Ari

Herself. Edgli is female.

Depends if you're of the "Hemalurgy always uses metal spikes" camp, or the "Hemalurgy uses a local focus or catalyst as a spike" camp.

Or it's equally as possible they're just being metaphorical. Occam's razor definitely cuts this to shreds atm as far as I'm concerned, I imagine Brandon will drop some hints if there are any nonhuman Vessels out there and it becomes relevant. Most likely is that it's the third race from Yolen if there are any non-human people who became Vessels, as we'd currently have no way to know, lol, wheras there was some pretty pointed language between Hoid and Frost that hinted the letter's recipient was a dragon.

Not really. Being apathetic is a lack of any emotion on a subject, essentially. So you can be apathetic about wanting to do things for yourself and not particularly care one way or another. All the Shards essentially have their own emotional or abstract themes, so an apathy shard would arguably be the opposite of any other Shard in the sense that odium has a Hatred level of 100%, but Apathy has one of 0%, so is a negation of Odium, or whatever other example you prefer. But that's not what's usually meant by an opposite in colloquial speech, that's merely a negation. Colloquially when we talk about opposites we mean opposing forces, like having a left and right wing of Parliament- forces that have different positive ideologies that end up at complete cross-purposes, like an individualist and a collectivist. A pure collectivist not only has 0% individualism, they also have 100% of an ideology that fundamentally opposes individualism, which from an individualist's point of view is much worse. There will also be other shards out there that fall at various points on that particular spectrum based on their own intents, so you might have multiple opposing forces but only one neat opposite, or even no neat opposite for some of them, like perhaps Endowment. Devotion is absolutely Odium's opposite in that second sense. Not quite as cleanly as Ruin is to Preservation, but as close as you'd get for either of the two. But Honour is also at pretty cross purposes with Odium too, although in some small respects they might agree. (For instance, I imagine both of them would agree that you have to suffer that dude at work you hate. Honour because you agreed to a contract which involves him, Odium because he just wants you to nurse that grudge)

So, M:SH spoilers FYI, (and a little bit of Stormlight Archive) but for everyone who's not ready to read them, suffice it to say I disagree with your quibble about my wording, which was rather deliberate. Conservation of energy doesn't get you around brain damage or its magical equivalent. (hence why I picked the example of using antimatter on a brain- physical reaction, "destroys" matter, but turns it into energy- you could theoretically later recover the energy and make it into brain-meat, but you'd need to have had an unrealistic amount of information, equipment and expertise to be able to actually heal someone that way) Preservation did the equivalent of brain damage to himself in using part of the cognitive aspect of his Vessel to trap Ruin. You seem to have misinterpretted that as saying some of the Shard was permanently damaged, which isn't true. Perhaps I should say Leras was permanently damaged as opposed to Preservation, but by that point, Leras is Preservation's mind and personality, so it's kinda splitting hairs to talk about one or the other anyway. Preservation draws a clear distinction that he didn't use his body/magic to trap Ruin in HoA, he used his mind, which technically means that what he damaged was the Vessel part of Preservation, not the Shard part. Normal Cosmere characters can sometimes get around brain damage to some extent if they have healing abilities because Brandon lets them have a spiritual backup of their bodies and minds that some of the powers can heal to. If Leras' ghost, the closest thing he would have to a "backup," could have been used to re-assemble his mind and hold the Shard, he would have done so while Ruin was trapped, to mitigate his efforts at manipulating prophecy. Essentially at the level the Shards are playing at, any "damage" to a Shard involves locking away and/or hiding some power that they should have access to, (what Preservation did to Ruin) or whatever the equivalent of brain damage should be called for Vessels. (what Preservation sacrificed of himself) We actually have an example of a Vessel's ghost holding part of their power in Way of Kings, and it's not exactly an ideal situation. (not least because it's obvious that the power Splintered before the Stormfather got his hands on it) Besides, something about what Preservation did meant he didn't particularly get the same moment as a full Cognitive Shadow that Ati did, which suggests to me he probably gave up his shot at the afterlife for his plan. It's possible Preservation would have been able to recover the power he used to trap Ruin and with some assistance and re-assimilate it, but there's no evidence he wouldn't still be confused and essentially brain-damaged like we see him in M:SH, and we don't see him okay when he comes back as a cognitive shadow iirc. But all the info we have suggests Leras went into his plan knowing he was dooming himself to be mentally damaged for an entire era, and eventually die.

I've read the sample chapter. Lift only talks about her Blessing so far, not her curse. She possibly doesn't know her curse, but it's not definite at this point.

If you want to view it that way, Apathy would be the opposite of every shard, lol.

Devotion is pretty much directly opposite to Odium, as they're synonyms of Love and Hate. (there's WoBs on both of those iirc)

We definitely know they don't know about the nature of their curse in advance, just that there will be one. We haven't met anyone who definitely doesn't know their curse, but that may be because so many of them just figured it out for themselves.

I figured that much was obvious?

Nalthis uses Commands for the same thing Scadrial uses Metals for, whatever you want to call it. (The way you can tell this is that the different commands determine what magical effect you get, the same way the different metals determine what type of Allomancy or Feruchemy you perform) The common term is a focus, but that doesn't really state anything about what a focus is. I'm actually pretty agnostic on that at this stage. Wavelengths of investiture is definitely one way to look at what's going on, although Brandon has previously referring to mixing different types of investiture, so that might make explaining things through a wavelength model a little more tricky. Roshar is up for a lot of debate at this stage as to what goes where, with Focus being the most contentious issue. It's clear there is a different type of Spren for each order, but IMO they don't seem to be the overall focus of the magic system. (Especially because of the WoB about the Splinter that powers a Seon being the Aon in their centre- you would expect Spren to have a similar interaction with Roshar's focus, which means that you'd end up with a different Spren for each order no matter what the focus was) Oaths are merely my current best guess. I don't feel that Gems or Spheres really fit the bill at this stage, and other answers create more questions than they answer so far. Oh Breaths doing the same thing Mists can do? Well I suppose technically they're a very low-level manifestation, so you could hack the breaths to fuel Allomancy, although the amount of work you'd have to put in would far exceed just spiking yourself with an Allomantic power.

Hah. Actually what Brandon said was that Syl would see herself as the closest to Honour. Sort of the same way some people in the USA engage in debates as to who's a "real American" while others say "we're all Americans." The Edgedancers' Spren are in a similar position with regards to Cultivation.

I would definitely be careful with trying to glean too much. I'm sure he's done stories as non-cosmere because the magic doesn't fit his magical Grand Unified Theory before, as well as for thematic reasons.

You don't think a flower growing from the banks of a Shardpool becomes something of a Manifestation itself by pulling that much liquid Endowment through its roots? Fair enough though, that particular example is certainly up for debate. The precise status of anything as a Manifestation or a Catalyst or Focus isn't so much what I'm concerned about, it's whether the terms themselves are useful and make sense. We got focus from Brandon, so that's definitely part of what's going on. Manifestation is just intended to be a useful shortcut for objects that have a ton of a Shard's power in them. What bothers me is whether there's one thing or multiple things going on with the elements of investiture that I've called catalysts. If there's just one thing going on, I suppose you could argue that Scadrial's metals are both catalyst and focus for Allomancy, assuming one's actually required. If there's multiple things going on, we've still got to figure out what. As for the oaths not always being in place for Surgebinding: Indeed not. The specific oaths might not have been relevant at that stage. (I suspect Spren were still looking for certain kinds of people though) The question is how dramatically did they have to change Surgebinding to impose the oaths on it? If the answer in "only mildly," then Oaths might have always been the focus, they just added several to each order. If the answer is "a lot," then maybe that might present problems for oaths as a focus. Yeah, the WoB you're quoting is one of the classic ones talking about focuses. It does seem like external magic systems don't need catalysts, until you look at forgery. External magic system using the Dor to change the cognitive history of objects and people. Still requires soulstamp to function. It also talks about our special case where Vin burns the mists and uses her own will as a focus for which power she's going to access. Uh, I'm pretty sure that ranges from incredibly difficult to impossible. Awakening certainly isn't going to be replicating Steelpulls or Ironpushes very easily, although it's possible you could self-awaken for some interesting mental effects, I don't even know if these would too closely mirror anything in Allomancy. The difference is with Awakening you're using a command, and sometimes, Breath and Colour, to copy focused thoughts into inanimate objects, or to modify your own mind, and the number of Breaths (investiture) stays constant, it's just moved around to various objects. When you burn an Allomantic metal however, the metal is gone, but you gain a constant stream of Investiture from Preservation for doing so, the exact type depending on which metal you burned. That said, you could do some things with Hemalurgy that made the Metallic Arts seem a little more like Awakening, but that's more a function of moving power around with Hemalurgy than anything else. The amount of spiritual hackery you'd need to do to have Awakening seem anything like Allomancy would be so intense, you'd be better off actually trying to get access to real Allomancy IMO.

No, I'm specifically referring to physical manifestations of a shard's power as Manifestations with a capital letter. (so things like the Tears of Edgli, Atium, Lerasium, Harmonium, "Trellium", the Mists, and probably Stormlight, and maybe Soulstone- you could shortcut a bit and refer to "solid manifestations," "gaseous manifestations," and "liquid manifestations" under that terminology if you wanted to talk about them as a category) I didn't create a term for magic systems in my terminology, I'm perfectly happy with calling them Magic Systems.

On Awakening: Sure, I'm looking up a reference for the WoB on Commands being Awakening's focus. They definitely are, (once you understand how focus works on Scadrial it becomes very clear that the Command is the only element of Awakening that makes sense as the focus, because it's what determines what the Awakened object will do) but it's difficult to search as focus is a common word, and Command hasn't been tagged on theoryland for ANYTHING for some reason, so I'm hoping the relevant WoB is there and using the word "Nalthis" so I can search it rather than go diving into google. I know I've seen the WoB, and I've found a lot of references here from other people who've been around a long time saying the same thing, I just haven't found it yet. I might have to get back to you with it as the search is looking like it'll take hours. So far, I found this one, which suggests that the reason for colour drain is copying a cognitive command into the object, (ie. investing it with a new personality) that Brandon thinks gets pretty close, so I could be wrong about the need for catalysts being related to the amount of loose investiture on the planet. This one suggests some shared fundamentals between Awakening and Surgebinding, which I would think probably refers to Commands and Oaths having similar roles. edit: The closest I've got so far to getting a confirmation is this one, where Chaos mentions Commands being the focus for Nalthis, and Brandon RAFOs him without correction. I think the WoB might actually be so ancient it's in the TWG archive at this point... As for Manifestations of the Dor- I wouldn't be surprised if the Dor maybe had two or three sets of manifestations, being a combination of Aona and Skai's power, similar to how Sazed now has Atium, Lerasium, and Harmonium. This is mainly a classification system for thinking about various aspects of investiture, and it could be very wrong still. Catalysts are the part I'm least sure about, especially why the need for them varies. It could simply be that catalysts are extra elements that are sometimes necessary for investing objects as part of magic. On Selish catalysts: Remember, arguably anything used to carve a stamp is a catalyst, not just the soulstone, as unlike AonDor, you need an object to carve the focus into. This could support the idea that the real reason for a catalyst is investing in changing an object- that would explain Awakening, Soulcasting, and Forging all needing one, although it doesn't explain why arguably Sand Mastery has one, unless something different is going on altogether with Sand Mastery. On Roshar's focus: I'm guessing with the oaths. I've vacillated a lot myself on what works here, but the oaths actually make a lot of sense. For Roshar, the focus needs to be what determines which order you join, and the nature of what oaths you make are a big part of what determine that. Some argue that it should be the Spren that's the focus, but that depends- we would expect the Spren to contain the focus at the core as part of their Splinter, like Seons do. If Roshar's focus is intangible, like an oath, that explains why there's nothing to see. And it also explains how Spren can die- if they bond with someone who breaks an oath while using their power, it cuts off access to their investiture through their splinter, as it has lost its focus, the same way Seons of Elantrians lost investiture to their focus when Elantris didn't have a valid Aon. Thus, fabrials automatically contain the focus because they trap a splinter, and the splinter has to have a focus to function, it's how they work. Also, just because Spren pre-dated Honour does not mean that Roshar didn't have a focus before Honour came. We've had WoB that focuses are aspects of the planet a Shard has invested in as opposed to a function of the Shard, so if a Shard invested itself in two planets at once, it might result in two flavours of the same magic system that each have a different focus. In a similar vein, Seventh of Dusk's world probably has a focus despite not even having a shard on it. Arguably it's whatever worm those birds eat.

Kolten pointed out this WoB in another thread that IMO implies the Ire are pre-Reod, fyi.

I've tagged this White Sand spoilers as the graphic novel is still pretty new, but it's critical to the pattern that I've observed that has convinced me my previous thoughts on how investiture worked were insufficient. (I had been thinking I was missing an element due to Nalthis' magic already, but I didn't have a second example that made me absolutely certain) We're probably all familiar with the term Focus. It's a necessary element for anyone to use Investiture to perform magic, and it's the part of the "spell" that determines how that power/magic manifests in the world. For Allomancy, that means metals determine which power you access. For AonDor, that's symbols. We also know that shards manifest their power in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms. I started thinking about this in detail after reading Secret History and noting that in the Cognitive Realm there, everything manifested as mists. There is sometimes some overlap between these manifestations and focuses, so it's not a clean delination. I call these Manifestations of Investiture, or just Manifestation for short, and they represent a Shard's power/body. I would argue, for instance, that Atium is both a Focus and Manifestation at the same time, wheras the Scadrian mists and Well of Eternity are simply Manifestations. I had convinced myself that one of these manifestations would determine the appearance of a planet's cognitive aspect, as we had an ocean of sphere in Shadesmar, and a sea of mists in cognitive Scadrial. On reflection, it seems to be more that one part of the equation is heavily reflected in the cognitive seas, but I don't have enough data yet to make a reasonable hypothesis as to which one. It's especially confusing that spheres are used on Roshar, as gems actually seem to be the relevant part of the equation that sphere would resemble. This could be due to the cognitive seas simply being composed of whatever people most clearly associate with magic- in which case, we would probably expect seas of symbols in Sel, seas of Colour in Nalthis, and maybe seas of Sand or Sunlight on Taldain. This system described Scadrial pretty well, and as it was the magic system we best understood, I was content with it, for a while. But it troubled me that while it arguably extended pretty well to Roshar, it has trouble decribing magic on Nalthis, which very clearly had three elements to it. A Command, which we knew via Word of Brandon is their focus, a variable number of Breaths, and of course, colour to drain. The Breaths seemed relatively obvious as a Manfestation of Endowment, as she literally grants Splinters of herself to the Returned that manifest as Divine Breaths. Arguably the colour could also be said to be a Manifestation if you believe that every bit of dye and paint in Hallandren was derived from Tears of Edgli, but I actually don't buy that argument, as we're explicitly told that those dyes are more effective for awakening, implying that mundane dyes and paints were often drained by Awakeners. I also felt skeptical that a magic system would require two manifestations at once, it seemed like I was missing a variable. I was stumped for a while, as I was convinced Manifestations were important, but that I was missing two crucial variables to the equation, one a third part that enabled magic, and one an element that determined where that third part of the equation was actually necessary, a multiplier of sorts to the constant of Colour on Nalthis. And then we had the newsletter confirming how Sand Mastery works. (this is where the spoilers come in) Apparently there is a barely-visible algae within Taldain's sand, which when depleted of magic, appears black. The sand master dehydrates himself to drain magic from the algae, mastering the sand, and then after four hours of exposure to sunlight, the algae is replenished and good to go again. At first, I wasn't particularly excited by reading this. Sure, the algae is their focus, and it's recharged by the Sun, the manifestation of Autonomy's power. But today I realised I was missing something, and went back and compared Taldain's and Nalthis' magic. So the drained colour, our final element of Awakening, was more of a catalyst than a necessary component of our magical equation. It can sometimes be done without, (as there is no obvious catalyst in Allomancy) but the stronger the catalyst, the stronger the magic, especially if your catalyst is also a Manifestation. In fact, this retroactively made sense of Atium being such a powerful metal too, as it was a focus and a manifestation of Ruin's power. Likewise, Water acted as a reserve of magic for Sand Mastery, although you also needed algae that had been charged with sunlight. Here we had a third element, and a consistent pattern of manifestation, focus, and catalyst that made sense. So... under this Focus/Manifestation/Catalyst system, Scadrial is missing one element but definitely has a Metal focus and the Mists and Godmetals are Manifestations. Arguably, feruchemical attributes could be considered a catalyst on Scadrial, but that might be stretching. Nalthis has a Command focus, a Breath manifestation, and a Colour catalyst. And Roshar is a bit more difficult to determine, but probably fits in some combination of gems, stormlight, and oaths to that structure. I would guess that it would be an Oath focus, with Stormlight as a gaseous manifestation of Honour, and a Gem catalyst. (This would explain nicely why Stormlight adheres to cut gems so well but gems aren't actually required for most Surges, as it seems like the necessity of the Catalyst part of the magic seems to vary by world) Selish magic has the form of various engravings, dances, Aons, or soulstamps as their focus, and obviously the Dor is their manifestation. This leaves Soulstone as either a solid manifestation of Aona or Skai, and/or as a catalyst that's required for Forgery, but presumably not for the other Selish magic. This pattern also seems to imply that more heavily invested worlds seem to have a more optional catalyst, as we know that the three worlds that don't have universally required catalysts (Sel, Roshar, and Scadrial) have a lot of loose investiture running around, or in the case of Scadrial, humans were artificially created by Shards investing themselves in the planet, saturating the whole thing with their power. So, in summary, magic requires a focus, and in less heavily invested environments, a catalyst. A manifestation can also be a focus or catalyst, which seems to enhance the power of the interaction. It also seems that a manifestation can stand in for a focus altogether, in the case that the magic user is highly attuned to the relevant Shard, as Vin demonstrated in Hero of Ages, but that might be a special case for those who are being attuned as Vessels. Any thoughts?

I think there's a reasonable argument that Dominion's splintering might be what Brandon is referring to when he gives that subtle nod in the earlier WoB to Odium and another Shard having worked together, in which case, Autonomy is our prime suspect due to the odd love-hate relationship between shards with directly opposing intents like Preservation and Ruin, Autonomy and Dominion, and Odium and Honour.

I would say that's actually Brandon hinting that they may be even older than Pre-reod. Definitiely a big kick in the teeth to people wanting a post-Reod Ire, as that's about as close as you can get to denying it without actually denying it.

That said, the real bonus of being a steel compounder is that if you tapped enough speed, you could Steelpull bullets to yourself and then move away, or even fine-tune pull them towards a different target.

Yeah this is even more confusing than Ati talking about Vax. My initial suspicion was that Senna was his greatest love before he became a Vessel, and that he left her(?) behind to do it. Definitely a case for WoB as she(?) might not be RAFO material if that's the case.

It could have a similar effect to Feruchemical iron if you used momentum to offset or enhance the lurch from your Steelpull on a heavy object, but it's less convenient because you need open space to do that.

That was always my assumption, that the reason Marsh is Ironeyes is because the sensitivity of inquisitor metal vision is about putting Iron or Steel allomantic spikes into the eyes. If you're creating various specialised hemalurgic minions, it makes sense to have one type that has extraordinary metal vision, especially if that's your "police force" for rogue allomancers. It might be that you need to spike both eyes to get the incredibly detailed allomantic vision that Inquisitors have, wheras spiking one eye simply gives you above average Iron/Steelsight.

It's probably worth going through and marking a few articles as being feature-quality, perhaps with a category, and then simply telling the wiki to rotate between them. Then the featured article will change regularly, (even if it's rotating between a small pool of articles) and Coppermind editors can simply tag exceptional articles with good pictures as they're polished up to the requisite standard.