Ari

Did we ever actually get confirmation that Survival Shard was actually Not On A Planet Shard? I thought that was something people just assumed. Because I was assuming that Autonomy was Not On A Planet Shard but not necessarily Survival Shard. (although, there's an argument that being Survival Shard would explain the slight implications in certain WoBs that Bavadin could be aligned with Odium)

Yeah, it's a fair cop that it's not confirmed that Honour's mobile perpendicularity actually is a single, moving highstorm. It seems very heavily implied, but it is not yet confirmed.

You wouldn't be able to return without a set perpendicularity if whatever got Khriss into the CR works the same way as Jasnah's trip into the Cognitive, and if you tried to return through one that's in the star, you'd just suicide in spectacular fashion. It's possible that there's a way to generate a temporary perpendicularity from the Cognitive side, but we've never seen it done before. It could be that such a way exists and Bavadin has a workaround that stops it from functioning in the local cognitive realm to Taldain. I agree that the star being a source of investiture doesn't guarantee it's a perpendicularity. However, it's pretty good evidence, as a lot of the time investiture does channel through the perpendicularities. I'll see your example of Scadrial's mists, and refer you to both Atium at the Pits, and Stormlight coming through Highstorms. (FYI, this forum isn't spoiler-gated for works that aren't new, but good on you for putting in the effort) In fact, the mists are the only case I can think of when we knew where a Perpendicularity was, and we didn't manage to link a manifestion of matter-based investiture (ie. solid, liquid, or gaseous investiture as opposed to kinetic investiture) back to it. Even on Nalthis, we suspect the dyes they're using in Hallandren are made from flowers that are growing using liquid Endowment. It's possibly they're somehow linked of course, but it's never explained if so.

Khriss escaping without dying into the Cognitive Realm doesn't necessarily mean that Bavadin's perpendicularity wasn't originally inside the star. (In fact, there's a WoB about light from Taldain's star being its primary form of investiture that you could see as backing this up) Remember, it is possible using certain types of Investiture to create your own one-way perpendicularities. (see Jasnah in WoR and her flashback "extra scene" that may or may not feature in Oathbringer- she is unable to get back into the Physical Realm easily after her escape) Assuming this is how she left, even though she has since gained a lot of knowledge, it's possible that Taldain's Cognitive Realm is now more dangerous than it was before, or simply that there are risks to going back that Khriss isn't willing to take, possibly because it's not really her "home" anymore, or that she legitimately hasn't found a way to exit Taldain's Cognitive directly onto the planet yet. I will, of course, concede that it could have been moved inside the star at some point, but it would be very surprising if that point was prior to White Sand, given that the entire magic system is driven by algae in the sand absorbing sunlight. I don't know where you'd expect the perpendicularity to be located if not inside the star. You're right though that we should pay careful attention to the Lost Metal, of course, as Bavadin is IMO the leading Trell candidate.

Right, there are now. What the in-universe book was talking about was whether it was possible to more widely recruit. You don't go calling an idea blasphemous and seditious because it's impossible, you do so because it's dangerous.

If you read the in-universe WoR carefully, it implies that to talk about the number growing beyond three is considered blasphemous, which probably means there are ways for it to happen. That would suggest that going beyond three requires some sort of Odiumspren. I suspect the reason they usually numbered no more than three is that there's a spren of Honour (accounted for, that's the Stormfather) a spren of Cultivation, (possibly the Nightwatcher themselves) and a spren that's equally of both that we haven't identified yet. If correct, that would suggest that there could be at least three, perhaps four additional bondsmiths if there were no risk to incorporating Odiumspren into the order. (obviously, there is, and that's why it was considered seditious to talk about recruited any further) That would be one Spren of Odium, one of equal parts Honour and Odium, one of equal parts Cultivation and Odium, and maybe also one balanced between all three.

Nah, it's literally just "any ability that lets you travel between planets." That coppermind intro was probably written before we actually knew some of the methods involved or got the WoB from Brandon about it being helpful to be an immortal if you wanted to go Worldhopping multiple times, and so they had probably just assumed it happened instantaneously.

Having a power that lets you travel in the Cognitive Realm directly, such as Jasnah's, is certainly the easist way to become a worldhopper. However, there's no indication that such a journey is quick or easy under your own power, as we have some indications that serial worldhoppers all have some method of dramatic life extension. I imagine most people taking even a one-way trip between planets are doing so with the aid of Initiated magicians from other worlds, or using Invested devices or cognitive tricks of the trade to aid their travel. I believe Hoid is the only person whose origin we have semi-confirmed as on Yolen. Khriss, for instance, is certainly a serial worldhopper of some sort, appearing in White Sand, apparently leaving Scadrial in Secret History, writing the various Ars Arcana, and having come back in time for Wax and Wayne's adventures to quiz Wax on being a Twinborn. She comes from Taldain originally, not Yolen. edit: That's a quote from Hoid to Kelsier in Secret History.

That's certainly a possibility. The other one is that you can't get to Taldain by traditional means because Bavadin's perpendicularity lines up with Taldain's main star.

My personal theory is that the "sun" is the cognitive/spiritual equivalent of perpendicularity, (which I assume is a physical/cognitive annex of some sort) that is, it represents the local Shards' power radiating down into the Cognitive Realm, so the "sky" is where the Spiritual Realm's locationless transcendance interacts with the location-based-but-weirdly-compressed Cognitive Realm, with "stars" being locations where Investiture can actually breach between the two in large quantities. Yeah, Civ talks about Toroidal maps because it's mapping a two-dimensional rectangle onto a three-dimensional space, and the result therefore is like a toroid, (ie. a doughnut) not a globe, which is why there are so many open questions for us cosmere fans about the fact that spherical planets are essentially mapped into a two-dimensional holographic space on the "ground" in the Cognitive. (we don't know for sure it's rectangular, but that's one option. It could also be a collection of triangles, or of ovoid shapes, and it's possible even that this changes depending on how people map their spherical worlds on paper on each Cosmere planet- so for instance, a seafaring civilisation might have a similar system to earth, where they use a local variant of the Mercator projection, so the areas of their landmasses nearer the poles look much bigger than they actually are, while a spacefaring civilisation might use some sort of tesselation so that satellite images look "the right shape" to them) That's also ignoring the implications of the fact that the terrain is reversed- ie. bodies of water turn into mountain ranges, and densely populated areas turn into seas of the local representation of cognitive concepts. (in Shadesmar, that's spheres. On Scadrial, it was mist) In terms of analogies for the cognitive realm, probably the best is imagining it as a giant swimming pool. It has depth, but it is also absolutely "flat" in a fundamental sense of the water only going so high before it stops being a pool, either because you reach the bottom or the top, no matter whether its shape is actually rectangular or not. Think of the top of the swimming pool as the interaction with our realm- it forms a reverse image of the shape of the Physical Realm because the two "flow" around each other.

The cognitive realm is never a globe. It is some sort of mapping of a three-dimensional sphere onto a surface in a three-dimensional plane. (that is, essentially, something like a very large blanket- it still has height/depth, but it has a "top" and a "bottom" that seem to be uniform, the bottom being loosely mapped to things in the Physical realm, and, if those of us who believe the sun in the Cognitive Realm is the Spiritual Realm, the top of the cognitive may have some interaction with it somehow) Remember, Brandon has given a WoB that something interesting would happen to a Spren (being native to the Cognitive realm that is two-dimensionally mapped to the Physical) that tried to circumnavigate the world. At some point, it would encounter the "edge" of Shadesmar, (that is, Cognitive Roshar as opposed to the entire CR) and might have difficulty moving any farther in that loop around spherical physical space. (he doesn't actually say the Spren would be stuck, he phrases it as a question, so maybe they teleport from one side of the plane in the CR to the other, who knows)

Also, in HoA Vin describes silver as Allomantically inert, in that it can't be pushed or pulled. So there's something interesting going on with it that it's useful against shades too, it's possible that there was some degree of aluminium in those metals used in HoA unbeknownst to Vin, (especially as TLR clearly knew about Aluminium) but that doesn't explain why she would incorrectly think any silver is inert, and why it works against Threnodite shades. It would also be interesting to know if aluminium would have similar qualities against Shades compared to silver.

I like where we're at with Mistborn so far better, but that's because we've had almost two complete arcs. We're so close to the beginning with Stormlight, but I know I'll love it even more when we're at Book 4 or 5, because it's a better book. I don't think I got quite as excited after Hero of Ages as I did after Words of Radiance, for instance.

I think you may be right, which is totally cheating on Brandon's part as he had already referred to Bavadin at that point even if he hadn't confirmed the name Autonomy yet, lol.

Brandon has previously called Adonalsium "the power of Creation," so I'm gonna go with that, and assume he means that Adonalsium made, at the least, the galaxy called the Cosmere, if not necessarily the entire universe containing that galaxy. (although perhaps!) As an atheist and a gnostic, I wouldn't presume to assume anything more about what Brandon is going for in his symbology here. Um, just to be slightly contrary, "The God Beyond" could be a perfect moniker for the holder of Adonalsium pre-Shattering if the process killed them, as that person could reasonably have been called a God, and they are now in the Beyond. I'm not saying that's definitively what that name has to mean, just that you should keep your mind open to that possibility.

My point is that you would literally need multiple hundreds of names, and probably other words in Thaylen too, before you could start judging the commonality of Mr as a phoneme in Thaylen and whether it means anything. (because while Mr might actually be a rare phoneme, there might be legitimate reasons why it's more common in names, or why it's a coincidence. And even if it's not, it could just be for instance that names starting with Mr are supposed to mean something completely unrelated, like say, a propensity for wisdom) Unless you ask Brandon you're unlikely to find that out, because there's no way you'd get enough Thaylen characters named for it to be reasonable to judge, you just never get that many characters from a single place of origin in a fictional series, not even in WoT. I had remembered that you were right in your talk of Thaylens being very mercantile though, so I'm glad Calderis dug up a quote to support that.

Yeah, I think you're a little closer to understanding what I was saying now. I was referring to the fact that some small fraction of Preservation's power is bound up in the Scadrian people, aligning them ever so slightly in favour of his Intent, and that thus a "full power" Harmony, so long as those Scadrians are alive and holding that extra bit of Preservation, is technically one that's a little more Ruinous than Sazed has been so far in Era 2, because he does in fact have the ability to recover the bit of Investiture that Leras hid away when he was still Preservation's Vessel. Brandon has said that if someone killed Sazed as of Era 2, he would drop Harmony, and not Ruin and Preservation. That doesn't mean that the integration of the two shards together is instant, (remember, it has been hundreds of years since Era 1, so there has been a lot of time for a gradual integration to progress, so we really don't know which way things got to where they are now until Sazed or Brandon tells us) and that doesn't mean that What Harmony Is isn't a combination of Ruin and Preservation in the states Sazed found them, which were balanced only because Ruin's extra investiture had been locked up in metallic Atium he couldn't access, and that Atium was temporarily inaccessible because it had been burned by Elend's army of Seers. (Remember, the analogy Brandon has used several times regarding Harmony is that a King of two countries is still a King. We have an example of that in real life: The United Kingdom, which is a country composed of four other countries, and has a single royal family for all four. We can meaningfully talk about the balance of power between England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland the same way we can talk about the imbalance between Ruin and Preservation- if you honestly tried to argue all four are equally influential within the Union, most people who live there would not take you seriously at all) If he tries to pick up that power for whatever reason and doesn't put it back into metal or something else that's not his own Vessel, his Intent will gradually change to something just a little more Ruinous than the name Harmony would imply, (The name "discord" is going to far. Perhaps Discontent, Progress, or Revolution, maybe) the same way that Preservation and Ruin's intents are presumably changing as they integrate into Harmony. Likewise, if Sazed left Atium's power in the ground or wherever he's put it, but somehow reclaimed Preservation's power from all the humans on his planet, (say there's a mass extinction he doesn't manage to stop and they all die, for instance) he'd cease being entirely Harmony in the way he is now, and become something slightly closer to Preservation. We don't know for sure where the extra Ruin is at the moment. Just before Sazed's ascension, it was in the "Atium cycle," and would have formed into geodes once the Pits of Hathsin healed after Kelsier's destruction of them, however the Pits are no longer a Perpendicularity as of Era 2, (speculation is that Harmony has a new Perpendicularity) so if Harmony has left that power on its own, it would by default coalesce at his new perpendicularity, making the manifestation of his power there slightly more ruinous than balanced, but we honestly don't know for sure that that's actually what's going on with the power. Sazed might have put it to good use somewhere else that it's actually needed, and the Harmonium that's coalescing from his use of Investiture on Scadrial actually is balanced in terms of Ruin's and Preservation's power, or he might have created some Atium out of it but not put it anywhere that the general public would find out, possibly so that Marsh had continued access to Atium into the future. (The Lost Metal is a suggestive name in this regard, although it could equally refer to Harmonium given what the Malwish were saying about Preservation and Ruin always having been one...)

Ah. Well, usually Brandon is giving us a hint that this sort of thing is reliable when he has a Kandra or Harmony say it, but I'm a little suspicious of VenDell given how wrong he was about so many things in BoM, lol. If he's right that identity works that way, it would certainly make things simpler in getting to that first unlocked medallion with both Soulbearer and Trueself powers in it.

I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work, as the Nicrosilmind would have an identity lock, so storing your identity wouldn't be enough to access it. I'm pretty sure you have to store your identity while you're storing in a fresh metalmind in order to do things like create the unlocked goldmind that they used in BoM. So if Nicrosilminds don't require any particular investiture to tap from even without a hack, all you need is someone spiked with an extra Ferring power or a full Feruchemist to start you off with some trueself medallions, then presumably you can just start copying your existing medallions by having Nicrosil compounders burn attributes they didn't already possess and dump them into several new medallions.

Almost impossible to happen accidentally, even, as to our knowledge there's no Full Feruchemists currently on Scadrial as of Era 2, so you'd essentially have to spike someone with either the Soulbearer or Trueself power to start making unlocked medallions, and the Kandra, like Harmony, are probably very against casual experimentation with Hemalurgy. (because it's not enough to have two of them together, you need the same person with access to both powers, which you can't get without either a full feruchemist, a spike, or a medallion as a starting point) That said, I'm not wedded to a particular answer, I'm just open to the possibility that what a Soulbearer is storing is, essentially, their sDNA, so all you might need to tap it once the identity lock is turned would be the generic Scadrian sDNA because the "investiture" itself provides the rest, the same way that Lerasium does in providing the ability to burn the metal before you actually become an Allomancer. It's less interesting for us Cosmere nerds that way, but also more elegant for the average reader to understand.

Oh there's far more than one thing weird about Hoid. We certainly know he's collecting artifacts from various worlds he's visiting, and that he's picking up abilities from them where possible, too. (we've seen it implied that he's using Mistborn abilities after he took a chunk of Lerasium in Mistborn, and apparently the anniversary edition of Elantris has him trying to get initiated as an Elantrian) I think that's more than enough to explain what's going on with his implication that he could survive a Shardblade.

It really depends on whether you take the principle of "Lerasium is a metal that anyone can burn" and see that extending to "nicrosilminds are a metalmind that anyone can tap" because of the stored investiture being a different type of attribute than the other feruchemy stores. It could also be that anyone can tap Nicrosilminds containing the Soulbearer ability, and that all the allomantic medallions are actually two-part ones. It's totally possible that isn't the case though, and that there's Something Extra needed to let anyone who's not a Soulbearer use the medallions, which in some ways is more interesting as it might mean we get our first canon explanation of investiture hacking, we just have no reference to that Something Extra being Harmonium specifically, so that's the sort of thing that needs theory and speculation to back it up IMO, because there's certainly no outright evidence pointing in that direction.

There's no definitive evidence that you'd need Harmonium/Ettmetal to create a medallion, in fact in the allomantic form, all you'd need is to figure out how to make an unlocked nicrosilmind. What we don't know, for sure, is if it's enough to simply store as much of your Identity as possible in an Aluminiumind while making the Nicrosilmind in order to unlock it, or if there's some other trick to the process, but there's no evidence saying for sure that anything extra is necessary. It's the feruchemical ones that are difficult because you need to combine multiple metalminds together so that you can usefully do anything with the stored Investiture, but even that can, as far as we know right now, be achieved simply by making a double metalmind. We do know that devices like the "Allomantic Grenade" require Harmonium, iirc as fuel not just to manufacture, so maybe you're confusing those two things? As to the Sazed epigraphs... do remember they are in-world sources and it's quite possible Sazed is deliberately leaving people to discover the details of feruchemical powers for themselves. The democratising effects of being able to share the Metallic Arts via feruchemy weren't known at all at the time, and Sazed might have had reason not to comment on them to his people, possibly wanting them to grow up a bit more before they made the Metallic Arts more widely available. While Sazed's reasoning may be true in part, 8bitBob's reasoning rings far truer to me now that we know Rashek's overall motivations were around consolidating power and maintaining a certain level of ignorance to the nature of the Metallic Arts.

I'm not making a false equivalence. This is a thing that's well-supported by WoBs, FiveLate. I think it's even in the Mistborn annotations, too. Intent is attached to the investiture which composes a Shard's body, which is why Atium tended to be used to violent effect, for instance, as opposed to mere self-preservation. (there was also the fact that it was so expensive you tended to use it in extremis, but that still wouldn't rule out running as a valid option...) I'm not sure why I've been getting so much pushback on this when it was like, one of the first things people started theorising about after AoL came out and we had eyes on Harmony, and it was literally just a small anecdote on why we should assume Brandon is in fact implying that Harmony is doing something with that extra Power that Ruin has in comparison to Preservation. The reason people were so keen to establish that he was doing something with Ruin's extra power was because they were worried it would unbalance his Intent. It may be that there's investiture out there that's not from the Shattering that is neutral of intent, or that has a different Intent to the sixteen shards, but as far as we can tell, every piece that composed the body of Adonalsium has some Intent attached to it. Presumably even the Dor is some mixture of Dominion and Devotion, (presumably, half of each) despite having no Vessel or magical sapience of its own to easily express its Intent through. But it's quite possible that Intent is limited only to the investiture that composes each Shard's body. I make no judgement on naturally-occured investiture that predates/doesn't relate to Adonalsium. But ask yourself this: If you could drain investiture from a Shard's body without its Intent affecting you, why hasn't Odium tried to do it? It's an obvious tactic given his objection to combining with other Shards is that he doesn't want to change his own Intent. Ruin's Intent didn't change when preservation siphoned off his extra power into Atium because he went from being 100% Ruin to being 100% Ruin, just with less investiture overall in the second 100%. Harmony's intent would change if he weren't doing something with that extra Ruin, as he would go from being 50% Preservation and 50% Ruin to some imbalanced number, like 55%/45% or 51%/49%. I'm honestly a little bit surprised that anyone thinks that the ratio of power from one shard to another wouldn't affect the combined Intent of, to borrow a political term, a Shard of Shards. (ie. a Shard composed of multiple Shards mixed together by one Vessel) This can't happen to an uncombined Shard, because if it gives away any of its investiture, there's no ratio to worry about. Endowment is still 100% Endowment when she gives away a Splinter to a new Returned.

He's something pretty close to Harmony, sure, but not exactly the same if he's not doing something with that extra bit of Ruin. If he hung onto it, he'd still be a lot more harmonious than Ruin was, but he'd also be more prone to revolution, to change, to destruction than he would to preservation, conservatism, etc... What I'm saying is that for instance, if you have a "centrist" political party that's 55% right-wing and 45% left-wing, they're not centrists anymore, they're centre-right. If Harmony takes on the extra Ruin, his intent will change, even if it's only subtle, it will add up over time. So it's likely he's doing something with it, as Sazed believes he should be Harmony.