Swimmingly

Brandon seems to have a thing for bad french. Roshar, for example, sounds exactly like rocher. French for "rock".

I doubt that Rysn's gift is a chasmfiend; remember that there are multiple types of greatshells. By the situation, I'm thinking that the gift is gonna be more like the kind that ...lives on... the island when it grows up.

So, 16 standard, 16 alloyed with Lerasium, 16 alloyed with Atium, Lerasium and atium, and Harmonium makes 51. Is it possible that everybody is a misting, they just don't have access to their metal? With that many allomantic metals, it's a possibility. Though I just remembered that the lerasium alloys make mistings of their alloyed metals - who can burn atium alloys? And where did the name malatium come from, if it doesn't mean "bad atium"?

We never actually see the storms infusing gems, or hear it described by an eyewitness. Kaladin is semiconcious and possibly hallucinating when he sees the storm, and highstorms aren't described as containing any glowiness all about in the air. To your second point, I see what you mean - however, the gas seems to interact with normal matter in the same way you would expect smoke to by default - there are oddities, but there are oddities in the mists on scadrial as well that are affected by Investiture and artistic licence.

We're talking about bullets that would be extra effective against bloodmakers - a bullet that can kill or incapacitate a man able to heal his injuries in minutes. A headshot would work - but no better or worse than on anybody else, same with all those other methods. We want ways to gain advantages if you don't have allomancy. Allomancy is not something everyone and their dog has, and only an eighth of the ones who do could drag anybody around by their bracers on the battlefield. A bloodmaker could also have decoy metalminds on them that go loose if pushed or pulled on too strongly. And remember, a bloodmaker facing any coinshot or lurcher but an Allomantic iron/Allomantic steel and Feruchemical iron/Feruchemical pewter twinborn could anchor themselves and give the shover a push/pull as well unless they were already anchored on something else.

I guess technically, anything Invested with Shardic power is part of that shard's body. I was comparing it to Atium and Lerasium in that they actually contain Shardic power instead of act as a gateway to it - a glowing gem contains Investiture, but an ounce of copper is just an ounce of copper (as far as we know). On Roshar, of course, Investiture tends to hang around all glowy in between being called in from the Spiritual, so I'm basing the designation on the fact that we call anything containing a Shard's investiture the body of that Shard. I think you're right, however. Infused gems are not the body of a Shard. You could put it this way: The gemstones have four functions: 1)They are gateways into the spiritual triggered by exposure to highstorms 2)They are batteries capable of holding raw investiture 3)They are filters that change the element of the Investiture inside when used for Soulcasting 4)They hold spren inside them to do a task when given Stormlight In the terminology of "focus, fuel, caster, power" , they are the focus in the first, as defined as a gateway into the spiritual realm. In the second, they are the fuel, though they are not consumed by removal of that power - just rendered inert until the next highstorm - though in that capacity they are closer to a hemalurgic spike, as a vessel holding a bit of raw shardic power. In the third, they are also the focus, and occasionally the fuel when the pressure of the Investiture being changed by them breaks them. (The entire process of the first three uses, in fact, is basically a time-delayed version of what happens when an allomancer burns a non-god-metal. A surgebinder who doesn't need the elemental specification, basically everyone but Soulcasters, simply converts the Investiture to its gaseous form, not losing anything, while a Soulcaster is forcing the raw investiture through the gem to change it, like draining a rather hard cheese forcefully with a weak cheesecloth - it's not going to break every time, but there's definitely a chance. Also, you eat the cheese, it takes you another dimension, and you bribe things with the particular flavour of whey you've pressed, which is determined by the cheesecloth and subtly altered by the way you hold it. The metaphor isn't perfect.) In the fourth usage, the spren/gemstone itself is the caster, focus, and fuel - they can presumably be fed Stormlight, store it, and use it. Surgebinding is a four-step process. There are three entities involved in the Surgebinding: -The Surgebinder -The bondspren/Nahel Bond -The infused gemstone The three steps are: 1) The surgebinder turns the stormlight into gaseous form with their order's body focus and the Nahel Bond 2) The Nahel Bond acts a spiritual conduit between the gaseous stormlight and the surgebinder's body (similar to the fragment of Preservation on Scadrial that allows Mistborn to absorb power released when burning the metals or the mists) allowing them to take in the gaseous stormlight 3) The stormlight held in the surgebinder's body slowly escapes, making them glow, have light eyes, healing minor injuries, replacing breathing, and exploding outwards in puffs of mist when used to brace against a force 4) The surgebinder surgebinds, instinctually, pushing the Investiture into the Physical realm in a certain form, the possibilities of which are determined by the type of Nahel bond and the exact specification as to which one and where it's going are determined by intent. In this case, the surgebinder is the caster, the nahel bond/spren is the focus, and the gaseous stormlight is both power and fuel. The infused gemstone could also be considered fuel.

"Wanted: Prophecies whispered with the final breath of loved ones. Reward: Money! Money! Money! P.s: Please don't crem dung us, even though we have no way of confirming whether you are or not. I might even be mad enough to assassinate you if your cryptic, vague sentences don't match up properly with the end of the world as we know it. If you are powerful enough that this offer can be considered "Politics", you're already on my list - and he's checking it twice, probably with tears staining that nice white uniform he wears. Right next to all that lack of blood, because he kills you by slicing out your soul. " In addition, I recall that some of the death prophecies mentioned that used "reported" quotes as well, though they were tagged "questionable". He has to make sure that the amount of crem dung in the prophecies doesn't override the data somehow. If he announces that he's looking for things people say as they die, as well, the patient mortality rate of his hospital might begin to look a little suspicious. People might even avoid it on the principle that they don't want to be used as an instrument of blasphemy (Vorinism discourages prophecy and prediction).

Anyway, Brandon's already used the "Everyone living at the poles" card

I bet T has scripts for everything he has to say/do in his plans in case they happen on a bad day. Which would be interesting in the extreme to steal and read. His limitation also highly encourages getting other people to enact the most critical stages of his plans - though it would be kind of funny to have Szeth or someone tracking him down and trying to give an epic rebuttal of all the values he holds in favour of Love and Friendship (or at least Peace and Cooperation)... to which he replies "Welll, your stoopid!". Bad spelling included.

I'm tending to agree to the "death of a thousand cuts, twice" method of dealing with bloodmakers - Allomantic pewter could probably shrug those off though. Bloodmaking is just so bloody all-encompassing that it seems the only way of killing one is to exhaust the supply by putting a lot of drains on it, quickly. Or just tie them up, impale them with something sharp, long, and heavy, and leave it there. For irony value, making it out of gold would even be a possibility, given that they couldn't store anything in it. You'd have to be really, really cruel and rich for that though. I mean, that's a Bond death if there ever was one - Wayne has been captured, and impaled with a gold spear! He had tons of health stored up, or the spear isn't somewhere that will kill him quickly, but Wax has to pay the ransom before he runs out of health and bleeds to death on the spear! Or just break in and save him.

From the way Feruchemy works, (multiple metalminds for closely related bits of Spiritweb, e.g. different tinminds for sight and smell), I think Lerasium/Harmonium would be a Feruchemy trump the same way Atium trumps Hemalurgy; you can store anything with it, but not all at once - a lerasium/harmoniummind could essentially act like any metalmind you wanted. I actually think it more likely to be the latter, because Allomantic lerasium allows you to burn any metal, an allomancy trump and hAtium lets you steal anything, a hemalurgy trump - it would fit thematically to have fHarmonium be feruchemy's trump. This is assuming that it exists - I think it could be the alloy of Lerasium and Atium, possibly with slightly more Atium to make up for humanity's Innate investiture, but who knows? Hey, that gives me an idea of what Sazed did with some of the extra Ruin power he had, if a mix of that and Preservation with slightly more Ruin is harmonium - he could dispose of the extra ruin by turning it into something unusable allomantically or hemalurgically, but able to do anything feruchemically. Wow, I digressed a little there.

In my opinion, Szeth's hatred of what he does is representative of both his willpower, in that he never goes against his master's orders despite abhoring them, as well as his appalling apathy/self-hatred, in that he does what he is told despite, or maybe partly because of, how much it hurts him. He is a walking contradiction: A huge amount of self-control, but no control over his actions. He even reminds me of a certain character in Mistborn, but mundanely, not magically, controlled.

Oh, the one...on...the island?

In tWoK, we see stormlight in three main different ways: a) making gems glow, b ) wisps of gas, and c) within a person turning their eyes light. We also know that solid shard-matter is the body of a god, capable of very specific things, that the liquid form is pure power, more or less, and that the gaseous form can power a user without the usual foci required - no specifics without spoiler tags on this please. I theorize that the stormlight turns gems into the body of the shard/s spowering the storms, that the wisps of glowyness are the gaseous form, and that Surgebinding (apart from Soulcasting) does not appear to use specific foci, or gateways to the Shardic power, because the power has already been brought into the physical realm via high storms. The spren/Navel bond are the thing that boosts a person's Innate investiture enough to use said pure investiture. Soulcasting is different in that it uses specific investitures from each type of gem directly, similar to mistborn opening the power of Preservation using metals as gateways - but with the gates holding charges of Investiture instead of being directly used.

My understanding is that Spiritwebs are bits of Shardic power "stapled" to your cognitive and physical aspects, kind of like a layer of a sandwich. It contains things that are essential to you, like magical power, sentience, etc. as well as the framework your body acts through. Basically, your nervous system but magical. There seem to be tags on the web that contain things like strength, speed, etc. Raw investiture is trickier - wielded by a shard, it can do anything, focused through an agent using a focus, it's much more specific. So the investiture stored by Feruchemical nicrosil seems unlikely to be your Spiritweb itself, as many other metals already do that but to specific parts of it. It makes little sense, to me, to have a trump metal like that capable of storing everything that can be obtained normally - it should be a god metal to do that(ooooh lerasium shiny). Being able to store raw Investiture would be useless, then, for anyone not able to collect it, which would be everyone on Scadrial. Because it can be used in so many ways, however, and seems to keep for a while in the physical realm, Szeth is probably holding pretty much raw investiture until it does something exiting like repair broken bones in scant moments, invert your ability to not be sucked into the vacuum of space from the ground, animate hulking abominations of pure elemental form, or make getting stabbed with a penknife more painful than it should be.

If Szeth was spiked with hDuralumin holding Feruchemical nicrosil and given a metal mind, could he get around his little stormlight-retention duration issue? Could he save up stormlight and then POW use it all at once on a binding?

So he's a god, not God - but is he powerful enough to define morals?

Letters seem to be common to multiple worlds. For example, "shash" is both a letter on Nalthis and a glyph on Roshar. Ati is a letter of the Steel Alphabet and an aon

Lerasium can grant any power, atium can steal any power...I wonder if there will be harmonium, capable of storing any power.

He's been enslaved, sold, escaped, recaptured, bought, transported, sold again, put through hell, changed armies, and now hangs out with high princes. I would not want to be the mailman come looking for him in that situation

I argue that Amaram was a basically decent human being who was tempted by a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that could be his key to true success. I imagine he was quite irritated at being a backwoods brightlord fighting border battles while the high princes warred

I figured out the problem; my phone was loading from its cache instead of from the server. I cleared the cache, so everything's working now.

Only humans/non-odius aligned sentients. It would be a pretty bad deal, sure, but as a way to ensure that the Honorblades are only used to fight the forces of Odium, it's pretty good. The only way to get out of that pact would be to leave your weapons behind. If the torture, suffering, etc. comes with the package, then you could almost consider the honorblades to be cursed - to be killed with one is to face an eternity of suffering, death, and brief moments of fear until you sacrifice another for the purpose

What is the point of a god that doesn't do anything, then? Sazed could have easily turned everyone into slaves with the same sort of Cognitive block the mistwraiths have, controlling them as he wished - he could have done anything. If having chosen not to use effective omnipower makes one a God, then Sazed is more one than any force that ever existed on Earth.

An omnipowerful God would be less morally justified, as being present in everything implies that you are responsible for everything - and if humans indeed have free will, then the God is not omnipowerful, as things happen outside of specific direction. Sazed is as powerful as a God, because he can't/won't affect free will. If God defines morals because of his power, then Sazed has the authority to do so as well.