Darkness

Can anyone make sense of the information for Sydney Supanova? As far as I can tell, Brandon is confirmed in the programme, and this is all I have from the supanova website: "Brandon will participate in a general admission Q&A, and signing sessions on Friday (2:00pm to 5:30pm) in Sydney, and throughout each Saturday (10.30am to 5.30pm) and Sunday (11am to 5pm) in both [Sydney and Perth]." I have no idea where in the showgrounds he'll be. Guess I'll wander around the Magic booth until I find him haha. Found his area I think.

saw that you posted it over in the other thread too that was the one... I was using sword and Nightblood as keywords though lol. Thanks!

Most likely Szeth cannot use surges since he can't draw in stormlight... Yet. But even if he could, they probably wouldn't be the same surges we were used to in the first 2 books (I cant find the WoB but I have dim memories of someone asking if Nightblood would grant Szeth surges, and Brandon said something like 'bonding Nightblood on Roshar would grant powers, but they may not be the ones you're familiar with'). Dont quote me on that though since I cant find the WoB. Here's a different one haha

Just thought I'd put this here to address the topic since the discussion wasn't conclusive and another person asked recently.

Truly no small feat. Since the water in shadesmar is solid and looks 'like obsidian', I think he must have gone through the Physical Realm. Especially with the 'you owe me a new coat' comment.

humans still have farms to supplement the soulcasters though, so that shouldn't be taken as hard evidence. That's just smart to have a backup

that's a nice confirmation for soulstamps, but I'm not convinced the push/pull argument answers my confusion about what is actually internally invested and what is just externally bound up in investiture. I guess a better way to ask it would be, 'does a hemalurgic spike absorb the target's piece of soul into itself, or is the piece of soul just kind of tethered to the spike?'

also, I have to wonder if Nazh has any magical abilities to help him get away with all this. I cant imagine Navani regularly lets ardents steal parts of her journal, and Shallan and Jasnah are notoriously hard to track.

upvoted for the timely WoB (read it previously, found it fascinating, promptly forgot haha), and great line of reasoning. I've been swayed along the lines of one-off, etc. In the specific case of Nightblood: if he was stamped, I feel that he was changed by his awakening sufficiently for any stamps to have faded. So I'm going to very briefly delve into semantics here. Does it count as 'invested metal' if the investiture is overlaying the object, and not actually infusing it? Because both forged objects and hemalurgic spikes seem to have investiture stuck or stapled to them, but not actually infusing them like a metalmind or (probably) god-metal.

re: Invested metal. I definitely agree with filled metalminds and hemalurgic spikes counting, and probably threnody's silver. But as far as I understand, soulcasting something does not make the product invested. Soulcasting steel wouldn't imbue the steel with investiture (but a surgebinder could probably stick investiture onto metal - like Kaladin and his rock climbing). Also, scadrian metal is not invested. You can take the same metal from another planet, bring it to scadrial, and have an allomancer burn it. The molecular pattern of the metal acts as a key / catalyst for investiture-based magic, but it isn't the source of the investiture. I think the only metals that might count as invested are the god-metals, because they are the solid form of investiture... The 'body' of shards. As for forged metal. I dont believe the target of the forgery gains any investiture from being stamped. The stamp itself likely contains investiture, but that's not quite the same thing.

the biggest problem with this I have is that the original 16 were equal in power at the beginning. If the shattering was controlled enough to make 16 exactly equivalent pieces, i cant imagine they lost anything in the process. A secondary, less important point is that 16 is the number Preservation adopted. To me that hearkens back to the nature of the shattering; i think the numbers themselves are important beyond a simple shardic talisman, i think they exist separately, and the shards were drawn to them or adopted them because of their correlating intents. Basically, 16 is the cosmere standard of preservation, which existed before the shard Preservation came into being. By breaking Adonalsium into 16 pieces, the original people (knowingly or otherwise) associated the shattering with a preexisting concept of preservation, thereby minimizing the amount of power that ended up outside of the 16 shards (i.e. Lost in the process). As a footnote: This, dear readers, is what happens when 17th sharders spend too long on the coppermind. Readers beware.

Probably not. I dont think there is a squirespren to bond with.

what's interesting to me is that the only shardblades Nightblood was likely patterned after were dead ones. They can only communicate when surgebinders touch them, and then they just scream. I wonder if a dead shardblade could think and communicate like Nightblood (meaning intelligibly) if it overcame the pain of being dead. I think the reason Nightblood can communicate with anyone (on Nalthis + at least Szeth) is because breaths are so universally accessible. Nightblood uses a medium that anyone can access, whereas only surgebinders can use stormlight (probably a squire could also hear dead shardblades). And yet Nightblood still ended up with a rudimentary personality/identity beyond "destroy evil". Case in point, Nightblood regards himself as male. In general, its just interesting that Nightblood became sentient even when he was patterned after something most people considered inert. Vasher will probably be much less surprised by living shardblades and their respective personalities than your average Rosharan.

Squireform.

Your spoiler is either a typo, or the most brilliant meta-commentary I've ever seen... I've been thinking about it for 5 minutes and I'm still trying to decide.

I think you misread my post. I'm not disputing that an unmade causes the thrill (which, as you noted, is separate to the unmade that causes the death rattles). And I know that the unmade are splinters of odium. What I'm saying is that, I assumed the thrill-induced sickness Dalinar feels is honor-investiture messing with the unmade's influence. But now, I'm not so sure... It might be Cultivation-investiture messing with the thrill. Not too likely since it's only been happening recently for him, but possible. I'll have to ask Brandon next month.

the problem with odium + anything is that Rayse actively avoids taking any foreign investiture into himself. He hates other investitures too much. Perhaps if Rayse were killed, then someone else would be ok with combining, but for now it simply isn't going to work. I feel like the fainlife (after it undergoes some massive alterations) is going to be the big bad, with an eventual return to Yolen to combat it at the source. The thing I love most about Brandon, is that he makes a habit of delving into the 'now what?' Question. Like in Mistborn. Plot resolved, ok now what? He can do that with odium, with fainlife, with Adonalsium in the beginning, with anything

If it helps, desolations were happening long before the spren figured out how to let humans surgebind. Ergo before radiants.

just had a fun thought. I am a big proponent of different investitures disrupting each other. I've used this to explain why the thrill sickens Dalinar as he draws closer to becoming a radiant. But, what if it is Cultivation's magic that is disrupting the thrill? Maybe his boon/curse are being triggered at the moments he becomes sickened in battle. I'm going to have to reread those passages carefully to see what they have in common excellent!

precision aside, elsecalling isn't exactly subtle. It'd be hard to surprise somebody by sneaking up behind them with a cylindrical, rotating vortex of fire.

I vaguely recall someone asking Brandon this and he said it had to do with linguistic similarities derived from the root language of the shards (from yolen). The same as Shash showing up as a number on Roshar and a letter/character in Elantris.

I guess my question on that would be, 'what changed?' What fixed the principle to allow bonds to form in the present day, and what happened to allow the Parshendi gods to return?

From what I can gather, each shard's investiture has a distinct flavor/wavelength/uniqueness to it that makes it more or less impossible to convert one shard's investiture into a different one on any meaningful time scale (obviously, Harmony is slowly becoming more adjoined into a more singular type over an immense period of time and millions of people's perception - although Sazed still talks about managing the difficulty of his dual nature). So for example you can't meaningfully convert even Stormlight into Breath. "Now hold on!" You say, "What about our Returned friend?" That brings me to my second point, and back to the thread's title: I think it is relatively easier to mimic the effects of a particular investiture as it travels through/is shaped by the magic user's spirit web. In other words, as long as you find a way to internalize and manipulate the given 'alien' investiture, and assuming you can connect (or 'key') yourself to the desired investiture's source planet (because I believe each planet has an important role in how shardic investiture manifests), you should be able to pump any kind of power through your spirit web and achieve the desired affect. I figure it might be harder in some cases because either obtaining, internalizing, manipulating, or connecting is more difficult in some magic systems than in others. As a brief example, I cite the IRE device. The device contained the power, making it obtainable. The power had gaseous form, like Stormlight, Mist, or Breath, which made it easy to internalize. Kelsier was already passingly familiar with magic use and connections, which helped him be capable of manipulating the internalized power (although in the case of the IRE device I suspect it was more of a "magic use for dummies" situation, where it didn't really need any instruction or input. And Kelsier was connected to Scadrial, and thereby to Preservation. So the device, while not using native Scadrian investiture, was capable of interacting with Scadrial's magic. Edit: For allomancy to fuel surgebinding, you would need to be capable of obtaining a metal/mist, internalizing (eating and burning/breathing), manipulating it (forcing it through channels in your spirit web that are specific to surgebinding instead of allomancy - you would likely need to be rebroken and patched by a Nahel bond, which could be the limiting factor, and sufficiently connected to Roshar for the planetary input to vitalize your effect. That last part is purposefully hazy, because it's hazy for me too haha, probably someone else can elaborate on that better. edit 2: Furthermore, I would suggest that Breath is so 'easy' to exchange because everybody's body innately knows what to do with it. Anyone can become an awakener. You dont need to have some special sDNA pathway that you break yourself into like allomancy. Similarly, I personally think having the passive benefits of Stormlight is relatively easy for the same reason: It's automatically manipulated by pretty much anyone... It just requires some prerequisites to internalize by yourself. That's probably why Vasher can use Stormlight to keep himself alive. Maybe he has some fabrial or soulcaster to help internalize Stormlight, and his body knows what to do with it, but he cant use it for Awakening yet because he hasn't figured out how to manipulate it well enough. It would be interesting to know... If Vasher lost his connection to Nalthis, would he still be able to use Stormlight to sustain himself?

That's... Not what I was saying. I'll say it in different words: Odium is God's divine wrath, without moderating context. A 'different shard', like the one you were suggesting might be worse than Odium, under the intent Evil or Cruelty, just doesn't jibe well as a facet in the overall personality of Adonalsium as I see it. Wrath/Odium has a place, Evil/Cruelty does not. That's all I was suggesting

Just off the top of my head, odium is meant to represent "God's divine wrath". It is in its original form a wholesome and contributing attribute to deity. However, I have trouble twisting something like cruelty or evil into a facet of what I see as adonalsium's original intent and composition; being generally beneficent, with this overall intent of 'creating and presiding' (my own words). Also, from what we've heard so far, rayse has imparted his craftiness to odium, which implies that he is not quite so blind as something like 'rage' might be.