Sandbox Discussions

[Kappa]

What the hell is Odium?

[PlainDealingVillain]

Basically the incarnation of hatred. I think. He likes to wreck nice things.

[Bluelantern]

Shards that exist in the broader Cosmere (which includes most of Sanderson's work, but it all shares a character - Hoid - and some basic principles of magic, and it is possible to travel between the various worlds) include Odium, Cultivation, Honor, Endowment, Preservation, Ruin, Devotion, and Dominion. There were 16 of them in all (probably), but the other 8 are unknown (also several of them have been 'shattered', mostly at the behest of Odium). Only Ruin and Preservation reside on Scadrial, though.

Those are paired-up? What the other five do? Cultivation is any *better* than Preservation?

[Marri]

Okay, just saying, y'all started this and I have a Brandon Sanderson problem. Spoilers for various books follow.

Odium, Cultivation and Honor show up in the Stormlight Archive books. Odium spends most of his time trying to destroy everything, like the delightful incarnation of hatred he is. He killed Tanavast, who held Honor, and Honor is now "dead" (which, for a Shard, means broken into lots of itty bitty pieces and braindead but usable as a magic system.) Cultivation is around somewhere, presumably does what her name implies, and is known to have a talent for seeing the future but hasn't really interacted with much yet.

Endowment is from the book Warbreaker. It's the only Shard in its world and as far as we know is just happily toddling along and periodically bringing people back from the dead. The magic system allows you to give life to things, basically? Like, make your scarf come alive and tie someone up, make your cloak come alive and defend you from attack, there's a talking sword that gained sentience (hello, would you like to destroy some evil today?), turn dead bodies into zombies (...friendly housekeeping zombies? mostly?), those sorts of things.

Preservation and Ruin, from the Mistborn books, went to Scadrial. You're familiar. In canon, they are eventually both picked up by the same person and are merged into a single power renamed Harmony.

Devotion and Dominion are from the book Elantris. Odium killed them both, like the charming psychopathic godling that he is, and they exist in shattered form like Honor does.

So the problem with bringing in any of these gods? They're either dead or care way more about stopping Odium. Because Preservation has Ruin moooostly in hand, and even if he doesn't, Ruin hasn't looked inclined to leave his particular universe. It's the god equivalent of "sorry, we have to deal with the serial killer before we can get to the domestic abuse."

[Nemo]

What the hell is Odium?

Exactly the hell is Odium.

Its current planet is known in a major religion as "Damnation," and followers believe that the worst people end up there when they die. (But I don't remember reading this, and it's marked citation needed in the wiki. So maybe not.) Odium is the Bigger Bad of one of the Cosmere series and probably eventually all of them. It wants to be the only Shard, which isn't necessarily too bad except that it would likely involve multiple apocalypses from killing gods while people are still using them. And that you don't want the only god to be something called Odium. Also, its methodology seems to involve proxy wars somehow. This is convenient because it means protagonists have something to do.


Shards aren't all paired up; Preservation and Ruin got that way because they are precise opposites. Others may or may not share worlds in groups of two, but only those two form a pair.
What Shards do is hard to say. I could describe the magic systems powered by some of them, but that doesn't necessarily mean much about their goals or methods. Like, Allomancy is Preservation's thing but it doesn't preserve things in any obvious way like how Hemalurgy is obviously Ruin-ous.
Cultivation being better than Preservation, eh probably. At least, a world where humans are cultivated sounds a lot Friendlier than one where they're preserved.

And I see Marri beat me to most of this while I was Googling quotes. Awesome!
One clarification, the form of "dead" that Honor, Devotion, and Dominion are is not the same thing as what happened to Preservation when it died to trap Ruin. As far as I know, the only practical difference between a Shard being splintered (Honor et al.) and a Shard having its holder die (Preservation) is whether or not someone else can pick up the Shard afterward. Also that the splinters may go on to cause other magic stuff. I'm not sure whether or not any previous magic system would still work.

And the talking sword is hilarious. Because the thing about creating an artifact of dread power to destroy evil? You have to define evil. They didn't do that. (Hey! That person looks evil! Can we destroy them? A little?)

[PlainDealingVillain]

Odium, Cultivation, Honor, Endowment, Preservation, Ruin, Devotion, and Dominion

Those are paired-up? What the other five do? Cultivation is any *better* than Preservation?

We don't know a ton about what several of the other named shards do, since the plot of those novels haven't gotten too close to the shards. They don't come in pairs for the most part; Endowment is on a world by itself, Odium, Cultivation, and Honor all share a world, and Devotion and Dominion share a world but aren't opposites the way Ruin/Preservation are.

Devotion spontaneously gives power to people who are really invested in something; one is a probably-autistic child who cares a lot about knowing the distances between things, another is a prince who is devoted to his country, several are craftsmen who immerse themselves in their work. The society that is probably based on worship of Dominion is intensely hierarchical and has structured master-servant relationships forming the organization of their religion-government; magic is also probably country-specific or race-specific in that world, which may demonstrate Dominion's influence. (books: Elantris and The Emperor's Soul, which are otherwise unrelated)

Honor's magic requires taking oaths and abiding by them; Cultivation's society puts farmers as the highest status (then again, they also live in the only country with dirt on that whole world). Cultivation may somehow be related to the Honor magic, as well, but we don't know that well, because that series is still ongoing and will be enormous. Odium is probably connected to some massive storms that circle the world scouring it horribly every few days (which is why most of it doesn't have dirt any more). (series: the Stormlight Archive)

Endowment seems to be about gifts, and possibly trust. The magic is all about Breath, which everyone has one of but which can't do much unless you have many; you get no passive magic until you have 50, and need to temporarily grant them to Awaken things, and grant more for more complex orders (sometimes hundreds, and the sword took 1000 Breaths and required the person doing it to have 20,000 left over.) (EDIT: was wrong about a bunch of this chunk, Marri checked the magic reference in Warbreaker and corrected me.) (book: Warbreaker)

But yeah, not clear that the other Shards would care that much about stopping Ruin, and they all have bigger problems to deal with elsewhere.

Last-minute postscript: Agree with most of what Nemo wrote, though there's some pretty suggestive elements to all the magic, even Preservation/Allomancy; to activate Allomantic powers, you need to 'snap', which requires stressful, usually dangerous situations and as the noble's power gets diluted requires the allomancer's lives to be put at risk. (The nobility institutionalizes abuse to trigger potential allomancers. Scadrial sucks for everyone except The Lord Ruler himself.)

[Adelene]

Scadrial-happily-ever-after-terribleness sounds like an interestingly Teah-sized problem, to me. (Have we established whether Teah can hear wishes from planets other than the one he's on? Intuition says yes and that might throw a spanner in the works, but if not, or if it's harder, or whatever.)

[DanielH]

He can, but only within a worldsheaf. He was sent to Cam's living room in Hell and started messing with Earth, Heaven, and Limbo too (once Cam mentioned they exist). He still needed to be sent to Hell from Elcenia, though.

[Adelene]

My intuition actually says that Heaven, Hell, and Limbo are in some sense closer to Earth than, say, Alpha Centauri is. This is obviously very incorrect in the usual sense, but the sense in which it is true could still be the relevant one.

(Also, Teah is a Joker; it isn't especially unlikely that he'd consider Preservation the more important problem regardless. Or multitask.)

[DanielH]

I don't think meters are the right unit for measuring distance between worlds, same sheaf or not, any more than they're the right unit for measuring the difference between two terminals on a battery if your goal is to power a circuit with that battery. Probably less, because there's still a conventional distance between two battery terminals, but not between worlds.