and because their Intents uniquely make them unable to create anything on their own, they had to work together to create Scadrial. The bargain came later, in regard to Humans. Preservation wasn't satisfied with life that wasn't very cognizant or sentient, and Ruin couldn't destroy everything. So, they made a deal: Preservation would give up a piece of himself to create sapient life, the humans, and that would result in Preservation's power becoming weaker than that of Ruin. After a little while, Ruin would then exploit this power imbalance to end everything, and the two would presumably start over or do something else. However, as soon as Preservation got to make humans, he double-crossed Ruin and trapped him, creating the Well, Mists, and Pits, and from there we go to the events of Era 1. The fact that the two could have just chosen to settle somewhere or even go their separate ways but didn't has spawned off all sorts of theories, such as Ati and Leras being lovers or best friends or something of that ilk. That does seem to be the case, though eventually, their extremely opposing Intents seemed to have driven them apart, all the way to actively hating one another by the end of Era 1.

If he chooses to surrender instead of losing the fight and actually dying, what then? And would Odium's Investiture being in him necessarily eject the bond?

Can she willingly become mortal? I'd have thought she would be bound to being a Dragon by her very nature, and since her spiritweb is currently infused into a Shard, I doubt she can alter it.

That's some good luck right there, unintentionally getting a potentially important detail from an unrelated question I never knew that Kaladin was related to Aesudan. Oh right, I forgot about that. The signs do point to Todium cornering Dalinar into surrendering or dying, but I still don't feel like that'll happen for some reason. It's just a hunch though, most likely he will actually die (and become a Fused) Edit: What would happen to Dalinar's Nahel bond if he becomes a Fused?

The evolved/cultivated Fainlife could always have arrived at some point after the Shattering; I believe there was a thread talking about the liklihood of cremlings having descended from Fainlife I meant evil as in opposed to her Intent, but you're right that it's not the right word to use here. And again, Fainlife may not be about taking over other lifeforms, but it just naturally happens to work in ways that kills other plants. There's no conscious intent for an entire ecosystem, which is what would make it oppose Endowment's Intent. Other than that, we see with Ruin that he can 'create' things if it will eventually lead to net destruction, so things that are seemingly impossible for Shards to do can be achieved, which is what I believe the case is here, if the Intent even opposes the action, which I doubt. I haven't seen that one, that does make it seem likely. To be honest I didn't even realise Nalthis could've been artificial until I read that timeline thread.

I agree with what @Quantus just said above, and I'd like to point out that Cultivation is also a Dragon, so she's immortal anyway. The loss of Tanavast, the stress of being forced to hide and try to protect a planet that's in an eternal war, and the emotional drain of it all may be enough for her to decide that being a Shard is not worth it, so she might just be setting the foundation for giving Roshar the best odds that she can manage and then leave quietly, passing the Shard onto someone else. Alternatively, she might have foreseen that the odds are high that she's going to die, and so is preparing another Vessel so Odium can't Splinter another Shard.

I think you're reading too much into its description as invasive. When you're talking about invasive in the context of ecology, it just means something foreign that harms the local ecosystem. You may be confusing invasive with parasytic, where an organism purposefully damages another organism for its own benefit on purpose. Invasive is just something that has so many advantages over the local ecosystem that it outcompetes everything else to dangerous levels. The only problem here would be if Endowment really cares about the local plants and doesn't want a Fainlife-only planet, or if she wants humans to be on Nalthis (since iirc Fainlife is dangerous to humans), and in that case it would be a choice not to create it. Just because they're detrimental to other types of ecosystems doesn't make them inherently evil or anything, which is what would have made it go against her Intent. In fact, for ecosystems that aren't very earth-like, like Roshar outside of Shinovar, Fainlife wouldn't be harmful. Ruin and Preservation's Intents stop them from creating anything on their own, so they need to work together. Endowment's Intent has no such qualms, so she could create pretty much anything. The things impossible to her would be forcefully taking something from someone or greedily hoarding something. Besides, we don't know that she created Nalthis and everything on it for sure, the only known Shard-made planet we know of so far is Scadrial. She could have just found a nice planet out of the way of the other Shards and decided to settle there, and humans happened to already be on it. Vasher's comment about Nalthis not being old enough to have fossils does cast some doubt on Nalthis having formed naturally, but not necessarily. I had a quick look on the Arcanum for WoBs mentioning Fainlife, and nothing there suggests that Fainlife is hard for a Shard to create on their own. Again, humans could have predated Endowment's arrival, but that's also possible. And Fainlife could totally exist on some random continent too.

Kaladin has ties to the crown? . The bodies get healed, yes, and we see Savantism reversed and Spook given Mistborn abilities, so both the Physical and Spritual Aspects can be healed or altered. I don't think the Cognitive Aspect can be healed nearly as eaily though, or at all. We see Shards like Ruin need your soul to have cracks in it (Through mental illness or Hemalurgy) to get in and control someone, and given where Brandon is going with the theme of Mental Health in the Cosmere, making it something fixable just doesn't make sense narratively. That said, what's happened to the Heralds is supernatural and not true mental illness as we understand it, so they could be theoretically healed. Here's a little mini-theory which could explain how they could get healed: the Heralds (at least Kalak and Jezrien) seem to not have undergone the supernatural insanity as of when they abandon the Oathpact at Aharietiam. We know Honor doesn't die until soon before the Recreance, as his raving before his death is what reveals to the KsR that Surgebinding destroyed Ashyn, which is what makes them abandon their oaths as a precaution. The next time we see the Heralds after that, they're insane. What is Honors Splintering is what caused their supernatural insanity? That could be why when Honor is invoked, such as a Radiant swearing an Oath, their insanity is temporarily lifted. If someone were to reassemble and Ascend to Honor, they may return to lucidity. So, while regular mental illnesses couldn't be healed by Shards, the Heralds' insanity's status as 'supernatural' may make this the exception to the rule. This would explain why Odium doesn't heal the Fused. That's aside, returning someone to life doesn't seem to necessarily have to be a voluntary choice. I could totally see a Shard forcing someone who died back into their body, though Sazed doesn't do this because he respects Vin and Elend's choice, and Endowment gives people the choice to Return because what's the point of forcing someone to Return when they could just as well refuse to do what they Returned for and maybe kill themselves at the first opportunity. The amnesia let's them get around that, but it seems like an unethical thing to do, something that Endowment may make Endowment choose not to go down that path. Theres enough evidence that you could argue consent is necessary, but I just don't believe that's the case. For other things, I don't think either Kaladin or Syl will die, mostly because Kaladin's entire arc started with him choosing to live on despite his suicidal thoughts, depression, and survivors guilt. Syl is tangential, but I don't think she will die because of the impact that woukd have on Kaladin. I don't think Dalinar will die either, though this ones more of a gut feeling than anything evidence based. The Stormfather's first bonded Radiant in a long time, a budding Bondsmith, and currently Honor's Vessel (????), I just don't think he will die, at least unless he gets defeated in the contest through trickery. Todium would totally use someone Dalinar loves as a Champion, which would force Dalinar to surrender, but I don't think he'll die unless he specifically chooses to do so. Szeth could totally die, though that begs the question of what will happen to Nightblood. I also think BAM will be found, possibly by Shallan, although I doubt BAM'll support anyone but Odium, given she probably hates the Radiants for trapping her for millenia. I feel like that could happen, but it's very unlikely. It does open the up question of what an Unmade Bond does to a person.

I personally like your theory more. The temporal metals really need more love than they get, and while that's partially resolved with Wayne and Marasi, things like Gold and Electrum are still left underappreciated. However, as much as I'd like for time shenaniganry to be the case, based on what we see and what Brandon says, that just doesn't seem to be what going on here, even though an ability like that should be technically possible in the Cosmere.

I've thought about this too, but I'm not sold that the last Shard is actually called Acumen. It fits the theme, but Hoid has previously also given a hint about the last Shard as "Wisdom", so I take that last bit with a grain of salt.