Bit of Analysis: the Cosmere

[Ahriman238]

Back at it. This time to talk about the Cosmere. This thread may be a little different, I intend to explain the various worlds of the Cosmere, but won't always or often have quotes at hand. I won't be doing plot outside some broad outlining, but expect much in the way of spoilers.


That out of the way, what is a Cosmere? The Cosmere is a shared universe of fantasy novels by Brandon Sanderson, taking place on ten distinct planets (more in the short stories) in a single dwarf galaxy, each with their own magic system. Sanderson is a big believer in consistency, so the magic systems have clear and simple rules and limitations, and in depth, so the consequences of each magic system on society are examined at length and played with. He has said the Cosmere esixts because he always wanted to write a vast series of novels, but didn't want to require fans to hunt every one of a planned 40+ books to understand what was going on. So a bunch of smaller series, self-contained but with small references to each other and feeding into an overarching myth arc. It's ambitious and new, and I love it!


The origins of the Cosmere are shrouded in myth, and largely fed to us in snippets. So far, here's what we DO know. There was once a most powerful and benevolent being called Aldonalsium, effectively God, but he died on a world called Yolen and was shattered into sixteen Shards. Each Shard was taken up by a human, their bodies disintegrated and they assumed godlike powers. However, each Shard influenced the person to fall more in line with it's nature, until their name and possibly identity were subsumed and they became an aspect of Aldonalsium. Preservation and Ruin, Cultivation and Honor, Endowment, Devotion, Dominion, Autonomy and Odium are the named Shards to date. They spread out some to the primary ten worlds of the series, often recreating human life there, and it is the presence and interactions of the Shards, the ways their power is Invested in the world, that create the wildly divergent magic systems of the Cosmere.

Reality in the Cosmere exists on three levels, the physical world we all live in, the cognitive, and the spiritual. The spiritual realm appears to be the ultimate source of magical energy. The cognitive realm, known as Shadesmar on Roshar, can be used by discount planeswalkers called worldhoppers to travel between the worlds of the Cosmere. The first linking element of these books is a worldhopper, Hoid, who under a variety of names has at least a cameo in every novel, though they be set on different worlds and centuries or millennia apart. As of the latest books, Hoid seems to be playing Gandalf, inspiring and aiding, even manipulating, others into saving the world, though his apparent involvement in events before Words of Radiance seem peripheral at best. Hoid was present for the Shattering of Aldonalsium and seemed to be friends with at least four of the Shards. There is an organization of worldhoppers calling themselves the Seventeenth Shard, dedicated to tracking and monitoring the Shards. Part of a book seems to be a letter from Hoid urging this group to act against Odium, and part of the next book a reply urging Hoid to join the writer in an oath of noninterference.

Shards can die. Odium, who hates everything and everyone, wishes to kill the other Shards. He succeeded in killing Honor on Roshar, but never left for at least centuries, and hasn't yet destroyed human civilization there. It's not clear what, if anything, is stopping them, the Seventeenth Shard seem to think it was something Honor did, and are afraid of getting involved in a situation they believe to be safely contained, lest they turn him loose.


To avoid spoilers in an initial post, I'll leave off here for now. The first book of the Cosmere, Elantris I still haven't read, so if you haven't read any of the books you can be introduced the same way I was, thorough Mistborn.

[Ahriman238]

Scadriel: World of Ash and Mist

As seen in;

The Mistborn Trilogy:
Mistborn or The Final Empire
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages

Wax and Wayne books:
The Alloy of Law
Shadows of Self

Shards: Preservation, Ruin.

Say hello to Scadriel, a world with just a couple of oddities. Every night, the Mists cover all landmass, mysterious and hard to see through, they disperse almost instantly on entering a building, monsters called mistwraiths stalk the night. And eight volcanoes known as the Ashmounts regularly belch out vast quantities of ash into the air. This is actually a good thing, Scadriel is close enough to the sun to be uninhabitable without the cooling effects of all that crap in the atmosphere, and the ecosystem is suited to it, from bacteria that breaks down the ash, to the hardy brown plants and people adapted to cope. Still, an awful lot of daily effort is spent in just sweeping away the ashfalls.

It wasn't always like this, in some corners of the world they tell stories of a time of green fields and blue skies, before the Deepness. Nobody is terribly clear on the specifics, but the greatest hero the world has ever known, the Lord Ruler, banished this existential threat to humanity, reshaped the world and won the right to rule as immortal god-king forever. Yep, that's how it happened, nothing here to see, move along, the Steel Ministry gets really touchy about the orthodoxy and you don't want to draw the Steel Inquisition's attention.

Yeah, it pretty much sucks to be a skaa (peasant) in this world. A noble can literally kill you on the spot for no legal consequence, in fact, should you be a girl unfortunate enough to catch a nobleman's eye, they're legally obligated to kill you before a half-breed child could be born. Not that this is a perfect system, people will fall through the cracks, someone will be too decent or attached to go through with it. The reason noble blood is so closely guarded is because it holds their magic, Allomancy. The nobles are descended from the Lord Ruler's first backers, and he rewarded them by making them all Mistborn, an ability he lacks now.

Allomancers can eat an allomantic metal and "burn" it in their bellies. The metal is slowly disintegrated and the Allomancer gains a particular power, depending on the metal. In the beginning, all Allomancers were Mistborn, someone who can burn all the metals, their descendants are occasionally Mistborn, more often Mistings, able to use just one metal, and more commonly not an Allomancer at all. Every Allomancer develops their powers only after Snapping, the powers come when they're traumatized and in mortal peril, which then noble houses usually provide by beating a child within an inch of their lives. A metal can be "flared" or burned faster for more power but a shorter life. Trying to burn a non-allomantic metal will make one violently ill and may be fatal. Burning a metal near-constantly for months or years can turn one into an Allomantic Savant, altering one's body to get more results out of the metal, this is stupid dangerous, though.


In the first book, we are told there are ten allomantic metals, and they are divided into categories, the common eight metals are cleanly divisible into two groups of four, physical and mental, and within those groups into internal and external, and within those one metal that "pushes" and one that "pulls" usually one is an alloy of the other. In fact, there are sixteen metals in four categories, or eighteen or fifty, depending on how you count.

Physical, the internal metals are pewter and tin. Pewter gives increased strength, toughness and endurance, and a pewter Misting is known as a Thug, formally as a Pewterarm, but everyone uses Thug. It won't heal you, exactly, but it can be used to stabilize an otherwise fatal injury. It's not precisely clear how much of a buff it is, from feats I ballpark it as strength of five men, more when flaring. Pewter is also one of the fastest-burning a standard dose gives just two minutes of time. Tin, on the other hand, enhances the senses, to a terrible degree. Every odor becomes near-overwhelming, every torch a blinding light, every footfall a thunderclap. The important thing with tin isn't how much you can see, but how much you can process, and so how much you can filter out.

Physical external are iron and steel. Burning either will cause you to see dozens or hundreds of glowing blue lines emanating from your body to every nearby metal object. By focusing on these lines you can push (steel) or pull (iron) on the metal. There's no particular subtlety to these, you can only push/pull directly towards/away from your self, and only with a force equivalent to throwing your entire strength and weight behind it, more if you flare. Physics also applies, if you push/pull something much heavier than yourself, or anchored to something, it doesn't move, you do. Drop a coin and push on it, you fly into the air and eventually hover. You cannot effect metal partially or completely inside another person's body. Great for getting around and battlefield control, a steel Misting is a Coinshot, iron, a Lurcher.

Mental internal are copper and bronze. A bronze Misting is a Seeker, with the ability to feel pulses when a nearby Allomancer is using their powers, and a crude sense of the direction the pulses are coming from. With time and practice, they can distinguish which metal is burning from the tone, refine their direction and ballpark distance. Burning just copper makes you a Smoker, they're immune to the mental external metals while burning, and cannot be sensed by Seekers. In fact, they create an invisible "coppercloud" that masks all nearby Allomancy from curious Seekers, essential to operating under the noses of the Steel Ministry.

Mental external are brass and zinc, the metals of emotional manipulation. Soothers (brass) can lessen or suppress selected emotions, in a person or in a crowd. Rioters (zinc) work the same, but excite rather than deaden.

Of the temporal metals, which supposedly (and wrongly) only work for Mistborn, the most important in the original trilogy is Atium, the basis for much of Scadriel's economy, and it's monopoly the source of much of the Lord Ruler's power. Atium burns even faster than pewter, but gives one combat precognition. You can see ghostly images darting ahead and showing what someone else will do, allowing casual domination of any fight. If two foes both burn Atium, they see a hundred shadows of action, reaction and counter-reaction and fight normally until one person runs out. Gold is much less impressive, you get a trippy sort of vision in which you see yourself as you were or would have been if you'd made drastically different choices, but you also see yourself as they would see you. Most characters seem to regard it as a particularly unpleasant and unhelpful experience.


A large plot point in the first book is Kelsier, a thief turned Mistborn revolutionary, discovered a secret Eleventh Metal, which turns out to be just like gold but it shows you other people.


Also in the first book we learned the Inquisition has a secret metal, aluminum, first of the group I call negation. Aluminum is allomantically inert, it can't be sensed or effected by burning iron or steel, an aluminum cap makes you immune to emotional manipulation and burning aluminum will clear out all other metals from your stomach.

In the second book, which is mostly about dealing with the fallout from overthrowing the Lord Ruler, two more important discoveries are made. First is duralumin, aluminum's cousin alloyed with copper. Duralumin wipes out any metal you're burning at the same time, but does so by burning it all at once, give one an insane super-burst of power at the cost of exhausting all one's store of that metal. The second was a single remaining nugget of metal in the Lord Ruler's secret sanctum, lerasium. Anyone can burn lerasium, which permanently alters their body, making them Mistborn. This is how the Lord Ruler did it, but he exhausted his stores except a nugget or two held in reserve.

The third book is much to concerned with the apocalypse to deliver much experimentation, They do find another temporal metal, electrum. Sort of like a poor man's atium, really, it shows your own future, which might give you a chance to see yourself take a hit and avoid it. Mostly, they use it as a cheap counter to atium, since it baffles precogs the same way using atium of their own would.


In the sequel series, Wax and Wayne, things are laid out. Atium and lerasium were both "god metals" as in, literally the form taken by the physical bodies of Preservation and Ruin. Which is why they were both so OP. Part of that was they could each be alloyed with any of the other allomantic metals to create something completely new and powerful, which is how Kelsier's "Eleventh Metal" came about. But atium and lerasium were always too rare and valuable for much experimentation, so while in theory there are fifty metals (16 allomantic + 2 god metals + 32 possible alloys) there's basically no chance of seeing them. Particularly as it seems unlikely that either atium or lerasium exist in the series after the first trilogy. Or maybe they still exist, or were supplanted by a third, yet undiscovered god metal, it's hard to say.

Anyways, physical and mental are fine. Temporal metals get two internal (gold and electrum) plus two external, cadmium and bendalloy. The external temporal metals create a bubble about a dozen yards across in which time moves 30x slower (cadmium) or faster (bendalloy) can't really shoot out of a bubble, projectiles are deflected in a random direction on hitting the border.

Negation gets filled out, aluminum and duralumin you know. Chromium gives the power to purge another Allomancer of metals by touch, just like burning aluminum would do. Nicrosil is like duralumin applied to other people, supercharges their allomancy for one big burst but only if they're burning a metal at the time.

Out of time for now, I'll be back to explain the other two magic systems in use on Scadriel, and something of society/history. How comfortable are the rest of you with spoilers? Sanderson's writing tends to take a lot of twists and turns and I'd really hate to ruin the experience for anyone else.

[Ahriman238]

Alright, so there are two other magic systems on Scadriel, Feruchemy and Hemalurgy, both are also deeply tied to the allomantic metals. Allomancy is Preservation's magic system, Hemalurgy is Ruin's and Feruchemy the art of balance.

Among the thieving crew turned rebels is a quiet and efficient servant and scholar, a Terrisman named Sazed and halfway through the first book it turns out he has powers of his own. Feruchemy is a magic native to the Terrismen, and the Lord Ruler has spent a thousand years suppressing it (and the Terris religion and culture, like all pre-ascension ones) and trying to literally breed it out of existence. A Feruchemist can charge a piece of metal, usually jewelry, with a particular energy or quality of his which he can later retrieve, like storing body heat and so being cooler now, in exchange for being able to call on warmth when it is needed. These charged metals are called metalminds. A Feruchemist can sense someone else's metalmind when he holds it, but cannot use or add to it. The advantage here is flexibility, even flaring pewter, there are limits to how strong an Allomancer can be, but the only hard cap for a Feruchemist is how much they filled their pewtermind and how rapidly they care to use it up. Speaking of, they have a lot of fine control in how much they fill their metalminds, and how much they draw from them. A Feruchemist can fill several, even many metalminds at once, as long as they don't mind being weak, sick, stupid and blind, and don't fill them to the point of death. For most of their history and all the first trilogy, Feruchemists like Mistborn could all use all the metals.

Physical metals; pewterminds for strength. Tin for the senses but they have to be done individually, usually as five rings. Steelminds store speed. Iron does weight, which is generally more helpful in the filling than the retrieving, weighing a quarter as much makes getting around a lot easier, but you could also tap an ironmind to become an immovable object, Sazed did once. Can;t seem to crush oneself, but otherwise tapping iron doesn't make one tougher.

Copperminds are most important to the hidden Terris resistance, they store memories. Sure you don't have them, but they don't get confused or decay, albeit visual memories don''t store well, facts and figures and words do much better and the data storage of a good set of copper armbands is functionally limitless. Bronze stores "wakefulness" you can make yourself sleepy in exchange for the ability to go without sleep unimpaired later. Brass stores body heat, and zinc stores mental speed, being able to think very quickly when tapped, but being slow-witted when filling.

Of the temporal metals, in Feruchemy called hybrid metals, gold is probably the most important as it stores health. Just two weeks spent in bed with fever and pains will give a person the ability to regenerate a gunshot wound or three, that's only going to get more useful as technology advances. Atium stored "youth" aging up a body when filled, making them younger when tapped, but they never found much use for it beyond a very expensive disguise. Electruminds hold determination, really more like depression filling and mania tapping, cadmium holds breath, and bendalloy energy (food/hunger).

One of the Lord Ruler, one of Rashek's greatest secrets was that he himself was originally a Terrisman and Feruchemist. When Vin tried to burn one of Sazed's metalminds (it was worth a shot) she got the standard allomatic effect and a sense of something there she couldn't touch or use, the same sensation, Sazed says, as a Feruchemist handling another's metalminds. But as the only Feruchemist/Mistborn, Rashek could fill a metalmind, then eat and burn it, and instead of the standard allomantic effect he'd get back from the metalmind many times what he'd put into it, which is how he was able to remain young and active for a thousand years, and survive impalement and decapitation. Rashek, who explored these powers more thoroughly than anyone, regularly retreated from the world to fill his metalminds in seclusion, to let himself be old and weak. Yet the Alloy of Law seems to strongly suggest it's possible to burn a metalmind for enormous profit of <quality> then turn right around and use most of that to fill another metalmind at no real cost, and maybe burn that in it's turn, which I admit strongly appeals to my inner power-gamer.



In the distant future (300 years) of the Wax and Wayne books, things have changed quite a bit. There are no more Mistborn, nor full Feruchemists because the blood of Terris has been spread so far and wide. Instead there are Ferrings with the ability to use a single allomantic metal to make metalminds. The genetic lottery still pays out in the form of Twinborn, people born with one allomantic and one feruchemic power, and in a few very rare cases, Conjoiners in whom those two metals are the same and so can use Rashek's trick of burning their own metalminds. There are a bunch of names for Ferrings and the various combinations of Twinborn, but Wax doesn't actually care, so the Ferring names are just in the appendix and the Twinborn ones not really mentioned at all.


The feruchemic effects of negation metals are esoteric, poorly understood and Ferrings with them tend to be highly secretive. They seem to be of a more abstract bent, and are called spiritual metalminds. Chromium is the most straightforward, it stores luck so you spend a while unlucky in echange for a few bursts of things really going your way when needed. Aluminum stores one's sense of identity, Duralumin stores connections, the ability to form and maintain friendships. Nicrosil stores "investiture" which is a term normally used for how a Shard's power manifests in the world. I don't know exactly what this means, and according to the Ars Arcanum page, neither does anyone in-universe.





Hemalurgy, in contrast, is a lot messier and nastier than the other two, though it doesn't require inborn talent or a convenient source of lerasium. If you stab a person through the heart with a blade, or a spike or any pointy piece of allomantic metal, you can steal a particular quality of theirs, physical, mental or even Allomantic or Feruchemic powers, and implant in another person by sticking them with the blade and leaving it in. Since Ruin was entropy personified, at least a little of the thing would be lost in transmission, less the quicker the metal bit was inserted, so the preferred method was to hammer a spike through a person's heart with the recipient lying directly beneath them. Apparently there is a lot of nuance into where the spikes go to achieve certain effects. Someone with Hemalurgy was susceptible to Ruin's influence to a certain degree, from hearing voices to outright bodyjacking, I'm not sure how much this applies to a Post-Ruin Scadriel.

Rashek mainly used Hemalurgy to create the Steel Inquisitors, loyal ministers elevated and made into artificial super-Mistborn by killing a great many Mistings. By doubling up on allomantic powers, Inquisitors could break a lot of the rules, like sensing Allomancy through a coppercloud or effecting metal inside someone's body. As far as I know, Rashek never trusted his inquisitors with Feruchemy. Inquisitors had spikes all over, even a pair through the eye-sockets and protruding slightly from the back of the skull. They "saw" by enhanced steel/iron burning, seeing a world of blues and shadows and the trace metals in all things. They could be killed only by disrupting the pattern of Hemalurgy that kept them going, either through decapitation or pulling a single key spike from the small of the back.

Though Rashek also used Hemalurgy to create the Koloss, something between an orc and a troll, and the shapeshifting Kandra. Among the notations in the back of Alloy of Law it claims that even Rashek barely scratched the surface of what Hemalurgy is capable of, and that it's not necessarily the dark art it can seem at first glance. I'm skeptical, not that there's more utility, anything that can create entirely new species has my respect, but I feel like anything beginning with human sacrifice is at the very least highly suspect.


In Hemalurgy you use iron stabby things to steal physical strength, tin for the senses, naturally. Steel you use on an Allomancer to steal the ability to burn one of the physical metals, and pewter to gain the ability to make a metalmind of one of them.

Copper to rip off mental fortitude, intellect and memories. Zinc for emotional stability and fortitude. Bronze to steal the ability to burn a single mental allomantic metal, and brass for mental metalminds.

Aluminum could steal the ability to burn negation metals. Atium... in the original appendix it says atium could steal the ability to burn temporal metals, but out-of-universe Sanderson clarified that an atium spike could be used to steal any quality. Likewise that duralumin steals Feruchemic negation/spiritual powers, and gold the hybrid ones.


Brandon Sanderson has said when asked that if a Mistborn burned a Hemalurgic spike their "spiritual DNA" would be mixed and shuffled with that of the person killed with it, but wouldn't elaborate on what he meant. Also that there was no reason a Hemalurgic spike couldn't become a metalmind or vice versa.