Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Hemalurgically, atium steals Allomantic Temporal Powers. But, that seems unlikely, since atium is a god metal. It wouldn't fit in with the rest of the magic system. Did Preservation, in addition to switching Cadmium and Bendalloy for Atium and Malatium, also switch atium's Feruchemical and Hemalurgic powers with Cadmium? Because it seems to me there's not a lot of atium Marsh can use to live for hundreds of years into the next Mistborn trilogy.

Preservation wanted Atium and Malatium to be of use to the people, as he recognized that it would be a very powerful tool—and that using it up could help defeat Ruin. But he also recognized that sixteen was a mythological important number, and felt it would make the best sign for his followers. So he took out the most unlikely (difficult to make and use) metals for his sign to his followers. But that doesn't have much to do with Hemalurgy's use here.

Remember that the tables—and the ars Arcanum—are 'in world' creations. (Or, at least, in-universe.) The knowledge represented in them is as people understand it, and can always have flaws. That was the case with having atium on the table in the first place, and that was the case with people (specifically the Inquisitors) trying to figure out what atium did Hemalurgically.

Their experiments (very expensive ones) are what determined that atium (which they thought was just one of the sixteen metals) granted the Allomantic Temporal powers. What they didn't realize is that atium (used correctly) could steal ANY of the powers. Think of it as a wild card. With the right knowledge, you could use it to mimic any other spike. It works far better than other spikes as well.

As for Marsh, he's got a whole bag of atium (taken off of the Kandra who was going to try to sell it.) So he's all right for quite a while. A small bead used right can reverse age someone back to their childhood.

But this was a little beyond their magical understanding at the time.

Theoryland

Uh—oh.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

THis is a very very minor spoiler. It's just a statement that was made in Alloy of Law, that Smokers could...

BRANDON SANDERSON

Oh yeah, that was just a typo.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

Is that going to change things?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Wait, go ahead and say it.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

Can Copperclouds shield others' emotions?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Oh okay. Did we put that in Alloy of Law in the Ars Arcanum? Is that wwhere you read it?

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

I forget. I don't remember where it is.

BRANDON SANDERSON

I believe it’s in the Ars Arcanum, which in Alloy of Law was put together by Peter. And that’s mostly a mistake, though the thing is the Role Playing Game came to me and said “Is it feasible that this could happen?” And I said “It’s perhaps feasible, but only a very rare individual could make this work if they knew exactly what they were doing.” And so I said “Yeah, go ahead, but make it a power that someone really has to know what they’re doing to make it work.” And so they put it in, and so Peter assumed that it was canon, that anyone can do it, but that’s not what I intended.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

So would it be easier to say that somebody discovered they could do it and now they are training copperclouds to do it?

BRANDON SANDERSON

I would say that it is viable that someone could figure it out, but it would be a very difficult thing to train, and it is not a common Coppercloud—A common Coppercloud isn’t going to be able to be doing it, and almost no Mistborn will ever be capable of doing it, they just don’t focus on that metal enough to learn it. Of course, there aren’t Mistborn around anymore. So it is a possible power, it is plausible, but it is not the standard. Perhaps I will allow it to become the standard eventually, but it’s not right now. It would be much easier to wear a tinfoil hat. (laughter) Aluminum, aluminum. Which does work.

So what happens if you have a Bendalloy bubble, and then another Bendalloy bubble inside of it?

It will compound and double, and it will multiply. Bendalloy is one of the metals from Alloy of Law if you haven’t read it, as this person obviously has, or has read the Ars Arcanum, you’ll find out what it does.

How many Feruchemical powers have you revealed in the Alloy of Law?

In the Ars Arcanum in the back, I have revealed them all. I have not explained them all. (laughter), But I have revealed them all, they are in the back, so you are free to theorize what they mean.

What the heck is Investiture?

I’m not going to say that because it would be a spoiler for those who haven’t read the Ars Arcanum yet.

These are things that I overheard.

Kelsier was not spiked.

Part of the Lord Ruler's motivation for setting up The Final Empire was revenge against the people he viewed as encroaching on his people's land. He was also obsessed with creating order, which Ruin later exploited.

The Ars Arcanum in the books were all written by one person.

The author of the Ars Arcanum is either Hoid or a member of the Seventeenth Shard. Brandon also pointed to an annotation on the map of Elendel that's relevant to this question.

There's just the one system in Warbreaker, and it's also a world with only one Shard on it.

Can Hemalurgy be used to steal magic attributes from any Shardworld?

Hemalurgy has larger ramifications then just Scadrial. That's about all he'd say.

The Stormlight archive is a very big book. Do you have plans of including a glossary that's more expansive than the ars arcanum?

If I do make a glossary, it will probably be on my website. Perhaps I'll be able to slip in a longer glossary into future books. The problem is that the first book is already so long, as you said. I just don't have the pages for it now. As the series expands, maybe.

The thing is, I've always partially liked a glossary and partially not liked them, because as series get longer and longer, you have to make decisions about what to include and what not to include. Using the glossary in the backs of the Wheel of Time books is somewhat bittersweet because it only covers around one percent of the things you'd want to be in there. So in some ways it's become irrelevant, because most of the things you'll want to look up are not going to be there. It seems like it served its purpose best in the early to middle books, but now if you really want to know you've got to go to Encyclopedia WoT or a similar site. So maybe we'll just do an online glossary or send people to one of the fan-created wikis.

The person who wrote the Ars Arcanum in Alloy of Law, is that the same person who wrote the Letter in Way of Kings.

Its not confirmed, but it's either Hoid, or someone in the 17th Shard. (However, thinking back, I'm not sure if he fully heard/understood the question, and perhaps he was expecting it to be something else. But it seems to me that if he namedropped Hoid, that he may have misunderstood the question, as it seems very likely that Hoid wrote the Letter, I dont think he'd let something slip like that. So i would count this information as rather tenuous.)

Who wrote the "Ars Arcanum"? Since the writer obviously had knowledge of the Cosmere I assumed that it was you making an editorial note, but then I thought that it could be Hoid (who was suspiciously absent) or Sazed or any Shardbearer... Does that make sense at all?

The Ars Arcanum is written in-cosmere by someone, but I don't want to saw who yet.

When did Preservation decide to imprison Ruin in the Well? No need to be specific, I should think. A simple "Near Alendi's time" or "Way before Alendi's time" would suffice, or whichever time of reference you want to use.

Also, this one is not a question, but nice Hoid reference in there. I especially like it how the Ars Arcanum refers to Slowswift as "bears a striking resemblance to a well-known storyteller." I'm on to you...

Brandon, I just wanted to confirm that you did have a couple of cameos as Slowswift? Or was that mean to be someone else?

CHAOS

I'm pretty sure Slowswift is Hoid. The Ars Arcanum says he "bears a striking resemblance to a storyteller", which I take to mean Hoid.

Slowswift is an homage to Grandpa Tolkien. A study of his personality will reveal why that name was chosen for him.

BRANDON SANDERSON

Hoid appears in that same chapter, but Vin doesn't meet him. Something he does spooks her. She's just too darn observant for her own good.

You hired four artists to contribute to this book…

Yes.

17TH SHARD

…and had their artwork included in the book. Why did you decide to do this?

BRANDON SANDERSON

When I say four artists I am including Michael Whelan whom I didn't hire, the company commissioned, so we really have three interior artists and then Michael Whelan who did the beautiful cover. Again, I wanted to use the form of this novel to try and enhance what epic fantasy can do, and downplay the things that are tough about it. One of the tough things about epic fantasy is the learning curve. How much you have to learn a pay attention to, how many things there are to just know. I felt that occasional illustrations could really help with that. For instance, how Shallan's sketch book, or uses of multiples maps, could give us a visual component to the book. You know, pictures really are worth a thousand words. You can have on that page something that shows a creature much better than I can describe it. And so I felt that that would help deemphasize the problem of the learning curve, while at the same time helping to make this world real. Epic fantasy is about immersion, and I wanted to make this world real since that's one of the great things we can do with epic fantasy. We've got the space and the room to just build a completely real world, and I felt that the art would allow me to do that, which is why I decided to do "in world" art.

I didn't want to take this toward a graphic novel. I like graphic novels but it wasn't appropriate here to do illustrations of the scenes and characters from the books, because I don't want to tell you what they look like. I want that to be up to your own imagination. And so we wanted that "in world" ephemera feel to it, as though it were some piece of art that you found in the world and included.

I think it goes back to Tolkien. There's a map in The Hobbit, and that map isn't just a random map, which has become almost a cliché of fantasy books, and of epic fantasy. "Oh, of course there's a random map in the front!" Well [Tolkien] wanted you to think this map was the actual map the characters carried around and that's why he included it. He wrote his books as if he were the archivist putting them together and translating them and bringing them to you, this wonderful story from another world, and he included the map because the map was there with the notes. That's what I wanted the feel for this ephemera to be. As though whoever's been writing the Ars Arcanum for all of the books has collected this book together, done the translation and included pieces of art and maps and things that they found in the world that had been collected during these events, and that's what you're getting.

In the Ars Arcanum of the Way of Kings, next to the Essences are listed ten Body Focuses. Are these Body Focuses the focus (in Cosmere terms) of Surgebinding?

RAFO.

So I was reading the Alloy of Law, and at the end I read through the Ars Arcanum. And I got confused because it’s written in first person, but it refers to Harmony in third person. I thought he was writing it, so who writes that part?

That’s a good question for you to be asking, one which people have been curious about, and I have not yet answered who writes all of the Ars Arcanum, but they are in-world, somebody's writing them. If you ever read The Way of Kings, it’s written in first-person too.

QUESTION

Are they all written by the same person?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Ah, have I answered that yet?

JOSH

You should.

BRANDON SANDERSON

I should? They are all written by the same person.

QUESTION

Because it sounds like they’re written by Hoid, I think.

BRANDON SANDERSON

They are all written by the same person.

Brandon, have we seen a point of view chapter from the character who writes the Ars Arcanum?

I’m not gonna tell you that. That would be way too much giving away.

QUESTION

Is the character who writes the Ars Arcanum from Sel originally?

BRANDON SANDERSON

I’m not gonna tell you anything about the character who writes the Ars Arcanum.

Yes, it is in cosmere

Question

Because it seems like it'd be written by someone like Hoid.

Brandon Sanderson

It's not him. I don't know if I've released who it is; but it's probably not who people are thinking but it is in-world.

Does Khriss write the Ars Arcanum?

Can a Seeker inside a Coppercloud Seek someone out of one?

What about a Soother instead of a Seeker?

Do all Epics' weaknesses come from things in their past?

RAFO.

It is possible.

Yes, again possible.

RAFO.

It's kind of surprising to me, but to some people, appendices like this can be very divisive topics. There are people who will pick up a book and check to see if it has a map and appendix—and if it has both, they're more likely to read it. (I was actually one of these when I was younger.) I guess the philosophy here, if I analyze my teenage self, was that if an author put so much work into a book—and if the book was so complex—that there had to be an appendix, then that was a book I wanted to read.

Others have the opposite reaction, I've come to learn. I've met people who think that this sort of thing in the back of a book indicates that the author is sloppy, and can't tell a tight story. Or, that the story is going to be too complicated to enjoy.

In Elantris, my first book, I fought for a pronunciation guide and a cast of characters in the back. I like appendixes, though now it's mostly because my untrustworthy brain often forgets who characters are. With the Mistborn trilogy being as complex as (hopefully) I want it to be, I figured I'd need cast lists in order to help you remember book one when reading book two.

So, book two has a bigger appendix. However, I wanted to do something in this one as well. One thing I knew people were going to ask about was a way to keep the metals straight. That's why I developed the quick reference chart, and my friend Isaac did that beautiful metal table for a visual reference—I absolutely love how it looks.

The name "Ars Arcanum" deserves a note as well. I've always liked how Ann McCaffery named her appendix the 'Dragondex' in the back of her Pern books. One of the biggest draws of my books are the magic systems, and since I intend to do a new one for every series I write (and many, like the Mistborn trilogy, will have multiple magic systems per series) I wanted some sort of 'catch all' title I could name the appendixes in each of my books.

I fiddled around for a while. Ars Magica was my first choice, since it's kind of a cool Latinate take on 'Magical Arts' or 'Magical Skills.' However, there's an RPG out with that name, and I figured I wanted to stay away from their title. Ars Arcanum, then, was my next choice. I ended up liking it better, if only because it has a little more true Latinate feel to it.

My magic systems are generally like a new science for the world in which they are practiced, so I like the feel this gives. Hopefully, you found this appendix useful. If not, I suspect you'll really appreciate the one in book two, as the cast of characters there will provide a lot of helpful reminders.

Question

Can you mix a form of magic with a source of investiture ? Vasher uses stormlight replacing Breath or that requires (word I don't understand) like Hemalurgy or something like that ?

Brandon Sanderson

Most of them required (again the word I don't understand). Some of them are little bit easier than others. It's depends on really what you need. For istance, white sand can be charged in the presence of any Investiture right? But it's not really using the magic, is just charging it with other Investiture but you know it would be very easy for istance to use Breath to fuel...Windrunning right? Because the oath and the bond and things like that make it pretty easy. However fueling Allomancy with something else is going to be a lot harder. So it really depends on the magic. It's the sort of thing that there will be lots of science in the books dedicated to making happen in the future and you will find some of the process these work easiser than other ones.