Can silver help a spore eater with their condition?
Yeah, it can stab them through the heart with a silver knife so they die. Much better ending. There is potentially an application of silver that could maybe help them, it would not be my first go to. Silver can be pretty destructive.
Can you tell us, what is the Command the father machine got in Yumi and the Nightmare Painter?
Yes, I can.
What is it?
RAFO.
It has to be very precise; I'm not going to look it up, it is in my notes. I would say it wrong if I gave it to you right now. It's one of those RAFOs of "Brandon doesn't want to look in his notes because we're in the lightning round."
Can we finally confirm what type of spren is used to create half-shards? Is it Radiant spren, Shardplate spren, or something different?
RAFO! This theoretically should be confirmed in the RPG. We should be giving you all the tools that you need for these sorts of things, including all of the armor spren, all the different brands of Fused, and things like that. The stuff we need so that you can roleplay...
People who are making them?
Yeah. This should all get confirmed in that.
Spores are said to eventually overwhelm a ship's silver defenses. Do aether spores ruin silver like the Shades over in Threnody do?
Yes. It'd take a lot, but yeah. Basically, this is how we have a ship that sinks not destroy the whole ocean.
Will we ever learn anything canonical about the person Luthadel was named after?
Someday, maybe.
Can we confirm that Xisis is "Foil," and do all dragons have a nickname?
Yes, all dragons have a nickname. It's very common. And you are allowed to confirm that.
Given what happens at the end of the book, is Yumi immortal now? If not, does she age?
Her perception is going to influence this. She's going to need a small bit of power to persist, but she is so highly invested that it would take a very long time for that to be noticeable. Particularly because she's not even using that power. There's no out let for it. She's a Cognitive Shadow, much like the Heralds or Vasher, that is more self sustaining because of how highly she is invested. Imagine someone like Vasher with thousands of Breaths. You're just never going to notice. But her perception of herself will cause her to age. Probably not to age to the point that she dies though. Basically the answer is yes. You've got an immortal being running a noodle shop in a backwater corner of the Cosmere.
We were wondering if you made a conscious choice with Charlie to focus on the lighter parts of his story rather than exploring some of the more tragic elements of his past. Just because if you actually look at it, he hasn't had a great life.
He has not had a great life. So, there's a couple of reasons. Yes, I did. One is - Charlie, as a person, is somebody who is... it's not that he hasn't been touched by these things, he definitely has been. But the person he presents to the world is somebody who is actively deciding to move on as best they can. This is not always a decision, but for Charlie that's a part of his persona. That's how he handles the fact that his father replaced him so easily, sent him off to be killed, and things like this. This is his coping mechanism, is his dramatic optimism. And because of that, it's letting Charlie control his narrative a little bit.
Part of it is the nature of the kind of the story that I was telling. It is not impossible in Hoid's voice (as I do occasionally both in Tress and Yumi) to get into the deeper character stuff, but I want to play those cards wisely, because the natural mocking nature of his narrative could undermine powerful moments if I'm not careful. So I play those cards carefully.
It's those two things kind of mixing together that gets us the lighthearted version of Charlie. That is really how he is, that's not Hoid sugar-coating it, but that is how he processes what's happened to him. Let's just say he's super happy! Where he ended up, maybe... he wants nothing to do with going back to his old life. He's quite pleased with how things played out.
I want to ask you about my favorite character, Kelsier! Which is a controversial opinion but I hold to it. In Secret History, when he steals that orb from the Ire, is that orb full of purified Dor? Is that the first time we see that?
That is the first time we see that.
We know Vasher has visited Roshar, and we know that the Vorin people Soulcast important people's bodies into stone after they die, like what happened to Gavilar. Was Vasher aware of this when he visited, and is that the inspiration for the D'Denir statues?
You know, he would be aware of that. I wasn't consciously making that connection, though, in the books, I'll be honest with you. This is just going back to origins of what you can do with the magics in the Cosmere. I think he would definitely be aware that they did that. You can have that be retro-canon if you want, but it was not what I was thinking. But it seems like it's the sort of thing that would be very reasonable.
Originally, Kaladin and Moash were essentially the major darkeyes who were in a position to criticize the nobility and lighteyed culture. Now that Kaladin has kind of (if not emotionally) bought into the system to some extent, by outranking most lighteyes, and Moash has gone full villain, are we going to get another character playing that role of a darkeyed or lower class individual who is critiquing the system?
Yeah, I've been looking at that. One of the questions is whether Lift can justifiably fulfill that role, as someone who considers herself a bit of an outsider even among the Radiants. But let's hang a little bit of a RAFO on that, ask me after you've read book five.
The Lost Metal Ars Arcanum calls Hemalurgic decay a thing of the past. The term has been used to describe the loss of power in spikes outside of bodies, as well as the small amount of power that is lost at the moment a spike is created. Which one of those things no longer happens?
The first one, the decay of spikes outside of a body. They have figured out how to make that no longer a thing.
So it's still a thing that happens in the cosmere, they just know how to avoid that completely?
Yes.
In original Dragonsteel, there is the point where Hoid gets a hold of a Tamu Kek and calls Frost just to kind of prank him. Frost thinks it's an actual devotee praying to him and it turns out it's just Hoid, he's found one, and he's... yeah. That's from 2009 - no, 1999 Dragonsteel. When Dragonsteel Prime comes out you'll be able to read Hoid pranking Frost with a Tamu Kek.
As he would, because he's Hoid.
As he would, yep. He was trying to prove that Frost was a Dragon and Frost was not letting on that he was, he was hanging out as an old dude and turns out Hoid got him.
What research about the aethers is Xisis hoarding?
His biggest interest is how aethers break down, and he's really researching the water cycle, and trying to figure out how the seethe happens, because he's very interested in the decomposition of aethers, which is what's causing the seethe. That's what he is hoarding there. He's got quite the establishment in Silverlight as well. Silverlight was once upon a time a bunch of dragon palaces, they all still have their skyscrapers there, basically. He's taking a little detour for some decades on Lumar, but his home base would be in Silverlight.
That kind of answers my follow up question, that was, is his scholarly seclusion typical of dragons, or just something unique to him?
He's taken a bit of seclusion, but I wouldn't say... There's a whole bunch of different things about dragons. If you've got a Tamu Kek, you can contact them, you can pray to them, and they can actually influence your emotions. They're all kind of like little mini gods. They're not immortal immortal, but they're pretty long lived and functionally immortal. They've been around for a while doing all kinds of stuff, so there's all kinds of things going on with them. Some of them will be secluded. Some of them take their duties very seriously, like Frost takes his duties very very very seriously. Other ones just don't care. You will get some themes with dragons, they do like bargains, they do tend to have their interests, they do tend to collect people and have either followers or corporations or things like that--I don't want to go too cyberpunk on us, but yeah. You'll notice some themes the more you get to know them.
I will warn you, in the cosmere, there are more Anne McCaffrey style dragons, lesser dragons if you want, that do not have a human form. The greater dragons, as well call them, they're basically like amphibians, they have to spend a part of their life cycle in a humanoid form. They give birth in humanoid form, then have a transformation in puberty to dragon form, and then can go back and forth after that. But we've got some Anne McCaffrey style dragons, we've even got some little drakelings on one planet that are not six limbed and stuff like that. We'll eventually have some more dragons, but when I was writing the early books in the cosmere, we were a little dragon flooded with Eragon and How to Train Your Dragon, so I didn't write the dragon stories. But maybe some day.
That's fascinating. And also, that means we got our Tamu Kek, which seems to be a theme with these because we always have a Tamu Kek somewhere.
One of the few ways to have an ansible in the cosmere in the early days, pre technology, if you wanted to communicate between planets, this is one of the only ways. Really handy to get a hold of one of those, or to get some seons. Before we get technological solutions, those were your two main ways to communicate across planets.
It looks like all my questions this time are going to be about parallels between different things. This one between white sand and sand mastery and some aether stuff. I noticed that are are parallels, the water requirement, there's a bond--the omnibus really stresses that the sand master is forging a bond there--there is the legendary thirteenth aether spore which may be white, may be black, that's a little weird. What's going on here? Has Autonomy corrupted an aether?
RAFO! You are theorizing along the correct lines, Argent, well done.
Kind of a similar question about the Midnight Essence, now that we have seen that crop up in Tress as well as in Stormlight Archive. Is something similar happening with the Midnight Essence? We have also the nightmares, in Yumi, that appear similar, they're also mimicking things.
So, there's a couple of things getting interwoven here. The actual idea of Midnight Essence is a concept like Lightweaving that predates the Shattering of Adonalsium, that various magic systems are basically "borrowing" a law of the cosmere and creating a parallel effect from the same basis, if that makes any sense.
Yumi is a little distinct from that. It's feeling similar; I would not call it true Midnight Essence. It's an awful lot more like a Lightweaving that has--because Lightweavings can have mass to them, because investiture can have mass to it--so you're looking a little bit more like... imagine a bunch of Stormlight becoming tangible, you can touch it, because of a powerful Lightweaving or something like that. Of course, these things all bleed together because I'm using the same fundamental principles to make them. But, for me, Midnight Essence has this personality that comes prefixed. What the Midnight Mother is making, what you're seeing in the Midnight Sea and things like this, you're gonna get some similar personalities to these things, and not necessarily the same with the nightmares.
So it's more of a autonomous-- a Lightweaving that's become autonomous and has kind of broken down a bit?
Yeah... the problem is it's also got the Cognitive Shadow, right? It's a really invested Cognitive Shadow that is borrowing this Investiture to interact with the world. Because these are their shadows; these are their Cognitive Shadows, all of these people's Cognitive Shadows. But the power is not themselves. Remember, a Cognitive Shadow is a little bit like a fossil, like Vasher describes it. You've got this pattern there, and then the power kind of makes it manifest and be able to interact, and things like that. And, when that personality asserts itself with that power in the right place, you end up with a person that is the shadow running it. But at the same time, you've got this mass of power and energy that the machine is kind of controlling, which pulls back and overrides the personality sometimes. You've got a very weird set of circumstances going on here.
But it was very fun to figure out all the backstory and the behind on it, and get it all working. This one was a little complex, to get these things all working behind the scenes. I like how they turned out. Yumi, if you dig into it, it has both pluses and minuses. The minuses is - from the beta readers and the alpha readers - the ending for non-arcanists was really overwhelming, which is why we have those Hoid scenes where he's like, "Okay, let me explain." It seems pretty obvious, I would expect that this is, like, "Alright, Brandon needs to do better explanations, Hoid's just gonna do it." But, because of all the work I did behind the scenes on Yumi, Yumi matches kind of cosmerological magic system stuff in ways that a lot of the side projects that I do just don't. Yumi is very deeply intertwined and following all of these processes in a way that works really well for me. But it also gets you into where you start to need a master's degree in the cosmere to figure it all out, which is why to make it easier, we have Hoid just spell it out for people. It is a little clunky; I prefer the clunkiness to the previous version where you needed a master's degree in the cosmere to understand even what was going on.
We only know the people of Komashi as having Investiture from Virtuosity, why does their Investiture seem to be split into the two streams of power known as hion? Is this something unique to Virtuosity as a Shard, or just how it happens to manifest on Komashi?
Yes. This will be a theme you will see wherever Virtuosity is involved. So yeah. hmmmmm interesting. This will be a theme. There is a sub theme to this in the Cosmere. The Push and Pull. The opposites should be echoing through the magic systems. It is more expressed in Virtuosity than the others but do keep in mind that the Yin Yang sort of thing is there in the Cosmere as well in the general magic system, but more pronounced with Virtuosity, shall we say.
I guess this kind of answers this question a bit, that you have more planned for the Ghostbloods in the future, but in followup to that, we were wondering... you also have Shallan reject the Ghostbloods in Rhythm of War, which was published right before. So did that play into the decision at all. Were you trying to approach the same arc from a different angle or was it more just the characters?
No, this was just the individual characters and what they need, so no. In my head, Marasi walking away from an offer is very different from Shallan declaring war. There will be lots of fun with that in upcoming books, lets just say that.
In Lost Metal, you had Marasi ultimately reject Kelsier’s offer of joining the Ghostbloods, and I think that's a decision we've seen some division on with the fans. So I'm curious, what’s your analysis and thoughts on that? Because it was an interesting and fun character choice.
Yeah, I'm not surprised there's some division of fans; there was division among the beta readers on this. And there is even—like, I, as I was writing the book, left myself the option to have her join if I wanted her to. I didn't lock myself in in that part of the outline.
My instinct was this isn't a good place for her. And so why…? And then when I got to the end am like, no, this isn't a good place for her. So, you know, Marasi’s journey through the books has been, "how do I change the world?", "how much am I interested in changing the world?", and "how much do I change the world?". Kind of in conversation with the dreams that she had as a younger person and the reality that she's now living?
And one of the things I wanted to deal with in this book was this idea that she is kind of worried that she's just— she's becoming a cop, with all that that entails, right? That there's a culture to that and whatnot. And should she be doing more? And all of that. And so that did lead a lot toward the whole Ghostbloods thing, right? And I expected a lot of people to be like, "Oh, yeah, well, here's the easy answer."
The problem is Kelsier is just such a terrible match to Marasi, right? Like personality-wise, you know, Kelsier is about the shadows. He honestly believes that if all the information were known that it would be worse for the world. He can share it in a small group. And he's got this sort of "I need to take care of people and I need to do it my way" sort of philosophy, which is really antithetical to somebody like Marasi, who, you know, her whole thing is "we need to be better as a society, not as individuals, and we need to be—". And so I at the end decided this is just a really bad place for her, right?
But she needed a place. Actually, the first draft of the book, I didn't have her make the decision to go into politics. She had rejected politics in the first book, right? She’s like, "I'm not going that way, that’s not that's not for me." And I went double back on that. I'm like, no, this is probably the right route for her, which is nice because like, it it kind of snapped together for me at that point when I did the revision to be like, no, she does need something. If she's going to turn down Kelsier, she needs something.
You know, you will have some fun in Era 3. Era 3, I don't know…? I warned you I might spoil unwritten books… Have I said this? I might have said this—you guys will know—Era 3’s working title for the series is Ghostbloods, right? And so like you know Mistborn: Ghostbloods is what Era 3 is going to be called, most likely. So if you were sad, well, just remember if Marasi joined the Ghostbloods we're still skipping decades. You would not have been able to see her as a member of the Ghostbloods. But that's what the name of the next series is going to be.
On all video games and stuff, I usually just do "Zellion" [as a username]. I've always liked that word. Now I'll never be able to get that in any game again, because I have released that there will be a mysterious Zellion figure in the future of the Cosmere. Any time I use a name, suddenly everyone jumps on it.
How have the Skyward Flight stories affected your writing of Defiant?
They affected them quite a bit. A lot will be spoilers but I already mentioned a couple things. New slugs were discovered, different relationship things happened, the relationships with the other races in the universe have developed, some big events happened. Basically, when I sat down to write it, I couldn't not take these all into account so I just wrote it with no coddling the fact that all of this had happened. My writing group is indicating that maybe I want to give a little bit more--which I'll try to do--for readers to bring them up to speed on what happened. But, y'know, these novellas, we imagined them as side stories but we both like to write things that are epic and expansive and interconnected--
And it grows.
--and it stops being side stories very quickly, once you get a couple of excited authors involved.
Every time we had a conversation the scope grew a little.
That's why they ended up... we say novellas, they were fifty thousand words each.
One of em's fifty.
What are the others?
Sixty.
Would a mortician be able to tell that the body in front of them is a worldhopper?
Yes. But not because of the worldhopping. A mortician would generally be able to tell because... I guess it depends. There's some that you would not be able to tell if they were. If someone left Roshar and came back to Roshar and died, a mortician wouldn't necessarily tell. Now, someone who can read their spiritweb might be able to tell. But that's not going to leave an effect on you physically, unless, for instance, they're doing an autopsy of what's in your stomach. And they're like, "Oh, we found offworld food." I would say, a lot of times, there's going to be some forensic sort of things you can do to determine. Or, you might be like, "This person is a different ethnicity than we have on this planet." So, I would say, a lot of the time, but there's nothing that's gonna leave intrinsically... it's not like, "Count the rings, how many times they leave the planet."
You said before that you want to cameo in any adaptations of your books as someone who dies in each one. Assuming you do this, would it just function as an out-of-universe nod? Or would you canonically be playing a very unlucky set of identical worldhopping siblings?
It wouldn't be siblings; it'd probably be, like, somebody who keeps getting reborn. Somebody who's immortal in some way, and something terrible happens to him every time he goes. A little like the unluckiest planeswalker from Magic, if you guys are familiar with that.
I would be the same person, I think, because we'd want to keep canon, and things like that. Some dude who maybe had a certain Dawnshard that makes him indestructible, for a short period of time (not Hoid), but tries to keep going places to get out of danger and just ends up getting squashed every time.
Kind of like I'd be the cosmere's Kenny.
Out of curiosity, in the [epigraphs] will we be getting another Letter?
I intend for the first five to all have letters.
When Stormlight 5 is out and you've read it, remember to ask me what happened in my writing on July 18th. I wrote an important scene yesterday that I think might be worthy of a little extra special notation.
I think we're completely stalled at this point, folks--not just because of the strikes. They're a relatively small issue in regards to what we were trying to do. We got really close in some ways I'll be able to talk about eventually, but I don't see any kind of film/TV announcement coming this year.
Hollywood is scared. Even Mission Impossible is under-performing, and Rings of Power did far beneath what they wanted. I think at this point, I might have to try some smaller forays (i.e. Not Stormlight, not Mistborn, maybe not even Cosmere) into Hollywood to build a reputation before I can get the kind of adaptation I want.
We'll see. There still are a few possibilities in the works that could turn this around. If it does happen, it won't be for an announcement this year.
For someone who says that you can do anything and you can have dragons, there's a remarkable lack of dragons in your book.
Yes, I know, I know. They started showing up. Secret Project One has the first onscreen as a dragon. But yes, the dragons have been kinda hiding out. The thing is, one of the first books I wrote in the Cosmere had a lot of dragons. It was called Dragonsteel. But it didn't get published. That book, it's still canon to the lore of the Cosmere, and I know all about it, but... yeah, you're right.
Someone brings a server and computer plus monitor to Roshar and uses AI to create AI art. Would creationspren or any other spren gather?
No, because it is emotion and perception of the person doing the creating that is drawing the creationspren. However, do that long enough, and there's a decent chance that a sufficiently strong AI would start gaining sentience in the cosmere, because of Investiture and the way things work.
So what about logicspren?
Logicspren are drawn to people's arguments. It's the person's emotion and thoughts that draw the spren, not the activity necessarily, in most cases. Some of the more... There's a division line. The spren that are a little more on the Cultivation spren, they can be drawn to just... Lifespren and rockspren, they're not looking for the human emotion, necessarily. But things like creationspren and logicspren are.
What's it like handing over keys to parts of the Cosmere to Dan and others? How do you see this collaboration working in the future once stories begin overlapping more?
It's very interesting. It's been, in some ways, a little bit easier than some of the other things. One of the things I realized in doing some of my collaborations that I did in the past was that handing over a story that I had been working on was actually kind of hard. Like, I didn't get to write the story. And once someone else wrote it, then it was written, and there was a part of me that was kind of a little bit sad. (Though some of those stories turned out fantastically, like The Original, which I wrote with Mary Robinette. She wrote it in a way I couldn't have.)
But with the Cosmere stories, we decided we're not doing that. What's happening with both Isaac and Dan (who are working on Cosmere stories) is, we sat down and we brainstormed stories in the Cosmere using some of my worldbuilding and things, but stories they wanted to tell that match who they are and their voices. So these are not books that I was planning to write, that I had outlined. These are books we're, like, "You know what? It'll work better if someone else doesn't just try to do a Brandon story that Brandon was planning to write, and instead we let them take the worldbuilding, the basis, and extrapolate from it." So Dan and Isaac and I have a brainstorming session every week, and we are working on just, right now, the worldbuilding and the plotting for Dan's story. And we've been spending a lot of time on it. It'll probably be another six months or a year before he even starts writing it, because we want to get it absolutely right. And it's a story that's doing the themes and what-not that Dan is really interested in. We're just (Isaac and I) making sure to help out and make sure it fits in the Cosmere. So I think it's gonna be a different kind of collaboration that I think is gonna work really well.
And I'm excited by it. There's nothing for this one that I'm like, "Oh, I wish I could write that." It is absolutely a Dan story built for Dan. It's gonna be a lot of fun. I won't say anything about it. I want Dan to come on and be able to talk about what's exciting, why he's made the decisions he has. But I'll say this: one of the nice things, we're in a spot where we can do something I never got to do when I was younger. Which is: have an art team do concept art. So Dan can say "I need this," and then the concept art team goes and comes back with twenty different versions of a worldbuilding thing done by three different artists, that he can be like "Oh, this is the one; extrapolate on this." It's actually a lot of fun. Having a concept art team is something that most writers never get to have, and I am really excited to be able to have it.
Axies the Collector, is he a kandra-like species? Are they common throughout the whole cosmere?
So, the Aimians reside on Roshar right now. They are... I would not say kandra-like, in that the other species of Aimian has more kandra-like qualities. There's two that used to live there, before it was Scoured. But they are a different species; they are not human.
*inaudible*
Shapeshifters, there are multiple types of shapeshifters, but... even, you would call the Royal Locks a type of shapeshifting. So, shapeshifting is a common thing in the cosmere. Having the ability... Once you know how the magic works, you will see why. So, there are other, kind of, species of shapeshifter.
There seems to be a concentration of “aliens” in the west of Roshar, with both the Sleepless and the Iriali being non-Rosharan, possibly the Siah Aimians too (though I have my own headcanon about them); and of course the Ashynite humans arrived somewhere in the west too, probably in or near Shinovar. Is this a coincidence? It seems reasonable to me that in the past, Honor’s Perpendicularity was somewhere in the region and at least some of these groups used it to arrive on Roshar.
Not a coincidence. Having multiple perpendicularities on the land, mixed with easy-to-access Investiture, mixed with a vibrant Shadesmar side with actual cultures and cities all make Roshar a tempting destination. The amount of investiture flying around (literally) also makes the place a little easier to find in Shadesmar than other destinations might be.
There's also the fact that it wasn't created post-Shattering, like Scadrial was. There's just been more time to get to it.
Heads-up that Horneater might not be involved in the [Words of Radiance leatherbound] Kickstarter. Brandon's writing time is really booked up currently.
The way Painter transforms nightmares into other things is reminiscent of the way spren are affected by perception - only much more extreme. Is perception (and the way the world is set up) the only important factor here, or is Painter using Investiture too somehow?
What's going on here is not Painter using Investiture really. It's the fact that the nightmares have less control over them from another source. Spren have an oversight from Honor, Cultivation, and Odium, and this is kind of leaving them less at the whims of other people's perception. The nightmares do not have that. I'm not going to say they don't have it at all, but Painter is not using Investiture, but the nightmares are specifically more susceptible to what's going on. So for instance, a good way to answer this is if he went and did this for a spren he would not have the same level of power.
Did anything else notable happen on Roshar on Taravangian's perfect day?
Yes.
Can you tell me anything about that, or no?
Nope. But I can give you a RAFO card.
In Dawnshard, when Rysn's looking at the mural, it's exploding the sun into four pieces and then each of them is broken into four from there. Based on this, would it be reasonable to assume four Shards of similar Intent could be able to form like a super-Shard without the issues Sazed is encountering? For example, say Honor, Valor, Mercy, and the last maybe unknown Shard like Wisdom or something like that?
That is a correct line of theorizing.
If a Hemalurgic spike loses its charge, does that mean the remaining part of the person's soul trapped will move on to the Beyond?
Yep.
If there was enough Investiture available, would a Forger be able to soulstamp lerasium, take it, and then remain a Mistborn after the stamp has worn off?
No, they would not remain a Mistborn. They would be able to do it during the time that they... It would wear off. Because their genetics would change back.
What are the other six types of spores we didn't get to see in the book? Were there any that you really wanted to include, but couldn't?
No. When I've written books, I tend to gravitate toward a couple of the aethers that are really the most dynamic for action scenes and things like that. Some of the other aethers are there for the necessity of the future of the Cosmere. For instance: zephyr, while very useful in this for firing cannons and stuff, is really there so that we can have propellant in space by just-add-water and make yourself some extra propellant. And atmosphere; kind of a low-tech (there's better-tech ways), but a low-tech way to: "hey, we've got zephyr aether, it makes breathable air. And so, if we've got water and a barrel of this stuff, then we'll be able to breathe." So there are some of the aethers that are there for that sort of reason, so that we can have pneumatic weaponry and some easy access to emergency propellant in space, and stuff like that.
But verdant is the one that I just keep coming back to, that one and roseite, as making for the most dynamic storytelling. We'll see what I do with some of the others. I'm not gonna answer what the ones I haven't mentioned are, because I am saving them for future books to be used and to be interesting and engaging with them.
We have now seen shades across the Cosmere. Please let me know if I'm thinking along the correct line. Is one of the reasons that shades form because their access to the Spiritual Realm has been altered or damaged?
RAFO. You are definitely theorizing along the correct lines. I can't verify the exact mechanism, but you're thinking along the right path.
Did Adonalsium have a gemheart?
RAFO, good question.
I'll release [Dragonsteel Prime] for the Words of Radiance Kickstarter.
Basically there's not a whole lot that's canon in that anymore. The Sho Del are, the dragons are, and the Tamu Keks are. But all the Hoid stuff is not really canon anymore. He'll get a completely new book backstory. I have really done some work lately on the aethers in ways that I really think is working. So I think I can start canonizing aethers, sneaking [them] into the mainline cosmere books. Whether I can ever write the book about the aethers is another question, but you should see more than just little cameo pieces now that I'm sure about some of the ways they work. I made some major breakthroughs in how I wanted that to all connect.
A lot of the Radiantspren descriptions are in some way similar to the essence described to them.
Yet Truthwatcher spren and Edgedancer spren seem to have switched essences in their descriptions.
Truthwatcher spren have been described as light passing through glass/crystal, yet that is the Edgedancer essence. Similarly, Edgedancer spren have been described as looking like vines, yet plants/pulp are the Truthwatcher essence.
Is this deliberate, or even meaningful?
It's important to remember that the table of the Ten Essences and Their Historical Associations is an in-world document based on the understanding of the people of Roshar. Some parts of it reflect reality more closely than other parts. Some of it attempts to put things in little boxes that resist being constrained to those boxes. Some of it may be essentially irrelevant. And there may also be other associations that exist but are not reflected in the table.
Also, feel free to quote me on this.
Hadinar, who hangs out with Azure… is he a worldhopper?
Umm… I’m going to go ahead and give you a RAFO card on that. Yeah… RAFO.
Jasnah found it difficult to sleep. A part of her wanted to blame this stupid bed. Wit adored plushness; he wanted a mattress that would swallow a person, and he had found her previous one to be unsuitable. So now she swam in stuffing, lying on her side, listening to his breathing. Wit didn’t snore when he slept, but he did occasionally whistle. She turned to her other side–which, since they both tended to sink toward the center of this awful mattress, should have jostled him. He just laid there on his back, whistling softly as he exhaled. Was he even actually asleep? Things he’d said to her indicated that perhaps he went to other places at night around the Cosmere, visiting other worlds, engaging in political machinations at which, even still, she could only guess.
“You lie to me sometimes,” she whispered to him. “You realized that means it can’t be a true relationship. I can trust someone with secrets—but someone who lies?” If he was aware, despite his sleep, he didn’t say anything.
She’d caught him so far only in the most mundane of ways. He’d engage with wordplay with her, or toy with puns, and she’d ask him to stop. He’d promise, and seem to have done what he said. But then she’d notice that the games hadn’t stopped; they’d only grown more inscrutable. Wit, twisting the wordplays to a deeper level, another layer of esoteric, more difficult to spot. He seemed to think it would engage her, push her. Instead, it signaled something disturbing. Wit would do what he thought was best for people, not what they wanted from him.
Despite her efforts, she knew she wasn’t connecting to him physically as much as he’d like. That made him feel anxious, as if he were doing something wrong. He thought if he listened better, tried harder, he’d do something mind-blowing and change the way she felt.
In turn, though, she wasn’t connecting to him on an emotional level. Something she did want—if only he’d be up front with her. If only he’d tell her.
She turned back on the other side; a stiff pillow did little to counteract the strange stuffing. The feathers of baby chickens; or perhaps the smallest feathers of adult chickens? She hadn’t been able to parse the way he’d said, but either way, she didn’t like it. A good lavis-husk mattress was far superior, shredded to not have awkward lumps.
Storms. And this is why it was best to avoid relationships. Nine days until Dalinar confronted Odium, and she was worrying about a relationship? Perhaps this was a way to distract herself; because despite all of her training, all of her learning, all of her preparation, it came down to someone else. She would have no part in the final confrontation; Dalinar had decided he would use no champion.
She did not dispute that choice. He was a Bondmsith. He had built the Knights Radiant. He’d had dealings with Odium and understood the creature better than, perhaps, any mortal. Jasnah had written out her reasons that he was the best choice, and she still agreed with them.
Yet… could it have been her? If, instead of hiding what she was, she’d gone out in the open? Told people what she was, what she could do, what she feared? Her life and Dalinar’s life seemed to be very different things. He’d burned a city in the open, and people forgave him. Yet when Jasnah had been honest about what she feared, what she believed, what she discovered… well, condemnation and judgement had chased her like twin headsmen, each looking to get a whipping in before the final execution. She’d barely stayed ahead of them. Because when Jasnah Kholin spoke her mind, people hated her. Perhaps she had learned the wrong lessons from that. But could she be blamed?
She curled up at that thought, listening to the quiet sounds of Urithiru. Water in the pipes, moving of its own accord. Air whispering as it was pumped through vents. Voices echoing far outside, despite the late hour. Trembling there, she realized, finally, why she hated this mattress so much. It reminded her of the soft restraints they’d given her when she’d been young. When those who loved her had taken away her own freedom for her own good. Those terrible months that basically everyone had forgotten about as an anomaly. Except by Jasnah, who would never forget.
Wit suddenly sat up in bed. “Oh, hell,” he whispered.
Jasnah became alert. It wasn’t difficult, considering how far from sleep she’d been. She formed Ivory as a blade—short, stout, basically just a dagger—and called for her armorspren to be ready. She reached for the cover of the bowl of spheres beside the bed, but did not remove the black shroud, lest she ruin her night vision. In a second, she could have Stormlight, but she hesitated on this, too, as the light rising from her skin would highlight her in the darkness.
Wit sat there, barely visible by moonlight, wearing his silken nightclothes. His hair was immaculate, despite having slept on it. How?
“What?” she finally hissed at him.
“Oh, bollocks!” he whispered, leaping from the bed. “The darkest, hairiest, greasiest bollocks on the most unkept nethers of the most wanton demon of the most obscure religion’s damnable hellscape!”
“Wit?” Jasnah said as he rushed to the counter, searching frantically among his things. “Wit!”
He looked at her, wild-eyed, then he pulled the shroud off some spheres and washed the room in light.
She blinked, dismissing her blade. If Wit wasn’t worried about blinding them, then this wasn’t a physical danger. It might just be another of his strange <range of> oddities. Except… the way he looked at her. Eyes like glowing spheres. Lips drawn without even a hint of a smile. Jaw taut, hands clenched, breathing quick. Genuine panic. She felt like summoning her blade again, if only to have something to hold as a chill went through her. “Wit, she said, “please. What’s wrong?”
“G-give me a moment,” he mumbled, turning back to his things. “I need… I need a moment.” He pulled out a notebook and began writing.
She rose and, though the air was warm—her mother’s transformations to Urithiru heating the air to unnatural levels for this elevation—she felt cold in only her nightgown. She threw on a robe and leaned over Wit’s shoulder. She couldn’t read what he wrote. The symbols were unfamiliar, one of the many languages he could speak from worlds beyond theirs. It looked like a table, though, not paragraphs. And those notations to the left of each line? The dots and lines? Numbers, perhaps? They repeated far more often than the other symbols did.
He wrote, increasingly furious, his handwriting growing sloppy. She didn’t miss that he’d gotten out some of the strange, color-changing sand he used sometimes when experimenting with various uses of Stormlight or other, more arcane abilities. And as he did, he seemed to grow more intense.
The doors began to shake. Jasnah had a sword in hand a second later, but then realized it was him. Nobody was on the other side; it was exerting some kind of strange pressure that made the doors vibrate. The rings in her jewelry box, also on the counter, pushed back and began to spill onto the floor. The shoes by her head scooted across the floor, pulled by their latches. Every bit of metal in the room, save for her sword, reacted to him in some way.
Then, the sand burst into light with a mother-of-pearl luminescence and hovered above the table. The filmy clothing on Wit’s back began to writhe and contort as if alive. His motions increasingly frantic, in a flash, it seemed like smoke expelled from his body, blown away by some invisible wind. He was another person. Similar, but different. Shorter, with stark white hair and subtly different features making him seem foreign. This is the real him, she realized. A man not from their world; a man who masqueraded as Wit.
That man turned to her, pencil snapping in his fingers as he grabbed it and broke it across a knuckle. “I’ve been tricked,” he said.
“How,” she asked.
The light of the sand went out, and it sprayed back down on the counter. Wit was back as his familiar self in a blink of an eye, and the odd effects stopped with an abrupt immediacy, as if on an order from him. He stood, again taller than she was, and held up what he’d written. “I’m missing,” he said, “three minute and twenty-seven seconds.”
“I’m not following, Wit,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to parse this, but… Storms, what’s happening? Sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, slumping back onto the seat beside the stone counter, a natural feature of the room that jutted from the wall, as was common in these rooms of Urithiru. “I’ve lived a long time, Jasnah. A long, long time. Longer than any mortal’s memories can track, so I must use other means to maintain myself. I store memories in something called Breath: an easily accessible, if costly, form of Investiture that a person can adopt and, with training, use to expand one’s soul and memory. That part isn’t specifically important; I periodically review memories, deciding on what is vital to keep and what can be jettisoned. It is one of the only ways to remain sane after such a long existence as mine. And in that review just earlier, Jasnah, I found something. Something unexpected. Something terrifying.”
“Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds?” she whispered, looking again at the notes on his page. As if by force of will, she could decipher them. “Missing. When?”
“One day ago,” he said.
“And what were you doing at the time?”
He let out a long breath, then met her eyes. “I was having a chat with Odium.”
“A chat?” she said flatly. “With the most ancient enemy of all humankind? The being that seeks to destroy us, to crush my family, to dominate—perhaps weaponize—all of Roshar for his own ends? A chat?”
“We have a history,” Wit explained. “As I believe I’ve told you.”
Jasnah pulled a chair over and sank down, feeling a spike of pain. A kind of final spike of pain. “I asked you, Wit,” she whispered. “I asked you to involve me in any dealings you had with him.”
“I’m telling you now, dear,” he said. “That is technically involving you.”
She held his eyes and knew. Perhaps he did, too. He will continue to be himself, a man so full of secrets he needed some kind of strange magic to keep them all inside his head. And one, it appeared, had been excised. There would never be a place for her inside of his deepest self, would there? She’d always just be another thing on the outside, maintained as part of his collection. Enjoyed, perhaps even loved, but never confided in.
In that moment, she knew she’d have to withdraw, for herself. She tucked away feelings of betrayal. She had known what she was getting into with him. One did not court a god lightly.
“Why?” she asked him. “What were you saying to him?”
“I…” he shrugged. “I had to gloat a little. It was requisite, Jasnah, considering our history.” His eyes became distant. “I remember feeling odd about the encounter… a sense of repetition? Something happened that day in the lost minutes. He got the better of me and excised the memory from my mind, letting me instead think I had won the exchange. I can find the remnants, now that I look, as it was awkwardly done, as if by one unfamiliar.”
“This is wrong, isn’t it?” she said.
“Very wrong. Rayse is a megalomaniac, Jasnah. For all his craftiness, it would hurt him to let me walk away thinking I’d bested him. In this case, he encouraged it.” Wit leaned forward and took her hand. “He’s grown. After ten thousand years, Rayse has actually learned something. That terrifies me. Because I can’t anticipate what he will do.”
“Then what?”
“We need to reread the contract between him and Dalinar,” Wit said. “Now.”
Jasnah had a copy nearby, but before she’d opened her ledger, a pounding on a <nearish> door, real this time, drew her attention. She passed out of the bedroom, through the sitting room, and eased open the outer door to reveal <Hemnid> of the Cobalt Guard. A man with discretion to match his general poise, she trusted him as much as she trusted any, so she wasn’t bothered as he glanced at Wit as he approached. “What?” she said to him, light spilling from the guardroom into her quarters.
“Radiant Shallan and Highprince Adolin have something to report,” he whispered. [Brandon: I’m gonna cut that out so you have some anticipation for what’s coming.] “Your uncle has called for a meeting immediately, despite the hour.”
“Tell him I’ll be there shortly,” she said, then closed the door, looking back into the darkened sitting room towards Wit. [Brandon skips another section.]
“It should be,” Wit said. “I need to study that contract. There might be loopholes.”
“And if you didn’t see them?” She said. “You didn’t before.”
“You’re right,” he said. He took a deep breath. “You’re… you’re right. We need an expert, beyond even my considerable knowledge in the area.”
“Do you know any?”
“From your world?” he asked. “Only one, but she and I aren’t on speaking terms. I will, instead, see if I can contract an old friend.”
So, in Tress's book, the last illustration is Hoid against Riina and Hoid has a very particular shirt with Mare's Flower. Does that indicate that Kelsier has interest in Lumar or was that just artist's inspiration?
No, that is a canon shirt that Wit has, but it's Wit's shirt.
So that's a pun against Kelsier?
Yeah.
I'm here as an "ambassador" of Cosmere Argentina, so, we as a community have a question that we'd like to ask. Have you taken inspiration for a character, a place, community, or whatever on a Latin American society?
Yes. So the main Latin American inspiration would be the Herdazians, but the secondary would be: Lift and her people are based on Bolivian indigenous peoples and kind of what is going on down there, so both in the Stormlight Archive is where I've kinda taken my Latin America inspirations.
So, I mean, Herdazians is more Mexico than South America, but Lift is Bolivia. Kinda looking into some of the Bolivian Indigenous, and what they would look like and things like that. Obviously, I'm not saying they all act like Lift, but Lift is her own person.
I’m pretty sure maipon sticks originated on Sel. Either they use eating implements from off-world, or the Rosharan audience knows them by a name from off-world.
It's the second. Maipon sticks are actually slightly different, but it's a point of reference his audience would know.
How do you come up with interesting new races? When do you know that you should consider creating a new race, rather than using one that people are familiar with?
I do use one of the standard races (which is dragons). They haven't appeared a lot in my books, but I just think dragons are cool. And so, I actually built one of the ecologies of my early books that didn't get published around the idea of "well, what would lead to dragons? And what other evolutionary strains would be on a planet that had dragons," and kind of built all around that.
Do you know if the GB symbol/Marewill developed together/always intended to resemble one another, or was it ascended fanon?
When it was decided that we needed to have a marewill design, I immediately pushed for it to resemble the GB icon. I don't think the original linked-diamonds symbol was intended to resemble a flower, but I wasn't the designer on that one.
It's possible that Brandon intended them to match from the start, and I was just already on the same page when I got the assignment. I honestly don't recall for sure, I just remember that it clicked quickly.
The early designs of Shardplate helmets had some options with holes instead of slot visors. These were specifically rejected, and thus all helms (in canon art, so far) have some variation on a slot visor.
I tried getting 'em in there with Plate, but he's got reasons for the slot shape.
