Does being female alter the spiritual overlays on a person, so that a Hemalurgically imbued spike would need to be placed differently than in a male body?
No. In fact, there are female inquisitors in the huge fight when Vin goes blasting through them, but he felt like bringing that out would have been distracting.
How long is the lifespan of an Inquisitor?
It depends on the powers they're given. Some burn up quickly, and others are extended. In general though they do tend to have slightly longer lives. Since Marsh has the missing bag of atium he's going to be around for a while.
Why did Rashek create mistwraiths the way that he did?
He wasn't sure what you meant by this, but he was sure that the annotations would cover what you wanted to know.
Can Inquisitors still breed through human reproductive methods?
Yes.
Could you tell us a chronology of the Shardworlds thus far? Like, did Warbreaker happen after Mistborn or before, things like that. Personally, I was under the impression you said Mistborn was a sequel to Elantris, but Mi'ch and Josh disagree.
He wasn't positive on where Warbreaker went, but Elantris is first and MB is after it.
This one is a personal favor... See, for metals that have Feruchemy, this verb is "charge". A metal is Feruchemically charged. But, you've been using the term "charge" for Hemalurgic metals, too, which I think is confusing. Before Hero of Ages I called Hemalurgic metals "Imbued" metals. I humbly petition to have that be the official term, because it's just confusing otherwise.
The Seventeenth Shard members use the term of Invest for all of those type of things. However, what they use in world is different on each world. For example Way of Kings [Roshar] is infuse.
Will Sazed eventually go mad trying to hold two Shard's power at the same time (being pushed to two different Purposes simultaneously for millennia)? Why hasn't anyone else tried this trick before in the Cosmere?
No. Since they're so opposite they work together to create a whole. However, after a LONG time it would change him as a person.
Can Sazed "will" himself to any Shardworld if he so desires?
Yes, he has the capacity for it. However, will he? Don't know. If he did there would be a lot of ramifications for it...
Does Ruin have a pool, similar to Preservation's pool with the Well of Ascension and Skai's pool in Elantris?
Yes. His pool is the Pits [Pits of Hathsin].
Will Hoid's character arc, as well as the whole Adonalsium arc, get a satisfactory conclusion eventually?
It depends on what Brandon decides to do. We also might or might not get the rest of the story (pre-story). From a market standpoint it's not wise, simply because if the books require you to have read 32 other books before you read them it doesn't make sense to work on them. However, if the demand is high enough he MIGHT do them after all of the rest of the cosmere books.
How many Shards have existed on Roshar?
Three.
Long, long ago when Hero of Ages came out you listed four Shards other than Ruin and Preservation. You said we interacted with two directly. One is a tough call, we've never met the Shard itself but have seen its power. The other one we've not met directly but have seen its influence. My questions:
-Is the Dor the "tough call" one?
-Do you count Hoid in this list of four shards? It makes a difference for the theories, Brandon! You don't even need to say if he is bound to a shard, rather just if you consider him in this list.
RAFO, and no, Hoid is not included in the list.
Will the character of Stick ever make a reappearance?
Stick is unlikely to make a reappearance.
Aww. You wrote an essay about it
Yes, I know. I know people really like Stick.
It was a good essay. It was a good essay.
Is Endowment linked to the ocean in Warbreaker?
RAFO.
Is Endowment blind to the words spoken by Awakeners? Is he blind to art?
RAFO.
Are Shards all paired? Does Endowment have a counterpart?
RAFO. Also, yes and no. Not all Shards have perfect counterparts like Ruin and Preservation.
Why were Ruin and Preservation linked together?
Because they're such perfect opposites. Basically it's just an opposites attract thing.
Hoid seems to have an inability to be able to harm people *inaudible* attempts it. Why is that?
That is a RAFO. That's a read and find out.
Why are specific focuses chosen for specific Shards? Why metals for Ruin and Preservation and not Commands like Endowment?
RAFO.
Is Edgli Endowment's real name?
RAFO, however the flowers are related to Endowment somehow...
Since the dawn of Scadrial, why was Feruchemy isolated in a single distinct population in the world, namely the Terrismen? Allomancy, while rare within the population of Scadrial, at least was not isolated to one population, it was spread evenly, it seems. What is special about the Terrismen that only they get the power of Feruchemy? Does it have something to do with the previous Ascensions before Rashek, with the guardian keeping the power for a time?
It's all in the spiritual DNA, which is passed on like normal DNA. However, they are a separate people. They've kept themselves isolated, similar to the Jews in our world. When I asked he said there have been some Feruchemical-mistings [Ferrings] in the past, but they are very rare.
Why is there such an imbalance between the amount of atium and the amount of lerasium in the world? Also, why are atium and lerasium very imbalanced in Allomantic power (Lerasium is far more useful than atium, really)?
There isn't. Leras is just spread out further. He is in the mists, in the Well, and in the lerasium. Ruin's power however is condensed strictly in atium.
What would have happened if Ruin did get the atium? Yeah, the world is destroyed, but how does Ruin "absorb" the atium so he can utilize the power?
He would metabolize it, just like the normal people have to do. However, if he did get it he would then be able to destroy the world.
Why did the Well of Ascension refill every thousand years rather than 500 or 200, etc.?
It's actually every 1024 years. The Lord Ruler just befuddled the information a bit.
In the most recent Hero of Ages annotation, you said that Preservation chose Vin to be the recipient of the power, just as Preservation had chosen Alendi previously (thus, this was why Ruin had manipulated the Prophecies). Was Alendi also chosen precisely sixteen years before the Well of Ascension's power returned?
Yes. He was chosen exactly sixteen years before, but he was a bit older then Vin when he was chosen.
Will we get more information like that about planets and stuff like that in the Ars.. *interrupted* ?
The Arcanum Unbound[ed] is... Yes, the cosmere collection. There will be little essays from Khriss on each of the planets. There will be stuff like that. You're going to have to wait until the science in-world approaches more of our science before I can get into some of the things you would want to know specifically. But, I mean, we are starting to get to an era where they can talk intelligently about these things. So yes, but it's-- Arcanum Unbound[ed] is kind of weird because I had to pick a date for her to be writing these essays, and the date that she wrote the essays is before some of the stories. For instance, Sixth of the Dusk, right? And so for that planet she's just like, "Hey, here's this place that something weird might be happening with. We don't know a lot about it, but it's got this one weird attribute that we're studying." The story hasn't happened yet. So you get a little bit of that. It's not all from the far future, when like Sixth of the Dusk is happening, because otherwise there would be way too many spoilers for what's coming in the future. So yes, there will be lots of cool little tidbits. The essays are meant for people who ask questions like that, and like this one, but I'm not answering everything.
As it turns out, there is an error in the Feruchemical table when Brandon put it in Mistborn 2. If you look closely, Determination (electrum) doesn't belong in its group. The group that it is in is obviously more physical powers. Determination was supposed to be a mental metal, and Warmth was supposed to be in that Physical group. He just made a mistake originally. But it turns out that Feruchemy obeys different rules than Allomancy, so Brandon isn't retconning it, but saying that Feruchemy works differently now. Apparently there was going to be a table of Feruchemy at the end of Alloy of Law, but it wasn't ready because Isaac kept thinking like an Allomancer. Feruchemy has its own rules (for example, Brandon confirmed that pewter does steal Feruchemical health, probably because that second group of physical Feruchemical powers are also "physical", so pewter can steal them.) Hemalurgy also obeys different rules.
One does not have to kill someone with Hemalurgy to charge a spike, but it rips off a large part of the soul. The person would not be the same.
There is a way to get a non-powered person to access a metalmind.
(Paraphrased) Can you tell us something about the Lord Ruler that we do not already know?
*Written* The Lord Ruler once gave up + tried to end the F.E.
Feruchemy is about multipliers. The more the Lord Ruler aged, the less "multiplier" he could store in his metalmind. And the more he aged the more he would need to Compound to stay alive. There could exist an upper bound to the amount of time the Lord Ruler could survive off this trick.
Allomantic pewter strength can be stored in a metalmind, but it's probably easier to just Compound.
The Shaod is an effect of Elantris.
What happens to seons during the Reod is that the Reod messes with the seon's spirit.
Shardblades can be willed down. We see this with Dalinar slamming the Shardblade down into the stone at the end of the Way of Kings.
Lerasium overwrites Spiritual DNA. It can do some interesting things, and can overwrite your Spiritual DNA in different ways if you do it right. If a Surgebinder ate lerasium, he would become an Allomancer, but Brandon implied other things could be done.
For people really into the obscure workings of the politics of the Final Empire, we asked about the legality of assassinations.
It turns out that you have to ask the obligators' permission to assassinate someone--and permission, of course, means bribe in this context. The Steel Ministry can say yes or no. Presumably more high level people would cost more money to be killed. Of course, if the Ministry says no, you can always risk it and assassinate illegally, but you'd have to be very careful not to get caught. Even with legal killings you need to keep things quiet. Brandon said the Steel Ministry has much more corruption than governments in our world. Corruption which we would abhor is commonplace in the Final Empire.
Ketchup does not exist in the Final Empire, since it is from a fruit, which are flowering plants. The Lord Ruler did not engineer fruit. Mostly people eat vegetables and roots.
If you are Smoked, you can't Seek.
[Brandon] told me that because burning copper creates an Allomantic dead zone, so to speak, everything inside it is effectively silenced. This prevents pulses from reaching Seekers who are outside the cloud, but it also prevents anyone inside the cloud from receiving any pulses whatsoever. The reason Vin could do this is because of her earring.
We asked if it was possible to use bronze to Seek Feruchemy.
He said it could be possible. If it were to happen, it was very hard, because the Inquisitors would desperately like to be able to find Feruchemists that way, and it was implied they had not discovered this power. So, it is a freaking hard technique to learn, if possible at all.
I continued to ask about the Lord Ruler and his Allomantic strength.
There's an upper bound to the amount of power you can get from being a savant. Brandon said that, obviously, the Lord Ruler wasn't using duralumin and Elend could only get that powerful in Soothing using duralumin. He implied that there was a way to Compound to enhance Allomancy.
We asked some questions about the Lord Ruler, like if he knew about chromium and nicrosil.
Brandon said he knew about those metals, and then also said "The Lord Ruler knew a lot of things that no one knows."
Seons are remnants of a dead Shard.
Will we ever get an explanation about the cosmological feasibility of the world [Taldain]?
Oh, the cosmological feasibility of a tidally locked planet between two stars?
We have one of those in our solar system, and it's not very habitable.
Yeah, *crowd laughs* the nice thing about the cosmere is I can do planets that would not work in a large scale way because I can hang something and say, "This orbit will degrade in two million years, but it was created and placed there," right? Which allows me to create planets that on a geologic timescale are not stable, but are stable on a rise and fall of human civilizations scale. And that's one of the advantages of being in fantasy, is I can go back to that. Like I try to be rule based when I can, but I also have magic and things that can interfere. So the answer is that. *crowd laughs* We know it's-- I mean, I don't think Roshar's moons are stable on a geologic timescale either. I think they're too close. There's a bunch of stuff in the cosmere that is not stable if you look at tens of millions of years, but it's just fine for a million or two years.
Brandon said offhandedly, "It is not random who got which Shard." Also, Shards very rarely change hands. Brandon emphasized the "very" there.
Odium wants to be the only Shard. Odium could pick up other Shards if he wants to, but, he doesn't want to. His Shard is a good match for his personality and he doesn't want to be influenced by another Shard.
I don't remember what prompted me to write this, or what impression I had that made me write this, but I wrote: Anyone can take up a Shard. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I would not have written this if it was not crystal clear to me that this is what Brandon meant.
Sazed is a Shard. Just like a king of two countries is still a king, a holder of two Shards is a Shard.
Sazed's two Shards do not "cancel out", as Brandon said that it would like being pulled by two huge gravitational tides. You can get to a way that you aren't instantly ripped apart, but that doesn't mean you don't feel it. (When asked what effect the Shards would have on Sazed, Brandon said, "Read Alloy of Law to find out".)
Shards and Shard intents: Holding a Shard is a contest of willpower against the Shard that, over time, is very hard to resist.
Shards affect you over time, but your mind will not leave a permanent effect on the Shard. A holder's [Vessel's] personality, however, does get to filter the Shard's intent, so to speak. However, if that holder [Vessel] no longer held that Shard, the Shard will not continue to be filtered by that person.
Inquisitors knowing how to Compound: some may have figured it out at some point. I [Chaos] got the impression it was not a technique the Lord Ruler taught them.
