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We've seen Kandra True Bodies made of crystal, stone, or wood. Can a kandra use a True Body made of metal? If so, what happens if each metal "bone" had a Hemalurgic charge, and each one is touching an appropriate bind point?
Yes. And that would work, better than you think, because Kandra have fluid bind points. But too many spikes can be dangerous to the psyche, even with Ati not messing things up.
If I were to cut an Elantrian's head off, would it still live? Just the head, the body, both or perhaps neither of them?
The body would grow a new head, as most of the soul is in that part.
Where did the body Kelsier is using come from?
That’s actually a RAFO. You will find out about that, probably in a Secret History, if I get to it. Eventually, I’ll answer that question for people. I don’t want to answer it now, because it is something I could put into a book.
I just realized that his body, most of it was gone. The bones might still be around.
The bones were in use, and were in Hero of Ages. The bones had made an appearance. They were still around, but whether that’s what he’s using, I’ll leave.
I didn’t think putting a spike into his skull [...]
You’ll find that out eventually.
When a Radiant is in the Cognitive Realm, does their mind exist individually, like separately from their body?
Uhh, no.
So you physically travel to the Cognitive Realm?
You can kind of step in between both but you do not separate from your body.
So when Shallan is only partly in...she's in both at the same time?
Yeah. She's transitioning. It's not astral projection. But no that's a legit question.
So Shallan, and Lightweavers, are capable of physically stepping into Shadesmar?
RAFO. But the implication is yes.
The First Generation Arrive
The First Generation are different from the other generations. Other kandra were born from mistwraiths that had bred true, becoming their own species. The Firsts, however, were humans who were changed directly into kandra. They aren't as good at holding their bodies together as creatures who were born first as mistwraiths. Someone like TenSoon carries with him a heritage of intuition and instinct gained by his previous life as a mistwraith.
The Firsts don't have that. They haven't practiced taking new bodies—in fact, only a couple of them have ever even done such a thing. They've spent their lives in the Homeland and don't know how to use their powers. The skin droops from their bones, and they look—and feel—old, something that doesn't happen to other kandra.
Here, oddly, is the first climax of the TenSoon chapters. He's not there to see it, but his words are what finally convinced the Firsts to come down from their alcoves and face the truth that the end has come.
Also, Moshe, I still think those should be podiums rather than lecterns.
How did Inquisitors find Atium mistings?
They spike the drinks at one of the nobility's balls with trace amounts of Atium, then cause a bit disturbance. (Often, the Inquisitors themselves arriving will do it) and burn bronze and watch for brief pulses. The body will burn metals instinctively if it can, which has been shown quite often in the series. This is also how they get a lot of their secret information about who is a Misting and who isn't. It's not a perfect method, since you have to watch for Copperclouds messing things up, but it is effective once in a while.
Any time an obligator who is not a Misting joins the Ministry, he is unknowingly given a larger chunk of atium and then forced into a series of rituals that will drain him physically and get the body to react and burn the metal. This was how Yomen was discovered.
TenSoon wonders, and I wonder too- How can kandra think and be sentient without brains? Doesn't the body need a physical coordinator to relay between the Physical and Cognitive realm? Or do the spikes do a good enough job with that?
I imagine kandra having a non-centralized nervous system, with brain power spread through their bodies. Well, non-centralized is probably the wrong way to say it. They have lobes of thought and memory attached to muscles here and there, and don't have a single 'brain.' They certainly have brain-like material, though.
Did Jasnah's body die, and she made a new one?
No, she actually transferred her body to the other side... I actually even wrote the scene where it happened, but I didn't end put it any books... That's what Elsecallers do, is they teleport. That's one of their things.
Did Sazed leave information about how his new religion should be run for Spook and the others to find? His note to Spook implies that there is an afterlife...
Sazed didn't immediately leave this, as he was too focused on other things. The next period of time will be difficult for Sazed, as he essentially sees himself as an avatar of deity—the force of Preservation—and not God with an upper case letter. He's still not sure what Truth is 100%. And there is an afterlife, but it's probably not what you're thinking. In other words, Sazed has not touched Heaven or Hell, and actually doesn't yet know what the final beyond contains. He has, however, run into some people who have been sticking around something of a middle place. It's related to the larger cosmology, and I'm afraid that I'll need to RAFO anything further.
Vasher Fights the Soldiers and Finally Pulls Nightblood
In my annotations, I've often talked about focus scenes. These are the scenes of a book that I imagine cinematically before I sit down and write the novel. They're part of what drives me to want to work on that book in particular, and I need a few really good ones before I'll write a book.
This was one of the primary focus scenes for this book. I had this in mind before I developed a lot of the rest of the story. I'm glad that I was able to write to a point where I was able to use it. Vasher, Awakening a rope to save himself, then fighting alongside Awakened sets of clothing. Then finally, at long last, drawing Nightblood. You probably knew that had to happen in this book. I certainly built up to it long enough.
I originally imagined the pulling of Nightblood from a body a little like a dark "sword in the stone" moment. I don't think that quite made the transition to the final book, but hopefully the image of a black sword leaking smoke is visually potent for you. I ended the scene in my head with Vasher standing amid those puffs of black smoke that used to be bodies, Nightblood at his side, feeding off of him with pulsing black veins.
What would a kandra without a body look like?
A kandra without a body is kind of a blob. It's a pile of muscles. It looks pretty gross.
My question has to do with the color of Shallan's eyes currently, because we've noticed over the books that Kaladin's eyes, as he's continued to use his Surge, changed to lighter and lighter blue. Whereas one could argue that Shallan is farther in her Ideals than Kaladin is, yet her eyes have not changed at all.
Right, 'cause they were already light.
'Cause they were already light? So it only affects lightness or darkness in the eyes, not necessarily any other color?
It's not like it is-- It's not like it's saying "Light minus 50%".
It's not like Honor is blue and--
No. It is not. It is just kind of the way that the changes the Stormlight is making the body and certain people are already descended from people who had repeated, over time, changes by the body which stopped physically... That's not to say that all lighteyes that's where they came from. There are some that are natural mutations.
How do the Heralds come back? As Cognitive Shadows, how do they a physical body?
That system will be explained in the coming books, so that is a RAFO. I'm gonna dig into it pretty deeply. It's relevant for multiple reasons...
In the original version, Taln ended up in someone else, like they would get a body from someone else, which was part of fueling the "Is he crazy, is he not," because people were like, "I recognize this guy!" I don't use that system anymore.
That's what I was wondering, because the Fused--
They use something kind of more like the Fused in the original draft, it's not that process anymore.
Is that gonna give us lead-ins to how it worked with Kelsier?
Maybe. Maybe. You shall see.
Very careful roleplayers have counted the numbers of Inquisitors appearing in the novels and they claim there must have been 25 if Vin and Elend killed two Inquisitors between Mistborn 2 and Mistborn 3. Could you clarify the numbers of Inquisitors there were? They've literally counted.
They literally, yeah…No, I mean, I've got it written down somewhere. I'm now so separated from this book. I had always imagined there being around three dozen Inquisitors at any given time.
Oh, okay, so quite a bit more than 20.
Right. Well the thing you've gotta remember is that, with the powers they're given, they're pretty much immune to disease and things like that, particularly after they've gained their healing spike.
Right. Is that common to all Inquisitors?
It does not come to all. It comes to almost all. That's a pretty common one, but being an Inquisitor does not mean you get it. I think it mentions in the books that there's one spike that they all get, but I can't remember what it is.
I would imagine that would…well, okay, a steel spike so they could see.
Right. Yeah, obvious, but the thing is you've gotta have a Keeper to be able give a healing spike. The ones alive now pretty much all have healing spikes, but there were times throughout history when he needed a new Inquisitor and he didn't have a Keeper (a Feruchemist) handy. He could make an Inquisitor without that. That is not what's keeping them alive from the spikes being driven through their bodies.
So the linchpin spike is not always the same type of spike.
It doesn't have to be. The linchpin spike is just, when you're putting that many spikes together into somebody it needs a spike to coordinate them all. That is part of what's holding their body together from all of this damage, and it doesn't have to be the healing spike. The nature of Feruchemy is separate from that, if that makes any sense. For instance, you could put a few spikes into an Inquisitor without a linchpin spike, and they wouldn't die.
There is that scene where Kaladin takes a sharp turn at high speeds and he almost blacks out. That is normal for jet pilots, since they experience high G forces when their airplane tries to accelerate them by their backs and bottoms.
But Lashing doesn't work that way, it generates fake gravity. Accelerating your whole body shouldn't cause you anything, you can't even feel it.
Is this something that is an admitted physics hiccup or I misunderstood this kind of Investiture usage?
This one is actually in the process of flux, as I do more research on the effects of acceleration (including interviews with fighter pilots, which has been fun.) Basically, I realized I needed to beef up my understanding of all this, and then make some decisions on exactly how this all works, because I've been relying on instinct too much in some of these sequences.
So...that's a RAFO, I'm afraid. More because I'm still tweaking some of the little details of how I want this all to work. (In ways that become increasingly relevant as I look forward toward things like Windrunners in space.)
There are a ton of details to consider, even if I eventually hand-wave some of it with the magic. (For example, the heart pumping blood in a high-g environment. How does that interact, if at all, with stormlight? And the direct oxygenation of the brain implied by not needing to breathe while holding stormlight...)
We have several very large math-ish projects going on behind the scenes.
I think it depends on if lashing independently impacts each atom within your body simultaneously, or if it is only a subset.
There's one important fact you're not considering, but which is vital: reader expectation.
One of the questions I have to ask myself is this: What will the reader expect to happen? How will they expect to feel? Granted, none of us have ever flown like this before--but we generally imagine similar things, similar feelings.
As a writer, one thing I need to balance is when I go against reader expectations and when I don't. Going against the expectations can be interesting, but often takes a large burden of words and explanation to keep reminding them something is not how they'd imagine it to be.
For example, it took a relatively large amount of reader attention (and explanation) to keep reminding people in Mistborn that plants weren't green and the sky wasn't blue. In many ways, making something new (like a chull) is easier on readers than making something familiar into something strange (like the horses in Dragonsteel, which were smaller than Earth horses--and kept causing confusion problems in my alpha readers.)
As annoying as this example can me, this is why Lucas had sound, fire, gravity, etc in space. Starships banking in formation felt real to the viewers, even if it didn't make sense in context. I hope to not go that far, but these questions are something in my mind.
I try to be careful not to remove the sensations of magic, in order to keep the movements of characters grounded. Windrunning has left me having to decide how far I want to go with things like this, in order to preserve the visceral feelings for the reader.
Does Sazed's biological body still exist somewhere? If so, does that body still possess Feruchemical abilities?
Yes, it does exist, though kind of...blended-in, so to speak, as happened with the others when they Ascended. Yes, it still has his abilities, though they are kind of moot now.
The character Spook, is there a pattern to Spook's street slang?
Yes, but it's a really loose one. It was based off of some rhyming slangs, some street slangs, and some things that I researched, where it would evolve day by day, and they would throw in some extraneous words just to confuse people that weren't speak it. It was also based on Internet slang. And so, yes, there are rules, but the rules are kind of loose and free, and you can add weird words when you want to. You basically put everything in the past progressive and then you add lots of extra "to be" phrases. Then you reverse a few of your syntaxes, and then you go for it.
So it's practicing a whole lot to sound improvised.
Yes. [...] Wasing the being of complicated to be. No, complicated to see. Yeah.
I have a rather simple question. What was Spook's real name? He gives a easternese slang term that becomes his name, then he goes by his Kelsier-given nick. So, what was his birth name? (Yes, I wonder about random things like that.)
Jedal. After his father.
Which is the reason why Spook didn't like using it.
In the Ars Arcanum of The Way of Kings, next to the Essences are listed ten Body Focuses. Are these Body Focuses the focus (in cosmere terms) of Surgebinding?
RAFO. :)
Can a Windrunner use a Basic Lashing on a specific body part?
Yes, but it works the same way a Steelpusher could push on a specific part of metal. Usually, you'd just affect the whole body, because of its Identity and cosmere magic not working as well on parts of something that considers itself a unit. When you're very skilled, you can isolate a hand, like Kelsier could push on specific sections of metal.
Is the focus for Surgebinding the Body Focuses?
Is the body the focus for Surgebinding, I think is what he meant.
Oh, okay. The Physical? Surgebinding is... Yeah, kinda. That's a "yeah, kinda."
The Sliding Scale of Allomantic Potential
Noblemen, despite what Spook says in this chapter, are not immune to the mistsickness. The rumor Spook is referencing does have merit, however. You see, since the mists are Snapping people and awakening the Allomantic potential within them, it will affect far fewer noblemen than skaa. Why? Because a lot of the noblemen have already Snapped. They were beaten as children to bring out the powers.
However, that won't stop all of them from being affected by the mistsickness, because the mistsickness is also awakening Allomantic potential that would otherwise be too subtle to be brought out. Pretend there's a sliding scale of Allomantic potential. 100% means you're an Allomancer—in this series, only two people have hit 100%—Vin and Elend. Buried within a lot of people, however, is enough of a touch of Preservation's power to hit, say, 50% on the relative scale of Allomantic power. These people, when beaten and made to pass through something traumatic, awaken to their Allomantic abilities.
There are a lot of people out there, however, with something more like 20% to 30%. These are the people the mists are Snapping—since the mists are, themselves, partially the power of Preservation, they can touch people and increase their Allomantic potential slightly and then bring it to the forefront.
Hoid worldhops between places. How did he do it on Scadrial? With Ati's body?
So, there were two perpendicularities on Scadrial.
I know he uses the pools, but how did he do it with Pits of Hathsin? There was no pool? The body was there...
So, it doesn't have to be going through the pool. What happens with a perpendicularity is, where there is a massive collection of Investiture, it pulls a conduit through. So, if you know what you're doing and where you are, you can get through that.
So you don't have to use the pools, just where there's a huge concentration...
A huge concentration of Investiture will warp the realms.
So can anyone worldhop that way, then? If they know what to do?
If they know what to do, in a perpendicularity, anyone should be able to get through there. But as proven with Raoden, if you don't know what it's supposed to do, nothing happens. He gets dumped int he pool, he thinks he's gonna die... nothing. So, it's more than just being there.
That's how he went from the Physical to the Cognitive, so I was wondering how did he do that at the Pits of Hathsin, when there shouldn't be a pool there
Well, that is the equivalent.
Was the book Wax reading written by the guy who gave it to him?
No, it was not.
Spook? Sounds like Spook's voice
It certainly doesn't sound like Marsh.
Before Preservation locked up Ruin, or whatever, or if Ruin had won. Would atium exist?
...There are timelines where there would be no atium.
...So if Harmony exists, does atium exist?
Atium does not exist because there is no Ati. Well there is atium left over from before, but--
So it was only part of Ati's body and not part of Harmony's body.
There is no atium, there is no Preservation any longer, there is no Ati.
So does harmonium exist?
...There's no Leras and there's no Ati, there's no Ruin--
Does harmonium exist then?
Good question.
So in Words of Radiance, at the end of the book, the singers in their Stormform can summon red lightning and it's revealed Shardplate can neutralize it. I was wondering, can Shardplate neutralize ALL electric discharges or just the "special" kind from Voidlight/voidspren powered from.
And if Shardplate can defend against lightning in general is their a maximum voltage/amperage before it loses effectiveness?
In my mind - the plate likely acts like a Faraday cage - essentially allowing the lightning to never have a path through the user's body (electricity moving through your body is how you get injured). This would assume that Shardplate is conductive.
If they jumped, then likely the lightning would again travel through the outside Shardplate metal and then to ground - again avoiding the human altogether..... That said, small aluminum airplanes have been known to have damage to wings from strikes. In the case of Shardplate, I doubt that thermal shock or melting temperature is an issue for the material.
This is along the lines of what I was thinking, though I'm not sure I have a maximum volt/amp answer handy.
Was basically asking to find out if I can use Shardplate users against Electromaster characters on /r/whowouldwin
Then I give you an official, "Yes you can."
Penrod's Dying Message
Here we get to see the aftermath of Marsh spiking Penrod. This is what could have happened with Spook, had he not made the decision he did at the end of his sequence of chapters. I figured that after watching Spook's narrative, we didn't need to explicitly see what Penrod did to cause so much destruction and damage, ending with his own death. Knowing that he was spiked, then seeing TenSoon's reaction to the terrible things happening in the city, should be enough to let your imagination flow.
In truth, it was a house war—which I believe was mentioned earlier in the text—that did much of this damage. The dangers that Kelsier rioted up and nearly loosed on the city four years before finally snapped and were allowed to run free. (Previously, Elend held off the skaa and the nobility from tearing the city to pieces.)
Poor Luthadel. It has taken a real beating. First the rebellion, then the siege, and now this. This is our last scene in the city for the series; we leave it behind as a corpse.
Note, however, that are indeed people hiding underneath Kredik Shaw, as Elend feared. A lot of them, in fact. As many as fled to the pits. But I didn't want to deal with this in the book, as it would be distracting.
Will we ever see Spook again?
You are unlikely... Okay how about-- Spook's touch is all over the books everywhere. So if you watch in the new ones, things he has done have had lasting ramifications. So you-- you will probably hear from him again, but it might be in the form of journals and things like that.
I get it that sometimes writers have organic process when they're writing sometime, they start on one thing and end on something else. Is there a particular character, situation where you started that as you were writing it, it kind of evolved on its own, and really kind of surprised you. If you don't mind, could you tell us about it?
So… there are always things when you're writing that evolve beyond what you expect them to be, and it happens even to the most strict of outliners. And I do, even as I usually call myself an outliner, say that you shouldn't be too strict on outlining. Just because the more--
What happens with the writers, the more you steep yourself in your story, the more your subconscious will start to make connections and the more your skill as a writer will start to-- Um-- Start to take over? It's hard to explain in a lot of ways, but it's similar in-- Honestly, like hitting a baseball, right? Where you, when you're practicing, you can be very conscious about it. "Alright, here's how my stance should be, here's what I'm doing wrong, let's work on that consciously". But in the moment when you're, like, swinging at the ball in the game, most of that's out of your head and you're just letting instinct go. The planning is all of that sort of stuff beforehand that you do, like a baseball player, and then the writing often involves a lot more of the "just swinging", and then the revision goes back to a lot more conscious, if that makes sense as an explanation. And so as you're going, a lot of times the instincts start going somewhere, and you'll get this chapter and say "Ehhh, something's wrong with this", or "Oh, this is a better path, let's go look at my outline and see what needs to be rebuilt."
Um, some examples of this, if I can give them… uh, well, I mean, I write the Alcatraz books completely just as free-written books, but in books you've read, for instance, Spook's story in Hero of Ages was not in the original outline. Um, you know, what happened to him and things like that in Well of Ascension was, and then I was like, um, I want to take this character further and I feel like I need more to this story, I'm missing something and Spook's story is where I started taking that. So that was a more natural, uh, sort of outgrowth of the storytelling. But that happens in every book, there are certain things that'll-- that go off target a little bit and turn out to be better. Yeah, there's a target that you're at that your subconscious is shooting for that your conscious doesn't know about yet. Yeah, it happens every book.
Do you know who Phineas Gage is?
No.
Okay, so he was a miner and had an iron rod shoot through his head...
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah…
...and it changed his personality and stuff.
Yeah, I have read about that.
So if like consciousness and personality can exist independently of a body, if something like that happened to somebody in the cosmere would it change their personality?
It would change their personality. Unless it were a hemalurgic spike but then that does usually twist you as well. Yes it still would. In the Cosmere most of these things will work the same way, because the body’s interpreting what’s going on.
For instance, a person's spiritual component knows how old they are.
Wow. Has this been talked about before? This kind of seems like a big tidbit. Now we have some idea of how Hoid changes his age?
I haven't said if this is a method Hoid uses or not, but it's part of the reason the Lord Ruler turned to dust when he lost his metalminds. (His body tried to match the age his spirit said he was.)
If they somehow killed the Lord Ruler in a conventional manner, would he still have turned to dust?
Yes. The metalminds would have stopped being tapped, and the spirit of the matter would probably still have had this strange effect. Not it didn't happen to the bodies of the shard vessels who died.
Would koloss spikes turn off when they die too, so dead ones shrivel up like raisins?
Hemalurgy changes the spirit. So not necessarily.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Talking Horses that Talk about Their Feelings
A fun story about this chapters beings by me admitting that I didn't come up with the "TenSoon digests a horse" trick at first. I tried writing this scene with Sazed clinging to TenSoon's wolfhound back as they ran to the south. It was awkward to describe, even more awkward to imagine, and it never worked that well.
Eventually, while working on a solution to the problem of getting Sazed south to the Homeland, I realized that TenSoon could just digest another body and use that. Easy fix, and one that fit marvelously with the magic and setting.
This intersects another story relating to my friend Nate Hatfield, one of the guys in my writing group. He's a big fan of Dinosaur Comics, a webcomic that often deals with philosophy or literary criticism. Years ago, he brought a comic to the group where one of the characters in the comic strip complains that fantasy books are all about talking horses that talk about their feelings.
All through the writing of book two of Mistborn, Nate took delight in the Vin/TenSoon scenes as they were about a talking dog who talks about his feelings. He never let me live that connection down.
And then, almost just for him, I had TenSoon take on the body of a horse for a few chapters. I doubt I'll ever hear that end of that one. At least he didn't end up saying much about his feelings. ;)
Who were Ruin and Preservation? I mean, when they died, they had bodies, like Vin. And you went as far as to describe their hair color (Red and Black, respectively). Preservation even had a prominent nose. Why describe their dead bodies, if they weren't at one time mortals themselves? They created humans, but were at one time human themselves?
RAFO. (Sorry.)
Chapter Thirty-Four
I know it seems like I'm setting Shaor up for a return, but I really don't intend to bring her back. At least, I didn't when I wrote this chapter. The truth is, I just didn't want to write a scene of the madmen returning with the torn up body of a little girl.
However, every time I read this section, I can't help noticing that I left one of the book's most dangerous villains alive (potentially.) Ironically, because it seems so obvious from the text that Shaor is still alive, I think I'd avoid doing anything with her in a sequel. It seems like in fiction, any time you don't see a body, you automatically assume (often correctly) that the villain is still out there somewhere.
However, in this case, it really doesn't make sense to use her again. Shaor wasn't a threat because of any special skills on her part–I see no reason to bring her back.
In the past, you've said that kandra have size limitations. They can't just lop off a chunk and make a squirrel or anything like that. If a kandra was in full human form, somehow consumed and absorbed an aviar, kept it fully attached to their shoulder, it wouldn't be able to fly off but it was still attached to them, they're one contiguous body, could they get the abilities of that aviar?
No, good question. They would have to-- They're just replicating the body, they're not replicating the soul.
When you're designing the look of something like a chasmfiend how many iterations do you go through?
It really depends on the creature and project, honestly. @Inkthinker is the artist on the chasmfiend and the whitespine, for example, and he is absolutely a fantastic artist. I think he submitted three versions of the chasmfiend, we chose one, and then he pretty much got it spot on for Shallan's illustration of the beast in Words of Radiance. He had already come up with a paradigm for these types of critters (a la the axehound) back in Volume 1, so that might've helped this one come together so quickly.
The whitespine, however, was a tougher nut to crack. He submitted ten or eleven different designs before we found the general shape that looked correct to Brandon, and then there were several smaller revisions after that to get different parts of the whitespine's body correct. But again, we were developing a different creature paradigm here. The chasmfiend was based off crustaceans, and the whitespine was more shark- or ray-like in the way its body was supposed to work. A landshark with spikes.
Spook Asks Kelsier for Help Talking to Beldre
"Kelsier" can't help Spook with relationship advice, which is telling. Ruin doesn't understand relationships at all. It's one of his main weaknesses.
In creating Ruin as a villain, I wanted to shy away from making a force that was purely evil. I don't believe that Ruin is evil, personally. I believe that he's actually justified in what he's trying to do.
That doesn't mean the characters should just sit back and let him destroy the world. However, he is a force given sentience—or, rather, sentience that has attached itself to a force. Regardless, that force drives him and dominates him. And destruction is a natural part of life.
Right, so Brandon's new novel is soon to be released, and it's obviously another Mistborn novel—it's a standalone. And we wanted to know, what can we expect?
That's Alloy of Law. Alloy of Law takes place several hundred years following the events of Hero of Ages. This was always the plan with the Mistborn series; I pitched it to my editor as a sequence of series set in the same world with an evolution of technology, which is not something I'd seen done very much in fantasy books—letting the technology process and seeing how magic interacts with it. Alloy of Law is the story of a man named Waxillium who has spent the last twenty years living out in the Roughs being a lawman. And his uncle dies, and we find out that Waxillium is actually the heir to his house. And back in the city of Elendel, they've got this sort of half lordship, half elected body that leads the government, and he has inherited a seat in this body and responsibility for thousands of people who work in his house. And so he has to leave the life of a lawman and come back to the city—which is patterned after 1910 New York—and live among, you know, the elite of the city. And yet he's kind of an unpolished sort of guy, having been out in the Roughs all this time. And it's his story, trying to make sense of this world. It's also a mystery; it's a very fast-paced sort of mystery, kind of... Imagine it this way, as I have been describing it lately. Imagine the Sherlock Holmes story. Now replace Sherlock Holmes with Clint Eastwood and add magic. And that's what you've got.
Quellion's Hidden Attack
Spook brings up that he feels they should have been attacked by now. This is an echo of what I said earlier, where I had planned to throw in an attack here in the middle and have them defeat some assassins. Like I said, I cut that out. Instead, I had the Citizen send his assassin to kill them all.
So, in a way, Spook is prophetic. He speaks of assassins, then Beldre shows up with orders to kill them. She didn't sneak past the soldiers; she was allowed in on the Citizen's orders. (That part should have seemed fishy to you, by the way. How did Beldre sneak past a soldier encampment?) However, her inexperience and general good nature meant that she couldn't do what her brother had ordered.
Not every Allomancer is an innate killer like Vin. Some are pampered girls who were trained to use their powers, but who never got very good at them—or even wanted to be good at them.
When a person dies who is then Returned, do they come back essentially immediately? According to Llarimar it sounds like a quick process...
"When we found you dead, I lost hope. I was going to resign my position. I knelt above your body, weeping. And then, the Colors started to glow. You lifted your head, body changing, getting larger, muscles growing stronger."
When they do come back, are they unconscious? I only ask because as Llarimar was holding him when he changed, if he came back right then, Lightsong's first memory would be of this man who was to be his priest holding him. I assume this would be something Lightsong would have asked about numerous times, why he was with Llarimar when he died, so it seems to me a Returned must be unconscious for a while in order to give them a chance to be brought to the Court of the Gods without being exposed to their family, whom they were probably around when they died.
It's usually a quick process, but not standardized. It could take hours, or longer, but generally does not.
It's something between what you're saying, and instantaneous waking up. More like they start to glow, and the transformation begins, then they wake up and stand. But they're confused and disoriented, and Lightsong was told his priests were gathered as soon as he started glowing, so that they could greet him as he came to himself. He never had reason to question, and that moment is fuzzy anyway. (As evidenced by him not remembering the event, and needing to be told about it.)
At least, that's my rationale as I remember it. It's been ten years at this point, so I could be fuzzy on the details. :)
Can a Shardblade-killed body be turned into a Lifeless?
Can a Shardblade-killed body be turned into a Lifeless. Yeees, it can be re-Invested. Yes.
Are there any side-effects to doing so?
Uhhh, there would be side-effects. I won't tell you what they are. They would be minor, minor, mostly inconsequential side-effects.
Chapter Ten
Are the Elantrians zombies? I've been asked this question before. The answer is a little bit yes, a little bit no. I very intentionally don't make any references in the story to them being zombie-like, and I certainly don't call them "undead." Both words bring a lot of baggage with them.
No, the Elantrians aren't "zombies." However, they certainly would fit the standard fantasy definition of being "undead." After all, their bodies aren't really alive, but they can think. Still, I resist comparisons to established fantasy traditions. I wanted the Elantrians to be their own genre of creatures. In the world I have created, they are simply "Elantrians." They are people who don't need to eat, whose bodies only function on a marginal level, and whose pains never go away. For the function they fill in the world and the story, I'd rather that they be compared to lepers.
That said, I always have wanted to do a story with a zombie as a main character.
Fatren's Viewpoint
I knew early on that I'd need to start with a viewpoint from someone we haven't seen before. I thought that someone fresh would allow us to get a distinct sense of what has happened to the world in the months since the end of book two. The viewpoints of the main characters would be clouded by events—I wanted someone who could show us what was really happening.
That meant using a skaa peasant in one of the outlying cities. I wanted to show a different slice of life and indicate how hard things were. In addition, I felt I wanted to hit right away on the fact that this book would be about the world ending.
Hence we have Fatren. I toyed with making him a main character, but I eventually discarded that idea. I think this is the only chapter from his viewpoint. I hate to use a throwaway viewpoint so early in the book, but the alternative—making him a main character just to avoid having a throwaway viewpoint—was a bad idea. We already have too much to focus on with Elend, Vin, Spook, TenSoon, Sazed, and Marsh all being major viewpoint characters in the novel.
Adding TenSoon, Marsh, and Spook gave us enough that was new in the way of viewpoints. We didn't need Fatren—except for this first scene. Here, we get to see Elend from an outside perspective, and I think this does an excellent job of providing contrast—both against the hopelessness of the world and against the Elend that readers have in their head.
He's changed, obviously. The beard and rugged looks are meant to indicate a year spent fighting koloss and leading humankind as it struggles against extinction. Using Fatren's viewpoint gave me a powerful way to update the world and explain what's changed. I'm pleased with how he turned out.
I would like to echo a question that someone beat me to. The way you ended it seemed to leave the door wide open for other books with characters such as Spook and Breeze playing much larger roles. My question is, was the ending planned as just an open-ended ending to make people wonder about what might happen, or was that with the intent of writing more books in mind?
I like it when my characters live on in people's minds. I have no plans right now to write any more books about Spook or Breeze, though what they do in the next period of time will create the history for the next series. However, there's a chance I'll change my mind on this. However, this ending was not set up for another book specifically. I just wanted to tell the best ending I could, and this is how it turned out.
Brandon does want to write more Mistborn books, but not with the same characters. There would be two more trilogies. The second trilogy would be set a few hundred years later, in a modern day–type setting, when the events of the first trilogy have passed into legend. The third trilogy would be set a few more hundred years later, in a future, outer space–type setting.
It's such an audacious idea I wish he would write it right now because I want to read it, especially the third trilogy. But Brandon has announced his next project (pending Tor approval) will be Way of Kings, a 10-volume epic fantasy. He'll sprinkle in a book from another project here and there, so the next Mistborn trilogy might start before Way of Kings is ended, but it will be years yet before there is any more Mistborn.
But Ookla, he already wrote that one!
I know. :)
The real story is that Brandon was writing (or revising?) Way of Kings when Tor offered to buy Elantris. Brandon signed a two-book contract for Elantris and Way of Kings. Then Brandon realized he wasn't in the point in his career yet where he could write Way of Kings the way he wanted to, so while he was supposed to be revising Way of Kings he secretly wrote the first Mistborn book instead, which he then sold to Tor as a trilogy, replacing Way of Kings in the original contract.
But for some reason Amazon already had a listing for Way of Kings, with a release date. Thence the fake reviews.
I've read an early draft of the first book, and it aims to be very epic. (No, Elvis is not involved.) I do wonder, though, whether when it actually comes out, the fake reviews will get attached to its Amazon listing. :)
This is all true. Note that the book would not be named The Way of Kings. Most likely, I'm going to make that the series name. So I guess the book "The Way of Kings" must be some kind of parallel novel or prequel or something... ;)
Oathshards is out, eh?
You're such a tease, Brandon. All these details about the next series will make everyone hungry for it, and then we'll all have to wait.
Of course, any other book you put out in the meantime will still be awesome, so we should be content, right?
I don't think Oathshards is as strong a name as "The Way of Kings." Plus, that's really what the series is about.
I've watched this conversation with interest, and wasn't planning to step in, as it's exactly the sort of thread that's generally better without me. Author intervention can derail a good discussion.
But after considering, I decided I did want to talk about this topic a little. There are two things going on here. One is the mistake I made with Jasnah in Words, which I've mentioned before. One is a larger discussion, relevant to the cosmere.
Warning, WALL OF TEXT. This is me we're talking about.
You see, Jasnah wasn't originally meant to be a fake-out. Jasnah originally was going to go with Shallan to the Shattered Plains--but she was really messing up the outline, diverting attention from Shallan's character arc and pointing it toward Shallan/Jasnah conflicts instead.
My biggest breakthrough when outlining the book in detail was the realization that the book would work so much better if things I'd planned to do with Jasnah in it were diverted to later books. When that came together, WORDS really started working. Hence her jaunt into Shadesmar. I initially wrote the scenes with it being pretty clear to the reader that she was forced to escape--and it was super suspicious that there was no body.
In drafting, however, early readers didn't like how obvious it was that Jasnah would be coming back. I made a crucial mistake by over-reacting to early feedback. I thought, "Well, I can make that more dramatic!" I employed some tools I've learned quite well, and turned that into a scene where the emotion is higher and the death is more powerful.
HOWEVER, I did this without realizing how it mixed with other plotlines--specifically Szeth's resurrection.
We get into sticky RAFO areas here, but one of the biggest themes of the Cosmere is Rebirth. The very first book (Elantris) starts with a character coming back from the dead. (As I've mentioned before, a big part of the inspiration for Elantris was a zombie story, from the viewpoint of the zombie.) Mistborn begins with Kelsier's rebirth following the Pits, and Warbreaker is about people literally called the Returned. (People who die, then come back as gods.) The Stormlight Archive kicks off with Kaladin's rebirth above the Honor Chasm, and Warbreaker is meant as a little foreshadowing toward the greater arc of the cosmere--that of the Shards of Adonalsium, who are held by ordinary people.
Szeth's rebirth, with his soul incorrectly affixed to his body, is one of the things I've been very excited to explore in The Stormlight Archive--and the mistake with Jasnah was letting her return distract from that.
That said, you're not wrong for disliking this theme--there's no "wrong" when it comes to artistic tastes. And I certainly wish I'd looked at the larger context of what happened when I shifted Jasnah's plot in book two. (Doubling down on "Jasnah is dead" for short term gain was far worse than realizing I should have gone with "Jasnah was forced to jump into Shadesmar, leaving Shallan alone." I consider not seeing that to be the biggest mistake I've made in The Stormlight Archive so far.)
However, the story of the cosmere isn't really about who lives or dies. We established early on that there is an afterlife (or, at least, one of the most powerful beings in the cosmere believes there is--and he tends to be a trustworthy sort.) And multiple books are about people being resurrected. What I'm really interested in is what this does to people. Getting given a second try at life, being reborn as something new. (Or, in some cases, as something worse.) The story of the cosmere is about what you do with the time you have, and the implications of the power of deity being in the hands of ordinary people.
More importantly (at least to me) I've always felt character deaths are actually somewhat narratively limp in stories. Perhaps it's our conditioning from things like Gandalf, Obi-Wan, and even Sherlock Holmes. But readers are always going to keep asking, "are they really dead?" And even if they stay dead, I can always jump back and tell more stories about them. The long cycle of comic books over-using resurrection has, I think, also jaded some of us to the idea of character death--but even without things like that, the reader knows they can always re-read the book. And that fan-fiction of the character living will exist. And that the author could always bring them back at any time. A death should still be a good death, mind you--and an author really shouldn't jerk people around, like I feel I did with Jasnah.
But early on, I realized I'd either have to go one of two directions with the cosmere. Either I had to go with no resurrections ever, stay hard line, and build up death as something really, really important. Or I had to shift the conversation of the books to greater dangers, greater stakes, and (if possible) focus a little more on the journey, not the sudden stop at the end.
I went with the latter. This isn't going to work for everyone. I'm fully aware of, and prepared for, the fact that things like Szeth coming back will ruin the stories for some readers. And I do admit, I've screwed it up in places. Hopefully, that will teach me better so that I can handle the theme delicately, and with strong narrative purpose behind the choices I make. But do warn you, there WILL be other resurrections in my books. (Though there are none planned for the near future. I took some extra care with the next few books, after feeling that things happening in Words and the Mistborn series in the last few years have hit the theme too hard.) This is a thing that I do, and a thing that I will continue to do. I consider it integral to the story I'm telling. Hopefully, in the future, I'll be able to achieve these acts with the weight and narrative complexity they deserve.
If it helps, I have several built-in rules for this. The first is that actual cosmere resurrections (rather than just fake-outs, like I did with Jasnah) can happen only under certain circumstances, and have a pretty big cost to them. Both will become increasingly obvious through the course of the stories. The other rule is more meta. I generally tell myself that I only get one major fake-out, or one actual resurrection, per character. (And I obviously won't use either one for most characters.) This is more to keep myself from leaning on this narrative device too much, which I worry I'll naturally do, considering that I see this as a major theme of the books.
...
(Sharders, please don't start asking me at signings who has had their "one death" so far. This is me drawing the curtain back a little on the process, I really don't want it to become an official thing that people focus on. Do feel free to talk about the mechanics of resurrection though--it should be pretty obvious now with Elantris, Warbreaker, Szeth, and a certain someone from Mistborn to use as guides.)
Would Stormlight healing, Progression, or Feruchemical gold healing count as some of the ways that a transgender person could change their body to match their identity?
Yes. Those would work. In fact, that's kind of the main way that you would make that happen. Injections of Investiture making the body match the Spiritual and Cognitive.
How could Vasher become Drab, since he would have to give up his Big Breath to do so?
The Divine Breath can be hid. Essentially, you have to view yourself NOT as a god at all, using a very specific bit of mental gymnastics. As a Returned, your body changes based on how you see yourself. (This, by the way, is an indication that Lightsong was more pleased with himself than he ever let on.)
You don't lose your Divine Breath, but it does go into hiding, making you look like a normal person. But you're still Returned, and are consuming a Breath at one a week. If you give away your other Breaths, you retain this hidden one, but your body will still consume its own spirit if left to do so. So you still need a Breath a week to survive, and will die the week you don't get one.
I left this as an intentional place to explore the magic in the sequel, which I had planned to be writing (and posting on my website) by the time Warbreaker was out in stores. The WoT has diverted me, and so I feel bad, since this ends up being a confusing question that a number of readers have had. The hints toward how this is working are very difficult to find. (The biggest one is probably in the opening, where Vasher thinks about how he could reach the Fifth Heightening instantly, if he wanted to.)
Could you make a Lifeless out of someone killed with a Shardblade?
Shardblades sever the soul from the body, but Awakening makes a "fake" soul for a body, so how the soul left doesn't matter.
When Kelsier is teaching Vin about the basic eight Allomantic Metals, he talks about not flaring metals, especially tin and pewter, as it does strange things to people. Does this imply that there were other savants before Spook?
His answer was that there were other savants before Spook.
*inaudible*
Yeah the Divine Breath is a gift of Investiture directly to the...basically they are being given a large Splinter of Endowment.
But is it the size?
The size is important, to make that happen, yeah.
To make it happen?
To make it happen, yeah. To make them come back and to do the things but...there is obviously some leakage there when they basically taking a Cognitive Sh...they have to create a Cognitive Shadow of the spirit, right. Which requires some work, and then to push that back into the body and get it to stick requires some work as well. You'll see that with Szeth it isn't sticking very well.
*inaudible*
Yeah Szeth is not a Cognitive Shadow, he actually got stuck back in but the soul is not sticking very well to the body
*inaudible*
That's what she's saying.
