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I would like to ask for help about whether I am remembering things correctly about something. I have a vague memory of reading about a Nalthian nation that treats the Returned as servants rather than gods, giving them a Breath each week but not worshiping them. Unfortunately, I now can't seem to find the excerpt or WoB that shows this. I know that neither the Pahn Kahl nor the Idrians give Breath to Returned, so it can't be them. I thought it might be Huth/Kuth (the nations that are now ruled by a tyrant who is employing Yesteel), but I can't find any evidence of that. Am I just remembering a fan theory? Or did Brandon really tell us about such a nation?

What Voidus said. You can check out Peter Ahlstrom's 17th Shard user page if you want to see the stuff he's posted here or if you want to contact him.

Although Vasher/Talaxin had a hand in the decision to create Nightblood (apparently because he wanted to create a Shardblade), it was his wife Shashara who actually Awakened him into being:

I have a question that might be useful for the Coppermind: There are two regions called Eon in Arelon. Is the northeastern one called North Eon and the southwestern one South Eon? If not, how do the Arelene differentiate between those two places? I'd be grateful if one of you could ask that.

Well, code names need not have anything to do with the nature of an organization that uses them. Besides, how does "suit" fit a mathematical theme?

Actually, aside from them all being collective nouns, these names also have a playing cards theme going on. SET - This is a generic collective term for cards. Also, it means three of a kind in poker. SUIT - The set of cards with the same "pips" (Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs or Spades). SEQUENCE - The set of two or more cards adjacent in rank. ARRAY - The seven columns of cards dealt at the start of a solitaire game. SERIES - This is the only term that doesn't seem to have a card game-specific definition (though perhaps I just didn't use the right Google search keywords), but "a series of plays" or "a series of games" can apply to card games.

I bet Hoid's home base contains a gym complete with assorted punching bags and wooden dummies.

Thanks for referencing my old theory! I will need to revise it as soon as we are allowed to post Secret History stuff in the regular forums, because I have changed my mind slightly about it. As you said, the mists in the Scadrian Cognitive Realm contradicts the Scadrial=Foil part of my theory, even though the fact that metals do glow there does support it. I now think that a Shardworld's nature is more properly viewed as a combination of two Essences, not just one. In the case of Scadrial, these Essences would be Foil (for metal) and Vapor (for mist). Why two Essences? As I posited in my L-Theory, the Cognitive Realm is the space between the Spiritual and the Physical Realms. Leras confirms this in Secret History: It's reasonable to assume that since the Physical and Spiritual aspects of objects pass through the Cognitive Realm, both the Physical and the Spiritual aspects are visible there to some extent. I theorize that the Physical and the Spiritual Realms for each Shardworld are each attuned to an Essence, and that this becomes more apparent when going to that Shardworld's Cognitive Realm. Theory details spoilered for length: TL;DR: Scadrial is Physically Vapor and Spiritually Foil. Roshar is Physically Lucentia and Spiritually Zephyr. Nalthis is Physically Tallow and Spiritually Vapor. Sel is Physically Zephyr and Spiritually Talus. I will probably delve deeper into some of these things in series-specific threads in the future, but it's nice to be able to post these tentative ideas here while we're waiting for the other forums to be open for Secret History discussion.

(Response to OP's spoilered section.) Have fun at the signing!

That's correct. If Kelsier is indeed currently living on Roshar (which I doubt), then Thaidakar (who appears to be the leader of the Ghosbloods) would be more likely to be him than any character we've seen so far, especially if Iyatil really is Southern Scadrian.

Here.

That's what I thought at first, but the Sovereign arrived only ten years after the Catacendre/Ice Death, and Spook ruled Northern Scadrial for a hundred years. It can't be him.

I don't know. But I have a theory. This is all I could find on the matter:

Just in case I don't wake up in time for this, here's a question I'd like to ask: During WoA, did Sazed ever think of experimenting with Aluminum and Duralumin Feruchemy? Also, did he ever do Feruchemical research on malatium? Or was he simply too focused on religions to think about such things?

@ccstat is correct. So, which group-1 element explodes with a power comparable to dynamite when in contact with water?

That makes a lot of sense, actually. I now have no doubt that what Miles called "the final metal" is in fact ettmetal, and that ettmetal is harmonium. As for "the lost metal", I think it's possible that it is not the same as "the final metal". Atium was called "the lost metal" in Shadows of Self, so I prefer to think that atium will be reappear in the fourth Era 2 book. If so, giving post-Catacendre Scadrians access to atium would be a great opportunity for Brandon to show off other cool atium alloys (which are certainly more interesting than lerasium alloys).

How long has your coworker been living where you live? The Southerners (barely) survived ten years before the Sovereign arrived. Ten years does seem way too long for them to still not be used to the (ostensibly mild) cold, but I don't really have a point of comparison. While Allik does imply that ettmetal burns while mimicking Allomancy (e.g. when operating a Southerner airship) I think it's a perfectly reasonable to speculate that it doesn't burn when mimicking Feruchemical storage.

It's also called Era Two in the BoM postscript, so that's two published instances of "Era Two" to refer to the Wax and Wayne books. At this point I'll just keep on using Era Two unless Brandon uses the "Era 1.5" term in a future book.

If the Southern Scadrians were simply in a better position to adapt to Scadrial's new orbit due to their location being favored by planetary movement cycles, there would have been nothing to stop Rashek from moving everyone to that location and establishing his Final Empire there. That's why I think that there was no naturally favorable location at the time, and that the Southerner's survival involved an imperfect magical solution that Rashek was not content with (hence the Ashmounts up north). Also, the Southerners did not have to know about ettmetal pre-Sovereign for my theory to work; as long as Rashek knew about ettmetal and as long as ettmetal can mimic Feruchemical storage, he could have used that knowledge to keep the Southerners from baking under the hotter sun for a thousand years.

Here's my current theory about why Southern Scadrial froze when Sazed remade the world, why he didn't unfreeze it, and why Southerners have trouble with heat even in "normal" temperatures. I think that during his Ascension, Rashek learned about the nature of ettmetal. When he moved Scadrial too close to the sun, he knew that one possible solution was to use all the ettmetal in Scadrial to mimic Feruchemical heat storage (ettmetal's behavior when interacting with Feruchemy was not explored in BoM, but I'm speculating that a Feruchemist could make ettmetal store a specific attribute). However, I think Rashek saw major issues with implementing a planet-wide ettmetal-based Heat-absorbing system. For one, Investing the planet to become supernaturally colder than it should be might affect the people Connected to it in adverse ways, e.g. they might be less capable of feeling Heat than normal people if placed in a normal environment. Or perhaps Investing the whole planet with so much Feruchemical Heat for more than a thousand years just wasn't a good idea. So Rashek chose his Ashmount-based heat control system instead, complete with the genetic modifications he made on the Northerners. But as Brandon said before, Rashek wanted a backup plan, and that was the Southerners: My theory is that Rashek's way of helping the Southerners survive was by utilizing the ettmetal in that small part of the planet the way I described above, storing the extra heat from the sun. Even if Scadrial's orbit was never fixed, the Southerners would at least be able to live comfortably until the ettmetal stores in their part of the world eventually stops absorbing Heat. The problem was that they were only ever meant to be backup. Rashek fully intended to take up the power of the Well again after 1024 years and fix Scadrial's orbit one way or another. After that, the Southerners would slowly freeze to death due to their land's heat-absorbing nature, but that was a sacrifice The Lord Ruler was willing to make. And so when Sazed Ascended and fixed everything for his fellow Northerners, he found to his consternation that the Southern Continent, now "free" from the extreme heat of the sun, was starting to freeze. The ettmetal sources in their lands were still siphoning off Heat even when it was no longer needed. And the Southerners, being less capable of adapting to the cold as the Northerners, began their ten year population decline until the Sovereign arrived to help them survive. But why didn't Sazed save them himself? Here's the next part of my theory: Ettmetal is the one Scadrian substance that Sazed cannot manipulate, because ettmetal is the physical representation of the very force that prevents Sazed from being too active, the force that binds Harmony's hands, the force that is Harmony itself. In other words, ettmetal is harmonium. How could Harmony's god metal exist even before Sazed Ascended? Allik gave us a clue: The Shards of Ruin and Preservation have often been described as perfect opposites, and harmony is the balance of opposites. I wouldn't be surprised if ettmetal/harmonium existed even before the Shattering, as a manifestation of the balance of opposites within Adonalsium. Just like aluminum, I believe ettmetal is another "natural" substance (perhaps lithium, as others have said) that has a special relationship with Investiture. Ettmetal even has the opposite effect as aluminum: whereas aluminum blocks Allomancy (among other things), ettmetal copies it (among other things, I bet). More than a year ago I speculated about harmonium being a real world metal that interacts with the Metallic Arts, works in the opposite way as aluminum, and is used by the Southerners to power their technology. I'm glad to find such a metal in BoM, even though I was wrong about that hypothetical metal's composition and how it is used to activate Allomantic technology.

Have you read the short story The Eleventh Metal? Kelsier first got the idea about an eleventh metal in Mantiz, a city in the northern part of the Western Dominance. It's possible that he obtained his bar of malatium in the so-called "Far Peninsula" (where is that? the Farmost Dominance?), but I wouldn't be surprised if he got it in the same place where he learned of it, and that what he told Ham was just a story he concocted as part of the mythos he was constructing around himself at the time. The scholar who gave Kelsier the idea of the Eleventh Metal wasn't exactly trying to lessen the oppression typical of Rashek's rule, so I doubt his Nelazan heritage (if he had any) inspired him to perform his experiments.

"Cephandrius" reminds me of Cephas, which means rock in Aramaic and is the name of one of the Apostles. I'd guess Cephandrius Maxtori is a reference to Hoid's other psuedonym Topaz, which he alluded to as "a rock" in WoK.

Thanks! Forton is from Hrovell, though, not Svorden.

Yes, I am indeed speculating that the Shardworlds are all located in the outer reaches of one of the arms of a dwarf spiral galaxy, close to the galactic plane.