darniil

Also, there's nothing that says that their rest has to end, that they have to get back to doing something not-restful. Maybe they're just going to hang with Sazed for a while, and then move on to What's Next. Or maybe there's some crap going down in the Cognitive Realm that they need to deal with off-camera. Wouldn't that be funky. Either way, I don't think we'll be seeing any more of them, except maybe as legends.

I'm giving it a shot this year. No idea how it's going to turn out, but apparently that doesn't matter. Same username as here.

Okay, thanks. My reasoning was that, once the Splinter (the Divine Breath) was invested in a human, the two (the Splinter + human; the Returned) would be a Sliver. Re-reading the wiki article, I see where I got mixed up.

Endowment is not splintered, but the Returned are Slivers of Endowment, much like TLR was a Sliver of Preservation after using the Well. (Someone correct me if I'm getting my terms mixed up.)

Ah, ok. Misunderstanding corrected. Now we should feast on leftover Halloween candy.

o.O!! That is mildly frightening. Not what I remember from my dream, but still frightening nonetheless. Also frightening is the fact that you were able to pull that right out of the Intertubez. (For the record, I've never seen Hitch.)

No, four generations is a short time. A "generation" isn't an accurate measure of time, of course, since it's more designed to measure, um, genetic replication(?). But four generations could be anywhere from 75-125 years. That is a short time. 41 centuries, however, is much closer to what I would have imagined.

Well, since you bring up Cultivation, perhaps the crem could be related to that Shard. After all, the flora of Roshar seems to use it as food. That could fall under Cultivation's purview.

Well, when it comes to this purpose, the only answer that matters is "Whatever your GM says."

That's not exactly how I imagined them, but it works.

Incorrigible Punslinger. Do not incorrige.

That makes sense, but it just seems (to me) like an incredibly short time, like everything (Shard-wise) is happening at a very quick pace. /shrug

Thanks for the update. I stopped by a local comics shop today to see if were possible that they could order me a hard-copy. The guy there said he'd have to check on it. At least now I know I won't be able to get it until (apparently) well after the 8th.

Ah, right. That makes sense. And the charge would decay a bit, once outside of a body, but if one were quick, an inquisitor could get a new power simply by stealing a spike from another inquisitor. Hmm. It's mentioned that a hemalurgic spike outside of a body will lose its charge to a decay, something that reminded me of the decay of a radioactive metal, but what about a spike within a corpse? Like, the spikes in the inquisitor that Kelsier killed - would those spikes retain their charges as long as they were within the body, or would they decay quicker in a corpse than they would in a living body?

No, I mean the dialect as a whole, not that one line.

Which in turn makes me wonder if one could make a hemalurgical spike from an inquisitor. There'd probably be additional decay, so it wouldn't be worth the effort.

Ah, nice. Yeah, I'd remembered the gist of that second paragraph, but I'd forgotten about the first. That first paragraph is obviously Preservation's ideal state of things, but obviously Ruin had other plans and things got off-kilter. The second paragraph definitely speaks to how things would have gone from TFE forward, but neither of them, IMO, speaks to how things were from Alendi's time back to the beginning. Well, maybe it hints at it. You'd have to be a Seeker to feel the pulses of the Well, but that doesn't mean others couldn't have found it - accidentally or by being led there - and then followed Preservation's desire to renew the prison. (Aren't we told that Rashek was able to learn exactly what was going on when he immersed himself in the Well's powers?) I also seem to recall something - maybe from Alendi's journal? - indicating that Preservation's mists weren't always around, that there was a time (perhaps a long time) when Scadrial could have easily been mistaken for Earth. I get the impression that Preservation's mists were something new and sudden in Alendi's time. Perhaps not within his lifetime, but at least within a generation of his birth. Grr. I'd really like to get some kind of an answer from Brandon on this, so that I can at least know if I'm on the right track or completely wrong. Exact years aren't even needed. Even something along the lines of "Humanity existed only a few centuries/millennia before Rashek" would suffice. That may not tell us how long Preservation and Ruin were dancing back and forth, poking each other with sticks, but it would at least let us know about how long the pact had existed.

Okay, so now I wonder: did Brandon pull a Tolkien and invent his own "language" (read: slang), or was this based off of something that Brandon was already familiar with? (Great catch, by the way. Sounds just like Spook's dialect.)

You could say "16 types of ferrings, 1 type of feruchemist". That would be analogous.

I had a thought regarding this. This "false trail" - from what we the readers know, the "false trail" seems to mean "They think I'm around the Purelake, but I'm really at the Shattered Plains." (This, of course, requires that the letter is written some time around the events of WoK, and not much, much earlier.) What if the "false trail" referred to, when the letter was written, means "They think I'm on Nalthis, but I'm really on Roshar", and that Hoid doesn't know that Galladon and the others have successfully trailed him to Roshar? No way to prove it either way, I know, but just something interesting that popped into my head. Hoid seems crafty, though, and has much more experience than Galladon, so I'd actually be a little surprised if Galladon and the others managed to get one up on Hoid without the latter knowing. Another thought that popped into my head. Brandon knows what we're like. He knows we'll do this very thing - try to analyze every single word that he wrote in an attempt to figure things out before it's all spelled out for us. It wouldn't surprise me if he put a line like this in there, intending its use to be literal, while we initially gloss over it as a simple insult. Hiding something in plain sight, as it were. "Hee hee, I'm actually telling them outright that the recipient is a reptile, but they're going to think the writer is just insulting the recipient. /cackle" So yeah, I too am leaning towards the dragon idea.

Template Inquisitor, IMO.

Regarding the two working together to create life, part of it, I'm sure, deals with simple "I don't like you, so I'm not going to let you do what you want" attitude. Also, though, even if Ruin didn't actively oppose, Preservation by its nature couldn't create. Creating life would not be preserving the current state of no-life, so Ruin's influence would be needed to change the no-life state. At this point, Leras obviously still had some of his mind left - while he could desire to create, he didn't have the power to do so on his own.

I'm not entirely sure why - maybe because of Jordan and WoT - but when I read Brandon's books, I always thought that there was a long, long time between "the beginning" and the events in the novels. For example, I remember being stunned when someone pointed out to me that Hoid's history lesson in Warbreaker only went back a few centuries. I thought it was at least a few millennia. Similarly, my current feeling is that Preservation's betrayal of Ruin was many millennia in the past. (And part of that is the thought that it take a long time to mold a mind to its Shard, and Leras wouldn't have been able to make the betrayal if he was fully Preservation. (Although, why would he have had to betray Ati if Ati wasn't fully Ruin? I guess that might be attributed to Preservation's greater clairvoyance, so Leras would have foreseen how Ati what Ati would have become.)) All of this together is why I've been thinking that the Well produced one bead of Lerasium every "cycle" rather than a bunch of them being made all at once by Preservation. We don't have any in-world evidence about what would happen if nobody used the Well every 1024 years, so there's no way to tell if many cycles happened and someone used it every cycle, or if few cycles happened. Brandon's mention of the Deepness, however, is interesting. And I think that part of deducing the age of mankind on Scadrial would lie in knowing how long it took Ruin to distort the mists of Preservation into the Deepness.

I've been meaning to try to fix that for a while now, but never got around to it. Part of my delay was because that article predated my arrival here, so I wasn't sure which thread it was referring to. My best guess is that it's referring to this thread, though I could be wrong.