Ari

I think we already knew that simply from the fact the recipient would have had personal knowledge of not only Ati, but also Rayse.

It may be worth pointing out that the author's goal and stopping Rayse & Bavadin may not be the same thing- the letter could be read as either "my goal is to oppose these two" or "let's ignore my goal and the fact you don't like it, these two shards are dangerous." Personally, I think the latter makes more sense.

It's entirely possible that atium use is an Allomantic mental ability (if it's a temporal ability, that would probably be harder to accidentally bind, seeing as nobody in the FE knew which metals stole temporal allomancy) and a Feruchemical physical ability, and simply doesn't need an atium spike. I can definitely see Ruin giving Marsh the Allomancy to burn atium, and it's always possible that through simple error he picked up Feruchemical atium through someone using the wrong bind point.

For the future, a w-word for "awesome" would be "wonderful".

Hmm, that's interesting, I was wondering if choosing a champion had something to do with the Oathpact and the nature of the conflict between Odium and Honour, but it definitely makes sense to think of Vin as a champion of Preservation. This is definitely something to keep an eye on to see if there are some mechanics we can glean.

I wonder if it's simply because it might be a bit inappropriate to refer to him by his surname or rank and surname, given that it's the King's surname as well.

You're assuming that Thunderclasts don't have anything to do with the Stone Shaman. (It's only a possibility, but it's hard to rule things out at this point)

Well, it could definitely be a giant spoiler of future books, so it's pretty understandable.

Yep, as I've said before, Brandon is one of the very few authors who has worse UK/World English covers than US covers. The Night Angel-style covers worked okay for Mistborn, but they don't seem well-suited to Elantris or WoK. edit: Just to be clear, I know this is out of Brandon's hands and is the decision of his UK publisher. It just seems derivative and not suited to actually selling his books.

Brandon's definitely implied that there aren't paired shards as directly opposing each other as Ruin and Preservation, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other paired shards at all. It's quite possible that Odium is Honour's "opposite", given one of the definitions of Odium is: In short, it would be well within Odium's intent to incite people to break vows and visit shame and odium on themselves in so doing. If Skai is Deprivation and counter to Endowment on Nalthis, they would probably be a neater pair than Odium and Honour, but not as neat as Ruin and Preservation, especially given they are/were situated on different planets. But it's also quite possible that Skai is Domination or something else we haven't yet thought of, and isn't a direct opposite to any known shards, too. I'm not prejudging anything, but we should definitely be open to future "messy pairs" like Honour and Odium.

I still expect that the reason Shin doesn't have Spren is just that someone once wrote down they didn't see any Spren while they were in Shin.

Sure, but calling them Shardtools just sounds wrong.

Well, yes and no. Want to know the most problematic thing? Diamond itself is crystallized carbon, and thus if the Ars Arcanum is correct in implying the modern definition of crystals, you can use diamonds to soulcast more diamonds. Hopefully Brandon has considered this and the Ars Arcanum either doesn't mean "crystal" in the sense of any solid with a highly regular molecular structure, or that trying to soulcast things into crystals that can also soulcast is highly inefficient, or it's simply wrong.

It's possible, but why would she be speaking to the spiritual aspect of the goblet when she has access to the cognitive realm? It seems more intuitive that she'd be seeing/hearing the cognitive aspects of things.

I think "loss" makes more sense for Skai than sacrifice does, although I'm not convinced that it's not Domination yet. In specific, I think Deprivation would be a good antonym for Endowment, if that's what we're thinking, and could certainly fit with both the sacrifices talked about to fuel their magic, and the general Dakhor culture in the same way I thought Domination did.

I honestly think you have it a bit backwards, and the returned really are draining their divine breath when they don't have a stockpile, and they have to consume a regular breath every week to replenish their divine breath before it gets so weak that they die. (again) It's entirely possible that Endowment augments the Returning person's breath with one of their own Splinters, or even just fuels them entirely with said splinter if drabs can be Returned. I think we have two new questions to ask Brandon at a signing now- whether drabs can return, and whether the divine breath is being drained over the week, or the normal one that started being consumed last week.

It's worth pointing out that many gems are actually crystals, and iirc, some of the ones that hold stormlight are crystals, for instance garnet.

You could get some information from your gold shadow, the problem would be determining whether it applies to you and your world or if it's merely "philosophically true".

Ah, now THAT should be quite doable.

Killing a Thunderclast was also my suspicion for why Szeth was Truthless.

Is this better? I've just added a drop shadow to the symbols. The psd weighs in just under a meg, (950kb) and I have a version where the outer rings are tinted a desaturated blue and red instead of yellow and untinted, in case different colours would help with contrast. Just pm me your email and I'll send it off. edit: I can also just zip out the symbols I extracted, they're all scaled to the same size, (max of 32x32 pixels) so you could insert them into a word document for presentation purposes while the actionscript is being programmed.

Here's a graphical version I threw together, grabbing the icons from the mistborn poster. It'd probably need a key, but would solve the issues with picking out small text. I have a .psd file with it on a transparent background, the cutouts on a separate layer, and the icons on their own layer, too, so it could be easily split up to be made into a flash file.

They're called Identical Twinborns. Back to twinborn powers for a minute: Gold (feruchemy) and Pewter (allomancy) would be pretty amazing in a fight. The point about a double Duralumin twinborn being able to enhance the feruchemical property of Duralumin is a good one. As for the whole double-pewter Twinborn burning Pewter to store strength idea, I'm not sure allomantic pewter equates as directly to strength as people seem to think- remember, in the trilogy, it also provides speed, balance, and enhances the body's natural healing abilities. That's three different types of feruchemy in one allomantic metal. It could probably help you deal with trying to store strength (or health, or speed) faster, and perhaps allow you to store a little more strength directly, but far more important would be that you could compensate better with the overall physical boost pewter provides. I doubt you could double the speed at which you could store strength without flaring.

I'm wondering if we'll get to see something of why or how people from Sel happened to travel to Roshar in either of these sequels. Of course it's possible that the drivers of that event occur much later than any of the Elantris books.

Hate and conflict could be Odium's means, or they could be his end, or they could be both, like it was for Ruin. It would be interesting if Odium's magic functioned through conflict or hate or disgust at hated actions, but they methods Odium used were more indirect and subtle, like Jasnah seemed to suggest with her theory of the parshmen being Voidbringers.