skaa

Yes. There was a discussion on this shortly after BoM was released. I noted back then that "suit" doesn't really fit the math theme as much as the rest and so I proposed that the theme was that of playing cards instead. I'll just paste here what I wrote there: I don't really know why the Set would use such a theme. Lots of card games involve bluffing and misdirection, so maybe the Set wanted a good analogy for the acts of deception that pervade their policies. "The world is a card game and you only win by fooling others," or some stupid thing Edwarn might say.

Well, we do have a cat Inquisitor: @Kurkistan. On a more serious note: And also:

Got it. I guess that makes sense. *upvotes*

Oh I see. So ミストボーン ("Mistborn") is the series title while 霧の落とし子 ("Mistborn") is the first book split into three volumes?

The author is Brandon Sanderson, so definitely not a fanfic. This really is the Japanese translation of Mistborn. Google Translate is still pretty terrible when it comes to Japanese, but in this case it's understandable because "Mistborn" is a word invented by Brandon. "ミストボーン" (mi-su-to-bo~n) is how you'd write "Mistborn" phonetically in katakana. Since Japanese phonetics is way more limited than English, the Japanese pronunciation isn't exact. 霧の落とし子 (kiri no otoshiko) can be roughly translated as "spawn of the mist", which can reasonably be rephrased as "mist-born". 灰色の帝国 (haiiro no teikoku) is more or less "ash-colored empire". I think the translator simply used his/her artistic license to make the title sound cool, instead of directly translating "final empire". It's an appropriate title, anyway. "ブランドン サンダースン" (bu-ra-n-do-n sa-n-da~so-n) is how you'd write Brandon Sanderson phonetically in katakana.

Yeah, that's my interpretation of the "Roshar was designed specifically" part of the WoB that @Pagerunner included in his question. This intentional formation of Roshar by Adonalsium is likely what Brandon referred to when he said "it is a fun easter egg that will tell you more about the history of the world" in the WoB I linked above. So, again, it's just a nifty thing. If I were to let my imagination run wild (as I sometimes do), I'd speculate that Roshar's geographic history looks like this animation (where each frame is a three-dimensional slice of the four-dimensional Julia set from which the current shape of Roshar was taken), meaning that at some point in the past there was a land bridge between Shin Kak Nish and Aimia, and that at some point in the far future the whole continent will disappear. But I don't really find that likely.

It's probably not going to have any interesting implications, I'm afraid. From here:

Pffft. Like that ever stopped me despite not being a physicist. I have it on good authority that it's atium that is bunnies. By skaa-logic, harmonium must be something else. Seriously speaking, I agree that there must be real-life physical substances that Scadrian god metals at least mimic (if not outright are, albeit with Spiritual modifications), because they interact with physical substances. This is why I spent so much time in the past trying to figure out what atium is made of. If something can be alloyed with real life metals, then there must at least be electrons in that something that participates in the metallic bonding process. Similarly, anything that chemically reacts with physical substances (like water) must have electrons. Oh, and speaking of alloys, do you guys think harmonium can be alloyed with Allomantic metals, and do you think that could affect its reactivity?

Feel free to ask for clarification if anything confuses you.

That's perfectly fine. I encourage you to ask questions in the Cosmere Q&A section of the forums, but let me take a stab at explaining the Shards to you. So, a long time ago the god-like being Adonalsium shattered into sixteen Shards. Sixteen different people from the planet Yolen took up those Shards and became god-like beings themselves, each one merging with a different aspect (or "Intent") of the former god. A man named Leras became Preservation, another one named Ati became Ruin, Tanavast became Honor, etc. Basically, each person became a Vessel of a Shard. In a sense, they became the Shards. Eventually the Shards decided to go their separate ways, though some teamed up with each other. Preservation and Ruin created a planet, called it Scadrial, and settled there (this is where the Mistborn books take place). Honor and Cultivation settled on an existing planet called Roshar, where the Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and the rest of the Stormlight Archive take place. There is of course a lot more to it than that, but you'll learn more as you browse through the forums and the Coppermind (and of course, read more cosmere books). Right now we only know ten of the sixteen Shards. Aside from the four mentioned above, there's also Devotion, Dominion, Endowment, Autonomy, Ambition, and Odium. The last one seems to be the Big Bad of the cosmere stories. The Reckoners series (Steelheart, Firefight, Calamity) are set on a different universe, so the harmsway has nothing to do with Gold Feruchemy. I hope I didn't bore you with all of that. See you around! Edit: As you know, @Valette Renaitre, understanding the cosmere isn't strictly required to appreciate Brandon's cosmere books. Most of it is just background info for now. I guess one thing I forgot to mention and that might be useful is that the cosmere is made up of three "realms", the Physical Realm, the Cognitive Realm, and the Spiritual Realm. More info in the Coppermind.

Welcome, @Valette Renaitre! Other than the Reckoners and Mistborn, what other Sanderson books have you read? Have you heard of the cosmere? I hope you're having a great time discovering the fandom. Allow me to answer your questions one by one. The Reckoners series is not related to the Mistborn series, but Sanderson has other books that are set in the same fictional universe (though not the same planet) as Mistborn. This fictional universe (well technically just a dwarf galaxy) is called the cosmere. The cosmere books include the Mistborn series, the Stormlight Archive, Warbreaker, Elantris, White Sand, and the short story collection Arcanum Unbounded. The Reckoners (along with all other books set on Earth) is not part of the cosmere. ### Most probably not. Brandon said this back in 2014: ### Aside from the fact that Allomancy is inherited via the "spiritual DNA" of people, we don't really know much about the rules of Allomantic inheritance. We know that people can be Allomancers even when their parents didn't show any ability, and we know there's lots of possible Misting types, so there's probably a complex interaction between various "spiritual genes" involved in Allomancy. There might be a Word of Brandon (WoB) about this that I'm forgetting, but otherwise we just don't know the specifics.

Yeah, sorry if I seemed to imply that it was completely natural. I just meant that I somewhat sympathetize with the Parshendi in this regard and I do not feel comfortable assigning sinister reasons for their reaction. But yeah there's probably some mystical thing going on there.

Whether or not dead Parshendi can be resurrected to become Voidbringers, why would the Parshendi pre-WoR want that to happen, when the very reason the war started in the first place was because they didn't want to return to the gods that once turned them into Voidbringers? I mean, sure, the Stormform Parshendi would probably want their dead resurrected in the service of the Unmade, but I doubt Rlain (for example) would want that. And we know from WoK that Rlain was also affected by what Kaladin was doing to Parshendi corpses. My point is that the reason they don't like their dead being defiled is probably much less sinister than you think. "Don't defile the dead" sounds like a pretty normal part of a moral code to me, even if the Parshendi's reaction to Kaladin was a bit extreme.

Yeah, here it is: And here's another WoB relevant to the OP:

I've had similar thoughts while writing my post above, but the questions still stand: First, can Chromium Allomancy affect non-metals? Second, if it can affect non-metals, how much power is needed to drain a single Breath from an Awakened object? Can a regular Leecher do it? How much chromium will he need? In other words, even if Chromium Allomancy can theoretically drain any Kinetic Investiture (which is an unknown), we still need to know if a particular Leecher's power is enough to drain a particular an object of a given amount of Kinetic Investiture.

That is an excellent question! Unfortunately we don't have a definite answer yet. We know (based on this WoB) that Chromium Allomancy works in a similar sort of way as when Nightblood or a larkin consumes Investiture, and we know that Nightblood consumes Breath, so maybe your player's idea is possible, but we're just not certain. We also know that it's more difficult to affect something with Chromium Allomancy the more Invested it is (from this WoB, and from the oft-repeated concept of Investiture resisting Investiture). So even if Leechers could theoretically drain Breaths, we don't know how much chromium it would take to do that, or if it would require a boost from duralumin/nicrosil or even Mist to accomplish that. Edit: And yeah, as @Jondesu pointed out, we don't even know if Leechers can affect non-metals. The only in-book instance of Chromium Allomancy used against non-Scadrian Investiture involves a metallic gun, and we don't even know if that story really did happen in-universe (if so, Nazh being the assailant is the obvious guess) or if "Nicelle Sauvage" merely made it up.

Good point. So there are in fact two things left unresolved by my theory: Why exactly would the effects of 1000+ years of ettmetal-based region-wide Feruchemical Heat storage be difficult for Sazed to fix? Why would Ati and Leras make a bunch of harmonium in the southern lands in the first place? My mediocre powers of imagination and creativity is not enough to create a satisfying theoretical answer to those questions. Maybe if we get more information I could try again. Nonetheless, I think it's important to acknowledge what our speculations have accomplished. Allow me to summarize a few things that I think are pretty solid: The southerners definitely have a problem with their sense of temperature. It was something Kelsier noticed when he first went to the South, before he taught them how to make Heat medallions. It was something Marasi should have noticed when she saw Allik for the first time in Dulsing, wrapped in thick blankets, when there was no indication of it being a chilly day. The southerners had more than a decade to adapt to their new climate, and yet they didn't. All this indicates that their problem is magical in nature. By my arguments here, Rashek could not have simply left the southerners alone without formulating a solution for the extreme heat of the sun brought about by the new orbit of the planet. The only part of the south that did not experience unbearably hot temperatures was the south pole, and we know from the southerner's inability to adapt to a temperate climate that they would have never survived the freezing sun-less months of a polar region. Hence, they must have lived in the hotter latitudes, meaning they could not have survived 1000+ years without Rashek's assistance. For some reason, Rashek considered the Ashmounts + genetic modifications to be the better solution. That's why he considered the southerners to be merely a reserve. Otherwise, he wouldn't have had to bother himself with the Ashmounts + genetic modifications. By doing what he did in the North and staying there, he was basically implying that what he did to the South was worse, in the grand scheme of things (though maybe it's not immediately apparent), than forcing people to live as genetic freaks in an ash-ridden hell hole. The fact that the southerners seemed pretty happy with their life pre-Ice Death (at least compared to their life afterwards) suggests that it was specifically the Ice Death that Rashek was worried about when he decided his southern solution was ultimately a bad idea, meaning his southern solution directly led to the Ice Death after the planet's orbit was fixed. This might also explain why he was okay with still using it on the reserves, because the bad consequence was still in the distant future at that point. And now for the not-so-solid things: The idea of harmonium being pre-Sazed. Ettmetal in the South is definitely not a recent thing. It must have been there at least from the time of Kelsier's rule, when Southern magitech was being developed, more than three hundred years before the Wax and Wayne era. If it was Sazed who put the ettmetal/harmonium there, he must have done it during or soon after his Ascension, back when he was still a new god who was happily coddling the northerners. Given everything that Sazed has done for the North, it seems suspiciously inconsistent for him to not also give harmonium to the inhabitants of the Elendel Basin at that early point in time if he could. Hence, I feel it's more likely that ettmetal was already there in the South before his Ascension, and that he somehow doesn't have much control over its distribution, perhaps due to some esoteric Shardic law. The idea of ettmetal being the tool Rashek used to allow southerners to survive. Honestly the only reason I don't consider this to be solid is because we're not certain if ettmetal existed during Rashek's time. Otherwise, given how ettmetal seems to only exist in the South and how it can be primed for Feruchemy, it would have been the perfect tool to cause a Heat-draining effect on the southern lands. The idea that 1000+ years of 1000+ years of ettmetal-based region-wide Feruchemical Heat storage would be enough to make lasting effects on the southerners' ability to sense heat. I'm only basing this on the mysterious Connection between the land and its native inhabitants that seems to exist cosmere-wide (not just in Sel, where this Connection is somehow used to vary the manifestation of Investiture for each region). This Connection to land can be changed or manipulated to communicate with foreigners, or even to reorient an object's gravitational behavior. It's very powerful stuff, so I naturally wondered what the effects of magically draining the heat from the land would be on its inhabitants, and I feel that the dampened heat sense of the southerners kind of fits that. So, anyway, I'd be happy if any of those ideas turns out to be true. Heck, forget the ettmetal speculations, I'd be extremely happy if none of the things on my "solid" list turn out to be false.

(Double-posting because I want the previous post to remain as is, and this is my thread.) We know that the reaction of water and harmonium will not produce oxides because of this recent WoB (taken from this transcript): I think the point that @Pagerunner and @Spoolofwhool were trying to make is that without an oxide that could have acted as a protective shell around a chunk of pure harmonium, any native harmonium in the land would eventually disappear over time. But if you noticed in the text I highlighted in yellow, Spool and Page missed something hugely important. Just because there's no harmonium oxide doesn't mean there's nothing else there. And in fact, there is something else. We just don't know what, yet. But whatever it is, if it forms a waterproof layer around a piece of harmonium then that might be enough for the harmonium to remain within the land for anyone to find it. (Though, again, I'm open to a more mystical way of obtaining harmonium. Or even the "harmonium in oil" idea that Spool told me the other day. All of this is just speculation, anyway.)

Did you read the WIkipedia article on native metal that I linked to? It lists a lot of elements that are found in nature in pure or alloyed metallic form (i.e. NOT oxides), including ALL Allomantic elements: aluminum, cadmium, chromium, iron, tin, zinc, gold, and copper. It even lists several Allomantic alloys: brass, bronze, pewter, and electrum. Granted, among those only gold and copper are found in large amounts on Earth, but to insist that Ati and Leras could not have decided to put harmonium in Scadrial for such a pedantic reason as "harmonium oxide doesn't exist" is frankly kind of weird. Like, they're Shards. They could find ways to keep water away from their hybrid god metal if they wanted to. Actually, I take that back. Yes, the fact that incredibly reactive elements tend to not exist in pure form makes the mining of ettmetal a bit more doubtful. I'm totally fine with ettmetal being obtained from some weird magical process. I think this could still fit my theory, so long as the magically-protected ettmetal can still affect the land.

Indeed. In an old pre-SoS theory of mine (wherein I predicted that harmonium is used by Southern Scadrians in their Allomantic technology), I thought harmonium needs to be touching an Allomantic metal for it to produce an Allomantic effect. As we now know, it doesn't need that. Harmonium produces an Allomantic effect as long as it's primed for an Allomantic effect. Similarly, being primed for a Feruchemical effect may not require a separate metalmind. Pardon me for my wrong terminology. I didn't know "ore" implied an oxide. I just meant the ettmetal that is (in my theory) sitting there somewhere in the southern continent pre-Sazed. The fact that Allik was surprised there was no ettmetal in the North made me think they mined ettmetal there like any other native metal. And yes that ettmetal obviously couldn't have been created by Rashek. Perhaps Leras and Ati made a bunch back when they were creating the planet, making it as close to "naturally occuring" as it gets, at least in the context of a Shard-made planet.

Can't sleep. >_< I would actually attribute that little conundrum to imprecise wording on Brandon's part (he does that sometimes), as he had a much more thorough discussion of the northern heat problem in the HoA annotations:

Yeah, I just realized they weren't at the geographic south pole. I'll edit the OP accordingly. But actually, it was Luthadel in the North that was on a magnetic pole. We have no idea where exactly the Southerners live except, as I pointed out above, it could not have been in the south pole as they had no concept of very cold weather before the Ice Death, and the months without the sun in the south pole would have definitely frozen things.

I'll address your other issues tomorrow as it is almost midnight here already, but I want to quickly point something out because this is the third time I've seen the "Rashek just placed the Southerners in the South Pole without doing anything else and it was hot but it was liveable" argument and it's a very odd argument to me. Why did Rashek place Ashmounts in his Final Empire? The Ashmounts were there to prevent the sun from killing off most living things in the Empire. This is because he placed Luthadel, not in the northern polar region, but rather a certain distance from the northern polar region. This can be seen by the normal day and night cycle. So, why didn't he place his capital in the polar region? Because while the polar region would experience months without the sun (which would have sucked anyway for anyone who disliked freezing temperatures), it would also experience months with a hot midnight sun, which again would kill most life in the empire. Given that there were no Ashmounts in the South, without any other magic trick Rashek's "control group" would need to choose between death by extremely hot weather and death by extremely long hot days. And since we definitely know that the Southerners did not adapt to the cold, they obviously did not experience the months-long night of the south pole. So, no, Rashek could not have left the Southerners alone there without giving them something first. Brandon practically implied this when he said "All I'll say is that he found a way other than changing them genetically to help them survive in the world he created." If Rashek just plopped them somewhere that wasn't burning and hoped for the best, why would Brandon be so coy about it?

Thanks! One hole in the theory I need to acknowledge is that I haven't explained why it's difficult for Harmony to undo what Rashek did. Changing the Spiritual aspect of people seems to be trivial to him given how he turned a mere Tineye to a full Mistborn. Perhaps the issue lies in the Cognitive side of things, but I don't have anything solid as of yet. Previously I attributed this difficulty to Harmony being incapable of affecting harmonium just as Ruin could not directly access atium, but that is again purely speculative. All we know is that Rashek decided not to rely on the solution he eventually used on the South, and that Harmony did not seem capable of fixing the Ice Death. I just put those two things together into a very speculative theory.

Introduction This theory is an attempt at solving several mysteries on Scadrial, most notably: What's with the Ice Death? I have actually posted a version of this theory last year as a comment in another person's Ice Death thread, But recently I've formulated several new arguments and found more evidence, and I want to reorganize my thoughts on the matter. Part I: The Lord Ruler To understand the need for my theory, let us first look at the issue of why the Southern Scadrians were put there by Rashek when he Ascended. Here's what Brandon said back in 2008 regarding them: There is one problem here: If Rashek found a way for people to survive extreme heat without genetic modification, why didn't he just use that method for everyone? Why go through all the hassle of creating the Ashmounts and changing people in the North to adapt to a world of ash when the people he moved to the South did not need those things anyway? In other words, if he was able to keep his genetically-unchanged control group alive, what was the point of his genetic experiments? One possibility that comes to mind is that whatever he did to the Southerners was not scalable planet-wide, meaning that whatever it was, it was only feasible to a limited region on the planet. But then, the same could be said of the Ash World solution. Another possibility is that in the event that Scadrial's orbit is fixed at some point in the future, it was much harder to revert the effects of this non-genetic method. It's very likely that Rashek intended to undo his damage on the world once the Well was refilled. It could be that he found the non-genetic solution (whatever it was) would be harder to undo when that happens, so he decided to use a method on the Northerners that was easier to undo when the orbit is eventually fixed. Except, he wasn't sure the Ash World solution would work long enough, so he still used the non-genetic solution on a select group of people as a "reserve". So we have these clues as to what Rashek did to the Southerners: It was definitely not genetic in nature. It may have been something that could only be applied to the southern continent. It may have effects that are difficult to undo even with Shardic power. Given this, can we figure out what the Southern Solution is? Part II: The Hero of Ages Here is another mystery. When Sazed obtained both Ruin and Preservation at the end of HoA, he used the knowledge of Scadrial's religions to both return the planet to its previous orbit, rearrange the continents back to their previous locations, and fix the genetic modifications that Rashek made to the Northerners: Afterwards, Sazed created the Elendel Basin, a fertile area where food and water was always plentiful and the climate was temperate, for the people of the North to live on. He also gave the Northerners copies of the contents of his Copperminds, and gave them hints regarding the Allomantic metals they haven't discovered yet. As he said in SoS, he made it very easy for his own people to live in the newly restored planet. Too easy: And that was our first hint of the troubles faced by the Southerners. In BoM we would learn that somehow, even after Sazed fixed the continents, the Southern Scadrians still experienced a climate catastrophe, the Ice Death, that would freeze many of them to death. Here's the mystery: Why didn't Sazed put as much effort in making the Southerners as comfortable and happy as the Northerners when he Ascended? Did he not care for them? Is Sazed racist? That doesn't sound like the wise and compassionate Terrisman that we know. Besides, we know for certain that the Southerners have a huge advantage over the Northerners: ettmetal. Or as Sazed apparently prefers to call it, harmonium. That's the god metal of Sazed, right? The god metal of Harmony. And it's all for the Southerners to exploit and use (once they figure it out). Why give harmonium to the South, when he can't even be bothered to remove the Ice Death phenomenon? Part III: The Sovereign Well, we do know someone who did bother to do something about it: Kelsier, who was known as the Sovereign in the South. Perhaps Harmony sent him there, but it's still weird how the god who directly created the blessed Elendel Basin could not directly solve the Ice Death problem. Anyway, Kelsier went there, taught the Southerners about the Metallic Arts, found a way to harness the Arts to create the medallions that the Southerners used to survive the intense coldness that they felt, and taught them how ettmetal can be used to harness Allomancy and Feruchemy. That's great and all, but there's still one problem: When Kelsier went to the South, it wasn't frozen at all. This is obviously not polar weather. There wasn't even any snow. Obviously Sazed succeeded in moving the southern continent towards a more temperate region of the planet, its original location pre-Rashek. Now, it's possible for people to experience hypothermia even in warmer climates. but one would think that the Southern Scadrians would have learned to adapt to the cold twelve years after it started. As someone who lives in a tropical country, I know full well how unpleasant it is to be suddenly faced with what people from temperate regions call "mildly cold weather", but every single person I know who's moved from my country to a non-tropical one managed to adapt to the new climate eventually. But that's not what happened to the Southern Scadrians. For more than a decade their population slowly dwindled as one by one people died from a coldness that they should have been used to at that point. And even after hundreds of years in that environment, they still depended on the Heat medallions, as proven by Allik needing to wrap thick blankets around himself just to ward off the coldness he felt in his prison at Dulsing. So, again, we go back to our previous question: Why didn't Sazed do anything? If the coldness that Southerners felt was merely biological, then Sazed could have restored them when he restored the Northerners. But we know it was not biological, because we've already established that Rashek did not touch their genes. I saw someone speculate that the constant use of Heat Feruchemy via the Heat medallions has been changing the Spiritual aspect of the Southern Scadrians, such that they now perceive heat differently than normal. That is an interesting idea, but suffice to say it can't be Kelsier's fault that the Southerners can't adapt to the heat, because they already couldn't adapt years before he taught them about the medallions. In other words, they've been perceiving heat abnormally before the Sovereign. But maybe Heat Feruchemy does have something to do with it... Part IV: The Jaggenmire A lot of people believe that since the term "harmonium" was coined by Sazed, the element could not have existed prior to his Ascension. I don't think that's necessarily true. The combination of Ruin and Preservation's powers has been happening long before Sazed was born. The very planet itself is Connected to both Shards, and the hybrid Metallic Art of Feruchemy (of which Sazed was a practitioner) is a testament that the two powers are complementary. The fact that Southern Scadrians have their own name for it could be a clue. Brandon used the term "ettmetal", likely from the Swedish word "ett", meaning "one", perhaps as a clue that the Southern Scadrians linked the metal to the Jaggenmire, the mysterious "two persons in one god" (a duonity?) concept that is the basis of their religion. "They were always one", said Allik. "And Always apart." Atium has always been different from lerasium, but perhaps there also has always been the One Metal that is both of them. Perhaps this is why Sazed doesn't like "sazedium" as an alternative name for ettmetal. It's not his modesty--at least, not just his modesty-- but rather his sense of truth. He does not want to name the metal after himself, the Vessel, because the metal was not his direct responsibility. Rather, he calls it "harmonium", because long before his time, long before even Rashek, the powers of Ruin and Preservation created the planet by harmoniously balancing their natures, as Herr and Frue were said to have done. Conclusion: The Lord Ruler Revisited Let me now put all those ideas together into a single theory. I believe that Sazed could not fix the Ice Death directly because its cause was very, very difficult to undo, even for a Shard. I believe the reason for the Ice Death is directly connected to what Rashek did to the Southerners to protect them from the extreme heat of the sun. And I believe it has something to do with ettmetal. So, how did Rashek use ettmetal, assuming it did exist during his time? Simple: In his Ascended state, he touched all the native ettmetal ores within the Southern continent and primed it with Feruchemical Heat storage. This allowed the whole continent to be colder than it should be, keeping temperatures at very comfortable levels for the population there. It's possible that all the ettmetal in the planet was concentrated in that continent, just as all the atium and all the lerasium can be found only in the North, in special areas connected to the Shards. In which case, this solution could only be implemented in the South. Rashek knew that a thousand years of region-wide Kinetic Investiture would affect those Connected to the region, similar to how the regional Investiture of Sel works, and somehow he knew that this effect on the Southern peoples could not be reverted easily. He knew exactly what would happen to the Southerners once the orbit is brought back to normal. Rashek foresaw the Ice Death, and found it an acceptable burden for a mere "reserve" to potentially bear. P.S. All this, of course, is just speculation on my part. Feel free to share your thoughts and offer constructive criticism.