Aight I always thought that shades mar was just the term used on roshar for cognitive realm. I guess it’s just a widely considered term used in the cosmere
Yeah, I'm not sure how this idea got started, but Shadesmar is not just a Rosharan term. It's widely used.
Hey, welcome to the Brandon Sanderson Frequently Asked Questions. We're going to take some of the questions I get the most often and record me answering them on YouTube. And our first one is, "What is the Cosmere?" This is indeed a frequently asked question. Most interviewers ask me this when I begin, though most fans have kind of figured it out by now. The Cosmere is my shared universe of epic fantasy stories. What happened is ... when I was 16-17 and was really getting into science fiction and fantasy, I read Isaac Asimov's later Robot books—later Foundation books, actually—he was combining Foundation with the Robot novels, and it blew my mind. I had never seen anything like this before. Now, granted, Marvel in comics and DC in comics had been doing shared universe for a long time with continuous continuity across multiple books. But in novels, Asimov was the first person I saw do something like this, and it really, really interested me.
Meanwhile, as I'd been reading these books, I really got into Anne McCaffrey's books, one of the very first authors I read, and then I got into Melanie Rawn's books, and then I got into David Eddings, and I got into Tad Williams, and I got into—I was just reading a lot of books. And however my mind works, I started to add my own characters to their books. It's a very weird thing. I've found out that other people do it too. So, I guess it's not individually weird, but we are collectively weird, those of us who do this. I would be reading a book and imagine a backstory to this side character, because I wanted to add something to the book, put something of myself into it, I guess. And then later on I'd pick up a different book by a different author and I'd be like, "Ooh, this side character, that's secretly the same person in disguise." And I started imagining this kind of back story where characters that I had devised were jumping between these different worlds and were having this big adventure behind the scenes where they were slipping in and out of other people's epic fantasy worlds. And I thought that was just really fun. It's something I continued doing all through my teens and 20s as I was reading. I still do this a little bit with games and books I read. I'll rewrite the story to match how I want it to be for me, particularly in video games, which gives me volition over my character. So, I figure I should be able to change what the character says, even if the dialogue option isn't there. My canon version of various video games is very different from the actual canon version.
Regardless, I had this character, Hoid, who was jumping in and out of books. When I started writing my own books in my early 20s, I started adding him as cameos to my books. I wrote 13 novels before I sold one. Book 6, Elantris, is the first one that got published, and it's the first time where I really sat down and said, "You know what? Epic fantasy is really what I want to do. Let's start building something here." And so, I wrote Hoid into that book. Then I wrote a book called Dragonsteel, where I jumped back, and I told his backstory on a different planet. Then I wrote something called Aether of Night a little bit later, where I delved into what had happened to some of those characters on a different planet far, far in the future. And I started building this thing that I called the Cosmere, which was an interconnected world of all these epic fantasy stories that people were moving around behind and jumping in and out of these worlds with different magic systems and different lore, but [which] all had some fundamental rules for the way the magic worked and where all these places had come from.
Well, eventually I sold Elantris, and Hoid was in there as a cameo. And I'd been giving a lot of thought to the Cosmere at that point. So as Elantris was getting published, I sat down and did an outline for the Mistborn trilogy, which I expanded to nine books in the middle of that outline and said, "what if I made this backbone series to the Cosmere", as I was then kind of officially calling it in my head. I went to my editor. I pitched it. I talked about Adonalsium, this god who was shattered long ago and sixteen individuals took up pieces of that god, the intents of the god, like that god's honor, or that god's sense of entropy, which was called Ruin, or things like this, and then went out into the Cosmere and were kind of ruling over these planets, or involved in these planets, or sometimes just lightly touching these planets. These sixteen Shards of Adonalsium, as we call them. And I grew, out of Mistborn and Stormlight, this idea for this large, super mega series, so to speak, behind the scenes.
Part of where this came from was me knowing that, as a new writer, pitching people on something that big was going to be tough. But if I could sell them a standalone novel like Elantris, they would be more likely to try that out, or a standalone trilogy like Mistborn. So, the whole goal was to have this hidden epic behind the scenes. And I wasn't even sure if I was ever going to get the chance to do more with it than just have it be cameos. You'll notice, if you watch for Hoid in the early books, they're just very cameo-ish. He briefly shows up here and there. In Mistborn 3 he's mentioned by name and you see him off in the distance. You don't even talk to him. This is because I wasn't sure if this was going to fly. One of the things that is difficult, particularly about storytelling back in the ‘80s and '90, was that you couldn't always rely on your audience being up to date with everything in the series. You couldn't expect them always to re-read everything. A lot of the books from the ‘80s and ‘90s will take a large chunk at the beginning to try to catch you up to speed in as non-annoying a way as possible. Well, that all changed once the Internet came around, and we were all able to just go look up summaries, or if we forget a character go to the wiki and find about them and things like that, which really is what I believe allowed something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe to actually exist and work, to have this deep and complex continuity.
And I was writing books just by happenstance that was doing all of this at the same time that this became a viable way of telling stories, at least a more viable way of telling stories. And people really latched onto the Cosmere and gave me the opportunity to really launch into it deep, so that there's a lot of interconnectedness growing between the books, as I always dreamed that I wanted to do but I wasn't sure if anyone would go along with me in it. And people have.
So, there's the long version of "What is the Cosmere?". The short version is it is my interconnected world of stories. But the long version is, it is the mega epic hiding behind the scenes, starring characters who make cameos in the other books.
When Zane is talking to Straff about Luthadel and whether they have the Atium, he is told by 'God' (Ruin) to kill Straff. Zane responds in his thoughts which we are told time and again that Ruin cannot read thoughts, even for spiked individuals like Marsh. However, Ruin directly responds to Zane's thoughts.
The full quote is
"Kill him!" God yelled. "You hate him! He kept you in squalor, forcing you to fight for your survival as a child."
He made me strong, Zane thought.
"Then use that strength to kill him!"
How could Ruin have known what Zane thought? Was this just a mistake or do you think it was intentional (perhaps Zane murmering under his breath)?
Ruin is not always paying close attention and sending specific words into Zane’s mind. Sometimes Zane’s own mind supplies the words to go with the impressions that Ruin is sending.
What Magic The Gathering colors would the Shards introduced in Rhythm of War or after be?
I have to RAFO that for now, because it kind of depends.
But Whimsy is pure red.
Did Kelsier create the Bands of Mourning? Does he want them back and did he get them back?
RAFO! There's stuff going on there for sure.
Why won't Moonlight's stamp wear off by itself?
This is an excellent question. The answer is—it might someday. But the other question is—it's been a spell. Depending on where I time these things, it's either been hundreds of years or decades since... Moonlight has had a lot of time to practice with powers and investigate what's possible in the Cosmere with magic and talk to some of the smartest people in the Cosmere about how it works. You should draw from the way the soulstamps work, the more mundane ones, that Shai has made a ton of progress in pushing forward the art of Forgery.
If an [attractor] fabrial is blocked by aluminum in a certain direction, will the attraction bend around the aluminum or does it work purely off line of sight?
Oh man... *mumbling* *sigh* All right. This could bend around aluminum. I believe. So. CAN bend around aluminum. Which would allow you to do some cool things. Yeah. That is, I believe... the aluminum is going to set up a big patch of... an interference pattern. Like, imagine it's going to make a shadow. How about that. That's a really good example. It'll bend around the corners like light is going to bend around a corner to a similar extent. Hopefully that helps in your theorizing.
In The Lost Metal, we find that Sho Del have four arms, making six appendages. In the [sample] chapters for The Liar of Partinel, we find that a fain deer has six legs. Is this pattern important?
Yeah.
Further, how relevant to this is [it] that if you count four legs plus two wings, dragons have six limbs?
Yep, that is the exact correlation that I would like you to draw! Dragons are fain, if you're wondering. If that's what the question is, yes, dragons are fain.
Could one negate the negative effects of wielding Nightblood with an aluminum gauntlet?
*hesitantly* This is theoretically possible, but you also wouldn't get some of the benefits. But many of the benefits are not being utilized by people who draw Nightblood. So to some of them, it would be... you wouldn't be able to notice the difference.
Was Wayne in fact the best lay MeLaan had ever had?
Yes. She wasn't lying. Let's just say MeLaan spent a lot of her youth very sheltered.
Is it not as big of a compliment as Wayne thinks it is?
I mean, you know. She is immortal. But maybe he imagined it as bigger compliment. But it's not a not-big compliment. How about that.
Could one combine all of the Rhythms—Honor plus Odium plus Cultivation? Would the result be the ultimate Light?
RAFO.
Do the scholars in Silverlight understand the Realmatic difference between a Shattering of a Shard and the unique hypercompression of Devotion and Dominion's Investiture in the Selish Cognitive Realm?
They do. Do they fully understand? No. But do they understand better than anyone else in the Cosmere who is not a Shard? Yes.
Seriously, what was going with Bloody Tan? Was he controlled by Autonomy? How did he move with what appeared like atium so Lessie died? It feels like there are a lot of open questions regarding him that we never addressed.
Yeah, there are a whole bunch, aren't there! I'm not gonna answer those right now, but I'm glad you're still asking those questions.
Does the dead body of a Shard pull at time and space, thus causing time to pass slower in that place of the cosmere, almost like a black hole?
It could go either way in the Cosmere, depending. But the answer is yes. A large amount, like a deific amount of Investiture will... any amount of Investiture will cause a bit of time dilation, but the amount you're getting from even a Shardpool is not enough to be noticeable. I mean, it is, you can notice it even on our planet if you take a jet that goes fast enough, so it is noticeable but not relevantly noticeable. We're talking about a slippage of a day or so in a year even off of a Shardpool (don't canonize me on that one, I don't have the actual numbers). But that's what we're talking about. There are are chunks of Investiture of deific nature that can cause amounts of time dilation that would be virtually impossible in our universe, without you becoming one with a black hole. There's a story I want to tell, and I don't know if I'll ever get around to telling it, about an entire society that rises and falls in several seconds of time dilation to everyone else. I want to be able to tell stories like that, and you couldn't do that in our universe, but that's part of the reason we have the Cosmere!
In his letter in Oathbringer, Patji tells Hoid that "You have spoken to one who cannot respond". I had assumed this meant Bavadin, but she seems pretty darn capable of responding in The Lost Metal. What is Patji referring to here?
RAFO.
Is Adonalsium a God Metal and not a person?
RAFO! Lot of people... I have been deliberately cagey. So you should assume that if I ever answer a thing where like they're saying Adonalsium - person and stuff like that, I have NOT canonized this and don't intend to canonize it. I try to take people's questions and deal with them and give them a good answer. But you shouldn't take it like, if they ask "When Adonalsium did this was he this?" and I answer it, be like "oh, he's canonizing the HE!" I have not really canonized other than there are plenty of people who refer to Adonalsium that way in the world.
During an interview recently you said you have been writing down one-liners for Wayne for the last ten years. Are there any one-liners or quips from this cast of characters that didn't make it into the book that you particularly enjoyed or wanted to share?
Here's one that I didn't end up using, 'cause I thought I was using too many penis jokes. Wayne, after someone says something about a penis, sighs and says "Ah, it's the little things in life that bring us so much happiness."
Where is Design during the events of The Lost Metal?
That is a good question, and it will be RAFOed. Because, where is Design? Ooh, excellent question.
In Edgedancer, Lift refers to Hoid as "Ol' Whitehair". Was Hoid not in disguise at the time? Did Lift and Hoid have any encounters between Oathbringer and Rhythm of War?
Lift has seen... how about this. Lift knows what Hoid is. Maybe not intellectually, because Lift doesn't know a lot of things intellectually, but she's connected dots that others have not connected and indeed she has seen him without his disguise on. She is another weird one. She pops in places she's not supposed to.
That was done deliberately, I shall say.
Are the men of gold and red from any Shardworld we've seen so far? Do they use any magic system we currently know?
Yes. Maybe not only, but yes.
Was a Dawnshard involved in Nightblood's creation, or did a Dawnshard alter it?
RAFO.
How does Roshar keep its rocky terrains? Wouldn't corrosion and vegetation break down the rocks outside of [Shinovar]?
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.
Far in the future, after all the people in The Lost Metal are dead and gone, does someone maintain the ritual of changing Wayne's hat every year? Does it become some sort of civic custom like the ceremonial lighting of a Christmas tree?
*laughter* Absolutely. That's what I imagined.
Cultivation, Ruin, and Preservation seem like aspects of Adonalsium's cosmic nature rather than personality traits like other Shards. Is there a fourth Shard that is cosmic in nature?
I think they all are cosmic in nature. Even Honor, like you could say that's a personality trait, I don't think it is, I think it's a cosmic sense of justice and order, if that makes sense. We're phrasing it as a personality trait but that's not really what it is. There are those who would argue that the Shard of Honor is what makes things fall to the ground when you drop them and obey natural laws.
Assuming the Dawnshards each represent four Shards, and considering their Intents seem to be similar, are Endowment, Cultivation, and Ruin all from the same category? Are they all Change Shards?
Oh, I get what you're saying. I'm going to RAFO that for now.
When Kelsier said in The Lost Metal that he couldn't Steelpush over water, do the Ghostbloods think that Kelsier has his Allomantic powers, and is he lying to them about it?
Yes, they think he has Allomantic powers still.
How were Shallan and Sja-anat sending messages to each other in the gap between Oathbringer and Rhythm of War?
RAFO, I'll have to go back to my notes on that one.
Is Hoid's restriction on not hurting someone living absolute? Could he cause pain for pleasure situations?
It is not absolute; you've seen at least one loophole. The thing about is, this is Dawnshard-derived, and weird things happen with the Dawnshards.
Now that we know a bit more about the connection between Trell and Autonomy, can you explain who exactly the person named Trell in White Sand is, and how they connect to the Trell, the avatar of Autonomy, that we see in The Lost Metal? Was this Trell just another person who acted as the Trell avatar after being Invested by Autonomy in a similar way to Telsin?
This is the way I want you theorizing.
Did Honor and Cultivation binding Odium to the Roshar system directly cause the death stroke to Honor?
*sighs indecisively for a good ten seconds* RAFO. It's fiddly.
Was Terion, who gave Vin duralumin, originally a worldhopper? He shows up for a paragraph, invents a new Allomantic metal, and then we never hear of him again.
Right, right, right. RAFO.
Who in-world named the Intents of the Shards? Is it possible that they misinterpreted the name in any case, and that the Intent is not fully in line with the name we know?
This is possible. Right, this is absolutely possible. I mean you have context for this with Odium kind of claiming that it's not the right name for Odium. Others would disagree, but Odium has tried, aggressively, to change that name. I will say, you could make the argument, well, Odium just is bucking the trend and this is actually who Odium is. It is possible. Which is why Odium would try to get that name changed. These are imperfect definitions of ideas, as most words are. Those ideas could be misinterpreted.
Could a Deception Shard be out there calling itself something else, and none would be the wiser?
None being the wiser would be real hard. The other Shards knowing but other people not knowing could happen. It would be pretty hard for the Shards to not know, but it is within the realm of possibility. How about that?
We know a bit about the Pathians and the Survivorists in Era 2, but almost nothing about the other major religion of the Basin, Sliverism. Can you share a bit about it and about Marsh's role in it.
I'd rather not right now. So we'll RAFO that.
In The Lost Metal, MeLaan is said to be the first kandra Harmony sent off-world. Does that mean that the kandra on Roshar are not in Harmony's employment?
Yes! Good way to connect the dots. That is exactly what that means.
Brandon, you previously said the kandra on Roshar WAS an agent of Harmony.
Did I? *sounds uncertain* Well... I'm changing my mind. Yeah. No. I... uhh... Nope, not an agent of-
I know exactly who this kandra is and what they're doing and yeah. I'm going to say I don't know why I said that before, but now, no.
We've always understood Elantris to be one of the earliest books in the Cosmere, but we see Kaise as Codenames in The Lost Metal, one of the latest books. Has the timeline contracted significantly, or are we just looking at the typical Shadesmar time dilation tricks?
So, here's thing, Argent. I'm not going to be able to give you strict timelines until I write Elantris 2 and 3. So my plan, originally, which might have been a bad plan, was Elantris 2 to take place some ten or fifteen years after Elantris 1. Maybe a little less than that. But years have passed. It was called Dakhor, in my notes. And then for 3 to be hundreds of years later. I don't know if that's the right move anymore, and if 3 isn't hundreds of years later, then where we slot Elantris in is going to change because of where I need certain characters to be in some of these things, and certain things to happen. We are getting really close to where this is going to be nailed down and locked down, and I'll get locked down. Probably right when we start Era 3 is when all of this is just gonna start... I've promised you guys a timeline. Once we've released that, we don't want to retcon it, does that make sense? So that's why we're waiting to release it.
But Kaise does have some time dilation going on, though. Though I say her name wrong because I'm not from Sel. But yeah, she has time dilation going on, she is... yeah. More time has passed than the ten or so years that... she's like what, 7 in Elantris? And she's like young 20s now, visibly, the age that she appears. I believe, something like that. So yeah, there you go. There's some information for you on that. I'm playing loose and free with this until I really get down to writing these. My loose plan is still write Mistborn Era 3 book 1, Elantris 2, Era 3 book 2, Elantris 3, Era 3 book 3. Five years of writing there that I can't even really think about until I've got Stormlight 5 in Tor's hands, if not your hands.
Could a Shard be split into smaller Intents, like if Honor were alive and then was split into maybe Integrity and Bravery?
This is possible. Very plausible. You ask some weird things sometimes, this one is not that weird, this is very plausible.
Is Adonalsium a unique being or are—were—there others?
RAFO! The aethers would say that there were lots. That there's like a bunch of aethers and Adonalsium. That they were co-equals. The aethers would say there were lots of them.
Do all four Dawnshards have the same origin?
Ooh! Let's RAFO that. There's nothing... no... again, don't read too much into that, this is me saying look, I've got to RAFO stuff from Dragonsteel. Just gotta.
Are you still working on Kingmaker and do you have any updates?
I don't have any updates on Kingmaker. I love that story. I don't know if Hoid's voice is the right voice for Kingmaker. There's a couple of really good lines, but the whole thing - I've tried like three times and it didn't work. So I may have to do it in a third-limited if I want it to work. It's a really fun, interesting story that I would love to write but I'm not currently working on it. I am currently working on Stormlight Five.
Are the Coinshots that helped Steris with getting people out of the flood zone, and who seemed rather concerned with whether she was following the law, actually Skybreakers?
Ah, hehehehehe. So, we'll just leave that one. So, how about this. At this point in continuity, a Skybreaker could not easily get off of Roshar. In fact, by this point in continuity, I believe (you can't hold me to this one too much) the only Radiant who's managed to get off of Roshar and maintain powers is Hoid. I believe that's the case. Hoid is weird. He also has lots of knowledge. He used a specific method to get... yeah, anyway.
Don't hold me to that, but I think by this point he is the first to get out of system. Off-world doesn't really count because you can go to Braize or Ashyn.
Sixteen. Does he originate from Scadrial?
They're asking about the odd character who lives in Lasting Integrity. The answer is yes, this is a Scadrian transplant. It's is one of the people who they think might be Restares but turns out isn't. Yes, it is a character from Scadrial.
It looks like we are done with the Set's and Telsin's stories, so can you share a bit about how the organization started and/or how Telsin joined them?
The Set began, honestly, as a domino effect of things Kelsier was doing on-world. It is his fault. He wouldn't necessarily take responsibility for it. A group of people who knew that things were happening behind the scenes and through various machinations and things like this decided that there was power to be had, from what they didn't quite know was off-world yet, but that they knew there were basically ancient gods. This was a great opportunity for certain individuals and beings around the Cosmere, specific ones, to take over the reins on this. People who begin looking for ancient gods find them, it turns out, in the Cosmere, sometimes.
Telsin was involved from a young age and Wax's parents were not. Wax's uncle was. I don't think he actually recruited her, as I remember. It's been a while since I went through these things. He, being part of it, was part of how she found her way there, if that makes any sense. Telsin's always very ambitious, and always knew... Telsin can be seen as a bit of a model for the Set itself, in that she knew there was more out there that people weren't telling her, and she found it and then it consumed her.
People in the chat are saying that Telsin recruited Suit.
That's right, Telsin did recruit Suit. Yep, Telsin recruited Suit. She was looking for things, she found her way to it, yeah. So there we are. Edwarn, Suit is his title. Yeah, I knew there was something there, but it's been...
Like I said, view Telsin as kind of an example of how the Set itself came to be. And I have to talk around some things because I want to write Secret History sequels but I don't know if I'll be able to. And in them you should be able to see the origins of the Set. It is planned right now to be not... it's not like Kelsier founded it, but the ripple effects of things Kelsier was doing.
Were Glys and Tumi deadeyes before being touched by Sja-anat?
RAFO! Good question.
A while back you said that if you didn't reveal how medallions are made after The Lost Metal, we could bug you for the step-by-step process. Can you tell us now?
So I tried to find my little write-up on this and I can't find it. So I have to re-write it up. You can bug me but I'm not going to get it yet. It needs to be canonized for certain things that are coming up very soon, so I need to write it all out again. Double-check that I run it through continuity, that it is right. The more we do these things the more complicated it gets, and the more like computer programming in a world using physics that don't exist it gets. Which is fun! That's the feature, not the bug, that it gets really finicky how these things work. But it means I have to do that whole writeup again. It was several pages. So I am going to do that again, I have to have it in hand before I can do Era Three. Bug me again when I'm writing Era Three. Sorry.
Would a book about kandra be a good Dan candidate?
Uh, yeah, a book about kandra would be a good Dan candidate. I think the first thing we would do with Dan, though, most likely, is create a brand-new world and a brand-new story that really matches something he's excited about rather than have him start by doing a book in one of the other worlds. That said, he probably will also be doing some short stories in the other worlds, to kind of start easing into... we'll see how he is with character voices of some of the characters I've already done. I really want to see the King Lopen story that I've never been able to write. Something like that. So a Kandra story but as a novel, that's not where we would start, we would start with here's a novel playing into the strengths that Dan writes and how he wants to write, that has worldbuilding and plotting done with my help.
If everyone in the Cosmere begins to understand that there is space travel, does that change the distance needed to travel around in Shadesmar considering it's made up of the beliefs of the people?
What's going to happen is it is going to make the travel distances longer. However, people cannot conceive the immensity of space. The amount different it's going to make it is not going to be so vast that it's insurmountable. It's not going to come one fractional piece of what the actual distance is.
When you kill someone to create a Hemalurgic spike, does their soul appear in the Cognitive Realm when they die or is it trapped in the spike?
Weird, kind of creepy stuff happens. You're not getting the whole soul, you're getting a piece of it. I'll leave you with that.
Will we ever see a story from Mythos?
I would sure like to write one for Mythos, but we'll see. There's a lot of stuff I want to write.
Mythos is a place. That's the colloquial term for the place.
I asked Ben McSweeney via Reddit if Taravangian's chapter icons were intentionally [rotationally] symmetrical, and he said yes, but did not say if this was foreshadowing his Ascension. Is it?
Hehehe. Eeehhh... RAFO.
Why is that a RAFO? I have to talk to Ben. I'm not going to canonize things for Ben that he might have been saying that I don't have the full context on.
That's just design. Just the design of the icons.
The designs... not all of them are symmetrical though. Pointing that out. Some of them are but not all of them are.
We know that Hoid has three apprentices. Are all of them human? Is Design one of those apprentices?
Design is not one, and they are not all human. [...] I've almost written a book about one of them multiple times. In fact, one Secret Project started off about one of them. When I was planning one of the Secret Projects to do, there was a plan to attempt to do one of them. That was the kite magic system. And I never got beyond the design stage in that. The kite magic book would have starred one of Hoid's apprentices who is not human.
In Oathbringer, Dalinar says the third ideal of the Bondsmiths:
"I will take responsibility for my actions, and each time I fail, I will rise again a better man."
He then opens a perpendicularity, saving the battle of Thaylen Field for our heroes. Later, Odium is ranting to Taravangian about how Dalinar wasn't supposed to Ascend, with a capital A.
The question - is Odium's use of the word "Ascend" referring to ascending to the next Ideal of the Bondsmiths, or is there something more going on there?
I used a capital letter there intentionally, and normal saying of oaths would not get a capital letter.
That is in a character's perspective. There's a character using that capital letter, the character uses that capital letter intentionally.
