Araris Valerian

Are metalminds invested when they are full and if so by which shard? Are hemalurgic spikes with a charge invested or do they act like aons/allomancy by creating a link to the shard directly? If shardblades are hard to push on because of their investiture, why can atium be push on?

I kind of was trying to say that metalminds are not invested. In general I have read investiture as "power of a shard" which maybe wrong. Feruchemy comes from your own body so in my opinion we might need a different term for feruchemical storage. However, whether or not that matters to this theory is more dependent upon how the amount a metalmind is filled affects how much it can be coumpounded. My idea is that instead of being invested, some objects could be modified to create an "Investiture Pathway" that requires some sort of maintenance to provide power. This is really hard to demonstrate, since as Darnam pointed out there is almost certainly a scale of investiture that affects pushes and shardblades and such, so whether or not an object actually possesses investiture at any given time. Currently we have three somewhat confirmed examples of these investiture pathways, Aons, allomantic metals and gemstones through soulcasting. I was trying to use compounding to extrapolate that storing in a metalmind creates one of these pathways with a temporary duration/investiture capacity. Compounding could use this separate pathway combined with the power of Preservation to give a special boost. Side Thought: Since atium is the body of a god, and (I assume) thus pure investiture, wouldn't it be hard to push/pull on?

@Darnam TLR had metalminds (strength, speed) besides atium that Vin could affect before she drew upon the mists unless he had swallowed them and she couldn't sense them all. She was fairly sure that the atium ones were the only ones that she couldn't affect.

Whoops! That's what Harmony should be called now since he is the shard of feruchemy. Upvote for you. @Bartbug I'm not really sure what you are getting at. Whether or not the physical manifestation of a spike is invested doesn't really affect how strong Ruin, since the way I described hemalurgy as working is the exact same way that allomancy works, just with spiking instead of burning.

As the title suggests, this is mostly my speculation as to the nature of a particular aspect of the metallic arts. We know that burning a metal starts an investiture with preservation, and that metals and other inanimate objects are equally balanced between Preservation and Ruin. I propose that neither charged hemalurgic spikes or filled metalminds have "Investiture". Rather, a hemalurgic spike creates a link to Ruin through which an investiture begins. The skill stored within a spike simply overwrites the allomantic coding of the metal to redirect the investiture to the opposite shard. Sazed does say that spiking a non-allomancer steals the innate investiture Preservation gave to that person. My opinion is that the investiture in this situation is returned to Preservation in its entirety while leaving behind a "signal" that acts as an access key to Ruin. Feruchemy is a little different since the power is coming from the perosn themselves. However, we have WoB that it is very difficult to push on an object allomantically if it is invested or involved in an investiture in any way(Shardblades). Vin, before she used the mists, was able to push/pull on all of the metalminds TLR had on him, even though he was accessing some of them during their battle. Again, this is a large assumption, but I would argue that feruchemy drains an attribute of the body to create a pathway through a metal to be able to access that ability in the future, limited to the amount of attribute stored and the size of the metal. So, in summary, I am speculating that the metallic arts all involve a direct link to a shard, removing the need for any investiture to exist within the metals themselves. This allows for allomancy to affect said metals as shown in Vin's battle against the Lord Ruler.

The shard of Unintelligence, the less you understand about your powers, the stronger. Come to think of it, Preservation is kind of a useless shard, he can't do anything by himself. Shard of Hypnotism, you can only use your powers when you are under someone else's influence.

Do Ruin/Harmony have the power to change what type of sensation is stored within a tinmind, like with Feruchemical copper? Does storing investiture with nicrosil allow for compounding the base investiture that Preservation gave everyone? Like what fuels Kandra Blessings?

This, In my opinion, is referencing to the fact that only Vin and Elend were at 100% allomantic strength (Hence the "most Mistborn"). Other people would have their Mistborn code fixed up by lerasium's default power to be 100% as well. Again, just my opinion, but I think that this is kind of like Allomantic iron or Allomantic steel, which have a default purpose of making blue lines appear. You have to actually try to push/pull once you are burning the metal, and continuous burning doesn't change the lines. You have to actually try to do something to make the metals you see move. Likewise, lerasium has a default ability of editing your Mistborn spiritweb, but the excess energy could simply leak away when you don't use it to change any other parts of your spiritweb.

Another possibility is that while burning lerasium you have the power to modify your spiritweb. This might mean that if you burn 5 grams of lerasium then you would have 20 characters within your spiritweb that you can edit. If allomantic power is only stored within those 20 characters, then the leftover power would have no effect allomantically, and simply continue rewriting your spiritweb to be closer to that of preservation.

I have seen speculation that Szeth's sword is an Honorblade and I don't know if it has been confirmed by WoB. However, Szeth mentions that the Stone Shamans would recover his blade upon his death, so if it is an Honorblade, there is some distinction in the Blade's behavior between owning it and being linked to the Oathpact through it.

Do we know if bronze works in a linear way? So if a coppercloud is between a seeker and the source of the bronze pulses, would the seeker still be able to sense the pulses? Based on the two other "cloud" metals we have, anything that enters a cloud is effected, but the effect is reversed to normal upon exiting the cloud.

This is possible. However, each shard's body comes in several forms. We have the mists, the Well and lerasium, then the smoke, Ruin's shardpool and atium. Within Roshar my opinion is that the gemhearts are more analogous to the metals on Scadrial, whose specific atomic composition allowed them to create an access pathway to Preservation's power. On Roshar, the specific gem seems to be important when used in fabrials. If Cultivation (or Honor) was to have a body represented as a gem then such a gemstone would, based on how atium works in hemalurgy, work in any fabrials. Unfortunately, our knowledge of how fabrials interact with their specific gemstone is limited. It does seem that surgebinding is much closer to feruchemy than to allomancy at this point, since gemstones are not used up. (they do shatter with excessive use). However, of the powers we have seen, only soulcasting/fabrials care about the type of gemstone used. My (partial) disagreement comes from how we have seen no solid body form for either Cultivation or Honor, so gemhearts/stones cannot really be tied to either shard.

@Shardlet On Scadrial TLR left a sampling of original humans in the southern half of the planet. If Cultivation was driven by her intent to adapt the people of Roshar then she might have done something similar with Shinovar, the only place we know of that produces chickens and horses and such.

Well 1 divine breath is enough to reach the 5th heightening, so it is roughly equal to 2000 breaths. We don't really know what the minimum threshold for being a sliver is, if such a thing exists. Rather, the important changes to a sliver probably occur when a person's spiritweb or other such thing is stretched and then brought back closer to normal. These could be similar to becoming a savant and thus have similar effects. Actually, with Returned we have seen some of this; the more breath they hold the better they can use it(although some of this might directly be tied into how breaths work and not other magic systems). About breaths being part of a person's soul, I speculate that this is basically the same as the innate investiture that is used to make kandra and koloss. The power Preservation gave to the people of Scadrial over so many years added up to significantly decrease his opposition to Ruin, which means that said innate investiture can be significant in large amounts.

Just to provide an alternate option, on Scadrial which is our closest link to Roshar and the highstorms, the adaptations (to the ashmounts) occurred via shardly powers opposed to the evolution happening over time. So, Roshar could have had similar influences, thus allowing highstorms to have come about as a result of Honor being splintered. Also, while this might not be related, greatshells fit into the ecosystems of Roshar very snugly and I think we have WoB that they can survive at such large sizes due to investiture for honor/cultivation along with lesser amounts of gravity. This would also take a long period of time, which implies similar time lengths both before and after Honor arrived.

If this is WoB then great. But Sazed said in HoA that the Well held only a fraction of the power of preservation. TLR is accepted to be a sliver after holding only this power, so perhaps Returned could be slivers as well. I feel like the distinction here is like comparing apples to bananas, both are fruit, but come in different flavors. There isn't really a measure of how many breaths would make up Endowment, nor how much the Well held of Preservation. Unfortunately, if Returned had the potential to become slivers the process kills them regardless. New question for Brandon: How many breaths makes up Endowment?

I feel afraid that Shallan is going to sneak up behind me after posting this theory. Also, it is quite possible that she mentally projects herself onto visitors since her curses are neurologically related. The strongest argument for Cultivation being weakened is that if she held the full power of her shard then its intent would influence her to cultivate Roshar. At least to me, life on Roshar seems more exotic but also more scarce when compared to the life on earth, or even in Shinovar. Wild tangent warning, perhaps part of Cultivation is trapped in Shinovar which is sheltering the land beyond what the mountains do.

WoB is that if two magics behave the same way then chances are that they are very related. I saw this on his first interview with 17th shard which I don't have a link for, but it was related to the unifying theory of magic. The number 16 (which is mathematical) was important not only to adonalsium, but to preservation and ruin as well. If mathematics is important for one magic system on Roshar, then quite possibly it could affect they other as well. Assuming that the storms are the body of Honor, it is quite possible also that the attunement of surgebinders with honor type Nahel bonds allows them to be more capable of navigating highstorms, just like mistborn were more capable of navigating the mists. This does coincide with Kaladin surviving the highstorm, although this is most likely due to him using stormlight to heal any potentially mortal wounds he obtained with the skymark he held onto.

This post is largely a collection of information about what the highstorms have been shown to do and my take on them. Firstly, highstorms can be predicted mathematically with some degree of accuracy ~80% by Lirin. Secondly, WoB is that they serve a similar function to the mists in some way. The Mists did several things: They were attracted to allomancers, they could be used to fuel allomancy by certain individuals, they countered the power of Ruin to some extent and allomancers burning tin became attuned to them. I believe a passing remark was made about desolations being predicted mathematically has also been made. Mists were also the body of Preservation. The likely explanation is that this last point is what Brandon meant about mists and highstorms being related, but I thought about taking the connections one step further. From these, we can draw parallels. The Highstorms certainly fuel surgebinding, although not as directly as the mists fueled Vin. Kaladin had a unique experience of seeing a face in the highstorm which can be connected to the attraction of mists to invested beings. (people with magic have some special resonance with the body of the shard powering them) My speculations are that the two other functions of the mists are also mirrored by highstorms. Both Desolations and Highstorms have the potential to be predicted with some accuracy. Thus, highstorms may be related to stopping desolations in some way. This covers both the countering of Odium's power and the mathematical predictions of each. If a highstorm occurs every time that a desolation has the potential to happen, they could block Odium's attacks. Does anyone have any other ideas on how these interactions might occurs or whether they happen at all?

@Darnam I agree with what you are saying and just assumed that the Cosmere Theories Section was accepted to have a lot of speculation in it, which would lead to people not assuming that I had 100% evidence for my suggestions. This theory appears to mostly be speculation now due to my misinterpretation of how Leras fit in the system of shards and slivers. The general attitude on this forum about spren is that there is a spectrum ranging from honor to cultivation. I reasoned that including that position in my theory would be fine. I simply found a possible explanation for several coinciding phenomena that fit said phenomena with some assumptions thrown in. Given that Cultivation is still a shard and has been one since the start, her sole purpose should be to cultivate at this point. Since our knowledge of her is mostly lacking this behavior, something is up. Splintering is a possible explanation.

So the Returned hold splinters. If they gave away the divine breath, they could be considered sliver due to having held a respectable portion of a shard's power and then losing it. Additionally, Kelsier is unique (so far as we know) in that he stayed around in the cognitive realm as opposed to where normal dead people go, which is the spiritual realm. This would give him some greater influence over the world such as the capacity to access a dead shard's power. Furthermore, we don't know how much influence Nalthians have over the 17th shard, while we do know that Demoux is a member. Thus Kelsier is a much more likely candidate than any of the Returned for being the founder of the 17th shard. We don't even know how realmatically aware Nalthians are. Given the evidence we have, it is hard to draw Nalthis and Endowment into this discussion. I simply meant that a Returned without breath would be another example of a sliver that we could examine.

I forgot about this. My explanation is that the mist spirit no longer had access to the power of preservation which had prevented its appearance. Also, Ruin very specifically could not appear to Spook or Vin when they were unspiked. This is my main example. @Darnam I guess I feel like anyone who visits this form will see several theories like this one such as Moogle's interpretation of the Davar/Ghostblood thing. The fact that no shard holding its power has been able to appear to non-invested humans, along with the existence of Cultivationspren, seem enough evidence to give my theory potential merit. By this point not much else is left to theorize on and I wanted to have some discussions on what people though of my ideas. That being said, I did follow your earlier advice about posting speculative information and I specifically stated I theorize... I do understand where you are coming from given my topic title, and should have added a question mark at the end. Do you know of a way to change this?

@Windrunner: Thank you. If you lost your human attribute through hemalurgy and somehow survived, would burning lerasium restore it back again? Also, how many breaths would it take to make up Endowment?

On the topic of Cultivation I put my reasons here. Discounting that leaves my one example where the kandra distinguished between holding the power at the Well and spending it. This means that TLR may have had some enhanced capabilities due to his sliverhood. I'm not sure if Leras can be counted as a sliver when he gave up his power, but if so he had special powers within the physical realm and possibly in the others, since he seemed to get around fairly well and had a special knife. With these examples, I surmise around 60% chance that Kelsier had some signifigant changes to his self after holding Preservation which could have boosted his capabilities to influence those such as Demoux. If only the Returned stayed alive, we could have seen if they had enhanced powers.

I theorize that the person of Cultivation has very little access to the shard of Cultivation. Here is my background information: Honorspren are the reason that Honor being shattered didn't effect the cognitive realm as much as on Sel, where a specific comparison to Seons, splinters of Devotion, has been made. Also, Cultivationspren exist (and thus might be splinters). Shards in all their power have rarely been able to appear to people lacking access to said shards power in some strength. Allomancers can see the mist spirit Everyone can see the mist spirit which is detached from its respective shard, and only spiked people could see Ruin's corporeal form. Additionally, Vin specifically appeared to Elend, an Allomancer in HoA. Honor has only appeared in human form so far to surgebinders like Dalinar and Kaladin. The Nightwatcher has some form approachable by humans. We know that cultivation was female, but the Rosharians recognize her as such, which implies some sort of being that may be in corporeal form. The base investiture by a shard is not enough to allow such interactions, as seen with Ruin, who very specifically could only appear to someone with a spike. Thus normal rosharians might not be able to see a shard that isn't more strongly invested in them (A possible exception to this argument involves feruchemists and whether or not they should have been able to see the spirit with Alendi at the Well) A parallel has been drawn between the mists and highstorms. The mists served to counter Ruin's power passively until a new Preservation came around. Highstorms could serve the same purpose of countering Odium. This would leave a fully empowered Cultivation capable of clearing out Odium's various investitures from Roshar, which has not been done. Leras was able to detach himself from his shardic power, so perhaps shards can do this to one another. In short, the nightwatcher appears to be recognizable as female, has much less influence on her world opposed to other shards, has spren that may be her splinters, and can be seen by non-invested humans. These suggest to me that by some means she has been deprived of her powers.