Argent
When Kaladin dreams about riding the highstorm, is that something only he can do, only Windrunners, all Radiants?
Brandon Sanderson
RAFO.
When Kaladin dreams about riding the highstorm, is that something only he can do, only Windrunners, all Radiants?
RAFO.
Would Aons work even better if they were drawn with a cartographer's or calligrapher's attention to detail? ...If you draw a map of Arelon?
*long pause* Yes and no. The answer really is, it depends. I'm going to say, on average, yes.
It is said by a spren, Syl, that everything has a spren. Does aluminum have a spren?
Does aluminum have a spren? This is a good question for philosophers in world. I would say the majority of them would say yes, its just a very isolated and unresponsive spren. There are some who would say no, it is the dead material, that has no spren, but others would argue that a dead material with no spren would just disintegrate to death, so aluminum is kind of a strange duck.
If two Surgebinders are next to each other in the Physical Realm and their spren are with them, chatting or whatever. Would this proximity be reflected in Shadesmar somehow? For example if there's a third Surgebinder in the same physical location, but in Shadesmar. Would they be able to deduce that this is what the physical-
Yeah, theoretically possible.
Maybe difficult?
I'll dig into the mechanics. Not necessarily though.
Are there any seons in the Cognitive Realm?
RAFO.
Are gloryspren composed entirely of Honor's investiture?
RAFO.
Voidbinding, and what Renarin does, we are still very confused about how much--
I am happy that you are very confused about that, because I haven't explained it very much.
Ok.
And Renarin didn't figure it out very much.
And he hasn't figured out it much, yeah. And we're not even sure whether he's a Voidbinder.
Yes.
He's probably a Voidbinder, right. Then I'm not going to ask you that, because you're going to say RAFO.
Yup.
Khriss believes that the reason Preservation is experiencing a slow death is because Ruin is not strong enough to Splinter Preservation.
Yeah, that is a theory.
Yeah, that's what she thinks. Does she think that this is because of Ruin's trapped power, or because of an inherent difference in the strength levels of Shards?
She thinks it is more along the lines of a matter of leveraging power as the power is-- The things that happen made it harder for him to leverage his power.
Trapped is a good enough term.
The mistspren, who crewed the Honorspren ship. Are they Radiant spren?
No they are not.
Have all the spikes been collected? You have a bunch of dead Inquisitors, you've got the koloss at the end of Mistborn.
Have they all been collected?
Or are they just lying around, or did they--
There are some that have been lost.
Let me set up this piece for you. Let me see if I can--I'm gonna look at the file and see when I first started writing this piece-- The master computer, that if you ran away with you would get all of my secrets. *crowd laughs* Nope, it says created when I created this new computer, so that doesn't help me.
But this is old. This is like 8 years old. Maybe 9 years old? And this is a story that I started writing-- You can date it by-- because you guys have been waiting for it. You can date it by when I told people I had written this thing in interviews. So it may be 2010, I dunno. You'll be able to find out I think by looking through the interview archive.
I wrote this thing that is very cosmere-aware. It's very kind of inside-- sort of a little bit self indulgent. And I wrote it, I'm like, "I'm gonna post this on my website." And then I thought, "No, this gives away too much. I can't post this on my website, and so I'm not going to finish it. We're going to wait." But now most of the stuff that it gave away then has come out in things like Secret History and stuff like that, so now I can actually read it. So I called this "The Traveler."
Is Dova is actually the Herald Battar.
Eh, RAFO. RAFO.
If a spike has gone too long without being stored in blood, will it completely lose its charge?
It will never completely lose its charge.
In Kaza's interlude, she pulls out her Soulcaster and kind of describes, what seems like a presence of a spren that's there? Is that similar to the Oathgate spren?
Uh, yes. Good job.
The cracked stone spren that we saw, we didn't get a name for them, are they the Stoneward spren?
Yes-- Oh wait, yes.
Do they have a name you can canonize right now?
No, I don't.
Lightspren, the ones who like to travel, are they the Willshaper spren? I thought it was pretty obvious.
Yeah.
Can you Forge liquids, like-- Does that go into Bloodsealing, can you change their blood type?
OK, can you use Forgery to, say, change someone's blood type? Yes. Can you Forge liquids? A little harder to stamp liquids, so this kind of comes down to, can you--
Like, if you have a glass of water and you put salt in the water can you Forge it or make it and make it--
This is possible, but it requires a few little workarounds. Obviously you can do it because you Forge somebody, and they're mostly liquid.
But you're putting in on a hard surface.
Yes, in the same way that you would with thr liquid you would probably--
Touch some ice?
No, you would probably take the cup, and make it part of the whole, and if you can-- Remember in the cosmere, it depends on how you view a thing. Is it a whole? Do you view this as a cup of water, or do you view it as a cup and the water? Do you view a person as a vessel and the blood inside them, or together as a person? And that perception really affects your magic. So it's possible, for instance, to Forge a cup of water, Forging just the cup is easier than Forging just the water.
Do you plan a Darth Vader style redemption for Moash or maybe not?
That is a RAFO.
Maybe later on?
There's is a pretty deep RAFO there.
Can you Hemalurgy Aviar?
Yes. You could.
So you could take a Aviar Hemalurgic spike and put it on a cat and make a Aviar cat?
See, this is where it gets-- you heard the asterisk in my-- These sorts of things-- It wouldn't do what you wanted to. But this is possible.
How closely does Adonalsium map to the gnostic demiurge?
A little bit.
So, not completely? I'm not completely off?
That's not off at all.
So, not the urge, but the demiurge.
Oh, well I'll have to go read to make sure what I'm talking about then. Your answer is: I will go read and make sure I know. I thought I knew what I was talking about.
So, there's the creator, which is the urge, which is the creator of the Universe. *large hand gesture* The demiurge is actually God. The demiurge is the one that creates [its] universe, *small hand gesture inside larger gesture* and entities living within the universe need knowledge of that which is beyond what the demiurge has created.
Okay, that matches pretty well.
How did Odium's people know that Taravangian stole the Honorblade?
I'll RAFO that.
The ground in Shadesmar, where it's like obsidian and stone-like, does that have anything to do with the Stone Shamans?
Tangentially, but not directly.
Is Renarin able to use the Surge of Illumination?
RAFO.
Does Silverlight have a Shard?
Good question. I will RAFO that.
When Veil went to Mraize's lair, she saw a vial of white sand. Was there a reason that it didn't turn black?
Yes
Can you tell me that reason?
So, sand will turn white in the presence of certain kinetic usage of Investiture.
Okay, so that was what Veil was doing?
Depends on how loud the Investiture is, that sand-- that sand just absorbed some of the Stormlight. I'll just be be clear with you, yeah... It was not the stuff that Veil was doing.
Was Shallan's family, during her childhood, being influenced by an Unmade?
Um, yes.
Was it the corrupting--
I'll RAFO that, but yes, there is some external influence there.
I know that with Harmony, he has difficulty interacting because he holds two Shards. Did Adonalsium, since he had all these other personality traits, also have issues directly interfering?
A RAFO! Good question. I've never been asked that question before.
A focused southern breeze made the trees sound like they were chattering. Tiny crisp leaves spreading the news of the Traveler's return. Pure white leaves, clustered along branches like skeletal limbs. Even the bark clinging to the trees was white. In some lands, white meant purity; in others, it meant death. Here, it didn't mean a thing. It was simply, normal.
The Traveler sat on the mossy white ground, back to the tree, legs crossed idly as he picked at a pomegranate, eating the seeds one by one then spitting out the pits. They fell on the stark moss-covered ground, leaving red juice like blood running across a sterile white floor. To say he wore rags would have be an insult to many a goodwife who kept her washing rags in much better shape than the Traveler's costume. Ragged brown and black canvas, tattered cloak, and scruffy beard, rubbed dark with a black material that might have been soot — or ash.
The leaves suddenly fluttered excitedly behind him, and a strange puff of wind blew across the trunks. A moment later, a figure in simple gray robes walked into the clearing. Clean-shaven and silver-haired, he had the look of an aged scribe, not haughty, but tired.
"So, you're back," the elderly visitor said.
"Did I leave? I am the lingering odor you can never quite locate, my friend. Just when you think I've faded you open your cupboard and find, in an overpowering reveal, that I've merely been… ripening."
"Hmph, that's a new look for you."
The Traveler looked down at his ragged clothing. "I've been learning to blend in. Hard to do that in one of my normal costumes."
"I doubt you'll ever be the type to blend in."
"You'd be surprised!"
"Is that soot in your hair?"
"Maybe."
The elderly man sighed, walking across the short clearing and settling himself down on a large protruding tree root. "You can't keep doing this." The Traveler continued to eat his seeds, though he had started to chew them up rather than spitting out the pits. "You will just make things worse."
"Ati and Leras are dead," the Traveler said, picking a piece of seed out from between his teeth. The elderly visitor said nothing, and the Traveler eyed him, leaning in closely, studying the man's eyes. The pupils were rimmed with a silver far too metallic to be natural, at least for a human.
"You sly old lizard!" the Traveler said, pointing. "You already knew! You were watching! And here you were chastising me."
"I did NOT interfere," the elderly man said. "You meddle in things we promised to leave alone. Things that we—"
Traveler held up a finger, interrupting him, then slowly he pointed at the older man. "I. Made. No. Promise."
"You made your choice. Why now seek for things you so eagerly denied? My friend, it's the dangerous desire, the lust for power best untouched, that created the situation in the first place."
The Traveler did not reply. The two sat for a time, listening to the winds through the garrulous trees.
"Did you… find what you were seeking?" the elder man finally asked.
The Traveler shrugged, picking at another seed and nibbling on it.
"You will not find a way to restore what you have lost, old friend," the aged man said softly. "It is impossible."
"You don't know that. The old rules no longer hold." The Traveler turned the pomegranate over in his fingers. "Besides, I've heard of a place… It doesn't matter. I don't care. This isn't about the dead… or it's not JUST about the dead, at least." He dropped the fruit to the ground, wiping his fingers on his riding coat.
"So it's a simple vendetta, then," the aged man said, sighing. "How many years have you lived, and you still can't learn the wisdom of just letting go?"
"A simple vendetta?" the Traveler said. He rose, stalking up to the older man, holding out a finger and touching the man's chest. "You saw what Ati nearly did." The Traveler leaned down, face even with that of his older companion. "I would not think it MY vendetta that should worry you, old friend."
I was wondering if the Nightwatcher can offer a boon or curse to other sentient species or non-native to Roshar.
Yes, the Nightwatcher could offer boons and curses to non-natives of Roshar. I mean, humans are not native. So there's a pretty good--
They were born there, but--
Yeah, yeah, someone who's not born there, yeah.
I have a follow-up question, would those boons and curses still apply when they left Roshar?
Yes, the boons and curses should still apply when they leave Roshar.
I noticed in Oathbringer the scene where Ash shows up as the washerwoman. Her description reminded me a lot of Khriss. Did Khriss have any personal relationships with Heralds?
I'll RAFO that. Khriss has been around for a while, and the Heralds have been around for a while.
Gavilar's black sphere. What was inside of it and how many does he have?
Well, it is what you think it is. And he had-- yeah... He had access to several. Did we canonize this Karen?
*shakes head*
No, we haven't canonized it. I'm going to say RAFO on the number, but it is what you think it is and what the third book implies that it is.
So if you were in the cosmere, and you know how it works, or how it all should work. Would you hack it like all ridiculously and like what would you-- Do you have a plan of action.
Oh yeah I would. I would have two choices. I would go hide on the planet I know is safe, and ride it all out. I have those two options.
What was the second option?
Well the second option is try to take over, right? 'Cause I know all the secrets. I don't know which one I would do.
Would you be able to hack it all?
Well, would I be able to? It depends on where I am in the cosmere, and how easy it is to get a hold of some Investiture.
But once you get some initial Investiture then you go out.
Then things start rolling. As soon as you can get one of the easy ones, it's easy to use, transfer.
Like Breath.
Yeah like Breath, or uh...
Mistborn?
Yeah, well Mistborn's harder, but you know Breath is the easiest I've approached so far. Unless you kind distill it, then you've got the... Anyway. We won't go there. You saw that in Secret History.
Oh, oh that.
Yeah. When you strip off all kinds of identity and stuff.
Connection Juice...not Connection Juice.
Connection Juice?
Yeah, that's what we're calling it.
Okay, okay I suppose.
If you need to bring food into Shadesmar, why don't you need to bring air?
Y'know, we actually talked and thought about this. There are certain things I just decided for narrative reasons... I wanted Shadesmar to be travelable and I wanted it to be a real place, and so I just made air, I came up with kind of my own hacks. There are times I do this for narrative reasons.
Let me give you an easier example. In the Mistborn books, and I've told people this before, I was working on speed bubbles. Slowing down time, speeding up time in a small little bubble around you, right? I went to Peter and I'm like, "This is what I'm going to do, what are the problems with this?" And he's like, "Well, redshift." Which means that basically you would be irradiating everyone with the light coming from inside the speed bubble. I'm like, "alright, we're just going to say that doesn't happen." This is where the line between for me science fiction and fantasy exists. When I'm building my story, I do try to have one foot in science with things like this. But I tend to work backward... A lot of science fiction starts with what we have now and extrapolates forward to [an] interesting, plausible premise. For my fantasy works, I start with some cool idea. And then I work backward in plausibility, trying to justify it. And we kind of meet in the center, but at the end of the day I am breaking the laws of thermodynamics, right? Just straight-up breaking laws-- I mean, we have our whole Realmatic Theory and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, I am trying to tell stories where certain extreme situations exist. Like, I bent over backwards to make the science of Roshar work with the greatshells, but at the end of the day, we still have to have a magical solution, right. To get beasties as big as we want to do, it doesn't matter how high your oxygen content is, if you've got .7 gravity or not, all these concessions we've made: the square-cube law says those things crush themselves. You just can't have things this big. And so we built in a magical solution. The spren creating this symbiotic bond is making it so these things don't crush themselves.
And when I was looking at Shadesmar, there are a couple things-- what I want for the narrative is this place. I am going to work backward and try to make as many concessions and nods toward science as I can. But the air one, I just said "You know what? There's just gonna be air in Shadesmar. I am just gonna make it so that you can." I want you to be able to walk between the planets on Shadesmar, I don't want people to have to worry about bringing a Windrunner with them and plants or whatever to get oxygen. I'm just gonna make that the case. Your in-world answers, I'm like "Well, air kind of permeates and has escaped through and things," but really do we have an oxygen cycle there? We've got plants, but are they really--
The answer is, there is air in Shadesmar because I want there to be air in Shadesmar.
So if a person's holding a Shard, someone like the original sixteen people. Some of the Shards got [Splintered], does that automatically kill the people? Or can some of those people still be walking around?
It does not automatically, because you can give up pieces of investiture and things like this. It did kill them, that was part of the point. But there are ways to conceive of this happening that it wouldn't. Technically what Endowment is doing is giving up pieces, intentionally Splintering to form these other pieces and things, so yeah.
So, when did Cusicesh the Protector first appear off the coast of Iri?
Um, a while ago. It's not
About 2,000 years ago?
It's not a recent event.
We saw that, in one case that she felt it was very important, Cultivation intervened when Dalinar was asking for his boon from the Nightwatcher. You said that for the most part she just sort of lets her work, but has she intervened in other cases that she feels are important, specifically with Taravangian?
She has intervened before.
When Dalinar became Unity, how much investiture of Cultivation did he have?
So, RAFO, RAFO, RAFO. *laughter* He called himself Unity, I'm not going to say what that necessarily means.
In universe, all the intents and charts and names, who names them? Do they name themselves?
I have kind of imagined this is one of those things that they certainly have influence over. But obviously Odium thinks that he's named something other than what he is, and I feel like these are intrinsic things that the sixteen all knew. Like, "I am missing this part of me, it is this." And it was less "we went around and named them" more like "this is just what it is". And various Shards are resisting that, but the others are all like "No, this is what you represent".
Follow-up question there. Would the entity that we call Odium refer to itself as Odium when it's honest with itself?
Ehhh, I don't think Odium is capable of being honest with himself. *laughter* There are times where Odium has called himself Odium. That is more out of convenience and the fact that everyone calls you by a name. But Odium is determined to change that perception.
So, does he genuinely believe in characterizing himself as Passion?
Yes. Part of him does.
Has he always ever been Odium since the Shattering?
Yes.
Have we seen the worldhopping kandra on-screen in Oathbringer?
Yes, I believe you have. Ahhhh, yes, she gets around.
Do the spren that we know of as the Cryptics exist before Honor and Cultivation came to Roshar?
Ah, good question! No. Cryptics would be one of the forms of spren that were a later creation. Creation is the wrong term, but yeah.
Later development? Evolution?
All of the sapient spren are later developments.
Are they evolved from the earlier spren?
Evolution doesn't work the same way on the spren, right? The spren were created more than evolved, I would say.
Maybe cultivated?
Yeah, cultivated. *laughter*
We started out in the earlier books knowing that there's this Hoid guy, he's a worldhopper. Hey, worldhoppers exist. And then we've kind of been given more and more. In Secret History it said you'd be surprised about the economy you've upended by destroying the perpedicularity. what amount of people are travelling between worlds? Hundreds? Thousands? Billions?
...Thousands.
Is it like vacation? Or is it like...
Well, I wouldn't call it--
Is it the frontier? Or is it from where you could go?
It depends on the roadway. Let's say you look at frontier era America. How hard was it to get to England? It was really far away, but it was actually relatively safe and common to do this. How difficult was it to get to Boise, Idaho? That's harder, but you know how to do it. How easy was it to get to, let's say, the Hawaiian Islands? You're starting to get into like, the question comes here, certain pathways are more traveled. There are going to be caravans, there are going to be guides. There are going to be safe travels between certain places that are done commonly enough that if you are in the know and are in the right place you can be like "I wanna buy passage here." And you go there, and you can have a reasonable expectation that you're going to make it to where you're going.
Other places, you say, "I wanna go here", and they're like, "Yeah, I've known someone who tried that and they never came back. I'm not taking you." So, where you're going, where you're trafficking, Khriss gives you some indications of which ones are easy to get to and which ones are commonly visited. I would recommend that if you want to go on vacation in the cosmere, like, "I want to go somewhere different," go to Nalthis. Go to Nalthis. Nalthis is great to go to, right? They even have customs that you can go through. You can like, arrive, and things like this. Don't go to Sel. Sel is not good to go to. Sel is really dangerous to go to. There's a dead Shard--two of them--in the Cognitive Realm that will destroy you. Other places, Scadrial, used to be a lot easier to get to. Roshar, depends on which era you're talking about. Sometimes it's pretty easy to go to. Those nice Horneaters will treat you like a god and feed you food. However, right now, it might not be a good time to try to visit Roshar.
Exactly how turbulent is the Cognitive Realm around Sel? Khriss seems to think it's rather difficult [to travel] but how difficult would it be for Hoid to get through?
How difficult would it be to get through to Sel, how difficult would it be for Hoid. I would say straining his resources and capacity. It is difficult for him. So take that as you will. But it is worth his effort and he has done it numerous times.
Does the deterioration of Urithiru have anything to do with the fact that the Sibling is asleep?
Yes.
So, kind of a support question... The nature of Investiture and metals, is it just solid Investiture that's metal or is all Investiture some kind of state of metal?
So this gets back into your idea of metal. Do they all represent metal? Well, I'm fascinated by states of matter, if you can't tell, and I'm fascinated by groupings on the periodic table in our world. I am fascinated by how certain things share... properties with one another but not other properties. When I was building the cosmere, I loved this idea of this pure Investiture, this solid state Investiture which looks like metal, but its not a metal that would be on our periodic table, and none of them are, but they share some properties with metals. You look at it and you're like "That's a metal!" But is it? Well it wouldn't go on the periodic table in our world. It's its own thing.
So yes and no.
Is that similar to the way that a Rosharan calls all birds "Chickens"?
No, the way that Rosharans call all birds "chickens" or all alcohols "wines" is actually me maybe feeling more clever than I am, putting in seeds from book one that-- This just happens in linguistics, where certain words sometimes narrow in definitions, other times they broaden in definition. Just how we call Googling something, searching for it. There are people who are joking that movies are just going to be called Disneys in the future. I love the linguistics of this, and I wanted to indicate that the word for "bird" just spread through Roshar as "chicken" because those were the birds that they knew about. And wine was a pretty good one. There aren't grapes on Roshar, right. They call them "wine"; none of it's wine. You wouldn't call any of it wine. Because they don't have grapes. But this is a word from a planet from when they used to have grapes, that they used for this thing, that eventually replaced the word and became the generic. You see it more often in our languages the other way, Peter can talk more about this. Words will become more and more narrow over time.
Why can't Zahel sleep at night?
Well, multiple reasons. None of which are particularly pleasant. He just has a rough time with a lot of different things.
I'll inject a follow-up on that. How many of those reasons would give rise to a bounty?
Multiples, depending on who's offering the bounty.
Could a shadow from Threnody be manifested as a Shardblade?
RAFO.
Okay, so Twinborn have [resonances], but full Mistborn don't, right?
Yes.
So then I assume that a nonmagical person, like someone who doesn't have magic, holding the Bands of Mourning will not have no perks.
I would say they would not.
Will a Twinborn that's holding the Bands of Mourning still have their original perk?
Yes.
Or, if a Ferring is holding the Bands, and they use just one ability, will they develop a perk, tied to the one second ability they are using?
The longer they use it, the more likely that this is to happen.
Using Investiture a lot over a long period changes your Spiritweb. So what happens if a nonmagical uses the Bands for a while?
Same thing that would happen to someone else, um, it would have a definite effect on them. *laughter* It would change them, as... in similar ways. Not exactly the same, but in similar ways.
Can you Hemalurgically spike a highspren?
Yes, asterisk.
There's a character in Bands of Mourning named Cob and there's also a character named Cob in the Oathbringer Epilogue. Are those two characters the same person?
Nope. Good question.
In the Celebrant Market, there's a nice piece of jewelry that's mentioned.
Yes, I wouldn't call it jewelry, but yes.
Say a spren in humanoid form there put that on, could they manifest in Roshar in their humanoid form?
So he's asking about the odd chain that's mentioned in the Celebrant Market. You are way off on this one. I'm going to say, point different directions than that on that one.