Questioner
Would you consider or have you considered romantic relationships between spren and humans?
Brandon Sanderson
That's a RAFO.
Would you consider or have you considered romantic relationships between spren and humans?
That's a RAFO.
Are Inquisitor spikes, kandra Blessings and koloss spikes interchangeable? Like if you it spiked in a different way--
*Hesitant* You could make that work and it wouldn't be that hard. But just as they are, no.
Would nothing happen or would weird stuff happen?
Weird stuff would happen
*pause*
But that one's not very hard to make work.
Can you reuse a spike?
Yes. Uh, yes, technically, but not as easily as that question makes it sound.
Can you re-use it if it's for the same exact thing or for a different thing? Will that change?
Spikes are going to get keyed by Identity--
So you can't already spike that person. But if you spike and don't kill them can you spike the same person again?
Yeah and if you can somehow strip the identity of the person or the spike-- So yes you can use them again but it comes into a sort of-- Like, you can't just take that spike and spike somebody else.
Was the reason the Listeners or the parsh people turned into parshmen, was that because Ba-Ado-Mishram was imprisoned by the Radiants? That she was Connected to all of them?
Oh, yeah, yeah. That plays into what happened there.
Back in ['14] you referred to Honor's Purposes to me at one point. Is that still a thing in the cosmere?
Honor's purpose?
Honor's purposes. You referred to ten of them. Using the concept of Shardic numbers. But I don't have that on record, I don't know anything about it, it's been a confusing topic ever since.
So that's still a deal. It just plays into the ten names of the Almighty and the ten attributes of the Fools and the ten attributes of the Almighty.
Are Purposes something every shard has?
I wouldn't say-- No. It's playing more into the nature of Honor itself.
Rosharans are good with math, because you did the whole... They're aware of the normal distribution and all that. So, do like, complex numbers, imaginary numbers, do they live in the Cognitive Realm? And would prime [numbers] be the brighteyes of the Cognitive Realm?
We will get into this. I would say--I've actually thought about this--that right now, there are spren that kind of represent abstract mathematics but not individual concepts within abstract mathematics. Like when you draw a spren that represents creativity, it's not necessarily divided into, "Painting," even though some of them may edge in that direction. So you could perhaps find a spren where you go, "Oh!"
I just want to see pi and phi arguing.
Does [Nazh] ever have any arguments with Khriss?
All the time.
But, they're basically best friends anyway right?
I don't know about that, I'd have to ask Brandon. But I imagine that they get along pretty well and he feels okay being grumpy around her.
So it's not like Mythbusters where they're only friends on TV but not actually friends in real life?
I would imagine it's not like that.
At the end of Calamity, I was wondering if the Prof and [David] together repair their relationship. They were kind of built up as a father/son kind of--
If I do any more books in direct sequence, what's going on with Prof would be be a factor in them. So I'm going to RAFO this just because I am planning...
Apocalypse Guard will not be a straight up follow up, but a sidestep, but I might do one someday.
...Does he ever get the chance to build a relationship with Tavi in another reality, similar to how David does with his father?
I'll give you a RAFO card on all of that.
...The reason Odium dealt with the Selish Shards in the way that he did, whether that was primarily because he was inexperienced in Splintering and so he knew that he wanted nobody to take the Shards--
There were better ways he could have done what he did.
And he then learned at least a little bit better?
He learned at least a little bit better.
How do visions in the cosmere work? And I'm thinking Realmatically.
So almost always [it's] glimpsing into the Spiritual Realm. But you are often seeing it through the Cognitive, and so like a vision that...
So like the vision that Dalinar sees. What's going on is-- being pulled, and kind of stretched a little bit through the Realms, into the Spiritual Realm. Where a Cognitive construct is adding a framework to seeds that are set in place.
So that you can kind of comprehend the Spiritual?
You can comprehend-- and also there's a little bit of a life to it. Meaning it can respond to you and things like this, to an extent. So imagine, it kind of works like an AI. Imagine there's some-- You've got that power in the Spiritual Realm and you're adding a framework to it, that it is shining through, and that is giving you the vision. Complicated, I know. Spiritual Realm is supposed to be weird, and we aren't supposed to quite comprehend it, but that's why we've got the Cognitive framework there.
Why were seons unaffected by the Reod?
They were.
They were? How?
RAFO.
Regular Aons can be specialized and enhanced using modifiers. Can Elantris be further augmented with such modifiers?
Theoretically plausible.
The many faces of Cusicesh, are they of real people?
RAFO.
Do any of the characters in The Stormlight Archive share a familial relationship that we don't know about? Considering that we know about Jezrien and Ash. Not necessarily Heralds but--
Yes, Yes. No more on that.
When the Fused die, do they return directly to the Everstorm, or back to Braize, and then they need to make their way back?
RAFO.
Nazh is an embodiment of his adventurous spirit, that he expresses through the books. Nazh is also much grumpier than he is and gets visibly angry when Isaac himself wouldn't.
Nazh is basically a young Peter Capaldi and is very prone to swearing when he is off screen.
Are mandras gravityspren?
*Very hesitantly* Nooooo? Kind of-- So the actual gravityspren, you're talking about the things Kaladin saw stuck to a wall? Those are not mandras.
Oh no, I was thinking about the ones that appear around dead chasmfiends.
Oh, dead chasmfiends, yes. The arrowheads, yeah.
But you're saying those are not gravityspren? They're mandras?
So the things Kaladin saw stuck to the wall are not gravityspren, right. So I want to make sure.-- So arrowhead spren, that Shallan is philosophizing, theorizing about, are mandras.
Do Feruchemical metalminds experience physical change such as wear and tear, due to just being used as Feruchemical metalminds
Never thought of it.
Do you want to make up canon?
Sure...
Half-canon?
Let's say half-canon. Wear and tear being used as metalminds, not counting clasping them on and things like that. Simply tapping or taking out? I would say no, but I would really have to think about that. Are we losing any particles to the transfer, the change? I don't think you are, but I don't know. I'd have to really dig into the physics of that. I had not even considered of that. There are ramifications of things-- So I'm going to say no, half-canon.
Does Awakening drain colors outside the visible spectrum?
Yes it does. You're talking about ultraviolet and infrared? Yeah.
How many waves of human populations have migrated to Roshar? So I'm thinking the Ashynites coming from Ashyn, right? Was that just the only humans that ever came as a population?
It depends on if you count the Iriali?
That's specifically the one I'm thinking of.
They came in a separate migration.
Not from Ashyn?
Not from Ashyn.
From whatever the Third Land was.
Lightsong's personality is very different than Stennimar's. If the Returned are their previous lives--Cognitive Shadows as you've said before, just stapled with Divine Breath--where do their new personalities come from?
My argument there is when I was writing him, getting into a kind of writer-thing, this is the person he would have become... My philosophy there was, the way that the Returned happen, and you losing your memories, it comes down to this nature versus nurture thing for me. The personality-- He is the same person, but with certain life experiences removed. Different circumstances. And in his case, that resulted in, let's say, a secondary mode of personality that had never been encouraged before.
Just like how, you put me in the right situation I'm an extrovert, but in a lot of situations I'm an introvert. So you remove a lot of the cultural conditioning and that is who he becomes.
Spren grant control over surges because surges are perceived as fundamental powers on Roshar. Would other Cognitive beings grant different powers based on what they perceive to be fundamental? Such as electromagnetism is on Earth?
It is plausible, although this was set up in a specific way.
By Honor or Adonalsium?
RAFO on that. Set up might be the wrong word. There were seeds that caused this to happen the way it did.
The Surgebinding thing?
Yes, specifically... Those influenced what people perceived as fundamental forces.
Are the Heralds champions of Honor in the same way that Tanavast was encouraging Dalinar to force Odium to choose a champion?
Similar.
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.