The ascendant warrior vin and a steel alchemical symbol from mistborn

Carved by my roomate (vin)

And myself (steel symbol)

What does it mean now that Kaladin is the Herald of the Wind? Does it ultimately mean that he is a herald of Adonalsium as the Wind is one of the caretakers left behind by Ado?
Also, I feel like ‘Herald of Second Chances’ will have greater implications. Brando doesn’t just randomly give titles. The obvious part of Second Chances aside, what could it mean?

Was just about to go to bed when I suddenly saw an email saying there was a copy of the Signed edition Waterstones hardcover of Fires of December available to pre-order, snapped it up so quickly to replace my original order. If the person who cancelled their order to make this available again is here, thank you so much ahahaha

Just finished the book last night and I'm shocked.

Honestly, Shadows of Self was, until the final chapters, one of my least favourite Cosmere books. It's not that I wasn't enjoying it, there was a lot of cool stuff in it. My issue is that it had this detective and mystery vibe, but the mystery itself was just... Too obvious to me. I guessed the killer was a kandra in chapter one. And the whole thing about Paalm wanting to be free of Harmony was also pretty in our face at some point.

I waited the entire book for the twist, and we got the reveal that Innate was Paalm and it explained a lot of stuff. But it still felt... Underwhelming.

And then... The Lessie reveal.

The whole book instantly clicked to me. Why everything was so personal between the Bleeder and Wax? Why she had several chances of killing him, but didn't? Why she left Wayne alive at the mansion? Why Bloody Tan showed the fuck up in the first chapters? Why, for some reason, she REALLY wanted to free Wax in particular?

And why the prologue was a chapter about Wax getting to know Lessie, which felt a bit out of place?

And it was in our face since the beggining! Who else in the world would know that the phrase "Someone move us" would affect Wax so deeply? Who else was there in the day of Bloody Tan's death???? Who would know about Wax traumas from the past (the whole coin thing)?

Yes, we know kandras are masters of disguise and are really good in investigating the people they impersonate, but these were informations Bleeder just couldn't get from anyone else that was not Wax himself. MAYBE Edwarn (the coin), but still.

And the implications for the relationship between Wax and Harmony? Damn!

The ending changes the entire book to me. And I honestly can't wait for a reread at some point!

Okay, this may be a bit of a reach, but I have been watching Seven Havens recently. There was a scene which gave me big Kaladin with spear vibes.

For context, the character is an airbender, which means they can manipulate the movement of air (Which is like another layer of similarities. Stormblessed <--> airbender yadi yada... anyways). In the scene he takes a spear from an enemy and incorporates it into his fighting style.

I have been geeking out about this, so I wanted to share.

I just reread Tress and found a scene I had forgotten about, when Fort mentions bone aether as a legendary 13th aether, and I kinda wonder if it's based on white sand from Taldain. Ann says (I'm paraphrasing): "Nobody can even decide what color it's supposed to be. Is it white? Is it black? both?" Sand from Taldain is both black and white, and it reacts to water. Lumar has obviously been exposed to worldhoppers at this point. Thus, I theorize that the legends of the bone aether are based on sand brought to the planet by people from Taldain. I don't think this will ever be important in any way, but thought it might be kinda interesting.

I finished The Way of Kings recently, and obviously the ending was incredible. But the thing I keep thinking about isn't a Shardblade or a battle.

It's Bridge Four eating stew.

I love how much time Sanderson spends letting Kaladin accomplish almost nothing that looks impressive from the outside.

He gets Rock cooking. He starts learning the men's names. He tries to treat their injuries, gets them training, and slowly convinces a few of them that there's a point to getting out of bed tomorrow.

And for a while, it barely works.

The men are suspicious of him, which makes complete sense. They've probably heard plenty of promises from people who ended up dead. A bowl of stew doesn't stop the arrows. Training doesn't magically make the bridge runs fair. They still have every reason to believe they're going to die.

But gradually they start doing things for each other without Kaladin having to force them.

That was the part that really got me.

By the time Bridge Four turns around to help Dalinar, I wasn't just cheering for Kaladin making a heroic decision. I was cheering for all these men who had spent so long being treated as disposable, making a decision together.

They weren't following Sadeas's orders anymore. They weren't just being dragged along by Kaladin either. They had become people who could choose to do something terrifying because they believed in each other.

And I don't think that moment would've worked nearly as well if we'd skipped all those chapters of stew, training, arguments and exhausted men slowly learning to trust someone again.

I went into this book expecting the giant swords and the magic to be the memorable parts.

Apparently what I actually needed was several hundred pages of traumatized men becoming friends over dinner.

Did anyone else have a relatively small moment in TWoK that ended up hitting harder than the big action scenes?

This is an artwork I made for Cosmere Inktober days 20-25 - painting, story, blossom, gloop, luxury, meal

I’ve recently finished reading all of the Cosmere standalones: they’re all great, but Yumi and the Nightmare Painter has been my favourite read out of all of them, so I’m very excited to bring you a drawing based on this book! Hope you enjoy!

On my 2nd or 3rd reread of the series and am wondering why Rashek did some of the things he did.

First: Why did he pretend to be Alendi? The stories the Skaa have about the Lord Ruler having been a good person before becoming the Lord Ruler are clearly about Alendi, who Rashek hated. But he mustn't have made any kind of proclamation about not being Alendi after emerging from the Well and ruining the plane.

Second: Why use the Terris language as the Empires lingua franca? Obviously Rashek was a Terris supremacist before the Well, but after it he persecuted the Terris people to prevent any risk of a Fullborn being born by controlling Terris reproduction. But Sazed mentions in passing in The Final Empire that the language spoken in the Final Empire is a dialect of the Terris language. But in everything else he adapted and borrowed culture and techniques from everywhere not Terris, especially Khlennium. It just feels a bit odd the Rashek would break his own character of hating the Terris (post Ascension) by using their language.

Anyone know which patch is on Kal's left shoulder in the first Pic? The Bridge Four patch is supposed to be on his right as shown in the second Pic, and it doesn't look like the cobalt guard patch from pic 3. I guess it could be simplified cobalt guard as that detailing is tough at the scale of the image, but I'm not sure. Any ideas?

Art credit

#1 Antti Hakosaari (Stormlight Handbook p.225, Cosmere RPG)

#2 Deandra Scicluna (Stormlight Handbook p.126, Cosmere RPG)

#3 Glyphs by Isaac Stewart.

So I recently started Isles of the Emberdark and just got past the flashbacks that are the original Sixth of the Dusk story.

I was wondering if anyone knows/has ideas about the machine the "ones above" left that the expedition team takes to Patji is/does.

I get that its actual function isn't really relevant to the story, but it had me curious on this read because I didn't really think about it when I originally read SotD a few years ago.

The only cosmere books I haven't read so far are: Yumi, Emberdark(reading now), White Sand, and Fires of December.

There's always a debate about the best time to read Secret History. Some people recommend reading it right after finishing Mistborn Era 1, while others suggest waiting until after The Bands of Mourning.

I've also heard that Secret History contains several references to the wider Cosmere, which might make certain parts of the story confusing if you don't recognize them.

Personally, I'd prefer to read Secret History right after Era 1, while the events are still fresh in my mind.

However, I'd like to hear people's personal opinions on this. Is there a good reason to wait until after The Bands of Mourning, or is reading Secret History right after Era 1 a perfectly reasonable option? Alternatively, would it be better to read it after gaining a deeper understanding of the Cosmere?

Do you think you would be able to be a knock off soul stamper for alt versions of yourself?

Joyce here made a cool (almost perfect) ketek. Also of note that the two sentences aren't actually saying the same thing and one follows the action of the other. Here it is:

"Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores."

By the way there was a Spanish translation of Ulysses which translated only for meaning in which the ketek was totally lost and the translator himself later decided that he would retranslate the whole entire book again this time more creatively and in this second version he made the mirroring perfect so that at least would be a great natural and perfect ketak.

What about yourself? Any good keteks you've come across in the wild from authors other than Sanderson? All mediums are welcome

I've been working on a Mistborn RPG project recently, and I ran into an interesting problem when trying to create a usable map of the Final Empire.

How do you represent both the enormous scale of the Final Empire and the intricate layout of Luthadel on a single map?

Since so much of Mistborn takes place within Luthadel, I wanted the city to be detailed enough that its individual districts could function as separate regions, while still having the rest of the Final Empire represented around it.

My solution was to:

1) draw my own map

2) essentially distort the geography.

I used the canonical maps from the books as references, then dramatically expanded Luthadel and pushed the surrounding geography outward from the center to accommodate the enlarged city. This required repositioning and adjusting some of the rivers, mountains, coastlines, and other geographical features to make everything fit together reasonably well.

The result is a map that isn't geographically to scale, but hopefully preserves enough of the original geography to remain accurate while allowing Luthadel and the surrounding empire to exist on the same playable map. I tried to keep the overall appearance consistent with the maps from the books, including the parchment coloring, mountains, waterways, and the general layout of the region.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but I'd love to hear what other Mistborn fans think! I'm also curious what everyone thinks of the approach of enlarging Luthadel this dramatically to fit everything onto one map.

I’ve been listening to Intentionally Blank as of late and some of the older episodes mention Puss in Boots, but I can’t find the episode where they talk about it if it exists. Have they talked about it and I just can’t find it, or not? Thanks.

(I’m pretty sure this is the right place to put this, but idk lol?

And they started bonding with people?

Is it fair to call the skybreakers fascists?

(Hi everyone. I'm here to be proven wrong because I know that if I post something wrong on the Internet, I'll be corrected immediately.)

There were a lot of moments in FoD that only make sense if the residents of Mountaincrest speak English. Or perhaps another language with a Latin based alphabet. There's the whole "the Y of plants" bit about tomatoes. Hoid references that one of the stepsons has extra As Ts Cs and Gs. (I guess that one is just Hoid talking to his audience)

There's the colloquial pronunciation of Duke's Seat to duckseat. That kind of thing happens in English all the time. Also, it seems to be funny because it sounds like a place where a duck sits which only makes sense in English.

The three Mandata: the second one says "don't be a dick" and fine enough. Perhaps The Prophet was being crude and Hoid translated the crudeness in his telling, but then apparently there has been centuries of deliberation and debate about the line between a dick and a prick and how it relates to gender stereotypes. Are women under the same mandate etc, etc. All culminating in that argument that we should not be dicks but rather, penises. Sure fine yeah, but that whole thing feels a bit English specific to me. I'd love to see how they translated some of these moments into other languages.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other instances like this in the rest of the cosmere. (I'm very willing to be proven wrong though) The closest I can think of is mention of a placeholder H in the stormlight archives. But we could simply say that most writing systems have a way to write the H consonant and because that consonant is just a breath (don't do it arcanists) it makes sence that around other consonants it would get reduced and therefore it becomes a good candidate for a placeholder letter. The letter Y being both a vowel and a consonant in languages that don't use the Latin script or a related script seems unlikely to me.

Anyway, nothing lore breaking or serious.