MistbornMathematician

And all I was able to find on the topic of one soul allowing multiple Nahel bonds was human-oriented, which doesn't even appear to have happened. So not a lot of evidence. Oh absolutely. We also know that they would have a different Identity. As for the weird things, we haven't seen any identical twins in the Cosmere, have we? Or am I forgetting someone?

You were fairly precise, just you responded to a statement about non-invested metals with a statement, apparently, that was about hemalurgy and wasn't particularly related. It's all good, we all make mistakes! Correct, which is also why it appears that you have a "stronger" protection if the metal is piercing your body as opposed to being in your mouth, though whether it's better if it's touching blood or not hasn't been answered. Correct -- perception, history, and all that would affect how an object's soul is structured. We know that to be true. What we don't know is whether this structuring of the object's soul is relevant to how your own soul is conducted into metal. It's possible that it's as you conjecture, where a person's soul influence only affects singular objects as defined by their souls (with the mechanical aspect being irrelevant), it may be as I conjecture, where a person's soul influence is conducted purely mechanically (with the object soul aspect being irrelevant), and it may be somewhere in between, where your soul's influence can be conducted from one soul-distinct object to another mechanically, but it loses a bit of potency when it makes that jump. That's what I think as well. Out of curiosity, what do you think would happen with the gauged ears experiment?

To be a Hemalurgic spike, definitely. But to "pierce the body" and thus be harder to push/pull on? That doesn't appear to be the case unless Kelsier was very misinformed about why Vin's earring was safe from being pushed or pulled while it was in her ear. If we assume he was right, and a normal earring in a normal pierced ear will gain this resistance, it never needs to touch blood at all. More generally, being "inside" a body is quite an interesting concept. We know by that WoB that it is explicitly not a matter of perception (making the statement "Perception has everything to do with it - as always in Cosmere" a bit of an inaccuracy). Therefore, if it's not a matter of perception or observation, it has to be by some objective metric. Inside the stomach and inside a closed mouth are confirmed to count as "inside". Holding a large metal object in your hand does not count. Earrings do, as does anything that has a part that goes under the skin. Unfortunately, I couldn't find many examples at all for testing the limits or rules, which means it's hard to say exactly what they are. You can still do some thought experiments, though: Take a thin hoop earring and someone with a normal pierced ear. From what we know already, it should be hard to push that earring in that ear. Take the same hoop earring and someone with a very, very stretched piercing. It seems the largest ear gauge is over four inches in diameter, so that's pretty significant. Now, take the earring and put it around the earlobe without touching the skin at all. Do you think it would be hard to push the earring? If the earring was allowed to touch the earlobe, do you think it would be hard to push the earring? If it isn't hard to push the earring, then how big can someone's ear piercing be before this happens? Is it a binary hard/not hard or a gradient? and Take some lengths of wire, ranging from very short (say, one centimeter) to very long (say, a spool of ten thousand feet of wire). Put the shortest in a normal pierced ear. From what we know already, it should be hard to push. Put the end of the huge 10,000 foot spool of wire in a normal pierced ear. Do you think it would be hard to push the spool of wire? If not, then how long can the wire get before it stops being hard to push? Is it a binary hard/not hard or a gradient? Take a fairly short wire which is hard to push. Cut it in half, then twist the cut ends back together. If one half is in the ear, will the other half (which is now separate) be hard to push? What if we weld it back together instead? Given that none of these questions (as far as I am aware) have been answered in any way, it seems difficult to say that (given that metal being inside/outside the body isn't affected in any way by perception) an object's perception-based soul must absolutely determine whether it's inside/piercing the body or not. Frankly, it's a stretch to say with any surety that "a spear with a wire" would necessarily have two souls. Say the spearhead was forged from half of a spool of wire while the other half stayed attached the entire time. Would that have to split the soul? As far as I know, there's nothing one way or the other on that topic. For all the information we have, since "metal and soul are the same", it could just be that metal inside someone "conducts" that person's soul somewhat. Like if the soul was a type of weak magnet, making metal inside of the body slightly soul-magnetized. This is what I'd bet on, if I had to -- it's a simple rule, since it avoids perception and object souls entirely.

I don't have time to respond fully, but ear piercings shouldn't be bleeding after the first few days. If they do bleed, it's usually a sign of infection. Do you think people who wear earrings just repeatedly stab their ears?

I agree with everything else you've said here, but personally I think this is an example of something which is probably a minor mistake in the book: impure Atium being pushable/pullable like a base metal. We already know many of the modern Cosmere details weren't exactly worked out back then: and I think that if he made an edited "2.0" of Mistborn to fix some stuff, he'd add a line about how Atium is very hard, or impossible, to push or pull, and then delete all references to using allomancy on it.

I'm not sure that the perception of being an "object" has much of anything to do with it. It is almost certainly some kind of mechanical/flesh-to-metal ratio, because otherwise you'd end up with the question of "how small do ear gauges have to be before a hoop earring through them can't be easily pushed" being answered by "idk, depends on your perception of it". I don't think Scadrial's allomancers would rely on earrings as unpushable metal if it was possible to convince yourself that the metal's in a closed and healed hole that happens to exist in the body and then steelpush an earring right through someone's head. And it seems similarly unlikely that, if you had massive gauged ears and just held a needle in the middle of the hole, people wouldn't be able to push or pull on it anymore. Apart from anything else, it would be supremely embarrassing to have your master plan get foiled because your wires got caught on a doorknob or a chair. Or a cat.

objectively correct Best sword man, and the best sword, man.

Currently, I think that we're more likely to see very cosmic stakes to the final battle. Mercy seems likely to be a major threat, with an "I desire an end to feeling" sort of attempted mass murder and Sazed being creeped out, but I think the final "enemy" Shard will be Wisdom/Prudence. Given how Brandon talks about stakes and the whole "is the world not in peril? imperil it!" thing, the main Cosmere ending with a big fight vs a truly omnicidal "I thought long and hard about it and the most prudent course of action is the end of existence itself" Shard seems quite fitting to me.

These are the WoBs I'm familiar with on the topic: Doesn't appear that as far as human-spren relations go, it's ever happened. Or at least that's the way he's phrasing it, which as we know could be tricky. It's certainly reasonable to think that a sufficiently strong connection between two people, perhaps both of whom genuinely think of themselves as the "same person", could allow for some Connection-based spookyness. Perhaps it'd manifest as some kind of "twinsense", perhaps it wouldn't do much of anything at all, or perhaps it could actively copy/share capital-B Bonds.

One might conjecture that the harmony between two different tones/rhythms being necessary to merge two types of Investiture is precisely what Harmony is. You can further wonder if Discord, which I guess you could imagine might separate Harmonium or could cause it to instantly detonate, could be somehow created with specific application of tones in a perfect un-harmony, but as everything that comes even close to Harmony and Shard Tones/rhythms gets RAFO'd, and as Preservation's rhythm may simply be "The infinity of a note held perfectly, never wavering.", the concept of a dissonant/harmonious rhythm gets somewhat blurry. Personally, I'd think that Harmony's somewhat unstable state reflects this as "the only different between a harmony and a discord between the tones/rhythms of Preservation and Ruin is Intent". But of course, we don't even know the status of Harmony's Tone(s).

Not sure what exactly to make of this, but for the record I do fully support the Jojen paste theory.

(THERE IS A TL;DR AT THE BOTTOM, DON'T WORRY) In my last post I discussed a theory that the Dawnshards corresponded to the Three Realms (calling those Exist, Feel, and Connect) plus Change, that each had a push-pull and internal-external alignment, and that every Shard corresponded to two Dawnshards, one first and one second, thus having a primary Dawnshard alignment and a push-pull and internal-external alignment corresponding to the second Dawnshard. I also discussed how it appeared that if a Shard's first Dawnshard formed a push-pull pair with the second, then they ended up "rebelling" against their Dawnshard alignment. The primary examples I used were Preservation, against Change, and Autonomy, against Connect, with a theory that Mercy is against Feel. However, due to Prudence/Wisdom/Survival (I'll call it Prudence) probably being an Exist Shard and this WoB it seems quite likely that, if this theory has any merits at all, Prudence should be the Shard against Exist. If we assume that, then, we have a slight adjustment to the previous chart, which I'll take a moment to adjust now. Anything that I've said in the previous post I'll leave fairly short and uncited so there isn't too much redundancy. First off, we assume Ruin and Preservation form a push-pull pair, and if we believe Ruin that he is the "True" Shard of Change (which I do), and we consider them to be the External Temporal Shards to correspond with the effects of Bendalloy and Cadmium, we again have Change being the External Pushing Dawnshard, making Exist the External Pulling Dawnshard, making (by our assumption) Prudence the External Pushing Physical Dawnshard. The arguments for Prudence and Whimsy being a push-pull pair still hold, in my opinion, so this would make Whimsy the "True" Shard of Exist. The "Rebel" Shard opposes the "True" Shard, which again makes sense with Odium and Mercy, and Honor and Autonomy. Feel and Connect have to be Internal, and Duralumin and Aluminum do seem to correspond quite well with Honor and Autonomy (who in turn are associated with Connection and Identity) so making Honor the Internal Pushing Spiritual Shard, and thus making Connect the Internal Pushing Dawnshard and Feel the Internal Pulling Dawnshard, fixes the other three. This does still make Odium correspond to Copper and Mercy to Bronze, which I personally do not like, but at least they have the same push-pull orientation as Rioting and Soothing. The rest fall into place quite well, using much the same arguments as before: Gold and Electrum correspond to Cultivation and Invention, Chromium and Nicrosil correspond to Ambition and Endowment, Tin and Pewter correspond to Virtuosity and Valor, and Zinc and Brass correspond to Dominion and Devotion. The one change, Valor and Virtuosity being Internal, does hold quite well with the metals, especially if Valor's Intent is indeed more like "Functionality" or "Efficacy" where Virtuosity's is more like "Artistry". The chart is, then (reordering things a little so the corners correspond to their proper Dawnshards): SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling COGNITIVE Internal Honor Autonomy Mercy Odium Internal External Endowment Ambition Devotion Dominion External Internal Invention Cultivation Valor Virtuosity Internal External Ruin Preservation Prudence Whimsy External TEMPORAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling PHYSICAL This is what we will be going with from now on. So, onto what you're here for: attempting to categorize every bit of magic in the Cosmere. We start with the biggest question: Can we categorize how Shards influence the Cosmere as a whole? I propose that they do so in four ways, which correspond to Dawnshards. The first are the mundane consequences, like Honor's existence enforcing the fundamental forces: Or Preservation and Ruin enforcing the first and second laws of thermodynamics. I will claim these are the "Natural Laws", corresponding to Exist. Then, you have laws of how Investiture works: I again argue that the first and second laws would be from Preservation and Ruin. I'll call these "Arcane Laws", corresponding to Feel. Next, we have what I'll refer to as "Invested Laws", corresponding to Connect, which have the following properties: They do not require any Connection to their Shard or a specific kind of (or unkeyed) Investiture. They require a supplied Intent which aligns with the Intent of their Shard. These three categories of Shardic influence also have one overarching property: they are largely unaffected by the Shard itself and whatever state they may be in. We have two clear examples of this, I believe: the first is Hemalurgy, which I claim is Ruin's Invested Law, and the second is Bonding, which I claim is Honor's Invested Law. Finally, we have "Invested Arts", corresponding to Change, which have the following properties: They require some kind of Connection to their Shard. Their Shard can exert a measure of control over them. They require that the user be Invested with Investiture keyed to their Shard. They involve use of kinetic Investiture. They can be taken by power-stealing Hemalurgic metals. Allomancy, Surgebinding, Forgery, and Sand Mastery are some clear examples. I'll further claim that there are two more properties: 5. They each have 16 sub-arts, each of which also have a Dawnshard/Internal-External/Push-Pull orientation in addition to the main "pinnacle" art. 6. An Invested Art can be affected and modified by a Shard or Shards that are not one it belongs to. So let's start with the Natural Laws, since we know relatively little about them, since our real-world knowledge of physics doesn't fully apply to the Cosmere. We do know the Laws of Thermodynamics hold, and that the first and second are of Preservation and Ruin, and we also know that "obeying the fundamental laws" is of Honor. We also know that the Strong and Weak Axial forces exist, corresponding to the Surges of Cohesion and Tension, but it's hard to say exactly who they'd belong to. Given that Hion lines appear to be somewhat related to electricity, one might suspect Virtuosity corresponds to light or possibly even the electric and magnetic forces, or perhaps given Virtuosity expressing the push-pull duality more prominantly: Virtuosity actually corresponds to some form of wave-particle duality. There's not much more to say about this aside from some even more baseless speculation, though -- maybe the Cognitive ones have something to do with how emotions work? Or how life works? Very hard to say. So let's put the four I have some reasoning for in the chart, and move on. SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling COGNITIVE Internal Honor Things obeying the laws of physics Autonomy ? Mercy ? Odium ? Internal External Endowment ? Ambition ? Devotion ? Dominion ? External Internal Invention ? Cultivation ? Valor ? Virtuosity Something related to light or electricity Internal External Ruin Entropy Preservation Conservation laws Prudence ? Whimsy ? External TEMPORAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling PHYSICAL We actually know a fairly large number of potential Arcane Laws: First Law: Investiture cannot be created or destroyed. (Preservation's?) Second Law: Investiture is subject to entropy. (Ruin's?) Third Law: Unknown, but it exists. Fourth Law: Unknown, but it relates to Adonalsium. Investiture can be Kinetic or Static. Investiture can be "keyed" to a Shard. (Dominion's?) Every form of Investiture generates some kind of emotion. (Odium's?) High concentrations of Investiture can dilate time. Raw Investiture is highly responsive to emotions and Intents. (Devotion's?) Connection. (Honor's?) Identity. (Autonomy's?) Fortune. (Ambition's?) Objects and entities can be Invested. (Endowment's?) Investiture tends to repel Investiture. (Could be part of Identity, given what Trellium does) Invested art "resonances". Large quantities of Investiture can become self-aware. Each type of Investiture has a color. And a taste. (Virtuosity's?) Solid Investiture is metallic, and each Shard's kind has a specific property. Investiture encodes a person's memories and "self". Invested people being healthier. (Cultivation's?) A cracked or broken Spiritweb allows for more Investiture usage. Every type of Investiture has an anti-Investiture. Every type of Investiture has a push and a pull. (Though this might not be a law, per se, just a consequence of the categorization. The existence of the categorization might be Adonalisium's Arcane Law, though. Who knows?) And there's probably some more possibilities out there that I've missed. Here are the ones I feel confident enough about to put in the chart: SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling COGNITIVE Internal Honor Things obeying the laws of physics Connection Autonomy ? Identity Mercy ? ? Odium ? Investiture causing emotion Internal External Endowment ? Objects and people being able to be Invested Ambition ? Fortune Devotion ? Investiture responding to emotions and intents Dominion ? Investiture being able to be "keyed" to a specific Shard External Internal Invention ? ? Cultivation ? Investiture innately healing and bolstering Invested things Valor ? ? Virtuosity Something related to light or electricity Investiture types having different colors and flavors Internal External Ruin Entropy Investiture Entropy Preservation Conservation laws Investiture Conservation Prudence ? ? Whimsy ? ? External TEMPORAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling PHYSICAL Now, onto the Invested Laws. Hemalurgy and Bonding are pretty straightforward: Hemalurgy can be done anywhere, by anyone, to anything, as long as there is some supplied intent to create a Hemalurgic spike and an Invested victim. Bonding is similar: as long as there's an intent to bond and a highly invested entity to bond with, you can bond with a ton of stuff across the Cosmere, from Aviar to Seons to Aethers to Nightmares to, of course, Spren. We also know that Bonds on Roshar do grant powers, but not the same ones: though it does seem likely that not all bonds would have some unique power, given that a cognitive shadow could bond someone and bonding giving powers isn't unique to Roshar though perhaps he's referring to lower-key powers like controlling Aethers. It is, again, hard to say, but according to that WoB, bonding is essentially the same mechanic everywhere, "just with different flavoring". Other potential Invested Laws might include: Investiture-based healing, which can be found in many Invested Arts and always has the same properties of healing the physical form to match the perception of "self", Lightweaving (not the surge, the power), and Elsecalling (also the power and not the surge). As per these WoBs: These three are noted as fundamental "powers", with Healing manifesting in various Invested Arts in the same way each time, Lightweaving being the "Illusion" power that's also manifested in several Invested Arts, and Elsecalling uses the same mechanic as a Perpendicularity. Given the prevalence of artists among Lightweavers, how art is often necessary to Lightweave properly, and Hoid's use of art alongside his own Yolish Lightweaving, it does seem likely that Lightweaving is of Virtuosity. Since gold corresponds with Cultivation, the Surge of Regrowth is of Cultivation, and everyone from Fused to Radiants is healing on Roshar, it does seem likely that Healing is of Cultivation. Healing and Lightweaving definitely follow the Intent of Cultivation and Virtuosity, respectively, but it is unclear what Intent Elsecalling follows. Perhaps we'll find out when we get a full explanation of how you use a Perpendicularity to travel between Realms, since that's a kind of Elsecalling that appears to have no requirements on the user whatsoever. Other possibilities for Invested Laws, such as fabrialcraft, which can work with any being of Investiture: and Soulcasting (given that it can be used through a fabrial and that such use can produce a Savant). Awakening is a big question, though. These WoBs: do seem to imply that Awakening can be done with anything, and with no Connection to Endowment, though her Investiture is best for it. We do already know that any Investiture can fuel any Invested Art, such as Ruin fueling Allomancy, but in that kind of case, there is still the Connection to Preservation (or the primary Shard in question), which is a marked difference. I personally believe that Awakening is an Invested Law, since Endowment does have some other magic which does seem to be more specific to her and her Investiture: Moreover, anyone with Breath can Awaken, and Breath is stolen with Nicrosil, not one of the power-stealing metals. I also suppose that the nature of what having a lot of Breath does to a person could also be seen to be an Invested Art, even if it might be an extension of her Arcane Law. And we know too little about using Connection to learn a planet's language and how so many worldhoppers become immortal (or at least age very, very slowly). So now, my chart: SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling COGNITIVE Internal Honor Things obeying the laws of physics Connection Bonding Autonomy ? Identity ? Mercy ? ? ? Odium ? Investiture causing emotion ? Internal External Endowment ? Objects and people being able to be Invested Awakening (using Investiture to give a kind of sentience to an inanimate object) Ambition ? Fortune ? Devotion ? Investiture responding to emotions and intents ? Dominion ? Investiture being able to be "keyed" to a specific Shard ? External Internal Invention ? ? ? Cultivation ? Investiture innately healing and bolstering Invested things Healing Valor ? ? ? Virtuosity Something related to light or electricity Investiture types having different colors and flavors Lightweaving Internal External Ruin Entropy Investiture Entropy Hemalurgy Preservation Conservation laws Investiture Conservation ? Prudence ? ? ? Whimsy ? ? ? External TEMPORAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling PHYSICAL And finally, for Invested Arts. Allomancy is obvious: it's Preservation's. Feruchemy, though, is much less so. In a previous post I detailed reasons why I thought Feruchemy was Ruin's Invested Art, and I'll summarize them here. Feruchemy isn't actually "truly" end-neutral. In fact, there's some decay. Shards can and do influence each others' Invested Arts, such as with Cultivation and Honor with Surgebinding. If Hemalurgy is an Invested Law, and not an Invested Art, then Ruin should have an Invested Art manifesting on Scadrial since magic "just kind of leaks out". Lerasium appears to be able to, just on its own (so without any Invested Art) be burned with an alloy to gain access to an Invested Art. Lerasium with itself (i.e. pure Lerasium) gives Preservation's Invested Art, alloying with a base metal can be burned to gain access to one of the sixteen sub-arts, and alloying with a god metal (and perhaps something else) can give you another Shard's Invested Art. I conjectured that burning Lerasium with a god metal tuned you to the Shard's art, and with a base metal tuned you to a specific sub-art. So if Sand Mastery was, say, Autonomy's Internal Pushing Physical Invested Art, then burning Lerasium with Bavadinium and Pewter would give you Sand Mastery. So what would a Lerasium and Atium alloy give you? It can't give you Hemalurgy, since that requires some kind of external power and not internal Investiture. But it could give you Feruchemy, as we know there is a way. And here's one more: First, Feruchemy is stealable by Hemalurgy, while Hemalurgy doesn't appear to be. Moreover, we know all Invested Arts can be stolen by Hemalurgy, and there is an odd relation between which metals steal Allomancy and which ones steal Feruchemy. Physical powers are stolen by Physical Pushing, Cognitive powers are stolen by Cognitive Pushing, Spiritual powers are stolen by Temporal Pushing, and Temporal powers are stolen by Temporal Pulling. However, for Physical powers, Allomancy is External while Feruchemy is Internal, for Cogntive, Feruchemy is External while Allomancy is Internal, for Spiritual, Feruchemy is External while Allomancy is Internal, and for Temporal, Allomancy is External while Feruchemy is Internal. Physical and Temporal powers correspond to External Dawnshards, while Cognitive and Spiritual correspond to Internal Dawnshards. This aligns with Allomancy, but opposes Feruchemy. If Preservation, and thus Allomancy, is Temporal External Pulling, then something in that classification is very likely to be the reason Allomancy aligns with the Dawnshards' internal-external split in Hemalurgy while Feruchemy doesn't. The most sensical, in my opinion, is a push-pull pair: pulling Invested Arts stay in the same internal-external space, while pushing ones go to the other one. So Hemalurgic Steel doesn't steal Physical Allomantic powers, it steals all Physical Pulling powers. And so, I think there's a very strong case for Feruchemy being Ruin's Invested Art. Some Invested Arts are pretty easy to place as a whole: Surgebinding is of Honor (with Cultivation's influence), Voidbinding is of Odium, and Old Magic is of Cultivation. Selish magics are pretty heavily blended between Devotion and Dominion, so the only way to tell which is which would likely be via Hemalurgic spikes (so if you took eight Elantrians and spiked them with Steel, Pewter, Brass, Bronze, Cadmium, Gold, Bendalloy, and Electrum, you'd be able to tell the Dawnshard correlation of Aon Dor and whether it's of Devotion or Dominion). Same thing for Autonomy's arts. Starmarks, Sand Mastery, the various Aviar abilities, and whatever was going on with Telsin's calculating powers do seem hard to pin down without experimentation, similar to how I bet it would be very difficult for a Feruchemist with no knowledge of Allomancy to figure out which metals were internal and which were external, even if they did know that pulling metals are pure and pushing are alloys. The other magics on Nalthis must belong to Endowment, but they're very vague. If the self-memory-erasing thing is in fact one of Endowment's sixteen sub-arts, it's probably Internal and Cognitive, but is it Pushing or Pulling? Does it correspond to copper or bronze? Copper is associated with memory, but this magic does seem to be doing the opposite of that. Perhaps copper's is how to imprint memories on Breath, while bronze's is how to erase them. I do have a rather wild theory that while most Shards' Invested Arts have to be fairly similar to each other, and are somewhat constrained by what existed before Adonalisium (as per one of the above WoBs), Autonomy and Invention are not at all limited by that. Autonomy's Invested Arts seem to be localized around, or perhaps based on, her Avatars, such as Patji and the Sand Lord. Invention, meanwhile, we know absolutely nothing about. But this WoB does make it seem like both of them are capable of making pretty whacky magic systems if they so choose, given that they're what Brandon would want for himself. So with these assumptions, our final overall chart looks like SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling COGNITIVE Internal Honor Things obeying the laws of physics Connection Bonding Surgebinding Autonomy ? Identity ? 16 unrelated sub-arts Mercy ? ? ? ? Odium ? Investiture causing emotion ? Voidbinding Internal External Endowment ? Objects and people being able to be Invested Awakening (using Investiture to give a kind of sentience to an inanimate object) Other Nalthis magic? Ambition ? Fortune ? ? Devotion ? Investiture responding to emotions and intents ? Some of Sel's magic Dominion ? Investiture being able to be "keyed" to a specific Shard ? Some of Sel's magic External Internal Invention ? ? ? 16 unrelated sub-arts? Cultivation ? Investiture innately healing and bolstering Invested things Healing Old Magic Valor ? ? ? ? Virtuosity Something related to light or electricity Investiture types having different colors and flavors Lightweaving ? Internal External Ruin Entropy Investiture Entropy Hemalurgy Feruchemy Preservation Conservation laws Investiture Conservation ? Allomancy Prudence ? ? ? ? Whimsy ? ? ? ? External TEMPORAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling PHYSICAL And, finally, let's move on to the subarts. Allomancy and Feruchemy are easy: each of the 16 subarts gives you access to the Allomantic or Feruchemical properties of one base metal and all its god metal alloys. Autonomy's two explored arts, Sand Mastery and Aviar, are the only ones we can properly speculate on for her, though perhaps we can associate Telsin's mental speed with Zinc and thus call it External Pulling Cognitive. Sand Mastery seems External and Physical, but the push-pull is unclear. Aviar seem to be able to somewhat mimic other powers in the Cosmere, but appear to be "built to be Cognitive" so I'd put the whole Aviar thing as definitely Cognitive. With Sel, Forgery is most likely External and Spiritual, given how it affect the spiritual aspects of things, and it's possible Bloodsealing is a push-pull pair with Forgery given the similarities. If that's true, then given Chromium's Hemalurgic and Feruchemical properties, it seems likely that Forgery would correspond to it and thus be External Pulling Spiritual. Then, ChayShan and Dakhor might both be Physical, and AonDor might be Internal and Spiritual. Finally, with Roshar, we only know enough to talk about Surgebinding, but its ten surges do have some easily classified elements. First, we definitely know that Honor put limitations on Surgebinding, which are now relaxing somewhat after his death, which does mean that while Cultivation has affected nine of the ten, they remain firmly "his" Invested Art. More supporting evidence for this is how Odium can directly grant the nine that Cultivation has touched, perhaps suggesting that if a Shard allows some parts of their Invested Art to become influenced by another Shard, those parts become more susceptible to being granted by other Shards. Adhesion is the "truest Surge of Honor", after all, and so is probably Internal Pushing Enhancement, and similarly Regrowth is the "truest Surge of Cultivation", and so is probably Internal Pulling Temporal. If we make the bold assumption that Ruin and Virtuosity correspond to Division and Illumination, respectively, we get: Adhesion: Internal Pushing Spiritual (Internal Pushing) Gravitation: Division: External Pushing Temporal (External Pushing) Abrasion: Progression: Internal Pulling Temporal (External Pushing) Illumination: Internal Pulling Physical (External Pulling) Transformation: Transportation: Cohesion: Tension: This doesn't look half bad, actually -- Adhesion and Division are two internal-external flips away, Division and Progression are an internal-external and push-pull flip away, and Progression and Illumination are a single push-pull flip away. It actually lines up. So if this is indeed the pattern, then Gravitation would be either Internal Pushing Temporal or External Pushing Spiritual, and Abrasion would be External Pulling Temporal or Internal Pushing Temporal. So Gravitation corresponds to Electrum/Invention or Nicrosil/Endowment and Abrasion would correspond to Chromium/Ambition or Electrum/Invention. Before we tackle that, let's also check Illumination to Adhesion: that's Internal Pulling (External Pulling) to Internal Pushing (Internal Pushing) in five flips. So we have three flips in positions 2, 3, and 4, and then one double flip that happens somewhere. Is this even possible, avoiding repetition? Turns out not only is it possible to get from Illumination to Adhesion, but if we have Gravitation be Internal Pushing Temporal/Nicrosil/Endowment and Abrasion be Internal Pushing Temporal/Electrum/Invention, we can get back using the exact same flips in the exact same order. If we flip positions 1, 3, 1, 2, 4, then 1, 3, 1, 2, 4, again, we get Adhesion: Internal Pushing Spiritual (Internal Pushing), Honor Gravitation: External Pushing Spiritual (Internal Pushing), Endowment Division: External Pushing Temporal (External Pushing), Ruin Abrasion: Internal Pushing Temporal (External Pushing), Invention Progression: Internal Pulling Temporal (External Pushing), Cultivation Illumination: Internal Pulling Physical (External Pulling), Virtuosity Transformation: External Pulling Physical (External Pulling), Whimsy Transportation: External Pulling Cognitive (Internal Pulling), Dominion Cohesion: Internal Pulling Cognitive (Internal Pulling), Odium Tension: Internal Pushing Cognitive (Internal Pulling), Mercy There's something quite nice about finding a somewhat natural symmetry in the magic system for the Stormlight Archives, given how symmetrical they like everything to be. (Note that there can't be a palindrome as a pattern, as two adjacent flips in the same position would cause a repetition.) There are even some decent correspondences: Transformation-Whimsy and Transportation-Dominion seem the nicest, though, as I find it hard to see what Odium or Copper has to do with Cohesion. And that's basically every magic system in the Cosmere that we know enough about! TL;DR I believe everything Adonalsium/Investiture-related in the Cosmere can be categorized by the push-pull and internal-external dichotomies. I've proposed a system for this from the Dawnshards on down. For example, I propose that Allomantic Steel is the External Pushing Physical (Internal Pulling) Invested Sub-Art of the External Pulling Temporal (External Pushing) Shard. I also propose that Shards have a Natural Law, the effect they have upon mundane physics in the Cosmere, an Arcane Law, the effect they have upon Investiture-based physics in the Cosmere, an Invested Law, a magic system that is a direct result of their power's existence and is more-or-less unrelated to them specifically, and an Invested Art, a magic system that they somewhat control and other Shards may influence. A Natural Law is something like gravity, entropy, or the "strong axial force". An Arcane Law is something like the Laws of Investiture, Identity, or Connection. An Invested Law is something like Hemalurgy or Bonding. An Invested Art is something like Allomancy, Surgebinding, or AonDor. Each Invested Art has 16 sub-arts. The best way to distinguish between an Invested Law and an Invested Art is to ask the following three questions: Can I steal it with Hemalurgic Steel, Pewter, Brass, Bronze, Cadmium, Bendalloy, Gold, Electrum, or pure Atium? Does it generally require that I be Invested with an Investiture keyed to a specific Shard? Can the power be obtained through a non-invested person burning a Lerasium alloy? If the answer is "yes" to all, it's an Invested Art or Sub-Art. If it's "no" to all, it's an Invested Law. The theory proposes some of the following potentially observable facts: The Dawnshards are Exist (or something corresponding to the Physical Realm), Feel (or something corresponding to the Cognitive Realm), Connect (or something corresponding to the Spiritual Realm), and Change. Mercy is against Feeling and is probably somewhat unstable. Prudence/Wisdom/Survival (whatever its real name is) is against Existing and is probably very unstable. Valor's Intent is "practicality" or "functionality". Feruchemy is technically Ruin's Invested Art. Lerasium alloyed with a God Metal grants the corresponding Shard's Invested Art. Adding a base metal grants the corresponding sub-art. Voidbinding and Surgebinding each have six unused powers which are currently only obtainable through Lerasium alloys. Autonomy and possibly also Invention each have the potential to create sixteen unrelated Invested Sub-Arts. Sand Mastery can most likely be stolen by a steel Hemalurgic spike. Bloodsealing and Forgery can most likely be stolen by a Bendalloy or Electrum Hemalurgic spike. And this is the full suggested chart. SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling COGNITIVE Internal Honor Things obeying the laws of physics Connection Bonding Surgebinding Autonomy ? Identity ? 16 unrelated sub-arts Mercy ? ? ? ? Odium ? Investiture causing emotion ? Voidbinding Internal External Endowment ? Objects and people being able to be Invested Awakening (using Investiture to give a kind of sentience to an inanimate object) Other Nalthis magic? Ambition ? Fortune ? ? Devotion ? Investiture responding to emotions and intents ? Some of Sel's magic Dominion ? Investiture being able to be "keyed" to a specific Shard ? Some of Sel's magic External Internal Invention ? ? ? 16 unrelated sub-arts? Cultivation ? Investiture innately healing and bolstering Invested things Healing Old Magic Valor ? ? ? ? Virtuosity Something related to light or electricity Investiture types having different colors and flavors Lightweaving ? Internal External Ruin Entropy Investiture Entropy Hemalurgy Feruchemy Preservation Conservation laws Investiture Conservation ? Allomancy Prudence ? ? ? ? Whimsy ? ? ? ? External TEMPORAL Pushing Pulling Pushing Pulling PHYSICAL And the Surge list: Adhesion: Internal Pushing Spiritual Gravitation: External Pushing Spiritual Division: External Pushing Temporal Abrasion: Internal Pushing Temporal Progression: Internal Pulling Temporal Illumination: Internal Pulling Physical Transformation: External Pulling Physical Transportation: External Pulling Cognitive Cohesion: Internal Pulling Cognitive Tension: Internal Pushing Cognitive As before, this is all speculation oftentimes based on tricky WoB phrasing or outright guesswork. Particularly with the Surges, even if they do have a very nice symmetry. Take everything here with as much salt (or copper) as you please.

Firstly, apologies for my delay in responding. I've been quite busy lately, but I really should have checked back in sooner. Anyways, I agree. It definitely feels quite "off". I suggested that a possible explanation is Shards whose secondary Dawnshard split formed a push-pull pair with their first were "rebels" against the initial Command, but that is more of an excuse than anything else given that Autonomy rebelling against Connect is something like four or five big assumptions deep and we know absolutely nothing about whether Mercy is rebelling against Feeling or, most speculative of all, that Valor is rebelling against Existing. Something like an overcorrection to a Command does make some kind of thematic sense, where the second Command's opposition to the first causes something like a slingshot effect, but there's certainly no in-world justification for any of it. What you pointed out here, though: feels to me to be something of a much more grounded possibility. I'd thought that Ruin and Preservation were definitely a push-pull pair, but like you said, perhaps they're Change-Change and Exist-Exist, and there's some sort of "double negative" relationship there which makes them appear to be opposites, yet belong together. There's an argument to be made that this is just how push-pull pairs work, or that this is a result of Ati and Leras being so close to each other for so long, but it definitely opens up the possibility that Ruin does oppose something else, like Invention or Cultivation. Primarily, because I was working under the strict assumption that Ruin and Preservation were a push-pull pair. Preservation also does seem distinctly Temporal, which almost certainly is associated with the Change Dawnshard. As Atlas pointed out, though, perhaps that's not something we should take for granted.

We know that many, many of the arcane processes in the Cosmere can be firmly categorized. We have push/pull, internal/external, and physical/mental/temporal/enhancement for metals (and perhaps other magic systems as well), we have Shard connections and percentages thereof (such as with each Surge having some percentage Honor and some percentage Cultivation), and we even have several suggestions of how Shard intents came from the four Dawnshard Intents, such as here. I now propose that literally everything arcane in the Cosmere can be put in a table of sixteen (or, for Dawnshards, four), indexed by the internal push/internal pull/external push/external pull and physical/mental/temporal/enhancement splits. I will replace “enhancement” with “spiritual” and “mental” with “cognitive”, using the Hemalurgic variations because they correspond nicely to the three realms which, as you'll soon see, is highly convenient. Let’s start with the Dawnshards. I propose that they correspond to physical/cognitive/spiritual/temporal, and separately correspond to internal pushing/internal pulling/external pulling/external pushing. We don’t have enough information to really speculate on the internal-external or push-pull polarities, but we can say that Change fits quite well with Temporal. If we check Dawnshard theories, a lot of people agree that one Dawnshard likely governs feeling, thinking, free will, or something along those lines. Common words are “Live”, “Feel”, “Think”, “Choose”, or “Decide”. Most people also think that there’s an opposing Dawnshard to Change, being something like “Exist” or “Continue”, or something to limit Change, being something like “Obey” or “Rules”. Others think that there’s something with life itself, calling it “Live” or “Be” or “Exist”. Then there’s people who think there’s something with Investiture, being “invest”, "connect", “empower”, or “soul”. I agree with most of that — I think there’s likely an “Exist” Dawnshard, which causes things in the Physical Realm to physically exist, a “Feel” Dawnshard, which causes the perception of sapient things to generate the Cognitive Realm, and an “Connect” (in the spiritual way) Dawnshard, which causes souls to exist, Investiture to connect to people, and the Spiritual Realm to exist as one big mass of Connection. The Change Dawnshard would be responsible for, on a Cosmere-wide scale, allowing Investiture to travel between the three realms and time itself to flow, as has been proposed in the past. It would also be different from the rest (since there's no real "Change Realm"): something we know is true: So this theory of Exist/Feel/Connect/Change does correspond very well to physical/cognitive/spiritual/temporal, but let’s be honest here, we came up with these Dawnshards to match, so it really means nothing. It would be far more compelling if they also happened to correspond with internal pushing/internal pulling/external pulling/external pushing, but we don’t have evidence of that yet. As such, let’s put a pin in this, and move on to the bigger thing this post will attempt to categorize: Shards. To avoid Yumi spoilers, I’ll refer to the spoiler Shard as X (and the other, perhaps more accurate, describing word as Y). I'll also assume the Wisdom/Prudence/Survival Shard exists, and I'll call it Prudence. So we have the Shards: Ambition, Autonomy, Cultivation, Devotion, Dominion, Endowment, Honor, Invention, Mercy, Odium, Preservation, Prudence, Ruin, Valor, Whimsy, and X. The push-pull law is Cosmere-wide (I remember a WoB on this, but I couldn't for the life of me find it), so if we make the guess that opposing Shards form a push-pull pair, let’s start with the one confirmed opposing pair of Shards: Ruin and Preservation. Both have a strong case for being Temporal, as Ruin is associated with entropy and Preservation is associated with resisting entropy, and them being External would make thematic sense, as their Intents are far more Cosmere-wide than most. We also see that A-Cadmium and A-Bendalloy, which slow down and speed up time, respectively, in that regard would correspond to Preservation and Ruin, and are also Temporal and External. So let’s say that Preservation is the External Pulling Temporal Shard, and Ruin is the External Pushing Temporal Shard. The other semi-known pair, Devotion and Dominion, as per this WoB, is also notable for Devotion having a kind of opposition with Odium. Devotion and Dominion seem set up as a very similar pairing to Ruin and Preservation, so I will assume they form a push-pull pair, and suggest that the semi-opposition with Odium means it's off-by-one from a push-pull pair from Devotion. The closest would be in the same physical/cognitive/spiritual/temporal region, so we’ll go with Dominion being an internal-external pair with Odium and a push-pull pair with Devotion. Odium definitely seems Cognitive and Internal, and A-zinc inflames emotions and is Pulling, so I suggest that Odium is the Internal Pulling Cognitive Shard and, therefore, Dominion is the External Pulling Cognitive Shard and Devotion is the External Pushing Cognitive Shard. Now, let’s check out some Feruchemical elements — specifically, the Spiritual ones, as some Spiritual elements definitely seem to be associated with certain Shards. Honor may correspond to Connection, and thus F-duralumin, making it the Internal Pushing Spiritual Shard, and if Autonomy does indeed correspond to Identity, as is thematically appropriate, it would then correspond to F-Aluminum, making Autonomy the Internal Pulling Spiritual Shard. This opposing nature does seem to check out, as Honor binds things together while Autonomy makes them different (and she is “is driven to divide off from the rest of [the Shards], go her own way”, according to Sazed), so they make a believable push-pull pair. While we’re on the topic of pairings, what’s the true opposing Shard to Odium? What’s Internal Pushing Cognitive? I suggest Mercy. Mercy is kind of similar to Devotion (Devotion was even theorized to be Mercy, before we even knew Mercy was a Shard), akin to how Dominion and Odium share several similarities, and Mercy decidedly opposes Odium’s hatred. Mercy may even have directly come into conflict with Odium during Ambition’s shattering, but the exact role Mercy played is unknown. Regardless, I’ll suggest that Mercy is the Internal Pushing Cognitive Shard, filling out the four Cognitive Shards. Moving on, let’s look for more prospective push-pull pairs. The remaining Shards are Ambition, Cultivation, Endowment, Invention, Prudence, Valor, Whimsy, and X. Prudence could oppose either Whimsy or X, as X can be compared to Y, but I propose that Prudence and Whimsy form a push-pull pair and Prudence and X form a one-off push-pull pair, like Odium and Devotion. This would force the three of them to be Physical shards. Whimsy and Prudence seem quite Internal, and X could definitely be External, but for who’s Pushing and who’s Pulling, we’ll have to come back later. Now, let’s go back to Temporal. As options, we have Ambition, Cultivation, Endowment, Invention, and Valor. Without relying on previous Dawnshard theories, aside from Change being the Temporal Dawnshard, we see that Cultivation (being described as “Change, regardless of where it leads” by Odium and slightly curated change by herself) fits perfectly. So what’s Cultivation’s opposing Shard? I think that it’s definitely not Endowment or Valor. Comparing Ambition and Invention, Invention seems much more tied to Change, and Invention could also be viewed as “artificial change” as opposed to Cultivation’s “natural change”, so I am comfortable saying Invention and Cultivation are the Internal Temporal Shards. As F-gold heals, and is Internal Temporal Pulling, I feel somewhat confident in saying Cultivation is the Internal Pulling Temporal Shard and Invention is the Internal Pushing Temporal Shard. Moving back to Spiritual, we have Ambition, Endowment, and Valor. Endowment’s Intent involves giving gifts or bestowing powers, and moreover Awakening is the art of putting Investiture into an inanimate object and brining it to life, which does correspond well with FH-nicrosil, and A-nicrosil can also be viewed as bestowing power upon a target. It’s a tenuous connection, but I’ll put Endowment as the External Pushing Spiritual Shard. To oppose Endowment, I suggest Ambition, as Ambition is about consolidating power to exert one’s will over others, as opposed to distributing power to others to do with as they wish, and so I’ll put Ambition as the External Pulling Spiritual Shard. How could Ambition correspond to Fortune or Destiny? Honestly, I don't really think it does. Maybe the idea of looking towards the future, trying to become the best and most powerful that you can be? That would be quite ironic seeing as Ambition had the shortest future of any Shard. Finally, this puts Valor as the External Physical Shard opposing X. I’ll be honest, unless Valor’s Intent isn’t exactly “valor”, similar to Odium also involving non-hatred emotions and X being closer to Y, this one doesn’t make a ton of sense. Perhaps Valor can be considered function-over-form in a way that X is more form-over-function. I suppose this does fit quite well with X being External Whimsy, since it would make Valor External Prudence, but it is a large assumption to think that Valor's true Intent might be more "practicality" or "utility". So who’s Push and who’s Pull? Because AFH-tin deals with senses, while AFH-pewter deals with strength, I’ll say that Whimsy and X are Pull, like tin, and Prudence and Valor are Push, like pewter. This is the most tenuous connection so far, so I would not personally take a lot of store in it. This gives us a final categorizing of: PHYSICAL Pushing Pulling Pulling Pushing COGNITIVE External Valor X Dominion Devotion External Internal Prudence Whimsy Odium Mercy Internal Internal Honor Autonomy Cultivation Invention Internal External Endowment Ambition Preservation Ruin External SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pulling Pushing TEMPORAL At this point, I will “fix” this table, and take stock of all of its patterns. If it is remotely correct, it will be consistent, and hopefully will also share patterns with the Dawnshard categorization above. So let’s start with opposing push-pull pairs: Valor and X: This makes sense, if Valor doesn’t exactly mean “valor” and instead is more like “practicality” or "utility", as suggested above, which would properly oppose Y. Prudence and Whimsy: This makes a lot of sense, as Prudence is thinking through things while Whimsy is not really thinking at all. Dominion and Devotion: This is (semi) canonical. Odium and Mercy: This makes a lot of sense, as hating things and being merciful to them are entirely different. Honor and Autonomy: This makes sense, as Honor binds things together and makes them obey rules, while Autonomy splits things apart and breaks rules. Ambition and Endowment: This makes sense, as Ambition is about gathering power and using it while Endowment is about giving power out for others to use. Cultivation and Invention: This makes sense, if you look at their change from the natural/unnatural and willing/forced perspectives. Preservation and Ruin: This is canonical. Not bad. Let’s check how the proposed one-off push-pull pairs are doing: Whimsy and Valor: This makes sense, if Valor is indeed “practicality” or "utility", as Whimsy isn't very practical or useful at all. Prudence and X: This makes some sense, perhaps in the “STEM vs performing arts” sort of way. Dominion and Mercy: This makes a lot of sense, as controlling and Dominating something is very rarely a form of Mercy. Odium and Devotion: This is (semi) canonical. Honor and Ambition: This makes a little sense, as Honor is about following the rules even when it disadvantages you, while Ambition often demands you break the rules for your own advantage. Endowment and Autonomy: This doesn’t make much sense. Autonomy endows things with power and makes them her avatars, but it’s a stretch. Endowment is also fairly Autonomous, as she refuses to help Hoid and thinks Shards should all stay separate. Cultivation and Ruin: This makes a lot of sense, as both want change, but Cultivation wants “positive” change while Ruin wants “negative” change. Preservation and Invention: This makes some sense, as Invention often includes an element of “out with the old, in with the new”, and definitely is an element of change. There’s one pairing that doesn’t quite hold up. There’s an emergent pattern I noticed here, where Shards often display the Intent of the other Shard in their internal/external pair. So let’s check those out: Valor and Prudence: We know nothing about these Shards. X and Whimsy: Whimsy we know nothing about, but X definitely acted in a “whimsical” matter, wandering around the Cosmere and Dominion and Odium: All we know of Dominion is that the Skaze are quite hateful, but Odium definitely exhibits the desire to dominate. Devotion and Mercy: Aside from thematic similarities, Devotion’s voice in her Perpendicularity was extremely merciful. Honor and Endowment: Honor very famously endowed some famous people with powers, but admittedly not moreso than many Shards. Bonds do endow people with powers, though, and they are highly associated with Honor. Endowment, meanwhile, does believe that Devotion and Dominion deserved what they got because they broke the rules, which is something, but not much. Autonomy and Ambition: We don’t know much about Ambition showing Autonomy, aside from potentially minding its own business before Odium showed up, but boy oh boy do we see Autonomy displaying a ton of Ambition. Cultivation and Preservation: Both share an interest in creation and protection, but this is also quite weak. Invention and Ruin: Ruin is quite inventive, but this is very weak. Three out of eight aren’t particularly strong, which isn’t great but isn’t absolutely terrible. Certainly when it does hold, it tends to hold very well, but this isn't particularly convincing in and of itself. So now, let’s go back to the Dawnshards, and “plug them in”. Let’s look at Change. What’s the “truest” Shard of Change? Odium seems to claim Cultivation is, but Ruin claims that he is, saying “Life is change, and I represent that change”, and I personally believe Ruin on this one, so I'll make Change the External Pushing Dawnshard. Similarly, Honor must surely be the “truest” Shard of Connecting, which would make Connect the Internal Pushing Dawnshard. For Feel, I think Odium is the clear choice as the “truest” Shard of Feeling, which would make Feel the Internal Pulling Dawnshard, and that would then force Exist to be the External Pulling Dawnshard. This makes X the “truest” Shard of Existing, which I think would make both Hoid and Brandon very happy. This then gives us a full “history” of the Shards, if we assume that the Physical/Cognitive/Spiritual/Change split happened first. PHYSICAL Pushing Pulling Pulling Pushing COGNITIVE External Valor Exist, then Change X Exist, then Exist Dominion Feel, then Exist Devotion Feel, then Change External Internal Prudence Exist, then Connect Whimsy Exist, then Feel Odium Feel, then Feel Mercy Feel, then Connect Internal Internal Honor Connect, then Connect Autonomy Connect, then Feel Cultivation Change, then Feel Invention Change, then Connect Internal External Endowment Connect, then Change Ambition Connect, then Exist Preservation Change, then Exist Ruin Change, then Change External SPIRITUAL Pushing Pulling Pulling Pushing TEMPORAL Checking these against the suggestions here, this does align somewhat, though the most notable difference is Preservation not being Exist, then Exist — at least, at the end of the day, Preservation ended up having Exist as the second split, but the notion of having Ruin and Preservation as a push-pull pair does prevent that entirely. Coming up with some kind of thematic justification for each of these: Valor, if "practicality" or "utility" more closely aligns with the Intent, is about changing to match existence, doing what works in a way that makes sense. X, as Y more closely aligns with the Intent, is about the true purpose of existence (as someone like Brandon might see it, that is). Prudence is about connecting with existence, understanding it and acting accordingly. Whimsy is about feeling existence out, doing whatever takes your fancy. Dominion is about imposing your feelings upon an area or people, bending them to your will. Devotion is about changing how you act based on your feelings, with empathy and the desire to serve. Odium is about raw, unfettered feeling. Mercy is about feeling a connection with something, and then acting accordingly. Honor is about pure connection, being bound to rules and bound to each other. Autonomy is about having your own feelings, despite your connection to others. Endowment is about connecting with things, and changing them through that connection. Ambition is about taking your connections and seizing what exists? I don't know about this one, I'll be honest with you. Cultivation is about change in accordance with one's feelings, letting things evolve how they see fit. Invention is about change from observed connections, creating new things from existing principles. Preservation is about imposing your will upon change, halting it. I also don't know about this one. Ruin is about the purest essence of change. There are a couple more emergent patterns now that I'll note: Change and Exist oppose each other, as do Feel and Connect. With this, we see that the two Shards we know much about whose second Dawnshard split opposes their first both do not want to follow the command of their first Dawnshard: Preservation does not want things to Change, instead preferring that they remain stationary, and Autonomy does not want things to Connect, instead preferring that they remain separate. Perhaps Mercy would prefer that things not Feel, and Valor would prefer that things...not Exist? I'll be honest, I'm not feeling that last one. That sort of concept would honestly work better with X, as Y is about making things that don't exist and X did in fact do that thing I spoilered earlier. If we did swap X and Valor, though, then that would make "the true purpose of existence" something far more mundane and less Brandon-y, and we would likely also have to swap Prudence and Whimsy to match the other patterns, and I don't see how Exist->Connect and Exist->Feel would work particularly well for Whimsy and Prudence. Perhaps Valor actually does want to stop things from existing because it's the nihilistic "pragmatic" thing to do. Perhaps this pattern is entirely accidental and I'm just reading too much into things as, debatably, I've been doing this entire time. The final pattern we'll look at is flipping over the Dawnshard axis: We've looked at the external-internal and push-pull oppositions, so now let's compare pairs of Shards across the Physical-Temporal and Cognitive-Spiritual oppositions and see how closely related they are. Valor and Ruin: If Valor is, in fact, secretly desiring the end of all existence, that direction works. Going the other way, Ruin does also claim to be practical and pragmatic, saying that he's inevitable, necessary, and outright beneficial. If Valor is really Valor, then, well, this one makes zero sense. X and Preservation: Y is often a form of preservation, and Preservation definitely finds things that withstand the test of time (like truly great Y) beautiful. Prudence and Invention: Thematically, both deal with reality and thinking about it the right way in order to come up with the "right" solution. Just with Invention, that solution is something new. We don't know much about the Shards themselves, though. Whimsy and Cultivation: We don't know if Whimsy likes to cultivate things, but Cultivation definitely lets things follow their whims when growing. Dominion and Ambition: You rarely find ambition without the desire to dominate, and you never find the desire to dominate without at least some ambition. Devotion and Endowment: Giving powers to people does align with Devotion's Intent, and Devotion's desire to help and serve may be somehow related to the unusually high endowment of Investiture that Elantrians have. This one's weak, though. Odium and Autonomy: Odium is stated to want to remain pure, which definitely aligns with Autonomy's Intent. He also rewards those with great Passion, who stand out and prove themselves -- very much like Autonomy. Autonomy, meanwhile, definitely seems to hate anything that doesn't go her way, and is bitterly envious of anything or anyone that beats her in any way, such as how she wanted all of Scadrial just because they were technologically advanced and because she was intimidated by Harmony (at least, if you believe Shai). Mercy and Honor: If we go with the idea that Mercy wants everything to stop Feeling, they do align somewhat during Honor's decline, where he cared more for the oath or bond itself than the meaning or virtue behind it. But this is weak. All in all, an interesting pattern, but not one that'll convince you or me that this is all correct. If anything, the recurring issues with the Physical quadrant make me pretty convinced that I've done something wrong somewhere. So, to sum up, my suggested Shard and Dawnshard tables: PHYSICAL (EXIST) Pushing Pulling Pulling Pushing COGNITIVE (FEEL) External Valor Exist, then Change X Exist, then Exist Dominion Feel, then Exist Devotion Feel, then Change External Internal Prudence Exist, then Connect Whimsy Exist, then Feel Odium Feel, then Feel Mercy Feel, then Connect Internal Internal Honor Connect, then Connect Autonomy Connect, then Feel Cultivation Change, then Feel Invention Change, then Connect Internal External Endowment Connect, then Change Ambition Connect, then Exist Preservation Change, then Exist Ruin Change, then Change External SPIRITUAL (CONNECT) Pushing Pulling Pulling Pushing TEMPORAL (CHANGE) Pushing Pulling External Change Exist Internal Connect Feel I have no solid evidence for the vast majority of this. Especially the "Valor is secretly Utility and is also the ultimate final BBEG of the Cosmere that wants total annihilation" bit which has precisely zero justification aside from these patterns which, I must remind you, I have essentially made up. As such I am open to any and all suggestions because I doubt I'm more qualified to speculate than you. EDIT: I have encountered this WoB which, in the framing of "the Exist, then Change Shard likely is nihilistic and wants everything to stop existing", seems to be compelling evidence that Prudence is actually this shard: This, however, seems to largely contradict the notion that Whimsy and Prudence are internal. Moreover, it goes against the very Sandersonian idea that art and beauty are the truest purpose of existence. I would be strongly remiss if I didn't at least mention this, though.

Yeah, very hard to say. I doubt we will see anything definitive on that topic anytime soon either. There I was referring to the spren breaking a potential Nahel Bond forced through applying extremely high amounts of Connection. But yes, it seems like you need to steal the Connection from the Radiant and then the power itself from the spren if you want to get an unbreakable Nahel Bond with, in a way, yourself. Perhaps this actually does give a valid reason to Compound Connection, though. If it indeed can force a Nahel Bond, and then you spike the power from the spren while it's active, you could avoid needing to spike a Radiant or find a bonded spren -- you would just need to find any suitable spren, blast them with Connection, spike them, and now you're done. Many "ifs" necessary, but it does seem like an appalling thing to do were it possible.

Huh, that seems entirely plausible. I suppose the only thing to be worried about is picking the right metal to burn -- if you accidentally pick the non-Allomantic metal, you'll get very sick then, possibly, blow up. I would think that risk could be avoided by swallowing the non-Allomantic metal first, noting the "feel" of the metal, then swallowing the metal-wrapped Harmonium, and only burning the new one. If Harmonium is comparable to an alkali metal, it would cause severe burns to skin and especially mucosal tissue. Even sodium, which is much far, far less reactive than Harmonium, would horribly burn your mouth -- I would not recommend putting Harmonium in your mouth, even if you are careful to dry it out as much as possible. This is a fantastic idea. Regardless of the answer, it's extremely useful. Even if Harmonium isn't a God Metal that anyone can burn, the Kandra do have Lerasium now. Though I'd imagine that Sazed knows full and well what Harmonium actually does, so likely wouldn't be amenable to such a plan.

Though it was not directly tested, both Odium's anti-Tone and Tone were not mentioned to have any effect upon the Raysium in the dagger. We also only see anti-Investiture creation with pure gaseous Investiture, and it took a not insignificant volume to affect said Investiture, which would lead me to think that affecting liquid and solid Investiture would take far more sound. Affecting Investiture in an Invested piece of metal seems even harder, if it is even possible at all, and since the Investiture that you find in a Hemalurgic spike is ripped directly from the soul, which may in fact be entirely unkeyed from any Shard, it starts to seem more and more impractical. So, if it is possible to use Tones to affect other forms of Investiture, and if it is possible to affect the Investiture in Invested objects in the same way, and if it is reasonably practical to do so, and if it is possible to do this to the Investiture found in a Hemalurgic spike, and if the process itself wouldn't involve the Hemalurgic spike ever being uninvested (despite it probably not being possible to have a piece of metal be Invested and anti-Invested at the same time, implying there would have to be some moment where it is neither), and if the process wouldn't otherwise make the spike no longer function Hemalurgically (in other words, not just be an anti-invested piece of metal), and if all of this is practical to do, then it could be possible. Personally I think that this is unlikely to be doable, and less likely to be a practical way of sending anti-Investiture into someone's Spiritweb.

That is what I would personally think the most likely outcome would be. It is conceivable that, if you force enough Connection to artificially form a Nahel Bond, due to the special properties of that type of Connection, it will snap into being and last even when you stop tapping Connection, but not only does that seem improbable but it is also not particularly helpful as, I would imagine, the spren in question would be highly unnerved and would promptly sever the bond and flee in terror. As you said, spiking would be far more accessible. The only real applications I can think of are forming very temporary Nahel Bonds with unbonded spren for Surgebinding purposes or using the temporary bond to kill the spren, but I think a duralumin Compounder can do much better things with their time than assassinating the Nightwatcher.

This statement exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of logic so profound that it, again, seems manufactured. Never, at any point, have I claimed that my idea is proven or true. I have only claimed that it is not disproven and not false. The fact that you are claiming to not understand this makes it very clear to me that you too are not acting in good faith, so I will also cease responding to you in this matter as well.

Strictly speaking, Compounding Connection has unknown, potentially very mysterious effects. It can also force a bond between the Compounder and a Kandra. It is entirely possible that tapping an incredible amount of Connection could indeed create a Nahel Bond, though I would not wager money on it.

I do have high standards of proof and disproof, since those notions are of absolute, demonstrable certainty. To that end, the evidence is insufficient, except regarding Ruin and Preservation swapping Invested Arts, which was indeed disproven. I don't think this is is necessary -- material would be more easily gathered from the star and Investing a planet is something Shards can just do if they want, as seen with Autonomy's invasion. There is also the innate Connection of making or shaping something, which is a powerful one. Agreed. I also believe that it is likely one particular kind of Shardblade will have precisely the "ideal" mixture. I am very sorry, but I cannot rationalize this kind of statement with any kind of good-faith discussion. I can think of no other explanation than an attempt at deliberate misrepresentation, which is extremely saddening given that you are clearly passionate about the subject. You deliberately assume a contradiction, then say "oh look, a contradiction", and continue to do this despite being informed that you are doing so. It is like seeing a statement of "x = sqrt(9)", hearing someone say "there's some evidence that x = -3, and that statement could be interpreted in a way that allows x to be negative", then promptly declaring "well x = 3 so you think 3 = -3". I'm sorry, but despite my attempts at good faith, this is clearly not a good faith discussion. So I'll not engage with it further, beyond saying that can be interpreted as being a reference to the internal power that Allomancers have, not an external source, though it is a significant stretch. That statement represents the single most convincing piece of evidence against Compounding not drawing Investiture solely from the metalmind that you or Firesong have come up with so far, and by a significant margin.

I agree completely. From

Given that the Investiture is traveling from the Spiritual Realm to the Physical Realm (or, I suppose, the Cognitive if you're spiking someone there) I would assume it has to, since it's moving Investiture and thus "kinetic". Bronze will detect someone summoning a Shardblade, after all, which is a similar realm transfer.

Firstly, this is not stated as the reason, or even remotely implied. Secondly, alloys of god metals work the same way, proving that burning an object that isn't pure Investiture can indeed cause the power to be sourced directly, though of course the base metal is alloyed with pure Investiture here. You even have agreed that if you Compound, you use the Investiture in the metalmind as part of your fuel: You state that you believe that you do get back Investiture from the metalmind. You state that you are not saying that all of the Investiture from Compounding comes from Preservation. But here you are attempting to equate it with a circumstance where it does all come from Preservation! I apologize for the insult, but given that you state the difference in one sentence and then claim it doesn't exist in the next, saying "So I do believe that my b's are equivalent", I really do not understand how you are coming up with this. You are directly saying that there is a difference before saying that there is no difference in the next sentence. Perhaps an argument could be made that the difference is insignificant, but that is absolutely impossible when the entire purpose of the distinction is to say that Compounding uses Investiture which is not of Preservation, a fact which, I must remind you again, you say you agree with and that nobody is disagreeing with. I claim that Compounding draws Investiture from the metalmind. You claim that Compounding draws Investiture from the metalmind. I conjecture that the Investiture in the metalmind is attached to Ruin, and that Compounding only draws Investiture from the metalmind. You then, for some inexplicable reason, with statements that contradict each other quite literally from one sentence to the next, declare that there is some implication from this that normal Allomancy draws Investiture only from Ruin. Just to hammer it into the ground and ensure that there is no conceivable way that this misrepresentation of my argument could possibly continue in good faith: We agree that burning an uninvested metal draws 100% of its investiture from Preservation. We agree that burning a metalmind draws 100-N% of its investiture from Preservation, and N% from the metalmind itself. I conjecture that this N% is 100%, and that investiture in a metalmind is of Ruin. This implies that burning a metalmind draws 100% of its investiture from Ruin. This does not imply that burning an uninvested metal draws 100% of its investiture from Ruin. This does not imply that the investiture in a metalmind would show up when burning an uninvested metal. This does not imply that Investiture of Preservation is no longer used when burning an uninvested metal. Put another way: We agree that the pool of Investiture inside a metalmind is entirely divorced from the reservoir of Preservation's Investiture that normal Allomancy draws from. I conjecture that this pool of Investiture is all that is used when Compounding. I conjecture that this pool of Investiture is entirely of Ruin. Therefore, I conjecture that the Investiture which is used when Compounding is entirely of Ruin. If this pool of Investiture was entirely of Preservation, I would thus say that the Investiture which is used when Compounding is entirely of Preservation. If this pool of Investiture was of Ruin but it only made up half of the Investiture used when Compounding, I would thus say that the Investiture used when Compounding is half of Preservation and half of Ruin. At no point do I ever conjecture that the reservoir of Preservation's Investiture that normal Allomancy draws from is a metalmind. At no point do I ever conjecture that the reservoir of Preservation's Investiture that normal Allomancy draws from is ever not of Preservation. At no point do I ever conjecture that Investiture from metalminds is ever used when burning an uninvested metal. At no point do I ever conjecture that any Investiture from Ruin is ever used when burning an uninvested metal. And yet you claim, repeatedly, that I have. I will say that I have only skimmed the other two posts at this point, so I apologize if I missed a spot where Alder corrected you, but I feel as if some extra redundancy would be warranted anyways.

No, my argument was that it is not a certainty that Compounding draws that energy from Preservation -- that there is no need for "extra energy". Yours is that it is a certainty. This is a very severe logical error. If an effect is gained through Allomancy, there is no global implication that it is fueled by the Shard that fuels Allomancy. The counterexample is, as previously stated, god metals and their alloys, which are fueled by their internal investiture. That is where this is wrong: That WoB directly states that god metals and their alloys are entirely internally fueled by the Investiture in the metal. This is strongly implied to be a result of the Investiture itself, which thus implies that any Invested metal would similarly be entirely or partially internally fueled. The existence of god metals and their alloys, though, is enough to contract your implication, much moreso than it just not being a true implication. Whenever constructing a proof, especially with logical notation, it is imperative that you remain consistent. For example, if attempting to show that a→b and b→c, giving you a→c, it is absolutely critical that your bs are equivalent. If they are not, then those implications are meaningless. We know for a fact that "you are burning an uninvested metal" → "you are drawing power from Preservation". You attempt to say that "you are burning a metal" → "you are drawing power from Preservation". This, from the text, would be neither confirmed nor contradicted, making its validity unclear. However, from the WoB, burning a god metal or its alloys do not, in fact, necessarily draw power from Preservation. Therefore, "you are burning a metal" /→ "you are drawing power from Preservation", leaving us with the only firm implication being "you are burning an uninvested metal" → "you are drawing power from Preservation". This causes your argument to fall apart as my claim, "you are burning an invested metal" → "you are drawing power from the metal, and not Preservation", therefore is not a contradiction as "you are burning an invested metal" \→ "you are burning a metal" and thus "you are burning a metal" \→ "you are drawing power from Preservation". Worth noting is, of course, there is also no confirmation that my implication is accurate, making its validity unclear. But my point is not that it is confirmed, as the existence of vaguely supporting evidence is not confirmation, rather that it is not contradicted, just as the existence of vaguely opposing evidence is not contradiction. I hope that makes sense. Rather ironically, this is actually something I worked out as more justification for my "you are drawing in power from an external source to fuel Feruchemy" theory, then scrapped because I thought it was too long and confusing. It is certainly entirely possible that, as you suggest, both the energy and Investiture gained from Feruchemy is done through energy conversion from minuscule amounts of matter. My own calculations were similar to yours, though a little more generic. For reference: Here's what I came up with (assume all units are metric): You can play around with the values with this calculator: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/5gj2ygthkg if you want. With a fairly reasonable scenario (Wax weighs 70 kg, his metalmind weighs 0.1kg, and he goes to 10% weight for five seconds), you can get up to a thousand picograms of mass lost. I would also point out that, over the course of the theoretical experiment, he moved over a kilometer. You can do, pound-for-time, far better, but then I'm not confident at all that such an idealized experiment would give a reasonable approximation. If you assume that this mass conversion happens irrespective of any changing potential energy (so even if Wax wasn't getting pulled up by a rope mass would still be consumed), it still isn't good: it would take over 150 years to reduce a metalmind by a gram if you were at 10% weight for the entire duration. So, all in all, the notion of the excess energy (and potentially investiture) being created via consuming matter in the metalmind is reasonable -- I really didn't consider that we could be converting matter in my earlier posts, so it could absolutely be that. I thought it would be as efficient as Lift's matter-to-Investiture conversion, but there's nothing to say that what she does is in any way efficient or doesn't use the same nutrition-to-Investiture thing that Feruchemy can allow for. I'd say it also fits much better with the WoBs that say Feruchemy's power is derived entirely internally, and it's not even incompatible with Compounding deriving its power from the metalmind's Investiture. Since my suggestion that Feruchemy uses large amounts of external Investiture in order to store the power relies upon an interpretation of numerous WoBs as only saying that the "stored" power of Feruchemy need be derived internally, not necessarily the "storing" power, I have to therefore admit that your suggestion is more likely than mine even if it feels less thematic to me. Both are possible, of course, but yours is consistent with even the strictest interpretations of those WoBs. Those WoBs say, explicitly, that Allomancy overcharges the Feruchemical process in Compounding and that normal Allomancy uses Preservation's power. As stated above, this is not a direct implication. That WoB seems a bit questionable. Going with this one would likely be better: as it seems a bit inconsistent with the supposed followup. These quotes make me quite concerned, given that metalminds having additional Investiture pulled from an external source was the core point of my post. These quotes also make me quite concerned, given that according to a WoB you yourself posted and the Bands of Mourning was simply a full metalmind, and by the very nature of being full it was "close" to being considered a shard, which does seem to imply that unless shardblades are extremely far away from the threshold of being a shard and that threshold requires, as you put it, a "tiny amount of investiture", a full metalmind is indeed relatively close to a shardblade and icontains a lot of Investiture. I will admit that me calling it "disproven" was something of a dig at Alder's standards of proof and disproof. Lifebinding being an entirely new magic system on Roshar would be quite the shock, given that it has never been so much as alluded to by anything or anyone. I would imagine it would count as a "major" system, yet things like this really seem to discount it as a probability. Saying Lifebinding exists and is entirely different from Fabrials and Old Magic would require an interpretation far, far more liberal than any I made to claim things like Feruchemy being of Ruin or Compounding requiring no external energy. Do we have confirmation that the surges on Roshar did not exist on Ashyn prior to Ishar getting his Honorblade? All I can find are WoBs stating the exact opposite. The closest I can find to something which remotely agrees with you is this But even then, it is entirely consistent with Elsecalling, as the surge of transportation, being the more-or-less the same (just less controlled), while Elsecallers (the Radiants, which only existed post-Ishar) didn't exist yet. Honor bound the surges, limiting their uses, and Ishar made the Radiants, limiting their users. We have absolutely no idea if that's true or not. One might immediately conjecture that doing so would have had incredible ramifications, including allowing more than 16 invested arts. If the Shattering produced, say, 32 shards, perhaps there would be 32 Allomantic metals. That is indeed entirely possible. Moreover, I'd even go so far as to call it likely. However, some of these "less energetic attributes" were known to fill or almost-fill metalminds, such as with Sazed's tin rings, meaning that, once again, we're not talking about tiny, insignificant amounts of Investiture.