Breaking a Forged Item

[Chromium Compounder]

I've been wondering for a while now what would happen if a forged item were to be broken, without breaking the seal.  

 

If the break were to break the seal, then I would assume that as soon as it does then the item were return to normal, plus whatever changes have happened to it since the seal was placed, which in this case includes the break.

 

But what if the seal weren't to break.  Shai mentions that if she were to be chained she could forge the chain to have a weak link.  The chain is a whole object, so the seal would affect the whole chain.  In that case the only change is the weak link, but what if instead you were to forge it to have thinner links.  Instead of big fat quarter inch wide links, you forge it to have skinny little sixteenth inch links.  Then you break the chain.  This makes it so the chain is no longer whole, and at some point, probably fairly quickly, the chain is no longer going to see itself as a single entity.  What would that do?

 

I can imagine three possibilities.  

 

One is that the forgery will maintain the chain's cognitive or spiritual aspect, forcing it to continue to view itself as a single object, and thereby maintaining the change to the chain until the seal is broken.  I don't think this one is very likely, but certainly possible.

 

Second is that the pieces of the chain which are no longer part of the portion of the chain which still has the seal will revert to their natural form, while the portion with the seal will remain changed.  I think this one is the most likely.

 

The third option is that the chain is changed so much by the break that the seal is no longer able to work on the chain and the seal fades.  At first I thought this quite likely, but then I thought about how the emperor's seal is able to handle him learning, growing, and changing in time.  Yes, the seal has to be reapplied every day, but if those changes were to make it so the seal wouldn't work then there would be the risk of his personality changing to the point that one day the seal wouldn't take.  So, I think seals are unaffected by what happens to the forged item or person after the seal is forged.  Another way to put this is that Forgery rewrites the past, and the past is unaffected by the future.

 

 

[Kurkistan]

You might want to look at the discussions we had on this thread.

[Chromium Compounder]

You might want to look at the discussions we had on this thread.

Yeah, that does cover the same basic premise I was thinking of.  I hadn't seen that one, and it didn't come up when I was searching before posting this.  

 

By the way, I'm of the opinion that the contents of a container aren't an integral part of the container itself, so forging it to be full wouldn't work.

[Windrunner]

Shai uses a soulstamp on a locked door to the emperor's rooms to forge them into having termite damage. It wasn't even a stamp designed for that door. She kicks it to pieces in the instant before the seal fades, and there's no indication that they fix themselves or anything like that. I imagine the door reverts back to not having termite damage, but it still is in pieces from when she kicked it down.