Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-24523863-20140901030628/@comment-7796572-20140912173031

Just bouncing ideas around (and I’m probably borrowing ideas from other posters), but I'm halfway certain after watching Chapter 7: I think Cinder's semblance is the ability to create black glass from burn dust (ashes, essentially, which firstly references her Cinderella theme and secondly relates to volcanic ash, which contains glass). We already know her shoes are made of black glass from the commentary in the very first episode S1CH1 [5:30], again tying into her  Cinderella  theme (also note the little black crystals in the anklet she's wearing).



In S2CH7 her boots are making a distinct clinking sound as she walks [10:49] if we take a look at her gloves and boots they have a shattered glass pattern (the same pattern appears to glow red whenever she's creating something out of dust like her swords/bow (if you pause at around [12:08], just after she blocks the fourth bullet, you can see she’s holding a dust canister in each hand as she spins and creates a sword from each). The pattern also glows when she’s blocking Ruby’s bullets (she may actually be reusing the dust from Ruby’s ammunition) but notably  not  when she activates the non-burn dust in her canister [12:03].

Another moment of importance is when the guard treads on Cinder's discarded mask at [12:36]. Sounds like glass to me.

When we see Cinder in the ballroom, her dress has the same broken glass pattern her gloves and boots were sporting earlier (13:08) and in her earrings... are those little black crystals again.



That all said we may not have seen her semblance at all: the gloves and boots themselves may be the root of most of these abilities since we saw Cinder stitching something black at the end of S2CH5 and the shattered glass pattern on the gloves and boots were still visible even when she changed into the dress. (Heck, some part of me thinks the clothes are her weapon, the bow/swords were just something they can make).