soulcastJam

I don't think David explained to anyone but Megan that you can face your fears to get rid of your weakness. I think it more likely he wants to exploit other people's weakness and kill off rival epics.

Actually, he does have a constructive power. There are tons of people working on better ways to harvest the power of the sun to generate electricity. If he gifted his power to people (and I still believe that every epic has the ability to gift) then they could come home at the end of a day working in the sun and heat up some water to turn a turbine. I'm curious as to how efficiently he collects light.

Can epics gift to only human non-epics? Or can they potentially gift to other organic life-forms? Whether or not they can, what sort of possibilities can you imagine? Example: Prof gifts the healing to a tree so you can chop it down over and over and get more wood. Save the rainforest!

Everyone seems to be ignoring the extreme power that duralumin enhanced emotional allomancy has. Similar to a huge influx of breath, emotional allomancy can temporarily cripple someone. And Szeth is none too stable already. If Vin pushes on shame or doubt or any number of emotions he won't even be able to stand, much less protect himself. Fighting solo against an allomancer when you don't have a copper cloud is as much a death sentence as fighting one with Atium. Edit: hoidhunter mentioned emotional allomancy while I was typing. Well played.

The plate is also useful against other things. The midnight shadows were able to harm it, so I tend to think that plate is meant to guard against the power of sprens in general.

This is a weird measure because in our world, a lumen isn't something you can consume or use up. It's a measure of the light generated from a source that is used up. I propose the use of stormJoules as a measure of the energy contained within a sphere. Actually, this brings up something odd about stormlight. It shines brighter when there is more infused, but it doesn't appear that the stormlight gets used up faster or slower based on the amount. In other words, the rate at which stormlight leaks from a gemstone is constant over time until it reaches zero (not proportional to the amount in the stone) but the light emitted decays linearly (proportional to the amount in the stone). This can especially be seen by the difference between large and small gemstones. I am assuming that the rate (stormJoules/sec) at which light decays from a gemstone is proportional to the amount it can contain. If a gemstone can be infused with a maximum of "x" stormJoules, then it will lose that stormlight in x / rate (seconds). However, x is proportional to rate, so the decay time will always be the same for all gemstones. So my conclusion is that stormlight emits light when infused in a gemstone, but this is essentially free light because it doesn't actually change the amount of light within the stone. If it did then really bright gemstones would quickly become dull with an exponentially decaying light emission. That means that a bunch of weak gemstones would be more effective for lighting than a couple of large ones.

Kaladin (singing) to Syl: Yooooouuuuuuu light up my aieeeeyes...

Szeth said that if he were to die the Stone Shamans would come to collect his blade from whoever killed him. How would they know? Clearly they are always watching Szeth, which begs the question of how? Do they have a web of spies or does one of the surges granted by the honorblades give the ability of far-sight? Or maybe this is a power entirely separate that the stone shamans employ. Either way, I would guess they are aware that Szeth lost his blade, and possibly that he is coming for them.

That's really an interesting question. Spren (I would assume) are not affected by gravity, but are while in solid (shardblade) form. Why?

I'd go with the transportation surge. I want to travel more, but there is never enough time, and planning takes so much effort. It would happen much more if I could just pop over to Italy for lunch and some gelato and then come back to work.

I agree that you could theoretically soulcast the air (although how you select a portion of air as being a single entity is questionable but seems to be done with erecting structures) over the army into acid, but you'd never soulcast that many individuals as a single entity. People are too complex. There isn't any army sufficiently united to be a single entity for soulcasting.

In fact, transformer shardplate!!!

Ah, navybrandt. This sounds like a plausible answer. Too bad because I was thinking of a shard-ferrari.

How does one weld to shardplate? Doesn't welding involve melting both materials at the interface to bond them together? Does that mean you can melt shardplate? Could you then make something new out of it? Feel free to also discuss things you would want made out of shardplate material.

How odd... I've only ever thought of him as Peter but I guess he has a last name. That's what happens when you're Brandon's assistant. You can just go by your first name.

Except that Vin could probably detect where she was using bronze.

It seemed to me more like the bottom was completely encased and some of the sides so only part of the top half was visible. So if you turned it upside down it wouldn't fall out.

Back to the OP. I think killing Sadeas will change Adolin simply because he was in the habit of controlling himself and channeling his anger in dad-approved methods. He often didn't agree with his dad but he still kept to it for the most part. He has now broken that habit in a way that he feels justified doing, which makes it much more likely that he won't get back in the habit. I'm not judging whether that is bad or good for the sake of the story, and I certainly don't think this precludes him from being a radiant as the oaths appear to be very subjective to me. Take the first oath- I've already seen several interpretations of it on this thread. I think all the oaths are interpreted as the user wants to interpret them, and they are binding if the Stormfather agrees that they fit into the loose concepts he has about the oaths. Life before death could mean a whole number of things with totally different implications. So Adolin might become a radiant, or he might not, but the type he becomes will probably change due to this incident as he has made a choice to act differently than he acted before. The concern people have with this destroying him is probably because they see this as a character-changing moment without the reassurance that it was a positive change. We are left with this as a cliff-hanger and have no idea if Brandon will use this to make him more likable or not. And that's totally subjective too, so likely Maxal will still like Adolin no matter what =), and the rest of us will like him more or less based on how much he changes his personality to fit how we want him to be. Or we might all love him because, after all, this is Brandon writing.

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing, but I don't think it works that way. Think about the way a dead-spren shardblade works. When you let go it disappears unless you concentrate really hard on it staying there. I think spren can't change into or stay in physical form without direct contact with their radiant. Maybe with concentration you could pull off the shard-arrow idea but it would take the kind of focus Adolin had to practice a lot to attain to keep it from disappearing.

It's possible that the earring doesn't burn simply because it's a spike.

Shallan draws something... This list might get kind of long.

No. They don't have any problem killing each other either. It just adds to the prestige to kill the ruler of beasts.

Perhaps Lerasium would preserve the entire charge and not lose any of the potency over time... =)

If Vasher is returned, where did his divine breath go during most of the book? Does he have some way of storing that without killing himself? How did he figure that out without trial and error (and consequently a lot of deaths)? Feel free to point me to an existing thread if this has been covered.

Obviously he was talking about Odium. Or squirrels.