18th Shard

Ah, you mistake me. I am referring to the Resealing that healed the arrow to the head, before Shai ever is released from prison, Forgeries not done by Shai but by the palace Resealers.

I don't know about that - while Shai's forgery definitely would have that hazard, I don't believe Ashravan had any requirement to be stamped for the resealing to remain in force.

I think (and @Sorana chime in if you think differently) Mike and Xanas could wind up whenever necessary. I vote go ahead with the Fatebreaker Era.

Xanas sat in the quiet stillness, eyes closed, hands brushing over the wooden stamp. Shadows danced across his fingers to a Rhythm the listeners had called the Rhythm of Silence - a cadence bearing only the slowest points of the Rhythm of Peace, muted and flat, as if the tune had been pressed into a two dimensional image. Carvings upon carvings layered across the stamp in shapes that should have been impossible to carve - an emptiness beneath solid wood here, a twist against the grain there. Thoughts appeared in Xanas's mind like sparks at a blacksmith's anvil, extinguished as the oil of the Void quenched them. Frost creepingly crystallized on the ground beneath him, and groans creaked through the tree bark. A voice echoed in the darkness, an annoyance, but not one of consequence. There was no reason to concern himself with the young man muttering inanely. There was only the darkness, the eye in the storm's center, the silence. Leaves rustling, twigs snapping - impeding, like stones tossed carelessly into the still waters, like footprints in a manicured garden. "Xanas." The voice, quiet, screamed in the silence. Didn't he understand that he was disturbing nature? The Void surging, pooling around his hands, spinning like sublimating ice into the air around him. "I-" Xanas's eyes bled black, pits where even light feared to tremble, shadows so deep even the natural darkness around him seemed to recoil. The air currents swirling from the boy's breath, disturbing the still air, his body heat leaching into everything he touched like a cancer of thermal energy. Xanas looked up at the child, his left hand crushing the stamp into a smoky powder, burning it out of reality, his right hand reaching out to rend the child's breath from his lungs, to pull his very soul into an eternal abyss and - Xanas met Mike's eyes, and something broke. The darkness rearing inside him seemed to shift. Xanas could feel it, raging, like a river, begging to burst its dam, but Xanas's will reasserted itself. He would not give in to that darkness. It chafed at his restraint, blurring in along the edges of his vision. He reached out to the tree to his right, arcane symbols and Forgeries carving themselves across it surface, the darkness within delightfully draining into his world. His sclera bled back to white, his iris back to the dull grey of a Lifeless. Xanas could feel the Void he had pulled here, into his sanctuary. This is a dangerous well to draw from. Xanas's head tilted as he looked at Mike. "You're an extrovert, I assume? It seems to be a dominantly breeding trait these days. In my experience, the extroverts never seem to understand how taxing it is for the rest of us to just keep talking." Mike's hands seemed to tighten just a hair, the motivators still on his hands. He didn't seem to be excited; in fact, his posture was more hesitant. Of course. He can't get them to work. "They're not a weapon, Mike. Not really. It's a little bit like an Aviar - you need to connect with it as a part of you. You can't just brute force them into working - you have to find the power, already a part of yourself. Reflect inward, and you'll feel something new and old all at the same time. That's what you're looking for. At least, that's what it feels like to this old, self-aware introvert." Xanas closed his eyes again. "If that doesn't work, I can always command the gardeners to try to kill you. Adrenaline also seems to help kick motivators on." He opened his eyes for a second, smiling. "Don't worry, they are slow, rusty old things. Nothing more deadly than tetanus is too likely to happen." Closing his eyes again, Xanas began to breath in and out, slowly. This time, don't start ripping pinpricks in the fabric of the universe. @Sorana

My mission was partly-Persian speaking (my last 6 months) and I am taking Arabic in college, and so hearing about a temple being built in the Middle East was so exciting!

I found this gem from a signing a few years ago. From the man himself: https://wob.coppermind.net/media/snippets/273/5084_13.mp3

Is this guild monitoring the spread of diseases or "monitoring the spread" of diseases? This question in no way represents the opinions, knowledge, or admissions of guilt of any Dark Alley members.

...I have no idea how that got typed the way it did. I am fully aware of that WoB. I think I meant to put Preservation instead of Honor, then got distracted and picked up without reading my own sentence. Wow. Well, let's edit that.

Just to note, I doubt Cultivation was romantically involved with Preservation, as she was romantically involved with Honor (as referenced in the WoB referenced above). While she could also have been friends with Preservation, I highly doubt that they were close enough for him to note her the way we see him do, as I think almost everyone interprets Preservation as using the name Senna in a romantic sense.

I think many Inquisitors had doubled steel, iron, or pewter-granting spikes, based on the above evidence.

So this person is a Steel Compounder? I believe we are currently not allowing Compounders for metals like Steel for balance reasons. Like Kenod said, I'd check out the index to figure out which investiture Zephyr has. Your character can have up to 100 points in Investiture and 50 points in skills (though Investiture points can be applied to skills). Welcome!

I'm just going to leave this here - it's my first post on the shard in 2013. Edit: On the last page, there is a meaningful WoB in a post quoting Satsuoni which is relevant to this discussion.

I think part of the issue they mention on the previous page is the identity of the kandra becoming imprinted onto their spikes, and part of it is the fact the old inquisitor spikes are simply no longer potent enough for the job. We also know blessings are almost always made from spikes that have stolen human attributes - strength, senses, emotional stability, mental fortitude. WoB says that it does require some tricks to use spikes stealing allomancy or feruchemy as a blessing, and inquisitor spikes are all allomantic or feruchemical. I doubt you could use this idea to restore a kandra who had lost their spikes, but it might be enough to make a new one.

*Summons the Dark Alley* On a serious note, though, we know that burning a spike may "[splice] your spiritual DNA to that of the person's that is in the spike". We also know if the identities don't match, "There would be power there, but you wouldn’t be able to access it. Like burning someone else’s metalmind." I think it has potential to work - if the spike steals something similar to what Feruchemical nicrosil stores, you may have a similar effect when burning an unkeyed spike as an unkeyed Nicrosil metalmind.

Looking through all of the WoB involving tapping spikes, generally Brandon just glosses over that part of the question. Here's a couple of examples:

I think that theoretically this (the OP) is possible; however, anywhere within a normal range of a savant or even someone using feruchemical Nicrosil, I kind of doubt it. It's a bit like the WoB on whether you could make a Death Star using Lightweaving or Soulcast lerasium - it's on the order of magnitude of turning lead to gold in a nuclear reactor. You have to remember that you can't push on metal inside a person's body but can Surgebind on them because Surgebinding is a bit more power intensive. Nightblood being your standard for vaporizing things is a bit skewed seeing as he is the single most invested object in the cosmere, and outranks the Unmade in pure investiture levels. If a Leecher is pulling that amount of Investiture, they are probably already past mistpoint. (Ettmetal grenades are literally consuming an unstable godmetal, so I'd say there is more going on there than meets the eye.)

We know, however, that in addition to being stronger than a lerasium-mistborn as a result of his time in the Well, the Lord Ruler could also compound nicrosil, burn duralumin, was essentially a savant in every metal, and any other tricks he needed to. I would say 2x stronger than a lerasium mistborn is at best a lower baseline.

"The control rooms in combat situations tend to be large rooms with communications equipment connected to the Dark Alley denizens in the fight. I prefer to help with the Alleymatic portion of the fight. If the Dark Alley actually has to involve me in a fight, then the combatants tend to be highly Invested, and so the problem isn't usually the martial capacity of the participants, it involves analyzing the individuals and determining where they derive power from, then disrupting that connection. Often Alleyways made in just the right way can be constructed around an individual, providing a Denizen with Investiture and depriving their opponent of it. I am partial to moving Shadesmar just a micrometer out of sync with the Physical Realm - that tends to cause a temporal displacement of the Investiture by a few seconds. I am one of the few Denizens who could be sufficiently precise with Alleys to be viable to use them in combat. Or at least, I was, a couple millennia ago. That's around when I planted these trees. There are micro-Alleyways embedded near the roots, siphoning crem from parts of Roshar and giving it a trickle of water from the Bright Sea. I kept the original plants in a bendalloy bubble for almost ten years or so, checking in every generation to make sure they were crossbreeding properly. I could have spliced the genetics of the plants together, but there is a certain beauty that you can only find when something is done by nature. It is perhaps one of the few truly peaceful places I have left." And then on a whim, I bring a child here, to practice combat. Xanas felt a twinge of anger, not at Mike, but himself. It had been millennia since he had done joint experiments. Rarely, if ever, had he taken a colleague with him when he left a lab, and so he had never had to adapt his habits to account for others. He took a breath, held it, then breathed out. It was strange how calming it was, in spite of the fact his body didn't require oxygen anymore. Xanas gestured to a small clearing in the middle of the trees. "I suppose you could practice using those motivators, just keep summoning a hedge clipper or something, repeatedly until you're used to how they work." Xanas walked deeper into the orchard, into a small dark patch, where the leaves of trees above perfectly interlocked to block out the light. Hanging Tsarik by the sheath on a knot in the wood, he sat down on a small bent tree, one that he had shaped as a bench while it was growing. He bent to the ground, picking up a short branch that had fallen, one that was about 5 centimeters thick, and a deep, dark, almost black, brown. He drew Tsarik and cut the branch into a piece a little longer than his fist, then set the sword back into its sheath. He pulled off his gloves. If Xanas was going to tell Mike to learn his new powers, it would be hypocritical not to do the same. He closed his eyes, held out a finger, and started tracing a narrow pattern along the top of the branch of the wood. As his finger brushed certain points, he began to Voidmake the top layer, carving a simple repeating pattern, a central line, branching off, bending and twisting, winding its way around and around. He continued until he reached the edge of the branch. Xanas might not be able to Forge anymore, but the simple practice was both calming and challenging enough to be soothing. He could feel the darkness inside consuming his emotions, and pictured a small flame sitting in the Void, consuming all the thoughts and worries in his mind. The Flame sputtered, and then went out, the dark spike in his still heart becoming cold to the touch. He continued to shave portions of the engraving by minuscule layers until the pattern was clear - Alleyways twisting in on themselves, spiraling out from a single little hole in the center, a hole that reached deep, all the way to the heart of the piece of wood. No forgery could ever fully capture the shape of the Alleys on its head - there were far too many that obeyed natural laws far too little - but the bigger the Forgery, the more precise you could be. Somehow, the Stranger and Voidus had managed to capture the whole thing on the Worldspike. As you looked down on its head, you could keep zooming in and in, details fractally dividing into infinity, not only mimicking, but defining, reality. Every other Forgery in the Alleys only approximated the original one found there. Xanas opened his eyes and blew on the top of the stamp before remembering that there was no dust. He flipped over the stamp and began carving. @Sorana

I think there would need to be a good reason any Radiant has a dead Blade, seeing the reactions of most characters on Roshar's reaction. Perhaps at one point he was a Third Ideal Radiant, then broke his oaths and is now keeping up to the second oath again? Edit: Perhaps he swore to follow someone or some code, realized that it was corrupt, and has trust issues with magically binding himself to something again? @HemalurgicStickBreaker

Oh, I am aware of those theories. The point of this one was more of a "maybe we are going about this backwards". Instead of creationspren - > Lightweavers - > midnight mother, it would be Lightweavers - > creationspren - > midnight mother, if that makes sense.

When Shallan faces Re-Shephir (the Midnight Mother), she notes mentally, "it's like a creationspren. Only so, so wrong." This got me thinking. I've seen theories matching the Unmade to Surges, to Radiant orders, to Heralds. But what about the minor spren that seem to pop up with each Radiant order? Midnight Mother -> creationspren -> Lightweavers The cousin spren theorized about include: windspren - Windrunners creationspren - Lightweavers lifespren - Edgedancers gloryspren - Bondsmiths (note, however, that there is no correlating Unmade to the order of Bondsmiths, according to WoB). The Unmade: Ashertmarn - the Heart of the Revel Ba-Ado-Mishram Chemoarish - Dustmother Dai-Gonarthis - Black Fisher Moelach (death rattles) Nergaoul (the Thrill) Re-Shephir - Midnight Mother Sja-anat - Taker of Secrets Yelig-nar - Blightwind Thus maybe Yelig-nar, the Blighwind, is similar in some way to windspren; Chemoarish to firespren, or whichever spren are the cousins of ashspren. Ideas?

I think it is evident that cognitive perception can inhibit healing but not strengthen it - and "FAR more efficient means of counteracting aging " would probably mean methods such as reaching the appropriate heightening, or delaying your aging in another method. If you can decrease the rate at which you age, the atium compounding becomes far more effective. The reason the TLR method is inefficient is because you need an exponential quantity of investiture. If you can get yourself to age slower, then even if you now need only multiplicatively more investiture, it is still far more efficient. In other words, I can't think of an example of cognitive perception that would actually make your healing work better. See the below WoBs.

Quoted from other topic: We don't know of a method of Hemalurgy that doesn't take the entire ability - it works by ripping off a chunk of the Spiritweb - and so this would most likely only work once per Gnat (unless the Gnat were healed sufficiently to restore their Spiritweb, but that is above most levels of healing on Scadrial). However, once medallions become more common, this should work, with the Duralumin Gnat storing in Nicrosil thier ability to burn duralumin, and then that medallion being used by another Allomancer to boost themselves. This would probably be similar to most abilities at that point though.