Hoiditthroughthegrapevine
Is Cultivation's Investiture distributed by the crem cycle?
Brandon Sanderson
RAFO.
#1
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#1
#2
Questioner
Where do gemhearts come from?
Brandon Sanderson
They grow naturally, just like your fingernails grow.
Questioner
Where do they get the resources?
Brandon Sanderson
The rain that falls on Roshar is [hard] water, full of crem that crystalizes. If you drink that water, it gives you the nutrients that you need to make gemhearts.
#3
leinton (paraphrased)
Is crem made out of calcium carbonate?
Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)
No, that it was a darker material, and wouldn’t directly correlate to any rocks on Earth
leinton (paraphrased)
Where does it come from?
Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)
That’s one of the greater mysteries. Far in the future, scientists on Roshar will start asking that same question.
#4
Questioner
Yesterday you said that crem was actually like Shard poop.
Brandon Sanderson
No, I was saying that it was more like that than what they were saying.
Questioner
It's not really poop?
Brandon Sanderson
No, its not.
Questioner
Dang it, I like poop jokes! Can you make it poop so i can have a poop joke.
Brandon Sanderson
Ok, for the next thirty seconds it is.
#5
Jason
How does Roshar keep its rocky terrains? Wouldn't corrosion and vegetation break down the rocks outside of [Shinovar]?
Brandon Sanderson
Yes! Good question. This is why I built the crem from the beginning. That was my first question to myself, and you will actually find that on a geological timescale, that Roshar has drifted! Meaning been worn off on one end and is shrinking a little bit, and then different pieces are growing that way off of different parts. Very slow-scale. The existence of Roshar is not so long that you'd be able to tell much, but you know there've been inches if not feet lost from the eastern portion of Roshar but the dumping of the crem is my perhaps-fantastical science answer to "what happens to erosion". Plants grow, they do crack the stone, they do start to break it down, even Rosharan plants whose roots aren't meant to go deep or things like this, and then crem gets in those cracks, fills it in, sticks the broken pieces back together, and you end up with stone, still. That was my devised answer to having a world that is hit by storms but is also stony.
This is the same reason coral reefs continue to exist. There's got to be a growth mechanism after things are being weathered a way to make sure that they continue to perpetuate. An above-water coral reef was one of my touchstones for Roshar.
#6
Questioner
Is crem something like spren poop? Or similar, because I know poop is important.
Brandon Sanderson
It's more like... Yes, but it’s more like... Shard poop?
#7
Questioner
In The Way of Kings, stormwater is described as having a metallic taste, which comes from the crem in the water. Are there trace amounts of a god metal in crem?
Brandon Sanderson
Oh, excellent question. You get a partial RAFO.
Let's just say... again, I write fantasy, right? I start with what I want to have happen, and then I justify it. That's how I define the difference between what I do and the hard science fiction writers. If we got Eric James Stone up here, who writes hard science fiction; he starts with the science and extrapolates story. I start with the story and go backward, right? And so, I started with the highstorms; and then I went backward and said, “Okay, I know I'm doing this. What would I need in a system to make this actually work (at least on a scale of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands of years).” Roshar is not geologically stable on… if you're accounting for the scale of planetary development, Roshar's gonna have some moons hit it during that timeframe. But during thousands of years, during the lifetime of civilizations, it is stable enough. What can I do to make it stable enough during that? And the crem and the rainwater that falls from it was an extremely important part of me figuring out the little bits I needed to fudge using cosmere mechanics in order to make Roshar actually exist.
That's why you get a RAFO: because I didn't quite answer! Read between the lines.
#8
Questioner
Has stormwater tasted metallic always?
Brandon Sanderson
Yes.
Questioner
Even pre-Shattering?
Brandon Sanderson
Even pre-Shattering it would get a metallic taste, that's the crem. So. That is an indication of Investiture and things. But it was there-- it was in place first, before.