happyman

I didn't see anything on Dawnslight recently, but I'd thought I'd add my take on him, since people seem to think he's more mysterious than he was meant to be. One thing to notice is that when people say "Since Calamity," they really mean "Since a year after Calamity rose." In the first book, Prof says that he was an Epic "since Calamity," but other people later talk about it in more detail and say it was a year later. Because the events and side-effects of Calamity were so, well, big, it's not surprising that people talk that way. With that little issue out of the way, it seems likely that Dawnlight is simply a very powerful Epic, one of the early few who avoided the darkness, either by facing his fear head on (perhaps as part of a dream or hallucination) or simply by virtue of being damaged in a way which made him less susceptible to fear. Either way, I don't think he was meant to be the huge enigma people are thinking of him as.

Feruchemists feel a natural affinity for their metal(s). It's pretty much instinctive.

It was *not* The Stick which Kelsier discovered. The Stick is still one with his stickness. (I think I'm legally obligated to include that here.) As for the first question, I think that you are absolutely correct. Kelsier says that the best things to have in Scadesmar are things which were owned, but have been lost or abandoned. They have a strong Identity, but aren't going to auto-teleport away when somebody in the real world claims them and changes their Identity.

Kelsier is on my personal list of people likely to be the Sovereign, and that list is only one person long (it is my personal list, mind).

I would say, based on other things I have read recently, that Elend saw something like all the possible futures, no idea how far. Yes, it's rather hard to maintain that knowledge, but in this case, there were really only two different outcomes: the multitude of bad endings with the world ripped to shreds by Ruin, or the single good ending with Sazed taking the powers. That's all he really needed to keep.

Or considers it to be outside his mandate, much like the mess that Wax and Lessie got themselves into.

He went haring after the IRE because he saw, essentially in vision, that that was the first step to the only way to defeat Ruin. He also actually did take everybody's word for it that the IRE wouldn't give him what he needed. He's just the kind of person who, when told that somebody won't help him on purpose, decides to con them instead. He took a third option, but it wasn't a bad one, all things considered.

Happily for this thread, we got a perfectly good Steris viewpoint towards the end of the book in circumstances which make this even more unlikely than it already was.

I think that these are interesting speculations, but that events quite that big would be reserved for the Era 3 trilogy.

Heh, that brings me back. When we were first speculating on how many shards there were (and note that this was back when about all we knew about the Cosmere was the name "Hoid"; this website had begun to exist, but only under the name "Hoid's compendium"), I personally guessed that there were 16 shards, for the same underlying reason there were 16 allomantic metals and the reason why Preservation chose the number 16 as his "give the humans some vital hints" signal. We still don't know what that reason is, but in Alloy of Law, Wax mentions that the "Law of Sixteen" is seen to often in nature to be ignored. So 16 is important. Dunno about speculation beyond that, though.

That too.

As a programmer, I can say that this magic system is just about certain to be too complex be to be treated properly, and if it was, it would be dead boring to most readers. This is almost certainly related to the state of the world they live in, but that speculation probably goes in Cosmere theories.

I don't think I cried, but I did find that ending very poignant. I agree that Elantris is one of Brandon's weakest published books (and if you look more closely, you find out that Hrathen's ending was added later in the writing process; the original version was far more geeky and less personal), but that's not the same as saying I don't like it. Hrathen was easily the best character in it, and that he got a kind of redemption and resurrection really got to me.

I have a strong hunch that you are absolutely right. Ruin whispering in his ear certainly didn't help, but it certainly seems like Rashek was acting from Preservation's perspective when he ruled. In the annotations to tFE, Brandon says that Rashek wore black and white to represent that he was of both Ruin and Preservation---but that that symbolism was a lie; he had only touched one of the powers (Preservation), and only partially (the well). I feel like the Lord Ruler's final empire is exactly the kind of world Preservation would create---near-perfect stasis of the place it had been when he had conquered it, with damage caused mostly by inexperience.

This is made even more likely by Syl saying that the Stormfather is broken. Apparently the Bondsmiths forswore their oaths at some point, and it did exactly this.

I think it is more likely that Endowment has been the same person since the Shattering. A more likely series of events is that she eventually figured out how to/decided to start Returning people about 500 years ago. As for how they got her name: it seems extremely likely one of the many Returned in all that time learned and mentioned it at some point. Returned, in one form or another, form the basis of the only religions we see in any depth.

Not Harmony; the Kandra.

This reminds me of nothing so much as the statement "Scholars now believe that the Illiad was not written by Homer. It was instead written by a different man of the same name." "Trell" is the name we are using for the foreign shard, assuming there is one, on Scadrial. He/she can't be a red herring, because whatever Trell is, it's the unknown influence.

Congratulations! You created a word which has exactly one hit in Google, and that hit is this post.

How did you hear about my cake?

It's this, mostly. He was trying to look into it---Wax's first actions in the book proper were trying to track down one of his last leads on the Set so that he could presumably rescue the women, etc. It's just the whole Bleeder situation kind of came up and distracted him. And absolutely everybody else, as well.

The terms they usually use are "alpha reader" and "beta reader." Alpha readers are trusted to see the crudest text shown to anybody not actually related to them. Beta readers are much more common and are invited when the story really, seriously needs input from the outside.

I'm not sure what I make of the rest of your ideas (I'm completely undecided), but on point 4, no argument. Which personally makes me think that David's current power position is something nobody has thought of yet!

For Mitosis, being turned back to normal *is* the same as melting his clones. Without his powers, he's just one person.

Too easy. Wish granted, but your Mistborn side is weak (900 years into TFE), you are alive during the Final Empire, and TLR knows about your powers and where you live. Have fun! I wish for a never-ending supply of marmalade.