11thorderknight

I think it's pretty clear that Brandon is sticking to a theme of 10 for the series, since it's clearly an important number. And it would definitely make sense to have each book be related to one of the 10 orders. The cool thing though, is that as the series goes on we'll be able to figure out which order is going to be featured prominently in which book, since some of them will have been eliminated already. For instance, Jez/Windrunners was obviously the theme of Way of Kings. So if Brandon is able to stick to his plan, that means Szeth's book will have to focus on a different order, even though he's currently using Windrunner powers (or 1st order surgebinding, or whatever you want to call what he's doing without a spren). Theory: Szeth will lose his Honorblade, thereby losing his abilities, but then bond with a spren and join a different order.

What, are you saying we're not capable of settling the central question of philosophy and theism on this forum? Also, with regard to the "ripping off a piece of someone's soul" part of hemalurgy - I admit that I don't take that into account when deciding on the morality of hemalurgy, simply because Brandon hasn't, as far as I know, actually given us any information as to what that actually means. If, as Moogle suggests, this has negative implications for that individual's state in the afterlife, then I would have to revise my assessment. But if the portion of the "spiritweb" that's ripped off is analogous to a physical organ, like the liver for instance, and doesn't have any afterlife implications, then I stand by my earlier arguments.

@Shardlet - you've brought up some very well-reasoned points, and in general, I agree with your conclusion. I'd have to say though, that I strongly disagree with your basic premise, which is that morality requires an "overarching moral authority". Morality is what it is, much the same way that mathematics is what it is; neither require an "authority" to make them so. We, as individuals of imperfect understanding, may be mistaken in our personal beliefs of what morality might be in any given situation, and there are certainly many situations where morality is not clear-cut (at least in my opinion, maybe I'm wrong!). My point, though, is that morality is universal and axiomatic; it is very different from law, which IS imposed by an authority. What's very interesting to me about this discussion is that this is EXACTLY the discussion that Jasnah and Shallan have in Way of Kings, when they discuss their respective religious beliefs. That discussion, and Brandon's characterization of Jasnah, is outstanding - I really feel that Brandon hit it out of the park with how well he depicted a real-world theological/moral/philosophical dilemma in-world. And as for Hemalurgy: I'll jump on the contrarian band-wagon and say that there is nothing whatsoever immoral about it. And since morality is universal, this is not my opinion, it's fact :-) Sure, the requirement that someone has to die in order to produce a useful spike is inconvenient, and makes it quite difficult to use hemalurgy in a moral way. It's obviously immoral to spike people against their will. But to spike someone who is imminently dying anyway in order to benefit others? With that person's consent? There's nothing objectively immoral about that at all. You may personally find it unpleasant, but your tastes do not dictate universal morality. As a very serious real-world analogy, there are some cultures that view organ transplantation as being taboo. Does that make it immoral? Aside from kidneys and livers, someone has to die to make an organ available for transplantation - does that make the practice immoral? Hemalurgy is no more immoral than that.

Exactly what Gloom said. Since you bring it up though....it would be interesting to know how Soulcasting fabrials work (from the user's point of view, not how they're made). In the Interludes, one of the two old ardents jokes about people eating while visiting Shadesmar. My point is this: how do they know what Shadesmar is? With everything that's been lost since the days of the Radiants, I have a hard time believing it's based on ancient knowledge. Their joke sounded like going to Shadesmar was something that people still did, at least some people. And we don't know of any other fabrials that allow access to Shadesmar. So....maybe the Soulcasters do?

I think if she had to use it in her defense publicly the story would have spread like wildfire, and it would be well-known. And why would she not be able to hide it? It's not like she needs anything she could soulcast, or couldn't explain another way for how she got it.

Regarding why the Ghostbloods would send one man to poison Jasnah in an intricate plot instead of do something much more direct: for one thing, we have no idea what the Ghostbloods want. For another, it's quite possible that Jasnah is not really the target of their plot. If their true enemy/target is the ardentia as a whole, then what better way to discredit them than frame them for the assassination of the king's sister, a known heretic and outspoken enemy of the ardents? Also, regarding Jasnah's use of Soulcasting - someone mentioned that she's been very careful in keeping it hidden. That's true, in a way. But in another way....wouldn't it have been even easier to simply hide the ability altogether? It would have saved her a lot of political heat, and she doesn't really need to Soulcast for any practical reason (other than learning and practice, which she could do in secret just as easily).

Yeah, there's no way that Jasnah been Traveling around Roshar Wheel-of-Time-style, everyone and their mother would notice. I'm sure the king of Alethkar's sister travels with a bunch of maids and a contingent of the Cobalt Guard, whether she wants to or not. So, officially at least, her party has to travel by normal means. Now, I could definitely see Jasnah taking a secret midnight jaunt from one place to another and being back by morning, such that no one sees her go. However, we really have no idea how the Transportation surge works. We know that during the Silver Kingdoms people could travel great distances instantaneously through the Oathgates, but we have no evidence that individual Radiants were capable of that on their own. It's possible that the Oathgates were fabrial science that took the Transportation surge beyond what any individual could accomplish on his own. Bottom line: we don't know how Transportation works, other that Oathgates existed once, but logic dictates that Jasnah travels around in a conventional manner.

Just throwing this out there - why does there have to be a romance at all? Jasnah is said to be 34, so when she first started showing signs of a Nahel bond at age 29, she was already an old maid by the standards of her society. I don't think Brandon is going to do a repeat of Wheel of Time, where every character gets paired off with another character.

I agree, I don't think that Elhokar did anything with all that Stormlight. But my point is that he didn't have to in order to drain the gems, even ten large sapphires. If you read the Szeth scenes, it's pretty clear that he can only hold Stormlight for a very short time. But he's aware of this, and uses it sparingly and to maximum effect. If Elhokar is unconsciously infusing himself, then having it dissipate, then over the course of a couple hours he could easily drain a bunch of large gems while not accomplishing anything. It would be like the gems had a "leak" in them. Then, when the chamsfiend attacked and his armor was stressed, the gems cracked because all of a sudden they took a large hit.

Real-world quantum entanglement applies to sub-atomic particles, and yes, obviously Brandon drew on his knowledge of physics and quantum theory for inspiration when he came up with realmatics and the three realms for the cosmere, especially with regard to spren. I'm just saying that, in-world, where EVERYTHING exists on all three realms, splitting a gem in two and having the pieces "stay connected" is a pretty clear example of the cognitive driving the physical.

Sorry, gotta jump in here - what you said above about real-world examples of brain injury just isn't accurate. Phineas Gage, and everyone who's ever been lobotomized, or had personality changes because of surgery or strokes, etc, sustained physical damage to very specific parts of their brain. In the case of Gage, he sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-order behavior and impulse control. The lobotomy cases are similar, and basically removed motivation from people. The people who lost short-term memory all had damage to specific parts of the temporal lobe (i forget which one, but its' well described). People who are in a "vegetative state" have damage to the entire cerebrum, and therefore have no personality or consciousness left; all they have are autonomic functions (breathing, etc) and reflexes. People who are "brain-dead" don't even have that, and require a machine to breathe for them. My point is that all of these are specific physical injuries, the same way that a broken arm is different from a broken leg. Applying this to TES, if the Emperor had been "alive" in the in-world spiritual sense, then healing his body of injuries would have also healed all the "brain damage" as well. I believe that the proper way to look at this is that the resealers got there too late, and basically healed a dead body.

OP - everything you said was correct. To recap: a Compounder is someone who has access to both allomantic and feruchemical properties of the same metal. This allows them to store a feruchemical charge in a small bit of the metal, then swallow it and burn it, because of their allomancy. The feruchemical charge changes the "identity" of the metal so that, when the burning process occurs, it grants the feruchemical power associated with it instead of the allomantic power. The amount of power derived this way is enormous, far in excess of what's required to create the charged metal. In order to save that power, most Compounders take that huge burst and store it in a regular metalmind. So, basically, a little bit of compounding here and there allows a compounder to walk around with perpetually filled metalminds. I hadn't heard the fact that TLR's atium bracers were hemalurgic spikes, but whether they were or not, it's not really relevant to what happened. Those bracers contained all his stored youth, and because he was a thousand years old, he was constantly tapping them to stay alive. Every once in a while, he needed to store a bit of it in a separate bead of atium, then burn that bead to create more youth to refill his bracers, but it's not something he was doing all the time, or even all that frequently, probably. Because he literally needed to have access to those bracers at all times to stay alive, he designed them so that they pierced his skin, and thus couldn't be Pushed/Pulled, at least by ordinary allomancers. If they also happened to be hemalurgic spikes....well, that doesn't really change any of the above.

Again, I'd be shocked if all ten orders couldn't use internal stormlight. It would be a major break in the symmetry of the magic system, and frankly, without that basic ability, those orders of knights would be chopped liver on the battlefield. Soulcasting, despite how awesome it is, is not the most useful surge in combat. One on one in a alley against some thugs, it'll do, though even then it uses a huge amount of stormlight. Against a thunderclast? No way. I'm pretty sure we'll find out though; in the Purelake vision, the Radiant Dalinar is with glows a "deep red". Sounds much more like garnet than ruby, to me...

For one thing, there's no reason that "allomantic compounding" has to exist. In the books, "compounding" is the term used for the "hack" of fueling feruchemical abilities with allomancy, which can be done by someone who has access to both the allomantic and feruchemical abilities of the same metal. We know that the opposite situation - fueling allomantic abilities with feruchemy - is possible, because we've seen TLR do it. But think about it for a moment; if all that this second "hack" required was access to both abilities for the same metal, then in 300 years at least one Twinborn would have found it, and it would be a known thing. My theory is that this second hack requires something different; namely, access to the ability to store pure Investiture.

That's an interesting WoB regarding one of the other Heralds being a PoV character. Since he had to think for a bit to say whether he was in WoK, it's unlikely to be either Jezrien or Kalak, since their scene is so prominent. And it's not Taln, since we know about him already. And Brandon did say "him". So, that leaves Nalan and Ishar. We know that Nalan is featured in WoK as a small cameo, but I doubt that he'd have introduced him as a bad guy in the interludes in WoR. So....more support for Ishar being the drunk guy at the feast?

Not to nitpick, but the gems are not associated with a single surge, they're associated with a single Essence. It's like the circle or surges and the circle of orders/gems/essences are staggered relative to each other, and each surge is shared by two essences, and vice versa. Also, the spanreeds very obviously use the Cognitive realm; they're made from two gems that are split from a single larger gem, and thereafter remain connected. It's like they still think they're one single gem, wink wink.

Actually, I feel like the cracked gems suggest the former - it would be really hard to sneak in dun, much less cracked (and therefore not glowing) gems into the king's armor as he's being dressed for battle. The gems are right smack in the middle of the breast plate, so Elhokar would literally have to get dressed with his eyes closed to miss the cracked gems. And whatever servants were helping him dress and were NOT in on the plot would all have had to have their eyes closed, too. Remember, in Shallan's POV when she first meets Jasnah, she described the gems in her Soulcaster as glowing "with the light of several torches". I'm sure the gems used for the king's Plate are at least as big and well cut. And there were, what, 10 of them in his Plate? Hard to miss that.

We know that fechuchemically-powered allomancy exists, because TLR was able to do insanely high-powered allomancy that no one could explain. My theory is that this involved storing and tapping Investiture through a nicromind. Example: TLR burns brass to create Soothing, but instead of using it, he stores it in his nicromind. Then, when riding in his carriage to the execution scene in Mistborn: Final Empire, he taps it and Soothes the entire city. One big question with this mechanism is whether the stored Investiture retains it's "flavor", or whether it becomes blank. To use the above example, did TLR have to burn a lot of brass for a while to store up epic Soothing power, or could he have stored ANY investiture or some type, and then use the "blank" investiture to supersize some brass burning? I tend to think it's the latter, because there has to be a way for a regular Keeper (i.e. feruchemist without any allomancy) to use nicrominds, and if the "flavor" was conserved, then a nicromind becomes just a way to store whatever you already can store but without using the necessary metal. Useful in some circumstances, I guess, but not really, since nicrosil is probably the rarest alloy of the 16. "Blank" investiture, on the other hand, would let you swap one attribute for another, and that is REALLY useful. For instance, you can constantly store weight, heat, food, water and air, and turn all of that essentially external energy into attributes that are very hard to store, like health, or luck, or even (if you have even a tiny bit of atium) youth. I can easily imagine a plot about the first Keeper in the AoL time period who discovers nicrosil - he/she would be like a mini-TLR!

You know, it's very possible that the Thrill is a very primitive and/or vestigial form of surgebinding that people with unrealized surgebinder potential can experience. It might grant a tiny bit of the power of stormlight, enough for someone to feel, but not enough to seem supernatural to onlookers. Once enough people described the same sensation, it became a known "thing" and people kept on attributing that rush of a tiny bit of stormlight to it. Remember, we've had several instances across Brandon's books of characters making up these explanations for powers they didnt' understand, such as Vin's "Luck" and Lift's "Awesomeness".

I'd be really disappointed, from a worldbuilding standpoint, if anyone other than Elhokar drained those gems. We're told that a Shardplate wearer can't be Invested, and that the Plate protected Gavilar's gems from being drained by Szeth during their fight. There's even a note made of the fact that Szeth is able to drain those gems once the breastplate is off and they're exposed, whereas he couldn't before. No, Elhokar's gems were either drained before he put on the Plate, or they were drained by him. Edit: Great minds think alike!

I've long been a proponent of the theory that the drained gems were a result of Elhokar unknowingly draining them himself. Note, though, that he doesn't have to actually do anything useful with that stormlight though, in order to drain the gems. He probably simply held the stormlight for a short time and let it drain out without using it for much. At his stage of development, he can probably hold it for only a few seconds, much like Szeth. And regarding the Cryptics - we have no confirmation at this point that they are the spren exclusive to the Lightweavers. In fact, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence to the contrary, in my opinion. Every other Radiant order we've seen so far (which is 3; the Windrunners, the Edgedancers, and order 5) bonds with a spren that resembles a "regular" spren, but has awareness and directly communicates with the Radiant. The Cryptics are markedly different on several fronts; they travel in a group rather than singly; they have no resemblance to "regular" spren types; and at least for Shallan, they seem to require an "exchange" in order to produce a surgebinding effect. Also, Elhokar and Shallan perceive them very differently; she sees them subconsiously in her drawings while he sees them in mirrors. Now, it's possible that this all has to do with the somewhat unique nature of the Soulcasting surge. But it's also possible that the Cryptics are an entirely different class from Honorspren, and may represent a separate way of becoming a surgebinder. My point here is that just because Elhokar sees Cryptics doesn't mean he's going to be a Lightweaver.

Also, I wouldn't base much on the Stoneward in the Skyfalls interlude. Stonewards don't have the Travel surge, so she was either using (another) fabrial, or Dalinar didn't see her arrive for some other reason. Remember, one of her surges would be the "surface tension" thing, and we know from Teft's histories that she should be "able to make stones melt". Maybe she swam up through the ground, for all we know. And there's still the last surge that we have no clue about.

I just want to clarify - I'm not necessarily stating that travel through Shadesmar would take longer in a city. I am stating, however, that there would be more Shadesmar distance to traverse than, say, over empty land, or in the extreme, through outer space. Also, just because it's fast doesn't mean it's easy. That raft that Jasnah made? I'm sure it required Stormlight, since she then proceeded to bitch out Shallan about how dangerous it is to go to Shadesmar without enough of it. What I was saying is that, while Shadesmar is a great option to cross the continent, and pretty much the only option to worldhop, it might not be that great an option to go over to your buddy's house for dinner if he lives a 20 minute walk away.

I guess it's a possibility that Gavilar was talking about something else...but given that he had recently become obsessed with the Way of Kings, it's a pretty good guess. My theory is that the book gives 41 parables of "honorable behavior" that exemplify the Ideals, and then it's up to the reader to see if any of them "click", and then "find the words".

I think the Cryptics would accept anything that someone genuinely feels to be true, regardless of objective criteria. So with regard to Shallan, it's possible that they would accept "I killed my father' even if she didn't physically do it, but only if she did something that, in her mind, directly led to his death and that she truly feels responsible for. If, otoh, she merely assumed blame to, for instance, shield one of her brothers, I don't think that would fly with them.