happyman

Wonderful, chaos! A very specific detail which we can use to place the recipient in time. That's it: The recipient is definitely not Sazed. In fact, the recipient was alive well before the events of Elantris, if the deaths of Aona and Skai could possibly be considered news, even sarcastically.

I haven't read the book in any way, shape or form, but this seems to me the way it should be. After all, there are lots of contexts in which sexual orientation would not be remotely obvious, and if one of those is where the character shows up, it would seem rather artificial to insert it. I've had friends and colleagues at work that I've thought might be gay, but never seeing them in a context where it mattered or was likely to come up, I never bothered to confirm or deny it.

Actually, the letter makes a lot more sense if the recipient is familiar with the Shardholders personally. It assumes a lot of background we aren't privy to, and which Sazed had not personal experienced either.

When Raoden described the "proto-zombie" case study, he explicitly said the base Aon was missing one of its lines. He mentioned that it shouldn't have done anything at all.

It's a valid objection. You'll note I did talk about the "eyes" problem. Being roughly two feet shorter than usual could help you hide, even if you need to keep your face hidden the whole time. As for the organs and metallic spikes and age---that's trickier. I don't know all the answers. It would be kind of cool, though, if Atium could change the size of the spikes to make an "mini-inquisitor". It is a god metal, it's not completely out of the question.

This---is awesome. It explains an awful lot about Mistborn, actually, especially towards the end. I suspect that choosing a champion has multiple side-effects. One is almost certainly that the champion has an increased affinity for the Shard's magic system. Another would probably be that the Shard can directly power the Champion in ways that would not be possible for the average magic user. This would explain a lot about the final fight between Elend and Marsh. On the other hand, though, I suspect that if a Shard does choose a champion, it limits other ways it can influence the world, even while giving it "hands-on" access that it otherwise would not have.

Exactly my point. I'm guessing that the "original" Elantrians (or at least, those Elantrians which weren't able to study magic from books) ran some risks in their experimentation. Accidentally setting themselves on fire or killing themselves with a mal-formed Aons seem like the kind of thing that could happen. Because the magic is too darn useful, though, experimentation would continue until it could be controlled.

Fan names are always a little bit strange. We just don't know enough to make a more sensible name. After all, we have AonDor, ClayShan, and ?????. No real pattern to help, not even a little bit.

Sounds dangerous, though! Kinda like studying something dangerous in the real world---like electricity or radiation. Which is probably a pretty good analogy.

Along these lines, I'd add that Ruin enjoyed killing people, by the end. He was also supremely confident in his ability to control the inquisitors, and for good reason. It was only purest luck that Marsh was in a situation to pull free at the last second. If he got to kill somebody and make one of his minions more powerful, he'd probably do it for lulz. Id also add that storing age does have some uses. Being able to sneak in or out of a town/city/jail without being recognized would be handy during the early stages of Ruin's campaign to spike people. Imagine if Marsh had been able to get at Elend in a crowd as a child? He'd have had to cover his spikes, I'd imagine, but at the very least, it would change his height, hair or face (below a shroud, obviously).

This has really, really got to be true. The fact that he thinks so calmly that they would come and take it means they must be seriously capable in at least one way. It makes me even more curious about the Shin. I'm half inclined to believe it would be a magic system the other people in Roshar have no experience with. This would help enormously if they tried to pull this stunt often. Maybe it's a form of stealth magic or mind magic.

I agree with this. If there were ur-Elantrians around when Aona was killed, I'm guessing Odium wouldn't have to try to take them out. They would just be collateral damage. Not that Odium would particular mind, I'm thinking.

This is a good question, and one which has no good answer yet. We don't know much about the Seons. Their origins are left deliberately vague. The fact that they don't have the chasm line was an important fact in one of Brandon's earlier drafts of Elantris (it was how Dilaf was finally defeated), but as Brandon himself noted, that ending was anti-climatic, especially compared to the one he actually went with. This leaves us without any clear explanation for where Seons come from or how they are sustained. The effect the Shaod has on a bound Seon is especially unclear. So, a good question. There are no canonical answers yet. The fact that the Seons are almost certainly tied to Aona's shard after the splintering makes it even less clear.

The number increase quite quickly when you take into account Feruchemy. It seems to me that Twinborn and Feruchemy should count as well. And of course, there is always the question of whether or not there are Lerasium mistings!

Given that Marsh managed to, briefly, resist Ruin's influence directly (when Ruin was trying to get him to read Spook's letter), I would say that the Lord Ruler's control of Inquisitors was strong, but also subtle. If even Ruin had to push and pull on Marsh' emotions to get him to obey, I assume TLR had to resort to essentially the same thing, but probably over a longer period of time. This means things like immediate rebellion and hidden agents would be a real, but temporary threat to him.

I, personally, am certain that 1024 is actually the very special combination of two meaningful numbers in the cosmere. E.g., I think it is special because it is 2^10. This still leaves me with the question though: which years were they using to measure it in? If the planet moved in orbit, the length of the year should have changed. Was it the original years that did or, or the new years? And regardless of which "year" it was, why is the length of the year significant, shard-power-wise? On Earth, the length of the year is not a clean multiple of anything other time unit we use; it is essentially irrational.

I imagine that practice is a large part of TLR's power. Elend may have been strong, but he was also inexperienced. Also, Elend didn't have the advantage of having held the power at the Well of Ascension. Even if it took a while for TLR to figure out how to combine his abilities, his memories of that time probably gave him a leg up.

I like this point. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if Nightblood's odd relationship with breath is a small-scale example of this "expending power in a way the Shards were reluctant to do." Nightblood forcibly steals and destroys Breaths at a stunning rate. That's a lot of power being burned right there, from a human perspective.

Personally, I expect there are some perfectly logical rules about who can take a shard, and when. I'm also quite certain there is absolutely no way Brandon will tell us what they are at the moment. He deliberately left it a mystery in Mistborn. Part of it is probably the fact that Sazed was a Feruchemist, and thus had equal access to Ruin and Preservation, but that's probably only the smallest part of it, or perhaps a side effect. (E.g. anybody capable of taking both Shards would by their nature have access to Feruchemy.)

I'll agree, in terms of the Cosmere, this actually does make sense. Life destroys more efficiently than unlife? At some level, this is true. Ruin probably espoused that philosophy, by the end.

Since it's an in-world document, I wouldn't worry too much about our scientific understanding of things. After all, in our world, we can't soulcast at all.

An interesting question. What if you burned gold and could somehow aim it at a particular choice you made in the recent past? Then could you find out what would have happened if you had decided to trail the scary Inquisitor and eavesdropped on him? Even if he would have killed you, you would learn something. I'm starting to get the feeling that gold is one of those mysteries deliberately left hanging.

Thermodynamics and chemistry is all you really need to understand the first part. As for that being the purpose of life, well, from the rigid empirical, scientific viewpoint, he is totally joking. In such an approach, the universe and any of its artifacts has no purpose. The second law of Thermodynamics (which is what he is referring to) is more of a really good suggestion than an actual law (although it is such a very good suggestion that we can normally treat it as a law), and there is no known fundamental constraint which says that the universe has to reach the highest entropy state before other factors (such as the expansion of the universe) make it all moot. If he isn't joking, then that takes us into a really, really philosophical discussion that I don't think we want to hold here. As for General Relativity, I'll just say that the only people who understand General Relativity well enough to understand it are people who get PhDs in physics with an emphasis on General Relativity or cosomology or some field that actually uses General Relativity. I got my PhD in physics, but because I focused on Quantum and Wave phenomena, I never saw anything more about it than the rest of you. I learned Thermodynamics and Newton's Laws, and Special Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics, and several other subfields as part of my general background, but not General Relativity. It's its own beast.

In this case, I would suggest looking up the HoA Q&A thread from Timewasters Guide. There was lots of stuff reported there, including the original reports of Brandon's statements on the relationship between Hoid, Adonalsium, and the shattering. What I remember most from these: Jokes about Hoid saying "Oops! I broke God!" Nobody really thinks it went down that way, though.

Double this. As far as I can tell, all the religions on Nalthis seem to have common elements as well, likely due to the presence (and active involvement) of exactly one shard.