allomancy Burning Hemalurgic Spikes?

[Lord-Ice]

I admit that I have yet to read the Era 2 books or the short stories, so perhaps this is revealed in one of those books. Still, worth asking if it hasn't. I've done quite a bit of browsing over on the Coppermind wiki, about the magic systems of Scadrial. I don't mind spoilers, since they only make me want to experience the source material firsthand, so I pumped myself up for reading Era 2 by reading about Allomancy and Feruchemy. Compounding was right up my alley, as someone who likes to figure out how things would mix. After a while, a thought occurred to me. 

 

What would happen if an Allomancer burned a charged Hemalurgic spike? Would it Compound, like Feruchemy? Would the Hemalurgic charge simply disappear? Would the Allomancer gain the Hemalurgic power permanently, as if... for lack of a better word, spot welding the Spiritual DNA of the Allomancer? Or would it be something else entirely. 

[8bitBob]

Long story short: we don't know, but something would probably happen.

Short story way longer, see my giant post on the subject here. I know you said you're fine with spoilers, but it gets pretty spoilery. You've been warned. It gets a bit speculative, but it also goes over what we know on the subject.

[Calderis]

How I think this would have to work (and this is total speculation based pretty heavily on @8bitBob's theories) is that you could burn a spike to retain the given attribute, but it would be painful. 

Hemalurgy relies on inserting the stolen chuck of soul into the proper portion of the spirit web, which is why bind points are necessary. So to retain the attribute you would have to burn the spike while it was inserted. 

I don't think it's something just anyone could start, because you'd have to be advanced enough with the metal to be able to burn metal outside the stomach. 

Then you'd need to be able to both withstand the pain of burning the spike itself, and depending on the location of the spike, possibly need the ability to heal the residual wound. 

So while I find it plausible, it's seems complicated enough that we'll likely never see it happen. 

[+hwiles]

Sanderson originally indicated (in 2008-ish I believe) that it wouldn't do anything unless the spike came from the person trying to burn it, which, while technically possible, would require bizarre circumstances and produce very odd results.

He changed his mind a few years later and said that burning a spike would "splice" the hemalurgic charge to the user's spiritweb, which would probably result in some far-reaching consequences and might be excruciatingly painful and life-altering.  The unspoken indication is that the portion of the spiritweb stored in the spike might not be added to your spiritweb, but may instead overwrite the corresponding section of your spiritweb, which could result in the loss of some/all of your allomantic/feruchemic abilities in exchange for whatever abilities are in the spike.  Or it might send you into shock and heart failure from agony...it's sort of open-ended.

Nowadays, I believe he just RAFO's this question, and promises that an answer will become clearer once things like "mechanical allomancy/feruchemy" have been explored and the underlying realmatics of the metallic arts have been better fleshed out.

Honestly, I believe he is still trying to decide how this should work realmatically.  It's a pretty complicated interaction and, given the nature and rarity of hemalurgic spikes so far in the series, it's not implausible that no one has ever tried it, or, if they have, it's not implausible that no one has ever documented it.  He still has like 7 books planned for the Mistborn series, as well as some musings on spin-offs and cross-overs in the distant future, so he's trying to be super careful not to unbalance the relative power of the magic systems and make one overpowered.  It's like trying to balance the power of character builds in an RPG, minus the ability to retroactively roll things back with patches and updates.