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Allomancy is of Preservation, correct?
Yes...
What are Feruchemy and Hemalurgy of?
Hemalurgy is definitely of Ruin.
Is it of pure Ruin?
Yes. That's a very Ruin thing. And Feruchemy is more of a blend. Though… there is more philosophy to that and human construct—like the Allomantic table—than I think I’ve made clear before.
What is Feruchemy, is it tied to any Shard?
Feruchemy, is it tied to any Shard in specific? Yes, they talk about that in the books.
Ok, it's like, of Preservation?
Yes, you could say that.
Because it seems like one Shard, one magic system?
Here's the thing, it's more that-- They, in their philosophy, say that it's kind of a hybrid between the two, but you could kind of feel that it's more--
It seems more Preservation.
It seems more Preservation, but in-world they think it's kind of a hybrid. The philosophy says that one was kind of net-positive, one was kind of net-negative and one was a hybrid. That's their in-world philosophy. I personally would place it more with Preservation.
Ok so more than one magic system can be tied to one Shard?
Yes.
Ok, that's what I wanted to know.
Here's the thing, the definition of magic system can be, is so fluid. Like you can look at this book and say "how many magic systems are there?". Is Surgebinding one or is it ten?
Allomancy's 16--
Is Allomancy 16 or one, and things like that. So yes multiple magic systems can be tied to a Shard.
When either Rashek or a Twinborn like Miles, how does he fuel his metalminds? Does he have to actually burn the gold in order to fuel them? Because, I feel like there's a paragraph in here where you kind of explained it, but I feel like you didn't actually say that you had to burn more gold in order to fill a metalmind. Is that how that works?
Yes. You can cross the streams and use one to power the other. But you are using the metal to power your Feruchemy instead of your own-- You're using, basically, the power that's coming through the metal...
So you do have to be burning one the whole time? Sounds good, good to know. So you could just infinitely fill it, basically? As you burn, you just use it to fill it and it just gets-- and that's where that comes from?
Yep. You are burning a metalmind that you've already filled, right? That's the key there. You fill a metalmind, then you burn that, and what that does is it keys the metalmind to the Feruchemy instead. Which normally no one can do because you could-
You can't do both.
Yeah. But if you can do both, you fill a metalmind, you burn that metalmind. What comes out of it is Feruchemical power instead, and you then are filling the metalmind with more.
So Allomancy is fueled by the power of the Shard. So what you're doing is you're powering your Feruchemy with the power of the Shard, instead of your own body. Using their Investiture instead of yours. Which is very dangerous.
A theme throughout a lot of the Cosmere novels is that form, of one sort or another (patterns, aons, etc.) has a crucial role to play in unlocking or using Investiture.
As a chemist, I'm curious about the role of form in Allomancy and Feruchemy. Does the underlying molecular or crystalline structure of the metal or alloy play a roll? Different processes, doping ratios, and metal mixtures result in different molecular packing, lattices, and ultimately structure. It seems like that kind of very defined, orderly matrix would be right in line with other forms of unlocking Investiture.
Yes! I've actually mentioned to people before that the chemistry of the various metals acts, for Allomancy, in the same way that the Aons work for AonDor. It's more a key than it is a source of power itself.
If you were a Twinborn with both steel, would you be able to move faster than people could use atium to see what you were going to do?
So you couldn't move faster than their atium, but you could move potentially faster than their mind's ability to process what they're seeing. You might be able to-- but the atium does lend a certain ability of natural reaction, but you are still limited by your muscles, and things like that. So I think you could probably beat atium that way. That would be a valid way.
If a Windrunner lashed Wax upwards, could he dump all of his weight into his metalminds and be unaffected or would the lashing affect his clothes and whatever else he had on him too?
Wax could mitigate the effect (unless he was in a vacuum) but not eliminate it completely.
Vacuum or freefall?
It can be easy to confuse them in the context of surface to orbit.
I was talking about a Vacuum, but it's good to clarify. What I'm saying is that without wind resistance, his mass doesn't matter--and the books have established that what Wax does is a freakish transformation of his mass, not just his weight.
Kaladin changes how much gravity pulls on someone, and in what direction. Wax (basically, it's more complex than this) changes how much mass he has. The two, then, have some very distinctive effects.
RAFO on bronze/copper twinborns because I want to leave myself room to create things.
Someone asked how much Sazed "cheated" when it came to the Metalborn distribution.
That was met by more mysterious smiles and even a bit of chuckling.
Can Feruchemists tell whose metal-mind it is, when it's not their own, based on the Identity?
This is theoretically possible, but they can't tell just as a rule. Like, just automatically.
Sorry if this has been asked before; I haven't been able to find a direct answer anywhere. It came up while playing the Mistborn Adventure Game (which has been very fun, btw!).
A Feruchemist can easily determine whether any metal is a metalmind, regardless of whether it's theirs, simply by touching it. And a Ferring can definitely determine the same, but for their own metal.
But, a question came up: can a Ferring also—perhaps with practice—tell whether any piece of metal has been stored in/is a metalmind? Would this be easier for certain kinds of Ferrings? (Ones that are more directly in tune with Investiture, perhaps?) And, if they can determine that a piece of metal is Invested, would they feel something similar to what Vin did when she was examining Sazed's metalmind? Would they be able to tell what the metal it is based on how that power feels? (That last bit might be infringing on what skilled/savant bronze Mistings might be able to do).
So, bronze Mistings are really good at reading investiture that is being used--it's harder to simply "detect investiture" as all things are made out of investiture in the cosmere. That said, I could see your game allowing this, as it's a natural extrapolation of the magic--and it could make for some good gameplay. Don't be afraid to extrapolate the magic for your own uses, even if it doesn't fall right in line with the way I do things.
Irich had that degenerative disease. If the Set still had Miles available, could he have cured Irich's disease by giving him Compounded health with a primer cube?
This requires more steps than it would appear, but this is the sort of thing people will trying very hard to figure out in coming novels.
Is Skimming a sort of restrictive Lashing?
Working on similar principles, but not the same.
If someone were to create a human shape, with full articulations, made out of the four Feruchemical Spiritual metals and copper and do like a full dump into them, would it be able to-- I mean, Investiture attains sapience on its own. And then with-- If those were mixed with the memories in the copper would it be able to effectively become an android of the person who created it?
So we got a couple of issues you have to overcome in creating this. Number one, the memories are not going to attune to the Investiture itself, they're going to be attuned to you. The Investiture as it attains sapience is gonna create its own Identity, which is then going to be a mismatch for those memories. So you would have to find a way to get those memories to work for that creation.
It wouldn't tie with the Identity that was stored in the aluminum?
No, it would not... The other thing you were getting at there though, is that just Investing it alone, you would have to leave it alone for a long time, naturally, for it to start developing anything. And so we're looking at thousands of years, probably. There are ways to speed that process along, but just doing that and leaving it, it's gonna take a while.
In mistborn you can't access someone else's feruchemical stores. However, what if feruchemist A stores something, and then hemalurgy is used to take A's ability and put into person B. Can person B use A's stores?
Also, what happens when someone burns metal with a hemalurgic charge? Or stores/retrieves something in a spike using feruchemy?
All RAFOs here, I'm afraid.
I have a Reddit PM WOB that says the Terris were given Feruchemy as a gift, and that Brandon may get into how that occurred at some point.
It was more of a gift than an accident, but I do plan to someday dig into it more.
Could an Augur Compound Health out of a goldmind if its proper owner messed with Identity in the right way?
This is possible
Could you steal any trait Hemalurgically that can be stored Feruchemically?
Yes, you could steal any trait that can be stored.
Chapter Ten
The Carriage Ride to the Forge
Note that Wayne sleeping here is a side effect of him getting really sickly for a short time, trying to recover a bit of healing power. Marasi thinks he's just relaxed, which . . . well, he kind of is, but he wouldn't be sleeping right now save for the effects of his Feruchemy.
As another side note, the city really is as miraculous as Marasi thinks to herself. Sazed created an Eden-esque little section of land here, a place of extreme bounty and fertility, in order to cradle the regrowth of mankind. The actual science (such that it is) of it has to do with the mists bringing fresh water and hugging the ground extra strongly here, as well as some molds that refertilize the ground.
Marewill flowers are named after Kelsier's wife. (Spook, the Lord Mistborn, came up with the name—as well as naming a lot of the things that held out until this time, such as the months of the year.) The other little worldbuilding item of note here is the idea of what Wayne calls the "God Beyond," which is an idea that has begun to creep into society, the idea that there is a greater God of the universe beyond people like Harmony or Kelsier. It's somewhat analogous to some of the Gnostic beliefs in early Christianity.
Can you burn or Feruchemically fill molten metal? Assuming, you know, that was something you wanted to do.
Yes, you should be able to but that would be very nasty.
Would it affect the Investiture?
Yeah, it would affect the Investiture.
Does a Connection medallion account for heavy sarcasm?
It would. Maybe not the heaviest, most deadpan sarcasm.
Does the loss during the withdrawal of large amounts of attribute depend on the rate of original storage?
No.
The Lord Ruler died because he had filled his bracers with a large amount of youthfulness, and had to keep drawing it out to stay young--as his soul knew how hold it was, and his body kept trying to 'bounce back' to its perceived age. Compounding is how he gained enough extra youthfulness to pull this off.
Actually, I have a question about the 'bouncing-back'.
Is the 'bounce back force' actually what's stored in a metalmind?
For instance, when storing atium a feruchemist ruins his body to make himself old, and then his metalmind 'catches' the force the soul puts out as it tries to restore his true, younger age?
So you create metalminds by seesawing a ruining and a preserving impulse together.
The bounce back is caused by the relationship between the three realms of the cosmere. What you're saying isn't terribly far off, but at the same time, ignores some underpinning fundamentals of how it all works.
In the cosmere, your soul is basically an idealized version of yourself--and is a constant force pushing your body to match it. Your perceptions are the filter through which this happens, however, and many of the magics can facilitate in interesting ways.
Would it be possible for someone to store Stormlight in a nicrosil metalmind?
I will RAFO that for now, but you're thinking the way I want you to be thinking.
I've got a Mistborn question for you. So, Identity? Can you store, like-- is your physical appearance part of your Identity?
It is to some people. To most people, it's a part of it, yes.... I don't know the answer-- don't take that as "You can store that." and things like that. It's involved. There are certain things you can do. But it's not as simple as it might have sounded, what I just implied.
So, does that apply to your Identity, if you're in the Cognitive Realm? Or the Physical Realm? Can you store that?
The reason you look like you do in the Cognitive Realm is because it's Identity, things like that. I'm not gonna talk about specifically how storing that works really. Although there is the idea that your soul is the key to Investiture and stuff like that.
And finally, whether a duralumin compounder could break into a kandra?
Um... yes, possible, yeah.
Marsh Vs. Sazed
But first we have the Marsh Sazed battle. I really like this scene, since I get to do something very new with it. Do you remember when I promised you that you'd see some cool interactions between Allomancy and Feruchemy?
I realized almost immediately, when designing Feruchemy, that I could do some very fun things with it mixing with Allomancy. With how much that Mistborn depend on their Steelpushes and Ironpulls, a person who can change his weight would have an enormous advantage. Everyone always says that Allomancy is the better combat skill, but that's just because the resource it uses–metal–is far more plentiful than the resource Feruchemy uses. Put the two into a battle together with enough power to spare, and the Feruchemist will almost always win.
At the end of this, Ham gets to do something. Makes me glad that I wrote him back into the story after forgetting about him. . . .
Oh, and that blow to the head was no slight blow–Sazed's actually wrong. That strike will lay Marsh out for some time. Remember what Ham said about two pewter burners canceling each other out? Well, you just had a very strong soldier flaring pewter hit a man who was simply burning it in the back of the head with a stick hard enough to break it. Marsh is out cold.
A question regaurding Feruchemical iron:
So, while Sazed was guarding one of the gates to Luthadel, he tapped weight to compensate, he had to tap pewter as well. Also, when he was climbing a tree, his strength to weght ratio rised, making it easier for him to climb it. Wax doesn't have to do this- when fighting Miles on the train, he's fine without any sort of muscular enhancement, and when he is climbing in the sets base, he notes that he does not make himself lighter because it would simply decrease his weight and strength equally (in contrast to Sazed climbing the tree).
So, is this difference for the same reason people can push/ pull on atium, being the you hadn't fully developed your idea for the cosmere yet? Or is it some other reason?
Hmm. I think the mistake is more on me writing the Wax scene than in the original. (For him climbing, specifically.) I'll put Peter on this and see if it's a continuity error we want to fix.
If a Feruchemist Taps warmth, does it actually warm them up physically, or do they just feel warmer?
It actually warms them. It’s not just a feeling.
I actually asked Peter Ahlstrom (who tends to handle math and magic system interactions with physics for Team Sanderson) about this a little while ago
A couple of friends and I are discussing if the iron feruchemy causing changes in speed is a retcon (since there's a mention in AoL that "increasing his weight manyfold would not affect his motion"), or if the effect is just more complicated (like only causing an instant change in speed if Wax changes weight while actively pushing on something).
Are you willing to weigh in on that, or is it just something we shouldn't be thinking too hard about?
Thanks :)
And his response was
I just don't know the answer to this question. :)
So I personally think the explanation is either 'Brandon thought it would be cooler for shifting your weight to change your velocity, and forgot he had mentioned it a couple times' or 'this is Wax's twinborn perk'. I'm leaning towards the latter, since the person who writes the magic system summaries at the end of the book specifically interrogated Wax about the effects, and mentioned she specifically was interested in his very unusual power combination.
As for the density thing, there is an explicit mention that you appear to get stronger when tapping, but only to the extent that you can still stand up and walk around - you still have more difficulty moving around overall. So (to pull out random numbers), if you're at 200% normal mass, you have 180% normal strength, and at 50% mass you have 60% normal strength. That means Wax habitually going around at 75% weight so he's 'light on his feet' makes sense - even if he's weaker overall, he's proportionally stronger.
The way I personally think about things for bullets or whatever, anything 'inside' the body (where 'inside' is defined in the same way that pushing/pulling metal 'inside' the body uses it) interacts with your body as if it were normal. So tapping iron doesn't cause your ultra-massive blood to be impossible for your heart to pump, but it also doesn't prevent a bullet from passing through your flesh. That seems to be consistent with how it's portrayed in the books.
Just a note: in the quote of mine above, I was trying (I believe) to find a way for Wax to indicate that weight doesn't influence the rate at which he falls. IE, acceleration in regards to gravity. It's tough, and I made the call (perhaps incorrectly) not to use modern physics terminology in the W&W books. It has been very hard then to explain:
1). Wax changing his weight doesn't change the pull of gravity on him, or the rate at which he falls. 2) He DOES follow the laws of conservation of momentum.
My talking around these things has let me to tie a few paragraphs in knots.
My friend wants to know how fast steel Compounders could possibly go, can they run up walls or over water like the Flash?
*jokingly* Can they run through time?
Steelrunners can resist a lot things due to the power, like they can withstand the Gs they are out through, but they can't ignore wind resistance and friction. They will burn up if they start running too quickly.
Can Feruchemical tin store Allomantically granted senses like bronze sense?
Possible.
Those of you who have read to the end might wonder where the Lord Ruler got his fantastic healing powers. Well, it has to do with Feruchemy. See, the ability to heal one's body is one of the things a Feruchemist can store up. And, the Lord Ruler's power–by being both Allomancer and Feruchemist–is to draw near-infinite power from his Feruchemical storages by burning them. He can be any age he wants. He can live as long as he wants. And, he can heal as quickly and much as he wants. More on this in book two.
Can aluminum be used to destroy a Feruchemist's metalmind if the person burning aluminum were to cut his hand and place it on the metalmind?
He said that cutting the hand would probably not be enough, but that I was on the right track.
If tapping heat means your own body gets hotter, does it also mean you become immune to hot temperatures so long as you're tapping it, or should you fill heat and grow colder for that to happen?
As everything in Feruchemy, you become immune to the effects of the ability only. Like weight doesn't crush you, but at the same time doesn't have a net gain in strength. Growing colder, however, would be more helpful in this regard.
Is it possible to Compound your Spiritual Connection to a location on a planet while storing your Spiritual Connection to all other locations on the planet to kind of pull yourself through the Spiritual Realm to that location?
That's not how that would work. Parts of what you say are possible, but the teleportation aspect wouldn't actually do anything.
Was Hoid trying to Compound his Spiritual location in the scene you added in the 10th Anniversary [Elantris]? Was he trying to Compound Connection to that location to try to become Elantrian?
...So at that point chronologically he was not an Allomancer.
Could you use the Feruchemical ability to store Identity to heal damage done to you in the Cognitive Realm?
Um... yes, but it's gonna take a roundabout method to make it happen... Yes, but Identity can be very useful for all sorts of things like this.
Does aluminum actually store Identity or is it more like a sink so you just dump it in and it poofs away.
I'll RAFO that for now. Sorry, I want to get into that eventually.
So if a steel compounder became an Edgedancer...
Oh, here we go. [Audience laughs]
If a steel compounder became an Edgedancer, how fast could they go?
[Dramatic sigh] They could go quite fast. They are not going to ever reach superhero levels of bending reality for speed. So, I will say quick, but not that quick. We aren't outracing an atom bomb, as the Flash periodically does.
What were your inspiration when you wrote the [Mistborn] series, or for particular characters--
Well, Mistborn-- I passed, honestly, through a fog bank at 70 mph driving from my mom's house, and I'm like, "This looks cool, I've got to use this." That's the first thought I can think of. Feruchemy goes back to being in high school and being an insomniac, being really tired and wishing I could store up my sleep, so I'd be sleepy when I wanted to be sleepy. Kelsier's inspiration was a guy who had been only out for himself, who realized the greater import of doing something.
What would happen if a Feruchemist fills, for example, a tin metalmind then mixes it to make a pewter metalmind? Does the stored attribute change? Is the Investiture gone when you melt the metal? What if he just makes it into a tin metalmind again?
If you make it impure, you'll keep the investiture, but won't be able to get it out. If you make it back into the same thing, you'll be fine, and can access it normally. If you try to fill it, after changing the composition to make another viable metal, it will act a little like a computer hard drive with corrupted sectors. Some of it will work for the new investiture, but you won't be able to fill it nearly as full. (Depending on how full it was before you melted down.)
This holds for basic uses of the metallurgic arts. Once you start playing with some of the more advanced parts of the magic, you can achieve different results, which are currently RAFO.
Similarly, if you were to soulcast a metal would it have similar effects of corrupting the investiture and making it inaccessible? Like if you turned a steel metalmind into pewter.
I've stayed away from soulcasting and forging in these types of discussions, as I feel my answers will dig too deeply and prompt more questions that, eventually, will lead to lots of RAFO type questions. I don't really want to go there--but I will say this. Changing invested objects with other magics is hard, and often requires such a force of investiture yourself, that it becomes very power-inefficient. Just like we can technically turn lead into gold right now--by spending way more money than the gold is worth.
So you could, for example, use electrolysis to dissolve a metalmind in water, then reverse the reaction later to get the investiture?
OR, better question, if you store investiture in one allotrope of iron, can your retrieve it off you change to a different allotrope?
I see no reason why these wouldn't work.
So would forging with the blood of a radiant(kaladin, dalinar,etc) work on a shard blade from a fallen radiant to say change who they had bonded, or how the bond was broken (to say death instead of giving up on the oath)?
RAFO.
If we spiked a singer with Feruchemical nicrosil, could he store the spren he's bonded to and lose form in the process? Could he bond another spren then? Could he then change forms at will by carefully storing and tapping nicrosil?
RAFO :)
You've always said that your favorite sort of magic was being a Coinshot or being a Windrunner because you really want to fly. So I thought that iron Feruchemy you can fly using just iron Feruchemy. So if you had a paraglider and a place to jump off of, you're paragliding, go downwards, your momentum increases, you increase your weight when you're going downwards. You pull upward and then you decrease your weight. Your velocity will increase and you'll go up--
We have thought about that. I'm not sure if the math-- Like, we're trying to conserve momentum. We're trying to follow the math of that. So the question is, would that work? It probably would, but I'd have to look at the math. Because I tried to make very clear in the Wax and Wayne books that we conserve momentum...
Really what we're doing is, we're breaking potential energy, right, when we're doing this. Because iron Feruchemy is just the weirdest of all of them. Because we're breaking potential energy, what you just said probably works, doesn't it.
That was in context with the thing I was saying yesterday, about Feruchemical savants. If you did that every day for years, would you potentially get to the point where you could potentially make one side of your body heavier than the other side?
...There are many people in the cosmere who would think this idea has merit and they would want to test it.
We have this one bizarre question, that actually was really, really weird but we have to know it.
There was a question about Siamese twins. If they were born gold Feruchemists, and they they were split apart, would they like, form together again?
Uhhhnn... It depends on how they view themselves
That's the answer to every question like that!
Right! But that's the whole point of the cosmere is that-- Spiritual Realm is filtered through the Cognitive Realm to the Physical Realm, right? And this lens is going to filter how things work. Perception is really important in the cosmere. That's where most of these things come from, and so-- Yeah that is the answer to everything. But that's the point of the answer to everything, is that there aren't a lot of hard and fast rules when it comes to a lot of these things, with Identity and whatnot is going be filtered through perception.
So it is technically possible for them, if they are seeing each other as one.
Right.
So we can--
Now the big hard question is, what if one of them views them as one and one of them doesn't?
Oh.
Aaaaoooohhh! Then it depends on who's using the magic.
What if both of them are?
Both of them what? Are gold? If both of them are healing and one doesn't want to and one does, magic's gonna cancel each other out and nothing will happen.
Ok.
Mmhmm. Yeah I made your question harder and weirder.
Well it was a very logical answer to a very unlogical question.
Yes. I've had to answer a lot of these. My feeling is that if I can make the fundamental magic principles work then you can answer those questions rationally but really what you would have to do is-- Even I'm not the expert on these things. Like I'm the ultimate word in some ways but in another ways the answer would be "I don't know, let's have a thought experiment and if it ever comes up, try it out and see what happens". But yeah, there you go. There is my best answer to you.
Why is it that Allomancers and Feruchemists get either one or all of the powers? Radiants / Surgebinders being limited to two Surges makes sense, because it depends on the type of spren they bond with, but Allomancers?
I'm not ready to answer this one yet, I'm afraid. So it's a RAFO.
Fair enough. Is this something we'll see explored in future (far future?) books, or will we need to bug you about it during signings / AMAs every few years?
It will explored in far future books, most likely.
When an Allomancer tries to burn a bad alloy, it can make them sick, or even kill them. Are there similar consequences for Feruchemy and Hemalurgy, such as being less efficient when storing and leaking power more quickly, or would such metals just be unusable?
Yes! Bad metals in Feruchemy/Hemalurgy would work poorly.
Do you actually store something related to...do you store the actual attribute or do you only store like an Investiture representation of an amount...
You store the Investiture representation.
So the metal is just the focus that says this will turn into this.
Yeah.
How would Nightblood work when drawn on Scadrial?
So, you would have to be actively burning a metal or tapping a metalmind, or Nightblood would eat you very quickly.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Last Feruchemist?
Sazed is likely not the last Feruchemist. The Lord Ruler tried for a long time to breed Feruchemy out of the population, and it's highly unlikely that now the power would simply vanish because the living Feruchemists were killed. The genetic trait is still there, suppressed in the population, but it would eventually resurface.
That's not to say that the loss of the Synod wasn't a blow. That many living Feruchemists suddenly killed would wipe out a large segment of the population who could have bred Feruchemy true. However, the fact that many of the Synod were eunuchs made their usefulness in that regard less important.
Remember, however, that Sazed is struggling with depression. It's easier for him to see things in a depressing light than it is to see them in a positive light.
As [Feruchemy] is the magic system combined from Ruin and Preservation's powers, and they created humankind on Scadrial, how is it that it only occurs in persons with Terrispeople in their ancestry?
RAFO :)
Do Gasper Ferrings and Surgebinders holding their breath use similar mechanisms to hold their breath?
It's not the same, but it is similar.
