darniil

I was going to post this on the Talk page for Aona's Shard, but I figured I might get more eyes here rather than there. The intent listed here - Aona's Shard seeks to care after its people. - makes sense if the Shard was Compassion, but Brandon has said the Shard's intent was closer to Devotion. The two concepts are similar, but not identical. While Karata was showing great compassion to the children, Taan didn't show any compassion to the sculptures, reliefs, and other artwork. I would even be hard-pressed to explain how Saolin was being compassionate. They all were, however, very devoted to something or someone. Consequently, I would think that the intent would be more along the lines of "the (mostly)* complete giving of oneself for the advancement of something/someone else". After all, we were also told that morally good people were not the only ones taken by the Shaod; some "bad" people were taken, too. * Normally I would just say "complete giving", but that also brings up images of cloistered monks/nuns, and I don't see evidence that the Shaod requires quite that much devotion.

That's assuming that Odium knows about Harmony. I'm sure he knew about Preservation and Ruin, but he may have put those two on a back-burner while he dealt with others first. (Since they so perfectly countered each other, odds are they wouldn't focus their attentions anywhere else.) He may not have any updated information about Scadrial yet. I'm sure if we knew how Adonalsium shattered, we'd be able to figure out the weaknesses in the other Shards. It's possible that Odium may not have exploited a weakness in the intent of those Shards he's killed*, but rather a weakness that's universal to the Shards of Adonalsium - perhaps something related to the weakness that allowed Adonalsium to be shattered in the first place. And while Harmony would definitely be a force to be reckoned with - especially with Sazed's mind behind it - Odium has lots of experience with his Shard, and he also has three confirmed kills already under his belt. He won't be easily opposed, even by someone holding two Shards. * To elaborate, Honor might have a unique weakness-in-intent to dishonor, "Devotion" might have a weakness to indifference, Endowment to greed, Cultivation to decay. (Preservation and Ruin were probably each other's weakness, considering how they annihilated each other when Vin confronted Ruin.)

If only Parlin had this. (As an aside, I am now newly amused by the "Insert Link" button when posting.

Now that is an interesting thought. Although, it does bring up an interesting question about something mentioned in AoL:

We've speculated on here before that iron feruchemy probably grants a tiny bit of (pewter-)strength to compensate for the added weight, but what about a gold spike? What is aging (in the sense of progressing towards death by old age)? A steady degradation of the body. What does gold do? It heals. It's a stretch, I admit, but it just jumped into my head as I read this thread, so I thought I'd bring it up.

That's because he never spoke to the old man in a cave. He was never warned that it was dangerous to go alone.

Those quotes sound like a pretty solid "Wait and see" kind of thing. :-/ Ah, well.

Yes, I remember Raoden saying that his Seon seemed less chatty, or otherwise different than it was before his change.

(Nitpick: Aona, not Skai. The Seons are tied to her, and the Skaze(?) are tied to Skai.) Hopefully we'll get some more information when the next Elantris book comes out. I wonder if perhaps the Seons are what Aona's Shard shattered into, considering how devoted they are to their masters. ... Hmm, no, that seems like too much of a stretch. They have aons within them for a reason. I guess there's a chance that Aona's Shard shattered into the aons themselves, (Brandon did say that shattered fragments could have their own versions of intents, and each aon symbolizes something, perhaps akin to how a Shard "symbolizes" an intent), but if there were ur-Elantrians (I like that term) before Odium's arrival, that would negate the possibility of Aona shattering into the aons.

Yeah, I think Brandon RAFOed the tattoo question. I like your idea about Odium annihilating the original Elantrians, the ones who built the city. It kind of makes sense, too - "I'm here to kill you, Shards, and anyone who ties themselves to you." So, if there were any people with Skai-based power, like Skai-lantrians, they were probably killed, too. (Just as I'd imagine that allomancers would have been killed if Odium had shown up on Scadrial to kill Preservation and Ruin.) And, of course, there were no Seons when Odium showed up, or I bet he would have taken those out, too.

Welcome aboard! Have a British bluebird.

@Cuaiir: Was it something specific you read that made you think that - the two "sets" of Elantrians - or was it just a bunch of little things you noticed and connected the dots between? @CrazyRioter: That's a good point, too. I just wish we had something that said one way or the other, so we didn't have to make up our own explanations. :-/

Okay, I think I'm starting to dig it. Even though the EMA is a large representation of Aon Rao, the Chasm Line shouldn't be drawn in relation to Aon Rao, but rather it should be drawn in relation to the initial Aon Aon, the starting point of all the more complex aons. And that's why the Chasm Line should have been drawn in Elantris rather than Kae (or even south of the southern suburb, as I had initially thought). This would be so much easier to explain with pictures than words. Maybe I'll sketch something out. (Or bug Chaos to add an oekaki to the board? Nah, sketching would probably be easier.) Edit: Thanks, you two. That helped. Edit 2: And zas, I read that thread, but for some reason it didn't click that it was covering this very topic. That's my mistake. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

17, if you count Mistborn alongside the 16 Mistings. (And 18 if you count Atium Mistings.)

My apologies for the three new threads. I had some questions pop up after finishing Elantris, and I thought it might be best to keep them in their own threads rather than lumping them together in a way that could make things complicated later (if the discussions became long). I see two conflicting opinions, both on Brandon's site. I'm not sure which one is accurate, and I don't remember reading anything here on the forums that makes a solid declaration in favor of one or the other. It's possible that someone other than Brandon wrote the Aon Ehe thing, and it's not canon, but it would be nice to be able to see something that gives a definitive - or close to it - answer either way. (I also realize that the first quote is from "god" (the designer of the universe) and the second quote is written in a more in-universe style, as if by the people who live there, so that could also explain the difference. If that's the case, then I would assume that the comment in the annotation would be the "real" way things happened.)

My apologies for the three new threads. I had some questions pop up after finishing Elantris, and I thought it might be best to keep them in their own threads rather than lumping them together in a way that could make things complicated later (if the discussions became long). Aon Rao, to describe it simply, is a square (with a dot in the center) that has a circle outside each side, and each circle is connected to its nearest side with a line. The city of Elantris and its four satellite cities are a large version of Aon Rao. The Shaod failed to work properly after the Reod because this large Aon Rao hadn't been edited to include the Chasm Line. When Raoden added it, the engines of AonDor began to work again. But why was he able to do that where he did it? We make maps. Maps are scaled-down representations of geographic areas. Aons work (due to an unknown mechanic) because they, too, are scaled-down representations of geographic areas. Curiously, the Elantris Metropolitan Area (ha!) is a scaled-up version of Aon Rao (which, in turn, is a scaled-down version of the EMA? Oh, the infinite loop makes my head hurt.). Getting back on track, we could say that the EMA is a 1:1 scale map of the geographical area represented by Aon Rao. (And suddenly I've derailed myself again by being reminded of Steven Wright's joke about buying a 1:1 scale map.) This brings up a couple questions. Firstly, 1: Why did he have to draw the Chasm Line? It was already represented in the scaled-up Aon Rao (that is, the geographic area of Arelon) as the Chasm itself. Did it need to be drawn by an Elantrian in order to make it "Real"? Secondly, 2: Why did it work when he drew it in Kae? 2a. Due to the scale issues, shouldn't he have drawn it in the Chasm itself? 2b. "Kae", we're told, means "east" - as in, Kae is east of Elantris, and it is the eastern circle in the EMA-aon. When he ran down from the pool, he ran into Kae. And this is where he drew the line to represent the Chasm Line. The Chasm, however, is south of the EMA. I might be able to buy it if we were to say that, due to the symmetrical nature of Aon Rao, north does not have to be up, and Kae could be representative of the bottom circle if the Chasm Line were drawn properly. However, 1: Raoden was inside the city of Kae, drawing the Chasm Line inside the city limits. The Chasm is south of the EMA, so the Chasm Line should be below a circle, not within it. And 2: The manner of drawing Aon Rao gives the square in the center two curved sides, with one of those sides being representative of the mountain range. If north does not have to always be up, due to the geographic nature that AonDor seems to require, the Chasm Line should be drawn "south" of a circle on a straight line, not on a curved line. I'm guessing I just missed some minor detail, and as a result I'm just over-thinking everything. I would appreciate some insight into this matter.

My apologies for the three new threads. I had some questions pop up after finishing Elantris, and I thought it might be best to keep them in their own threads rather than lumping them together in a way that could make things complicated later (if the discussions became long). Why did the Seons continue to work after the Reod? They had outdated aons in them, just like the ones that Raoden drew, (and just like the aons all around Elantris), but the Seons continued to function normally (unless the one they were bound to went through the Shaod, in which case they were made incomplete). And is there any indication that post-"reconstruction" Seons have the Chasm Line in their aons?

Well that's an interesting thing to say. I know that the map of Shadesmar we have in WoK looks like an inverted Roshar, which means if we extend both maps to a global scale, the pattern would probably continue. However, when Brandon said that Shadesmar was the Cognitive Realm, that made me think of it more like the Astral(?) Plane in D&D, something that "overlaps" all the material planes. (But since Brandon's cosmere books all take place within the same physical dimension, the Cognitive Realm would "overlap" all of the different planets.) If that is the case - the Cognitive Realm is one plane of existence that entirely overlaps the Physical Realm - then maybe the Cognitive Realm is incredibly malleable, its state of being in a given geographic area dependent upon what happens in the Physical Realm of the same geographic area. But then again, Hoid's use of it to planet hop suggests that there isn't a 1:1 ratio between geography in Shadesmar and the layout of the physical universe. (That, or the equivalent of faster than light travel is easier in Shadesmar than in the Physical Realm.)

Now that I've finished Elantris, I can read this forum. As regards the ChayShan, I think it's safe to assume that Brandon was inspired by some of Earth's martial arts. (I was specifically reminded of t'ai chi ch'uan.) So, if Sel isn't like Scadrial, (that is, the following analogies are not true - Preservation:Aona :: Ruin:Skai :: Allomancy:AonDor :: Hemalurgy:DakhorMagic :: Feruchemy:ChayShan), then we can probably conclude that the Dor is very similar to what we on Earth call chi (or ki, whichever you prefer), and, as Raoden speculated, it can be accessed in different ways. Otherwise, the Dor would be unique to AonDor, the Dakhor stuff has its own unique energy, and so does ChayShan. ... Okay, I just found a quote in Part 3 that says the Dakhor magics are powered by the Dor, so that means that Dor isn't exclusive to Aona's stuff, and that Raoden's speculation is accurate. I guess we can completely ignore the preceding paragraph. It makes me wonder, then - if the Dor is something akin to our chi, usable by the disciples of both Aona and Skai, is this energy something that developed post-Odium, a mixture of the residue of splintered Shards? Or was it there pre-Odium, an energy that developed because of the interactions between Shards in close proximity?

Right. Thanks. I used binary because it reminded me of the values of the bits in a byte. (And I used it in quotes because I didn't know the right term to use.)

I always thought that the Pits, or rather, the geodes, were the "pool" for Ruin. Brandon's comment that there were small wells in the Pits makes me think this even more. Although, it doesn't fully explain why Ruin's pools (if that's what the geodes were) would create the solid form. (Though, LightReader's comment about power changing aspects might explain that.) Of course the Well of Ascension may have also created Lerasium, just at a much slower rate. (We never see anything that suggests where the beads of Lerasium came from, right?) Or, maybe it has to do with attention. The more attention a Shard focuses on a planet, the more likely it will "cast" a pool there (like one casts a shadow, or footprints will be made over time in a semi-solid surface if one stays stationary, or how a black hole extends its event horizon farther out as it grows over time). Sazed's been looking around investigating a lot of other stuff, too. Not necessarily on other worlds, but trying to find out about Adonalsium, etc. Then again, the "focused attention" idea wouldn't explain the blue pool on Sel. In this particular quote, don't you mean the solid form does a specific thing? Liquids are physical, too. I think I see what you mean, but if I am seeing what you mean, I also think it might be more precise to say solid, not physical. That's interesting, and it goes right in line with how we (can't help but) look at things differently than Brandon. I got the feeling that Brandon doesn't separate the Shards from their holders anywhere near as much as we do, and this seems to suggest the same. The way I read the part I quoted, I would have thought "that consciousness" would be what originally called itself Leras, which, in turn, would make it not a part of Adonalsium. I don't really have any theory or anything to go along with this. I just thought it was interesting. Something else I wondered: what's the significance of the "binary" counting? People on Scadrial kept saying it took the Well of Ascension a thousand years to refill, but didn't Brandon say it was 1024? The computer geek in me loves this progression, of course, but I haven't seen an explanation as to why the numbers work this way. Hmm, going back to something I mentioned earlier, (and this is pure speculation; show me where I'm wrong, if I am). If Preservation's pool generated Lerasium, that might explain why there were so few beads of it: Preservation had one pool. Ruin had many small pools. The geodes could be destroyed, but they would eventually come back. Preservation's pool took 1024 years to recharge after it was "destroyed" (read: used). Ruin had smaller pools than Preservation, but many more. One versus many - this could explain the vast difference in quantity of solid representations of the two Shards. (It takes time for a solid aspect to develop from a liquid aspect, and Ruin had many more "factories" operating than Preservation did.) If this is the case, it might also give an indication as to how long it had been since Preservation trapped Ruin. (Or has Brandon given us a timeline?) That is, of course, if one bead of Lerasium is generated every "Well-cycle".

But Vin didn't touch the Well until the second book. Wasn't she able to draw upon the mists when she fought the Lord Ruler? (I'm still in my re-read of TFE, and I haven't gotten to that point yet, so I can't remember correctly.) Oh, do please tell us what that word is once the book is out.

I love it when people have names and avatars that match. Welcome aboard!

Obsessed with Terry Goodkind? I can't imagine why. Brandon's a much better writer. He doesn't ramble on as if he doesn't know what to do with his characters, and he certainly doesn't make his series last so long that he gets tired of writing them, putting together some weak ending just so he can stop. 'Course, I may be biased against Goodkind these days. >_>

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. On a different note, why does the subject say "Hoid wrote the letter in tWoK to", but the "to" part isn't mentioned in the first post? It's only touched on later in the thread. Does that have something to do with the merging that Rubix mentioned on page 2?