"All people must accept that we have the potential to do terrible things. It is part of seeing our place in the universe, our heritage, and our natures. But in that acceptance we gain strength, for potential can be refused. Any hero who could have been a monster is more heroic for the choices he or she made to walk another road." -Lord Hesho, Cytonic

I may be reading into this wrong, but this feels like the first time I’ve read one of Sanderson books that has had such directly earthen things like strawberries and chickens. In the cytonic books they live on an alien planet so it’s fair that they don’t have that stuff, but I can’t for the life of me remember anything like those things in the Mistborn trilogy. And that one was a lot closer to being like earth. Aside from wheat, I think. If I’m wrong, then it means nothing. But why go through all the effort of designing a new ecosystem and environment but have people with stuff we normally have a mountain range over? What’s his game? There’s always a twist when it comes to this shit. In both other books there’s a twist about where the humans live, and I won’t spoil things, but I’ll just say that there’s something that has caused an unnaturality. We know from Delinar’s vision that the silver city see to exist where the shattered plains are. And there’s that whole thing of the “origin” and the hi-storms that rage from it. We know that there are likely some immortals. The people from the prologue that later went on to be known as the heralds. And one of them that got left behind, whatever “behind” meant, all that torture weird stuff. Gem hearts, blades and armor too advanced for its era, storms that are extremely powerful and have existed long enough to warp the environment around it. Delinar’s vision didn’t say anything about the environment I remember, so I assume it was the same rocky terrain that holds all of alethkar. But no shattered plains. And the houses were all wood, far too fragile for a storm. He met the radiance, so whatever happened must be after the radiance split or ‘betrayed’ or whatever. But nobody talks about the blasted subject! I mean, I get it. I wouldn’t talk about the origins of a storm in my normal day to day life because it’s common knowledge. But still it’s infuriating.