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What are Savants?


King Cole

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Savants are Mistings that burn their metal so often and at such a high burn that they "stretch" their spirit web to allow for them to draw more power from their metal. This make their strength in that one metal more then a mistborns power. However being a savant can be damaging like what happens to spook because he thought that the way the world looked normally was super dull and drab. Steel and iron savants just have very fine control over their metal aswell. Fun fact: if you burned enough lerasium (well of Ascension metal) to be a savant then you would hold the shard of preservation

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Before I give you the answer, I need to preface it with a warning - Brandon is almost certainly changing something about what constitutes a savant and how savants work. So anything I tell you might get changed in the future.

This being said, savants are magic users who have gotten really really good at what they do. So good, investiture - the stuff of magic - has built up on their soul and is changing them in some ways. Spook, for example, is our first example of a tin savant - his ability with Allomantic tin is far beyond what a regular Tineye or a Mistborn would be able to accomplish, but it comes with a cost. If you've read Words of Radiance (no spoilers, I promise), there is a brief scene where one of the characters sees a group of people whose skin has started (at least visually) turning to stone - those too are savants.

That's the short and not-too-technical answer.

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Ok, so this may spiral downwards depending on what other terms you understand.

Basically, your Spiritweb is what determines what powers you have. Allomancers (and Surgebinders) have to snap first, which is some form of physical/emotional trauma that creates a crack in the spiritweb. These cracks are what lets the Investiture(power of magic) through and gives you the ability to use your powers. Think of your spiritweb like a dam and the Investiture is the water it is holding back.

Pulling the power through those cracks make them start to widen. After a certain point, you've made a bigger hole in the Spiritweb and it lets more power through. That's basically becoming a Savant. It lets you do some fancy things with certain powers that you couldn't do normally, but can also have some negative effects. These vary based on power, both the positive and the negative aspects

Edit: But as Argent just said, Brandon appears to be changing something about Savants, and we do not know exactly what.

Edited by The One Who Connects
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20 minutes ago, King Cole said:

Ohhh, the people who used the soulcasters to such an extent that they had stone skin. Are there any other examples of this in the cosmere?

Not that I can recall. I keep hearing that Miles Hundredlives was a gold/gold savant (which I can totally believe), but I can't recall a WoB on the topic. Wax was planned as a savant of the combination of both of his powers - i.e. not an "Allomantic steel" savant, not a "Feruchemical iron savant", but a "savant of the combination of Allomantic steel and Feruchemical iron." However, Brandon is concerned that he hasn't added enough (or any, really) downsides to Wax's supposed savantism, so this might be one of the things he changes (i.e. Wax might end up being canonically not a savant; we'll see). 

I don't think anyone else has been confirmed to be a savant - though we'll get an interlude from the POV of a Soulcaster savant in Oathbringer.

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38 minutes ago, Argent said:

I don't think anyone else has been confirmed to be a savant - though we'll get an interlude from the POV of a Soulcaster savant in Oathbringer.

oh GoodyGoody thats exciting!!! ;) 

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