First off ... I became recently aware of Brandon through TWoT goings on and such; stumbled across the Warbreaker ebook, downloaded it and devoured it in 2 days time. Really enjoyed it ... very creative, unique magic system, nice characters and character arcs, so forth and so on, effusive praise, effusive praise. Nice job.
Now ... ****SPOILER ALERT****
I just started re-reading it and noticed in the prologue a hint as to Vasher's Returned status, right after he received the Breaths from Vahr:
"Vasher could, of course, have up to the Fifth Heightening at any time, if he wished. That would require certain sacrifices he wasn't willing to make. And so he forced himself to do it the old-fashioned way, by gathering Breaths from people like Vahr." [e-book v.1, pg 22]
Of course I didn't realize it the first time through, but now the reference to having up to the Fifth Heightening at any time makes sense ... Vasher could, as he did at the end of the book, revert back to Returned status with its accompanying mega-one-breath-equal-to-2,000-normal-breaths. This raises a number a questions/presumptions. Do all Returned have the ability to revert back to normal human proportions? (i.e., could Lightsong or Blushweaver or any of the other Hallandren gods have done the same thing?) In this process, what happens to the uber-Breath? Vivenna and others with Breath did not sense it ... has it been transferred to an object? or does it just become muted?
And what's up with the 2 of the 5 Scholars that we meet in the book (Vasher and Denth) both having reverted back to human form? Of course, this question presumes that all of the 5 scholars were Returned (are we ever told that?). So, presumably Denth, like Vasher, was also Returned and decided, like Vasher, to forego the god-like Returned status in order to ... do what? walk among normal folk and influence affairs? Can we presume that their decision to do so was a result of the Manywar and its aftermath? It seems like we've been given a rationale for Vasher to make this transformation (i.e., he did not like what he had become or what lengths he had to go to in order to end the Manywar), but what rationale would Denth have had for giving up god-like status?
Just some thoughts rattling around ...