BlackYeti

I'm not sure which symbol you mean when you refer to the cover. My cover looks like this, and obviously there's no symbol on that, can you clarify what you mean here?

We'll have to agree to disagree here then, because I don't want to hijack this thread discussing this. If you want to debate this further, feel free to PM me. The point that I was trying to make was that only the god metals and their alloys power Allomancy themselves, the base metals do not; I wasn't trying to make a statement on what precisely it means for something to be Invested.

That is Scadrian metal specifically, I was referring to metals generally, since Allomancy is not restricted to Scadrian metal. The point that I was making in any event was that unlike the god metals, it isn't physical Investiture. Also I wasn't talking about atium, but malatium, which contains physical Investiture in the form of atium, but is not itself pure Investiture. Consider Nightblood: it contains 1000 Breaths and is often referred to as being Invested. Yet Breath is also physical Investiture, albeit in a gaseous rather than solid state, so if it is incorrect to refer to malatium as Invested, then it follows that it would also be incorrect as well to describe Nightblood as being Invested.

Gold is not of Ruin. Nor is it of Preservation, or any of the other Shards: it is one of the base 16 metals. Like all of the base metals, it acts as a focus only, opening a specific conduit to Preservation which provides the Investiture for the Allomancer to use. As @Spoolofwhool, @Yata, and now @lidrevan have said, the eleventh metal, malatium, is an alloy of atium and gold. This means that the metal itself is Invested and is powering the Allomancy itself, however unlike a pure god metal the presence of a base metal means that the power is being filtered differently than it would be if it were pure atium. So it is being powered by Ruin, and only Ruin here, and just as the Allomancy from any base metal is powered by Preservation only, but based on the metal provides different effects, the effect here is different from pure atium (and different from any other atium alloy as well). And yes that does mean that there are 16 possible alloys for every possible god metal (not counting the potential for alloying the different god metals with each other).

Find some bendalloy, swallow it, then try to burn it. That way you can do both (Note: I take no responsibility if you end up with heavy metal poisoning after following this advice.)

If that were true, then Susebron would have needed to have his tongue cut out every week!

I got mine today (okay, it really came a few days back, but I resisted opening it until today). I decided to go with something fun, so I asked him to write the First Ideal of the Knights Radiant translated into High Imperial. It's a shame that he missed my name off, but I can't complain too much given how much I've fallen in love with it. Also I think I've now finally figured what to use as a signature. Could be worse: I mixed up the time zones, which coupled with an authentication issue and my ignorance of the 90 character restriction (my original attempt was 91 characters long), meant that I ordered mine about 2 hours and 15 minutes after it went on sale. As such I got #1328. And to mirror your post, I got #97 for Elantris last year!

I think we're mostly in agreement then, but if you will allow me to clarify the point on Haemalurgy. In order to steal anything with Haemalurgy you need 3 things: the correct intent, the correct bind point, and the correct metal. If you were to try and find a new combination therefore, you would need to test every bind point with every metal (though depending on how much you know of the system, you could narrow the metal down by the category of the attribute that you're trying to steal). We know that there's between 200 and 300 bind points in the human body, so if we assume 256 to keep to the base 2 nature of the metallic arts, that means that you'd need a maxiumum of 256*16 = 4096 guinea pigs. Whereas if you had atium, you would effectively eliminate one of the variables. You would still need to test for the correct metal afterwards, but it reduces the maximum to 256+16 = 272 guinea pigs, a far more manageable number. [This doesn't look anywhere near evil enough, why don't we have an evil grin option?]

I wouldn't be so sure of that if I were you. Firstly, do we know whether Seers are still being born or not? Secondly, just think how much easier it would be to experiment with Haemalurgy if you had a universal spike that can steal anything. Thirdly, I suspect that all of the god metals can be used in ways that we don't know about yet: just look at what the southerners are doing with ettmetal/harmonium.

Which was why I made sure to point out that I was the person who asked: I saw his body language, facial expression, heard his tone of voice. There's a lot that simple text can't convey properly. It was over two years ago that I asked this now, but I still remember it very well. When I mentioned the name Kalad he was grinning. I would agree that this isn't conclusive, but it was definitely the impression that he left me with.

That would be an in-world linguistic connection I think.

I would say that their is a link: specifically that they are both based off of Kalak. Since I was the one who asked this question, I'm pretty confident that Brandon was implying that Kalad does indeed come from Kalak.

@Yata and @Spoolofwhool are correct, a Knight Radiant dying does not by itself kill their spren. I remember reading a WoB to that effect, though I can't remember where and my searching did not it them up. The way I see it there are only four possibilities here: Helaran was never a Surgebinder. Helaran was a Surgebinder, but he was bonded to a dead Shardblade as well and was somehow able to ignore the screaming in his head. Helaran was at one point a Surgebinder, but he betrayed his oaths leaving him with only a dead Shardblade. Helaran wasn't killed by Kaladin Edit: Of course I only see @Yata's edit with the very WoB I was thinking of after I post this.

I think you could potentially be looking at this a bit wrong: I don't necessarily see Devotion and Dominion as being opposites. I could easily imagine someone seeking to dominate something/someone, whilst at the same time being devoted to it/them. It really comes down to how the person trying to take the powers perceives the Intents. As such, I don't think it would be particularly difficult for someone with the right mindset to combine the two (at least in comparison to the difficulty in combining any two Shards). As for the question regarding the species for Shard Vessels: they do not need to be human (in fact not all of the current Vessels are human). However, they may well need to be sapient, which means that unless it were a worldhopper only a human could have taken the Shards on Sel.

From chapter 88: Consequently there's been much speculation that Helaran was a Skybreaker. Which has in turn led to theories such as it not being Helaran that Kaladin killed.

This is hillarious! I can't stop laughing at the thought of Tonk Fah as a pet. At least I couldn't until the thought struck me that that's actually exactly what he was: Denth's pet. Then things got disturbing somewhat fast.

I was just going by what @sprocket said, the part that you quoted (I haven't reread the section from the book itself). That clearly states ten, with one between the shoulders.

The lynchpin spike is between the shoulder blades. I think therefore that it's included in the ten spikes listed in the Hero of Ages description.

Correct. This makes you the second person to get the answer. Well Done.

Yet in feruchemy, Identity is stored in aluminium, which is in the Spiritual quadrant. This surely requires Identity to be a Spiritual property, not a Cognitive one.

I believe it was originally intended to be 7 books, but Brandon's since revised it down to a trilogy. Also @Pagerunner, that was a truly excellent extrapolation save for one thing, did you forget about Nightblood? Edit: nope it was there, I'm apparently blind

I was just about to post the same thing. I'd be interested to hear the logic behind @harambe's answer though. In any event, congratulations on the correct answer, @Alvron

In case you’re unfamiliar with Einstein’s riddle, it’s a logic puzzle which, according to legend, was written by Albert Einstein. It is reportedly so difficult that only 2% of the population would be capable of solving it correctly (however I was able to do just that and I’m not that smart, so I’d take that with a massive grain of salt if I were you). Anyway, I recently spent a little time adapting it to fit in the Cosmere, and I thought I’d share the result. In a street in Silverlight, there are five consecutive houses, in which there live five different people, each of a different species. The five house owners each possess a certain Invested item, play a certain game, eat a certain food, and keep a certain pet. None of them have the same pet, play the same game, eat the same food, or own the same Invested Item. The question is: who keeps the shade? The Facts: The dragon has unmastered sand. The Dysian Aimian keeps axehounds as pets. The Parshendi plays Tarachin. The owner of one of the Tears of Edgli lives in the house to the immediate left of the house of the owner of the Moon Sceptre. The owner of one of the Tears of Edgli plays fets. The person who eats Tashikk pancakes rears Aviar. The person who owns the Shardblade eats Horneater stew. The person living in the centre house plays breakneck. The kandra lives in the first house. The person who eats Hraggish meat wraps lives next to the person who keeps a Seon as a pet. The person who keeps tonks lives next to the person who eats Horneater stew. The person who eats Tektees food plays shelldry. The Siah Aimian eats lagets. The kandra lives next to the owner of the atium. The person who eats Hraggish meat wraps has a neighbour who plays kabers.

I agree with @Yata. Note that non-Nalthians are not Drabs yet they do not have Breath, so whilst they are only ever-so-slightly less Invested than a Nalthian with a single Breath, we don't see any real difference from their perspective. I don't think that the slight difference in the type of a small portion of their Innate Investiture would be enough to give a Nalthian this sense of what to do with their Breath, yet leave a non-Nalthian without that (which it has to since they have no Breath). On a more personal note, it's not been that long since my mother passed away, and I can say with certainty that in her final weeks, there's no chance that she would have been able to say anything clearly. I highly doubt therefore that a Nalthian would gain the clarity to clearly visualize and enunciate a Command on their deathbed.

I'm guessing the "damnation" thing was caused by an auto-correct, because I can't see him blowing up Braize without his own Death Star. I don't think even the Lord Ruler had one of those, and he was a bona fide Evil Emperor. More seriously though, I think you're reading too much into this. I don't see Paalm having the time to research the man's family, so it's understandable that she wouldn't know their names. Also she's more than a little bit mad, so somewhat unpredictable.