I promised a reply, and I've never been one for dramatic introductions (which is part of the reason, I suspect, that Chaos defeated me for the position of Hero of Ages), so here it is.
Now, for the sake of cohesion, I shall list the shards that I believe we know of.
1. Ruin
2. Preservation
3. Endowment
4. Hoid
5. The Dor (Possibly linked to the Pool)
6. (Possibly) The Pool
7. (Possibly) Whatever Jaddeth is / the force behind the Dakhor monks.
Ruin and Preservation I'm going to ignore, since we know quite a bit about them and are discussing the OTHER shards we know of.
Endowment So. I wanted to begin with this quote.
He turned to the side. Blushweaver’s body lay red and bloodied. He’d seen
that it in a vision. In the vague shadows of morning memory, he’d thought
that the image had been of her blushing, but now he remembered. He looked
to the side. Llarimar, eyes closed as if asleep—that image had been in his
dream as well. Lightsong realized the man had them shut as he wept.
The God King in prison. Lightsong had seen that too. But above it all,
he remembered standing on the other side of a brilliant, colorful wave of
light, looking down at the world from the other side. And seeing everything
he loved dissolve into the destruction of war. A war greater than any the
world had known, a war more deadly—even—than the Manywar.
He remembered the other side. And he remembered a voice, calm and
comforting, offering him an opportunity.
To Return.
By the Colors . . . Lightsong thought, standing up as the priests forced the
God King to his knees. I am a god.
Lightsong stepped forward, moving up to the bars of his cage. He saw
pain and tears in the God King’s face and somehow understood them. The
man did love Siri. Lightsong had seen the same thing in the queen’s eyes.
She had somehow come to care for the man who was to oppress her.
“You are my king,” Lightsong whispered. “And lord of the gods.”
The Pahn Kahl men forced the God King facedown on the stones. One
of the priests raised a sword. The God King’s arm jutted out, his hand toward
Lightsong.
I have seen the void, he thought. And I came back.
Emphasis mine.
As you can see, Lightsong does not actually talk with the voice here. He remembers that he did talk with the voice. He doesn't even repeat the conversation. As such, I do not think that we can count this as having interacted directly with a shard. Even if we did hear the voices, Lightsong is having a flashback. I'm not sure we can count a memory as direct interaction either. Either way, Endowment is NOT, as chaos has suggested, one of the Shards of Adonalsium who we have interacted with directly.
That leaves Endowment, using Chaos' numbering system, to fill either space 3 or 4. I would say probably 3, as Awakening and the Returned seem to be more manifestations of Endowment's Power rather than its Influence.
So, we right now have:
1) Unknown
2) Unknown
3)Endowment
4)Unknown
HoidI, too, remember someone authoritative saying that Hoid was bound to a shard. As such, that would make him the Cognitive part of that shard, the sentient part.
Now, Chaos mentioned something about the person eventually beginning to become like the shard they control. For instance, in HoA, Vin talks to Ruin. Now, I would like to point out that through all of this, Vin remains very much .... well, Vin. She doesn't change. Ati, however, talks as though he has been Ruin since Ruin and Preservation created Mankind. So, either a) Ati really is the original cognitive manifestation of Ruin, and was there when Ruin and Preservation created Mankind, or b) Ati
thinks that he was there, but actually wasn't. He's become so much the personality of the force (Ruin) behind the shard that he just kind of morphs to it. He's deceived himself into believing that he helped create mankind.
Compared with the original Shards, Midus (or is it Midius? I don't remember the Liar prologue) held onto his Shard a rather short time. He could retain his consciousness fairly effectively.
IIRC, in the Hoid thread it was recently proposed (and confirmed, though not by Brandon) that Hoid is in fact Midius from Dragonsteel. As such, I'd imagine that this solves the problem of Hoid being able to retain his personality. Quite simply if we go by the theory that the shards don't affect the personality of the person controlling them, then Hoid is fine. If we go by the theory that the Shards do affect that person's personality, then we can just assume that the Shard that Hoid controls is similar to what he's doing (the shard of randomly appearing everywhere?). The one theory I can think of that I like, which I probably read somewhere on here but don't remember who to give credit to, is that the shard that Hoid is bound to is the core of the original Adonalsium, and as such, would want to do what Hoid is doing. Planet hopping to all of the worlds where there are shards, maybe seeing if there was a way to reunite the shards, interfering with some shards and helping others, etc. It makes sense to me.
Anyway, the point is that Hoid is bound to a shard, and we have directly interacted with him. As Such, using Chaos' numbering system, we have:
1) Hoid
2) Unknown
3) Endowment
4) Unknown
So we now know half of them. This is where it gets a little messy.
The Dor and/or The PoolThere are two possilibities here, the Dor and the Pool being one Shard, which Ookla has named Release, or the Dor and the Pool being Two shards.
At first, I'm going to operate under the assumption that there are 2 shards here. If we go under the assertion that the Dor is mindless, and is waiting to be used (like I think Raoden suggests some time in Elantris, not really sure, correct me if I'm wrong), then we can also assume that either A) the sentient part of the Dor is gone, making it like Preservation was through most of the Mistborn books, or B) that the Sentient part of the Dor left, making it and excellent candidate for #4. However, because of another possibility I don't think either of these likely. More on this later.
Still assuming the the Dor and the pool are two seperate shards leaves us with another problem. The only thing that we really know about the power of the pool is that it provides rest for Elantrians (who are an integral part of the system with the Dor, nonetheless). We really don't have anything else to go on for this shard.
It's much easier to say that the Dor and the Pool are the same shard. We can say that the shard is called Release. It causes the Shaod to take men and transform them into Elantrians, who have the ability to Release the power of the dor (presumably from the shard, Release). It then takes the Elantrians, when they have grown tired of life/want to die, and gives them their final Release from life, putting them at peace. This makes sense.
In answer to the problem Chaos mentioned, where it seems like the pool goes counter to what would be productive to the dor by offering to give Raoden rest, I say that the instinct of the shard is Release, and even if Raoden would have been able to release the Dor more fully by not being in the pool, the Shard's instinct would still be to Release Raoden, and allow him peace. Even though it seems counter productive, it still makes sense. Kind of like Preservation making more allomancers with the mist-sickness in HoA. People died, and didn't actually know that they were being made into allomancers. Seems like it would help Ruin, yet it actually worked out in the end.
This also leaves us with another shard that we have directly interacted with, and gives us this:
1) Hoid
2) Release
3) Endowment
4) Unknown
And finally, we have
JaddethYes, I know that we don't even know that Jaddeth is a real entity. We do, however, know that the monks of Dakhor use a power that is not (so far as we know) related to Aon Dor. I propose that their magic system stems from another Shard on the Elantris world, which we will hear about in the Elantris sequel Brandon may or may not be writing. For the sake of easiness/convenience, I'm going to call this shard Jaddeth. And it conveniently fills in the missing hole in our chart. After all, by the insistance of the Fjordell or however you spell it, Jaddeth is sleeping. Or perhaps, missing from the world? Left it? It could be that Jaddeth was there and the Fjordell worship him. Jaddeth has since left. If this is the case, it could also be that the Dakhor monks are using the powers of Release (which would be a little weird), since Jaddeth is not there. That's an interesting question. Does the shard have to be on the world a magic user is on for that magic system to work. IE, in a future mistborn book, a mistborn travels to the world where Elantris is via space travel. He/she finds that he/she cannot use allomancy because preservation is not present on that world. See what I mean? Or does it matter? Maybe the magic system works everywhere. hmmm.
EDIT: I forgot to add that it also makes sense that Jaddeth left because we haven't seen his power, we've seen his influence. All of the Fjordell have been influenced by him. All the followers of that one religion that escapes me, Shu-Whatever.
Anyway, for kicks and giggles, I'm going to put Jaddeth in the 4th slot, since we really don't have any better options. I'm by no means sold on this, but I don't have any better suggestions. So:
1) Hoid
2) Release
3) Endowment
4) Jaddeth
That's my theory at the moment. I really don't have much else to offer on the matter until I see some critiques of this. So there. Yes.
EDIT: 1683 words according to word count in word. The word "Word" appears far too much in that sentence. Anyway.