Ari

The other possibility is that storing connection is both, but stripping the Connection of a feruchemical Identity makes the connection to the land more obvious than the connection to other people, while storing connection to other people might be the most obvious effect when a feruchemist uses their own keyed duraluminminds. Basically, we haven't seen it in action or had it explained enough to know details of how it works at this point. The Ars Arcana often present the understanding at the time, so it seems reasonable that Duralumin could split into several different types of connection, and that initially all they'd discovered was connection to other people. Rife for speculation!

There's some indication they're pretty cosmere savvy, and they do somewhat imply they understand a bit about the Shattering on their world. It's not hard proof or anything, but they're probably more likely to be pre-Reod Elantrians who managed to survive going through Devotion's perpendicularity given their casual references to events pre-Reod, although nothing actually rules out them being New Elantrians that have figured a lot of stuff out since Elantris, especially given Brandon has given some indications that Elantris 2 might be a bit more tied into Cosmere-wide events than Elantris 1 was by saying that it needs to come after the things he's currently writing.

Do we have a WoB on this or something? Because there's a fair amount of assumption built in there that I'm not comfortable with just taking someone else's word for. (That said, we all miss things in the books, so if this is one of those things for me, all good) All I remember the books implying is that there's a Spren of this type that has power over highstorms, and it's Honour's cognitive shadow. I don't recall any indication that Stormfather is more like a title that can be taken up by any Spren, as opposed to a result of who this Spren was. And the Parshendi do imply he is and has always been their enemy, which would be consistent with the Stormfather only ever having been the one Spren, at least in living memory.

Could have that in it as well, but if it doesn't have any honour in it, it's very strange that the Stormfather has any control over it.

Think of it this way: If I removed part of my brain to annihilate with some antimatter, then used that reaction to charge a battery, I wouldn't get my brain back just because the battery was later depleted. Even if someone "gives away" (ie. wastes) the energy, it's just going to react with the nearest thing that it can, rather than undo the previous reaction. Hence why it freed Ruin. Preservation permanently damaged his cognitive aspect in order to turn it into investiture to trap Ruin. Even if you were an expert at healing that sort of magical damage, you'd have a really hard time getting anything significantly back from healing him.

We have pretty good indications that Stormlight is to some extent aligned with Honour. It might have some of Cultivation's power mixed in, but we know it doesn't have any Odium in it.

I agree it probably is "Trellium", (or more specifically, Bavadinium or maybe on an outside chance, Raysium) that's certainly my favoured theory. But just because a lot of people believe something doesn't rule out something contradictory being true. Gotta endorse what Sam says here. I think Autonomy and Odium are probably aligned, but that's from reading between the lines. That's not confirmed anywhere. It's all about observing that Odium went to great risk to Shatter both shards on Sel, which makes a lot more sense if he had help from Autonomy to do so.

It's specifically ghosts (ie. people's cognitive aspects that have overcome the pull to the Beyond after death) that are referred to as cognitive shadows. There's a bunch of non-shadow things in the Cognitive Realm, from Spren to Worldhoppers, to fires representing people's intelligence, to representations of ideas, such as Kelsier's collection of ideals of abandoned items in M:SH. Not trying to be too pedantic but we do honestly risk going down the wrong path a lot in this forum when we let definitions drift. (look at what happens whenever we start talking about Focuses, for instance)

I'm inclined to think it's actually more specific than that, and that the sun is the cognitive manifestation of a Shard's spiritual power. We'll know if anyone makes their way into the Cognitive Realm on a world that doesn't have a Shard, or if Brandon chooses to answer a question about the cognitive realm's sun(s) without RAFOing it.

You have to pay a fair amount of attention to the idioms he uses to pick up on it.

That doesn't precisely rule out once of the unknown Shards being Trell, even though I don't think they are, it just rules out any of them using their own godmetals for spikes.

Have their numbers actually recovered? I don't recall reading anything like that in the Stormlight Archive... It does seem plausible that Spren can be born in ways that don't directly involve splintering from a Shard, but I suspect Yata is right that if Spren repopulate, it's so dramatically different from biological reproduction that it should probably use a different word.

Cheers for the plug to that older post. My excited post-read post thinking about group 1 metals might have been a little too enthusiastic in bypassing the possibility of Lerasium, Harmonium, or some other non-Atium godmetal at first, but I did compare the reactivity of the group 1 metals before posting, hence why I jumped straight to Cesium. (Lithium was totally the one that came to mind when I read the book, so I guess great minds think alike in terms of Figbert's conclusion ettmetal was Lithium) I'm not as sold on Cesium nowadays either, but I'm pretty sure it's either Cesium or some form of godmetal.

The humans that the Spren bond with see living things as having binary gender. Therefore the Spren pick up the concept of gender and self-assign according to their relationship with their human, through some wacky bond-based cognitive leakage.

I'm not sure you're necessarily right there. Yes, sometimes the influence of one shard locks out the influence of another- but the examples we've had that of are ruin and preservation, who were two of the most diametrically opposed shards. Endowment and Honour might be compatible enough that it wouldn't be an issue. That said, interesting speculation but I don't really see anything to back it up at this stage. It's a REALLY out there theory though, so if it ends up being true you get serious bonus points, lol.

I'd consider it strange if you could soulcast aluminium into anything else, making other things into aluminium seems quite reasonable. Its resistance to investiture shouldn't kick in until the soulcasting is actually complete.

Yes and no? If you're looking for in-world gods, that's a very strong hint that Something Is Up with the cultural significance of the sun. You don't necessarily need to be cosmere-aware for that, you just need to be aware of fantasy tropes in general to pick up on the not-so-subtle hints being dropped. Someone who's not big on either of those things probably will find it subtle.

Yeah that was like, the exact opposite of subtle lol.

I thought it was more that Elantrians are very vulnerable to stress and other factors of mental health, eg. dying of broken heart syndrome? Subtle distinction I suppose, though. The only thing we hear about suicide in the books is as a direct response to becoming Hoed and being in constant pain. But yeah, fifth heightening definitely seems to be the immortality option with the least downsides from what I can see. That's sort of like saying changing species is a great way for a cow not to get eaten, it's technically true, but that's because you've become something with an entirely different set of problems. Ascending to godhood is getting around being a mortal person by subtracting out the "person" as much as the "mortal."

Remember, the reason TLR wanted to hunt down Feruchemists was to prevent the two metallic arts mixing in ways he didn't control, not necessarily because of the philosophies of the Worldbringers. In fact the existence of the Kandra suggests he really didn't want to get rid of the actual people who were Worldbringers at the time in order to meet that goal.

There's no solid evidence that the Nightwatcher is Initiating anyone in using the Old Magic. Initiation gives you the ability to to use and control magic yourself, but the people who have gone to receive the Old Magic seem to simply have magic used on them, similar to the Hemalurgic chimaeras, and don't display any ability to control their "curses" and "blessings" themselves. It's possible they are initiated, but we've never seen them exercise that control, but it seems relatively unlikely at this point, especially given that we have hints that Cultivation's magic is tied up with the Knights Radiant the same way that Honour's is.

Did you see the body without any shenanigans? No? Then he's open for not-dying. That said, I don't yet see any particular reason we'd need Ym for the story, unlike, say, Jasnah.

Maybe Terrispeople have a culture that's in balance between Preservation and Ruin, which has given them the sDNA to use Feruchemy? We don't really know enough about how Initiation works in general to make a call yet, so it's wide open for speculation. FYI, Terra is Latin for Earth, and thus "Terran" is an adjective meaning of or from Earth, which doesn't exist in the Cosmere. You might want to be clear that you're talking about Terris blood.

Yeah, I think a better way to phrase is it that that specific appearance of Lunu'anaki is Hoid.

Well, it's likely given what we've heard in M:SH about the sky representing the Spiritual Realm, and the names of the Expanses from the WoK map, that the sky will have a crack in it where the investiture has fallen through into the cognitive. I'm with the others, it'll be some form of symbol that's being used for the actual manifestation of investiture in the cognitive.