Human, spren, Splinter, Sliver, Shard, Adonalsium - which of these is most similar ontologically to Nakomi?
*laughter* I can't say anything about Nakomi! Robert Jordan did not want anything said about Nakomi! I can't say anything at all about Nakomi! Dig into the notes when they are released, and then you can find out things said about Nakomi. The little tiny hints we have, I told you he wrote that thing at the end, and I'm like well, okay. So.
How much time elapses between the beginning of the main part of the story [where they start out at the Shattered Plains] and the end of the series?
And the end of the series? Because the end of the series, um, we have a 15-year gap between [books number] 5 and 6. So, the first five will probably be Wheel of Time-ish, sort of, each one picks up where the last one left off; we have a little more time, maybe, than Wheel of Time, but not terribly much, so it will probably be just a couple of years for the first ones, but then we will jump.
Have you actually written out the Diagram, and Words of Radiance, and so on?
Oh, heavens, no. That's the sort of thing that falls into the worldbuilder's disease thing; there's no way that writing those out is worth the effort, so no, I have not. Definitely not the Diagram. If I were going to write any of them, I would write The Way of Kings, but even that, it's probably 30 or 40 thousand words in-world.
The bit with the bandits out there, and the deserters, and she [Shallan] convinces them to all go... Was she doing Lightweaving? Was she doing Transformation? Was she doing some combination?
She was... You have seen what she was doing before, done by another character.
When Shallan does Lightweaving, is that a combination of Illumination and Transformation, or is Lightweaving just of Illumination?
Lightweaving is just of Illumination. Lightweaving is a long-established power in the cosmere. Very early books, in fact one of the very first stories I ever wrote, Lightweaving was the magic. (That story is unpublished, written long ago - long before Liar of Partinel) And so, this stems from my own personal affection for illusion and my feeling that it had not been used as well as I wanted it to be used in fantasy fiction. So I consider it only Illumination truly in The Stormlight Archive.
In addition to the two abilities given by each Surge, does a Knight Radiant Order have a third blended ability, the interaction of its two given Surges?
Not specifically as phrased there, but each Order has quirks that are unique to it. They are magical quirks, but it's not necessarily a blend of the powers.
So Shallan's Memories is kind of a...
Is associated with her Order, yes.
It's not just because she had that wonderful ability, and Pattern came along and went, "Oh, I like this one!"
No that is not necessarily what attracted Pattern.
Are we going to see Book 5 of Alcatraz?
Are you going to see Book 5 of Alcatraz, that counts as awesome. So I have written Book 5 of Alcatraz... I have written it, Tor is re-releasing them, because we bought them back from Scholastic and are then, I bought the rights back, I didn't think they were treating the books very well, and we sold them again to Tor, and Tor just got the cover art for the first four and it looks really cool. It's the best cover art I've had on an Alcatraz book, which is good because Alcatraz, in the books, makes fun of the cover art on the books because it is so bad. I don't think our publisher liked that. *laughter* So I'm going to have to change the line or something. Anyway the plan is to re-release those starting in January next year and release them every one to two months until we get to the fifth book in the summer and release it then. So it's still a little ways off, I've been saying that for a long time but there is at least cover art now and the book is actually written.
Prior to becoming pregnant, did [Queen Aesudan] spend most of her time at the Shattered Plains, or in the capital?
She has spent most of her time in the capital. She obviously has been back and forth. I would say she has spent more time off the Shattered Plains than at it.
But she was at the Shattered Plains, rather than Elhokar going back to the capital?
He has been back at least once, but it is a long trip.
Do Cryptics have the same general dislike of honorspren as Syl has towards Cryptics?
RAFO!!
Was Adonalsium Shattered all at once? Or did each Shard form at a separate time?
All at once.
Were any of the original Shardholders related? We know that Honor and Cultivation were romantically involved, but were any of them brother and sister or child/parent?
There was at least one relationship of that style.
I was curious what the-- or if you had an inspiration for the scene with Vin and Elend going to his father's camp and the talk about acceptance?
Yeah a lot of these con-- these stories-- If you didn't hear it, there's a scene where Vin and Elend in Words of Radiance go to visit-- *crowd murmurs* not Words of Radiance *laughter* Well of Ascension! They both start with a "W" I'm running out of letters to start books with. Yeah it's a good problem. So they go to talk to Straff and there's a lot of discussion about acceptance and just kind of things I was thinking about at the time and think about a lot. One of the things is "I hope people enjoy this, if not you're just going to have to deal with it." I work out what I'm thinking about life through the voices of my characters. And it's something I really look for in books as well, I do want a little philosophy with my fantasy. And, y'know, it's not that I'm trying to answer those questions, but I'm working on them. And the characters, because they have a different perspective from myself--because the characters don't voice what I think, they voice what they think about something I'm thinking about--and that really kind of helps me think about it and talk through it. And it's one of the reasons I write books, besides doing awesome stuff.
So, in Steelheart, if you were going to have an Epic be good, who would it be?
If I were going to have an Epic be good in Steelheart, which one would it be? That it as big ol' R-A-F-O, which stands for Read And Find Out because I will talk about that through the course of the books. So you need to read Firefight, okay?
What are some of your favorite books to read to your kids?
Favorite books to read to the kids, hands down my favorite book to read to the kids is Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus *laughter* Just, that story is just so much fun-- When they get it, right? I read it to the two- or three-year-old and they don't quite get it, but by four they're like "I get to say no to the pigeon?" and they love it. They absolutely love it. Lately we've been reading one they love called Supertato? We bought it when we were in the UK so they use all of these trolleys instead of-- And it's just about a potato that saves people-- that saves vegetables in the supermarket. And it came with stickers to stick on your own potatoes to turn them into supertatoes. And so-- I have three little boys and so they love, absolutely love Supertato. If you want to see a picture of my little boys, I did a blog thing--which was really just a big advertisement for my books, but don't tell anyone--talking about the superhero genre and my children who dress up as superheroes, and it's so funny. They are endless sources of inspiration. They go into the room and come out with things and they're like "I'm Batman" I'm like "You've got a bucket, and you've got an iPad that you've affixed to your arm somehow, and you've got an oven mitt and you're Batman?" "I'm Batman" "You look just like him."
Are we going to see anything in the Elantris universe anytime soon?
You should see-- I mean "anytime soon" is a very sub-- difficult to answer. Like the next thing I'm doing are the Mistborn books, I actually wrote two of those instead of one because two for the price of one, right? Did you guys know this? I sent them to my publisher because the book was due and I sent the book off and I attached a sequel to it *laughter* in the email and said nothing about it except "Here's your book" and then went to bed 'cause I was sending this at like 4AM because I stay up really late. And so I got up the next morning to mass panic from my publisher and agent and they're like "You put two books in here!?!" and I'm like "Yeah I wrote two on accident" *laughter* And so I did that, and yeah. And then they threw a party because an extra Sanderson book, unsurprisingly, is a pretty big deal at the publisher and then they decided to publish them very quickly. So what I'm doing is I'm writing Calamity, third of The Reckoners, and final of The Reckoners, right now. So our next sequence of books will be two Mistborn, then Calamity, and then the third Stormlight book.
Where does Sixth of the Dusk sit in the timeline?
Where does Sixth of the Dusk sit in the timeline. It is probably the furthest future of any of the cosmere stories I've done.
So around the third trilogy of Mistborn?
Potentially, probably not quite to that. But yeah, it is very... But yeah that's the latest.
I don't know what you can or cannot tell me but I read a comment that Hoid is your favorite character, I don't know what you can say about that.
Hoid is definitely a favorite of mine. Picking a favorite character is like trying to pick a favorite child, It's just not productive. Robert Jordan always answered this question by saying "My favorite is the one that I am writing right now" and so-- But yes, Hoid is the character-- one of the very first characters I came up with, and he travels through almost all of my books. So you can watch for him.
How do you come up with the languages? Just because it sounds cool, or...
Languages. So languages in my books, I have a couple of tools that I use and it depends on the book. For some books I just use kind of shortcuts. Mistborn is an example of this, there's only one language that everyone is speaking and there is a little bit of Terris, so for that I just made every region-- I based off of an Earth language and used that. Like for instance the Central Dominance is French, so Vin and Demoux--and they would say Kelsi-ay--and things like this is where the names came from. For something more intricate like Stormlight Archive, I did take linguistics classes, I only snuck into a few of those. And so I'm able to drill down and do some real linguistics. And so I know what I want things to sound like, I know how I want them to feel. And I have all sorts of goofy things that you would even need to know, like for instance they would say "Kholin" instead of Kholin and stuff like this because there's a little bit of Semitic, the language family I'm using as a basis. And then there's stuff like the symmetrical names and stuff like that. Anyway, I can talk about that forever but the answer is yes I find what's cool but sometimes it's really academically cool and sometimes it really puts people of. Like one of the first reviews I got from Elantris was like "These names are really hard to pronounce and kind of dumb" and this was like one of the major review magazines "I can't get into these names" because I had used lots of linguistic things from my time living in Korea to create the languages, and they were kind of hard to say. It's part of why in Mistborn everyone has a nickname that's easy to remember.
As an aside, it's really funny, like I've had on and off sort of things go well with Hollywood and things not go well with Hollywood and things get optioned. Someone in Hollywood read one of my books and then went online and googled about it and found about this whole thing and then called me and wanted to buy the rights to the entire thing 'cause they're like "It's like the Avengers, everything's crossing over!" Apparently that's hot in Hollywood right now, which is very cool that someone in Hollywood was excited by it but it was kind of funny to me that now that's the big deal and this goofy thing I've been doing for twenty years is suddenly hot. So who knows it might turn into something, it might not. For those who are curious about movie things I have optioned most of the rights to a lot of my different books. I think the closest-- *sighs* What's the closest? I'm not sure what the closest is. The closest is probably The Emperor's Soul, though Mistborn is close behind it. I don't think either one is particularly close right now. That's just how Hollywood works. So don't hold your breath but I hope to have exciting things I can say eventually, because I really do like the people, both Emperor's Soul and Mistborn. They're some of the best people in Hollywood I've ever worked with, those two groups. They feel very genuine and I have a great feeling about it.
I heard a rumor that the universes of all your books are interconnected?
Yes. Most of my books, not all of them. If a book mentions Earth, it is not connected to what I call the cosmere, I kind of made this decision early on. So for those of you who don't know, my epic fantasies are indeed all connected. There are characters who cross over between them. I've been planning this for twenty years so I've got this intricate thing going on. There will eventually be big crossover books but for right now I don't want people to feel like they have to read everything in order to understand what's going on, and so for right now each of the books are only cameos. But you will be able to notice characters crossing between and there will be big crossover books eventually.
Which of the worlds is your favorite? Like if you could find yourself living in that world?
Woah, that's two different things. *laughter* Which is my favorite. Roshar is my favorite. I've been working on that one the longest. I think it is the most unique. I've put a lot into it, but I don't know if I would want to live there because on Scadrial, where the Mistborn books take place they have flush toilets, right? *laughter* They have some of them on Roshar too but on Scadrial they have cars. I like modern conveniences. I like mac & cheese. I like the internet. And so the answer to you if someone were to say "You have to live in one of the worlds you're going to make" I would go hurriedly and write one that is far-future and awesome where nothing exciting ever happens. *laughter* Because that would be the best place for a writer to live.
Your Mistborn series are they trying to make a movie of it?
Yes I did-- They are trying to make a movie of it. I don't know when it will get made, or if it will get made, but I was reading the treatment for the second book on the plane today and it was actually really good.
How do you like to do internal monologues or thinking between different characters who are very similar to each other.
How do I like to do internal monologues and thinking between different characters who are distinct from each other. I just try to make it be in their voice. I am a person who likes to put thoughts directly in someone's head, so you'll see them in italics. And I try to keep to their voice as much as possible, so if they have linguistic quirks I put them into the thoughts.
Do you have any advice for a married couple who both hope to be professional novelists?
If you hope to be professional wri-- novelists and married couple, you're very lucky because you'll be able to understand each other. You are also "you poor souls" because you're going to ignore each other a lot. *laughter* I would say, the number one piece of advice I give to writers is this: Treat becoming a writer, doing your writing, like someone would treat being a pianist. Meaning your job is not to write a great book, your job is to train yourself to be a person who can write great books. And that is a very big distinction. You don't find pianists who only play one song. Maybe you do, they're at parties and they're trying to pick up girls. But otherwise a pianist is someone who enjoys the process of playing these different songs and learning this music. Same with writing. The job is you are the end result, not the book. A person who can write great books. And you do that by practicing a lot. At your own scale, whatever you can manage, but you do it by practicing. And you do it by thinking in your head "This is all practice" even the books that might get published is practice. It's about the process of creating something.
Otherwise I would say listen to my podcast Writing Excuses we started a brand new thing on Writing Excuses, if you've never listened before, this year we're doing a master's class, is how we call it, where every month we are going to drill down into a topic and guide you through writing a story. Pre-writing the first month, and then plotting the second month and things like this. So writingexcuses.com. The other resource I have is my class. Now I teach that in Provo so you probably can't get to it, but I do post the lectures online and the ones from last year just went up. So if you want those I have little cards that show you the url, they're just free. My writing lectures, okay? But as a couple, set goals with each other, this is your big advantage. And, you know, don't set goals of "I wrote more than you" set goals of, like "this is what I want to accomplish. This is my writing time. This is your writing time" and help each other out. Plus you've got a great start to a writing group.
Was there an Allomantic power that didn't make it into the book?
Was there an Allomantic power that didn't make it into the book. Oh... Yes, but I'm trying to remember. I had like two dozen of them? Oh boy I can't even remember the ones that I discarded. I was going to do a lot more stuff externally, stuff that like wasn't inside of you and it didn't end up working out. The big thing that I talk about with Allomancy that changed is originally I was using...silver as one of the metals, this is-- this is because... Dumb story time, so when I was a kid I painted these little miniatures that you do in D&D so your little guys can actually fight each other, right? And my brother still does this, they're awesome, I was terrible at it, but I painted these little guys. And at one point I went-- and they used to be lead, and then they realized that lead kills you *laughter* and so--or maybe it just makes you strange, I can't remember--I went and all of the prices had gone up, like by a double, because they had made them out of pewter instead. And I said to the guy "What is up with this, you are totally ripping us off. My figures now cost us 50 cents instead of--" I don't remember what it was and he went "Uh yeah it's because pewter has silver in it man. You're buying little silver figures now" and I went "Oh. That's cool." And I bought them. And so for years I thought pewter was an alloy of silver and I wrote an entire book. An Entire Book. The whole first Mistborn book with silvereyes and pewterarms until it went to my beta readers and like "There's almost no silver in pewter Brandon, you don't even really need it. Everything in this magic system works except that." and I went "Well maybe we can just pretend in this world pewter--" "No that's stupid" *laughter* So I had to change it to tin which is actually what you find in pewter. To this day my assistant Peter, who is my continuity editor, came to me and said "You realize you wrote silvereye instead of tineye in the newest Mistborn book that you just finished? It's been ten years Brandon get over it." *laughter* Still happens.
During the Steelheart tour you mentioned you were trying to work with Tor to get free ebook copies for every hardcover, did anything--
Yes something is coming, I'll tell you about it... So, I think the first chance we're going to have to do this is for my next Tor book which is going to be Shadows of Self, a Mistborn novel. And if you watch we're going to-- we're coming up with something-- it's still-- I think in about five years, maybe sooner than that, this will happen with every book you buy, but I'm going to try and jump the gun because I'm tired of waiting and I'm going to be impatient. So when I come to UBooks for that book there should be an option to get the book with the ebook. I can't promise 100% but I have a half-go-ahead from Tor on coming up with something to do with this. I can't give you details because we're being recorded. *laughter* I could trust you, all of you. And the all the people you have on Twitter that you are tweeting to but I'm not sure I can trust him. *gestures to camera* But no, it should be coming. And so watch, if I can get this together we should be able to announce what we're doing and how we're doing it before too long. It's something that is very important to me, I want to be able to do bundling like this. What I really would like to do is be able to sell you a copy that has, for a slightly higher price but not super high, the ebook, the audiobook, and the hardcover. That's what I'm trying to make work.
How do you choose ages for your characters and how often does that change throughout the writing process?
How do I choose ages for my characters and how often does that change the writing process. I choose my characters... It's really hard to talk about. Because I can really drill down into how I come up with settings, so magic systems and things, and I can talk a lot about how I plot and why I plot. Character is the one that I discovery write. Writers tend to fall somewhere on this spectrum generally between what we call discovery writers and we call outliners, and I'm mostly an outliner. I like a nice tight outline, I like to know where I'm going and what's going on in my world before I start writing. But I found that I have to free write my characters, I have to figure out who they are as I write. Otherwise this outline is going to be too restrictive and I'm going to end up with characters who feel wooden. And I think that's the real risk of outlining too much, is writing the life out of your characters. And so the ages do change, and the personalities change. The famous one is Mistborn, which stars a sixteen year old girl named Vin, she was a boy in the first chapter I tried to write of that. And then that didn't work so I tried a girl with a different personality and that didn't work either. So it was the third try where it's like I'm having people walk in and and try casting calls and seeing who works. And that's generally how I go about it.
With Steelheart the character didn't click for me, and I was really worried about that. Like the prologue worked wonderfully and I wrote the prologue separately, I wrote it years before I went back to the book. Because I just had that prologue pop into my head and I wrote it out. So if you read Steelheart the prologue is like 5,000 words, it's huge, it's like twenty pages or something like that. It may not be that long, but it's a big chunk. It was the first thing that I did, and then I put the book aside. And I was really worried when I started writing that I didn't have a voice for the character, because the prologue takes place ten years before when the main character is a child. So I started writing and it didn't work, and I started writing again and it didn't work, and the thing that ended up working, this is the silliest thing, but it was when I wrote a metaphor that was really bad, a simile, right? And I'm like "Oh that's stupid" because that's what normally happens. That's what you do when you are writing, you come up with something and go "Why did I write that, it's dumb?" and you delete it. And this time I started to delete it and thought "What if I ran with that?" So I started running with it and this character grew out of the fact that he makes bad metaphors. And that's just a simple trope, a simple thing, but it grew into an entire personality. This is a person who is really earnest, trying really, really hard. They are smart, they are putting things together, but they just don't think the same way that everyone else does and they are a little bit befuddled by things. It's like they are trying a little too hard. Ironically-- Or I guess coincidentally, not ironically, the metaphor of writing bad metaphors became what grew into the personality for David. His entire personality grew out of this idea of someone who is trying so hard, and you just love him because he is trying so hard but sometimes he just faceplants. And my children do this. Like I remember my child when he was five years old and he was running toward me so excited, telling me about something and this thing that he had in his hand and there was a pole in front of him but the thing was so important. And he smacked right into and fell right back over just stunned. Like "Who put this pole in front of me?" *laughter* It was at our house, it's not like he didn't know there was a pole there, right? He was just so excited by this thing Dad, this thing! And that was where David came from.
All the people with powers fit into one category.
All the people with powers fit into one category? Yes.
Was there a reason you chose to do that?
Was there a reason I chose to do that? Well, I'm not sure if I can answer that... So I assume you're asking-- The original premise for Steelheart was that everyone who has superpowers is evil.
Yes.
And that is just the original premise so that is not a spoiler. In my-- The reason I came up with the series is I wanted to tell a story about a world where Superman was not there to save you, or what not. Where it was "what if people started gaining these powers and did terrible things with them". When I was touring for the first book I told people the story of how I came up with that, I imagined-- when someone cut me off in traffic I imagined blowing their car up and feeling very satisfied and like "Yeah" and then feeling really guilty because I'm like "Is that really what I'd do with superpowers? Oh... Well I better write a book about it." *laughter* It's what authors do, anything that makes us think, or makes us have strong emotion, we're like "Well that's going in a book". And so it was an intentional choice, it was the whole premise and concept for me. And then the question became did the powers corrupt, or did only evil people get them, or what's going on. And that is one of the primary questions going on in the first book. They've mostly kind of drilled down to an answer by the second book.
Is there a word that you made up that's a favorite word of yours?
I still find occasionally find myself, curse-wise, saying "Merciful Domi", which is from my first one. Otherwise there are lots of interesting words, lately I've put the word "Catacendre" into the Alloy of Law era to mean the end of the ash. And I like how that flows with kind of almost a psuedo-Latin on it and things like that. And so, Catacendre, that's my favorite lately, but I've been working on those books a lot.
Would you rather be a Misting or a Mistborn?
Would I rather be a Misting or a Mistborn? Would I rather have one power or ALL THE POWERS?!? *laughter* I'm going to pick all the powers...
What if you have to be a Misting?
What if I had to be a Misting? Coinshot, so I can jump around and fly. I should pick like Thug so I can be tough and people can punch me and I'd be "haha" or whatever but really I just want to be jumping around, flying off of cars and things.
I was wondering if you could talk a little about expletives and blasphemy?
*amusedly* Expletives and blasphemy... So, It's really interesting, one of the first things that I think about when I'm coming up with a fantasy world is "How would they-- How do they curse?". And I don't know why this happens to me, but it feels like you can build out and extrapolate a lot about a culture from what they curse by, and how they curse. And it's become a thing. Like in one of my short stories I did I used *stumbles over words* saying "hell take you" to someone was a compliment because they didn't want to go to heaven because there was a god-king they hated. They were like "We don't want to go where he is so hell must be the better place". Which was a lot of fun to me in coming up with that. Or other ones I have them curse by in-world and sometimes I just use the biblical curses, the damns and hells and things like that. Why do I use those? I use those in Mistborn because I was writing about a bunch of thieves living on the streets and when I tried to use kind-of more fantasy-ish curse words it just felt fake for them. And yet it didn't feel fake when I started using "Merciful Domi" in Elantris because the religion of that world was so important to all the people that they would use the name of their own deity.So this is just something I kind of dance around and it's very interesting to me being a religious person myself. I will sometimes never-- like I don't use the curses that my characters will, but I'm not my characters and things like this. So it's something I think about, perhaps way too much, is how are the people going to curse in these books. That's a very good question.
My friend is eager to know whether power plants in Elendel use Allomancers to generate electricity. Do they?
RAFO.
When you're writing, how many words you do per day on average? And when you're revising, how many words per day on average?
Writing between 2k and 3k. Revising, between 10k and 20k, depending on how difficult the section is.
Do female listeners have periods? If yes, do all forms have it, or just mateform?
If they do, it's just mateform. (Maybe slaveform too.)
Why aren't seons affected by the lack of a chasm line in their Aon?
If they tried to actualize their Aon, it would have an undesirable result. In addition, the chasm broke their bond to the humans they were tied to, and you can see the result of that. So they were affected.
Why does Preservation fueling Allomancy not weaken Preservation compared to Ruin?
Because the power, once used, returns to him--much as water, after passing over a turbine, continues on in its system.
What is the relationship between blood and the Spiritual Realm? (Since Hemalurgy needs blood to graft the sDNA in a spike into someone else's sDNA)
The blood being in motion is part of it.
And I saw on facebook about the discussion about the name of the second book. This is more like a request, please, keep the name of it being The Book Of Endless Pages. That title is awesome! Oh and another suggestion, please, keep making huge books! Now, after reading your books, I expect books to be at least 600 pages, so you can see I get disappointed quite often lol
I will keep the books, in this series at least, long. It's what the story demands. As for title...it does have a certain charm, but I worry that it just feels wrong to too many people. Three out of four laugh when I mention it. That doesn't bode well...
Are you planning to include a gay character in the second book of The Stormlight Archive? I know there is that bridge guy, but I mean a character with some weight on the book. Would be cool.
I've tried to be more GLBT aware in recent years, but I want to be careful. Doing it poorly could be more insulting than doing it not at all. Having Ryan, the real world Drehy from Bridge Four, as a friend does at least give me access to someone who can give early feedback and tell me where I might be going wrong. So let's just say maybe.
Do you ever plan to continue "I Hate Dragons"? I have a theory that Skip does not have a separate knack to make him smell delicious to dragons, but rather that he is high in levels of human magical potential, which the dragons need in their diet.
Perhaps. I've got a few more chapters than I've posted. Including some viewpoints from the most powerful magical sword ever created. Most powerful...in that he has the most powers. Thousands of them. All useless.
Does Hoid have a safety-deposit box somewhere, or does he carry all his souvenirs with him?
He has a home base.
If a character bears multiple Shardblades, can they summon them all in the same 10 heartbeat span, or does each Shardblade require a separate summoning? Dying doesn't count.
Separate summoning.
Is it hypothetically possible to Awaken an object using a divine Breath?
Yes.
Nightwatcher's curses all appear to be neurological in effect, are the boons limited in any particular manner?
Yes.
Did Amaram ever find out who the Shardbearer that Kaladin killed was?
Yes.
Was it Shallan's brother, by the way?
RAFO.
For the modern day Mistborn trilogy, have you decided on whether the nicrosil Misting main character will be male or female yet? I haven't seen you mention it anywhere.
I have him as a guy right now, but that could change. (It has before.)
There's also been a long standing debate on whether an Allomacer could burn the One Ring, stance on that?
Burn the One Ring, eh? I think it's such a powerfully Invested object that it would be very, very dangerous to try.
Oh and is Hoid an older Alcatraz Smedry? (This is a joke I know Alcatraz isn't in the Cosmere but with Hoid being present at the Shattering and Alcatraz's Talent being breaking things... That could include Gods.)
Re: Alcatraz. Ha!
So some of us happened across a line in [Mistborn: The Final Empire] that gave us pause. It's in the chapter 19 epigraph:
"Not so Kwaan. In a way, he is as unlikely a prophet as I am a hero. He never had an air of ceremonious wisdom - nor was he even a religious scholar. When we first met, he was studying one of his ridiculous interests in the great Khlenni library--I believe he was trying to determine whether or not trees could think."
This sounded to us like Kwaan the Terrisman might have been looking into or might have known something about Realmatics, like for instance knowing of the Realms and that things have aspects in all three. Is this the case? If so, was such knowledge common among his people or Scadrial?
Realmatic theory was part of the ancient Terris religion.
Since Allomancy is powered by burning metal, isn't Scadrial going to eventually start running out of metal?
Hmmm... is that why there's a space trilogy? They have to mine asteroids and other planets for their metal?
It could happen. However, it's not really a danger with the current population of Allomancers. There just aren't enough of them.
