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Lightspine

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Lightspine last won the day on July 26 2020

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  1. Actually, I don't think the Nightmare was touching Nikaro in that scene. What you're remembering is when Liyun is feeding from Yumi. Here's the full passage: However, the Nightmare certainly did need to get closer to Nikaro in order to start feeding on him, and couldn't do it from a significant distance, so I understand your consternation at the machine being able to perform this over a range of (probably) thousands of miles. My tentative thought here is that the Festival itself probably made it easier. A significant chunk of the Torish population may have been gathered in the capital city at that time, and a crowd of them gathered right up at the machine when it was being activated (Yumi finds the machine in what was once a "grand exhibit hall"). Maybe the large number of nearby souls was able to give the machine the power boost it needed to reach out and gather the more distant ones?
  2. I don't have much to say here in terms of theory that hasn't already been said, but I haven't seen this particular passage brought up yet so I thought I would do it: Whatever the Father machine did is not unique to it. (And remember the smaller "child" machine also extracted hion from the scholar and Yumi when it was being primed). Another instance of souls having hion characteristics is during the carnival ride: Since hion seems to be just what Virtuosity's investiture looks like, there's two options here: 1). the people's souls are being converted into Virtuosity investiture when machines/Nightmares feed on them. 2). the people's souls are already Invested by Virtuosity on this particular planet. I don't know if there's evidence either way about this.
  3. A bit of a tangent but this quote really makes me worried about Ishar's experiments. Like, I think this implies something pretty significantly messed up happens as a consequence of what Ishar is doing.
  4. Jumping in maybe a little late in this discussion, but here's my take on it: Yumi is basically the same as those people from Torio that Painter painted out of the stable nightmares during the attack, except that she has enough Investiture to choose not to dissipate with the rest of the shroud. To elaborate just a bit more: as Design says, raw investiture is given form by human perception, which is why Painter is able to force them into the shapes he draws. Painter used this method to give the investiture that is Yumi's cognitive shadow a shape, which she then maintains with her own will. Importantly, I don't think she needed a physical body to get "stapled" to like we've seen for other cognitive shadows (Kelsier, Fused) because her cognitive shadow or some part of its investiture somehow already existed in the Physical Realm, unlike those examples.
  5. I was trying to cook up a theory along these lines of thought, but I couldn't quite connect everything together. First, what I think are the established facts: Black smoke seems to be the form that investiture takes when it is "consumed" by Nightblood or the Machine. However, the nature of the investiture in these two cases might be slightly different: The Shroud created by the machine are souls (probably synonymous with spiritwebs, which Design confirms in this book are the part of somebody made of pure investiture) that have been consumed and spat back out. My first thought after reading this was that Nightblood's smoke was also the refuse of consumed souls, but there's this WoB from 2011, which says it's the leftovers of Breaths instead: That said, there's still room for these to be the same. Souls on Nalthis are invested differently than elsewhere—since a drab has less investiture than a normal human from a different planet. It is possible that Breaths contain the investiture of the spiritweb on Nalthis or something like that which makes Breaths and "souls" somewhat synonymous. There's also the fact that this is a Wob from over 12 years ago, and it's entirely possible that Branderson has changed his mind since then. In summary: the Shroud and Nightblood smoke are at the very least extremely similar, but may or may not be identical phenomenon. Now, about the Midnight Essence stuff. I've found one quote from the book and one WoB which seem relevant here: Both of these quotes seem to point towards one idea: what's happening here isn't unique to the source of investiture. Design says any "raw investiture" would respond this way to the painting, and Branderson acknowledges that Honor/Cultivation/Odium's investiture also has this response, just to a lesser degree due to "oversight". Unfortunately for the conspiracy-board-connection-making, this means that Re-Shephir, Midnight Aether, and Nightmares do not necessarily have to be related directly. Rather, they are just all manifestations of "raw investiture" that responds in this way to human thought. That said, they are still united in their dark smokey appearance (and oily black when given more form) so it's very possible that Re-Shephir and Midnight Aether are also some type of chewed-up soul. I just don't think this can be confidently asserted yet. Anyway, that's all of the facts and more well-grounded speculation I was able to scrounge up about this. I was trying to connect these ideas by making a theory about the "entropy" of investiture but it didn't quite fit together. (If you're curious, the gist of it is sort of complicating the investiture --> energy conversion. The Machine and Nightblood are able to "consume" investiture without destroying it. In physics terms, this means they were able to extract useful work (or "free energy") from the investiture by stripping it of Identity and whatnot. In real-life physics, free energy can be extracted by a process that increases total entropy. Therefore, I think the Shroud/Nightblood smoke is investiture in a high-entropy state and somehow more "raw" and manipulatable, and that any investiture—not just souls—could be converted into this state. There's some interesting quotes in SP3 about the spirits admiring art because it creates "order from disorder" which sort of maybe fits this idea? But I couldn't find enough evidence for it to make it a formal theory)
  6. This is a minor theory without any real implications, but I'm pretty sure that Yumi accidentally gave the small machine (which I'll call the Child, since it's established the larger one is the "Father") the boost it needed to start. TL;DR: the Child machine would have consumed one of the scholar's souls to get itself going, but instead Yumi, highly invested being that she is, gives it this energy. This line of enquiry began because of this quote later in the book: Huh. Going back to the scene where the Child machine is being primed, it's actually quite clear what this means. Just like the Father, the Child machine needed an energy boost to start before it could perpetuate itself by stacking stones to attract spirits. (A bit of a side note: if I'm understanding it correctly, rather than keeping the spirits it attracted bound to it like the Father, the Child machine stole some energy from the spirits it attracted to keep itself going before binding the spirit to some other task. This is why it was able to make spirit devices for the villagers, but also why they were less effective—some of their energy was stolen to keep the machine going) From the text: Knowing what we know after Hoid's explanations towards the end of the book, "The Incident" refers to the Father machine consuming the souls of Torio in order to get itself running. This explains the general reluctance of any of the scholars when it comes to priming the Child: In this case, "priming" means feeding their soul to the Child to give it the energy it needed. Now, I'm not entirely sure if this is necessary to the explanation but I do believe that this could only have been done by one of the scholars, and not any of the poor souls drifting formlessly in the Shroud. This is because the scholars were "held in reserve": My interpretation of this is that the scholars' souls weren't yet "consumed" by the Father and therefore could still have been "eaten" by the Child for power. (You could probably convince me that a particularly stable nightmare like Liyun might also have been able to do it) Anyway, let's finally get to the meat of my theory. Yup, that's pretty much all the evidence I have. But from the inferences I made above and the reactions of the scholars themselves to the prospect of "priming" I'm quite confident that they expected the scholar doing it to be sacrificed. Instead, however, the Child machine draws enough investiture from Yumi to get started. (Notice how the lights that go up in the machine do so immediately after the hion lines connecting Yumi to the machine form) This is why Yumi feels the "coldness"—and remember, she's in "ghost" form during this so it's not like the machine stole physical warmth from her, it definitely took investiture. Now, the reason I don't think this theory is particularly impactful is that I don't think Yumi was necessary. If our protagonists hadn't decided to go snooping at that moment, the only difference would have been that the Child would have consumed one of the scholar's souls to get going, and nothing else would have changed.
  7. Just wanted to post a detail I've noticed upon rereading some of the earlier chapters after having finished: Masaka being very defensive about aliens being friends! (This is before she's revealed to be an Aimian)
  8. Oh I see what you mean. Yeah we're in agreement that the water isn't completely vanishing afterwards. Now that you mention it I am curious about that. It does seem like spore eaters should be more commonplace, maybe their numbers dwindle because of how unerringly fatal the condition is.
  9. It's unclear if that's what normally happens when spores are exposed to water, or specifically for the case of spore eaters like Captain Crow: I would think that if the normal spores fed the aether on the moon then spore eaters would be unnecessary. That, combined with the fact that this planet has a water cycle, makes me believe the water hangs around somehow.
  10. Hmm, you bring up an interesting point. The water certainly appears consumed, but I'm wondering if it actually is like, chemically consumed or magically converted into something else, or if it remains as water somehow. The main reason I'm concerned about is that I've been called out by Hoid: Like, we know this planet has rainfall. If all the water that falls onto the seas is consumed, that doesn't bid well for the planet's water cycle. Therefore, the water used by the spores has to be recoverable somehow. For something like Verdant it seems straightforward since plants contain a lot of water, but the other Aethers don't make as much sense. Not that any of them seem to abide by conservation of mass since it seems like spiritual investiture --> matter conversion is happening. My best guess is that when the materials produced by the aethers dissipate as smoke they release water vapor? Can't see any other way the planet's water cycle makes sense.
  11. Someone on Reddit pointed out that the so called "bone spores" rumored to be a 13th type of Aether might actually be white sand! Since there's disagreement about whether or not bone spores are white or black, and white sand is both (white when charged with investiture, black when drained). I know I'm not adding much to the discussion with Autonomy but I think it's a neat tie-in. As for the differences, I think the largest one is that the white sand doesn't "grow" like the Aether's do. And the use of water is also a bit strange, since the Aether's explicitly use water as a "catalyst" to draw investiture from the Spiritual realm (according to Ulaam) yet the white sand microorganisms already have investiture before the water is given to them. The way Brandon describes the white sand microorganisms: I think this implies the lichen might be using water to reproduce/grow, in which case it is very similar to the Aether spores, just less pronounced. Perhaps both Aethers and white sand microorganisms require both water and investiture to spread. White sand just happens to already have access to one of those, but demands water too?
  12. Almost certainly Riina. We see Raoden use something that would probably be classified as Lightweaving in Elantris to pass off as a non-Elantrian. This should be well within Riina's abilities. I don't think the creature fits any known descriptions of the Sho-Del, so it's probably an intelligent race we haven't met yet. I'm also interested in why they're around. Are they a friend of Riina's, or more like a pet? I assume they aren't native to Lumar, so Riina must have brought them with her?
  13. I've seen the question of how Riina was able to curse somebody as powerful as Hoid so effectively been brought up. Of course, it certainly helps that Hoid was a willing participant and he likely made himself quite vulnerable to make the sort of Connection necessary to making himself an Elantrian. However, I think there might be something more going on behind the scenes of this curse. First of all, let's look at the curse's effects again: I think we've actually seen a previous example of an Elantrian losing their sense of self: the Hoed. Now, I'm not saying that Hoid has gone insane under the burden of immense pain or something like that. I don't believe he was Hoed. Rather, I would focus on how this process was reversed. When Raoden drew the Chasm Line and restored the Aon Rao, the Hoed recovered from their condition. This sets a precedent: an Elantrian can regain their mind when they enter the influence of Aon Rao. One of the things which set me down this train of thought were the actions of Shai in TLM, immediately after using her Essence Mark: I don't think it's controversial to say that Shai drew the Aon Rao, modified to match the geography of the Elendel Basin. I also think it's relatively uncontroversial to say that Riina almost definitely had such an Aon, corresponding the Lumarian geography, somewhere in her tower. Let's look at some descriptions. I'm especially intrigued by the, perhaps coincidental, way that last quote compares to the description of Shai standing "in the center of the circular drawing of light." Now, also look at the clue that Hoid gives Tress on breaking his curse. Tress realizes during the final act that this means to bring Hoid to Riina's room, and I don't think that it is a coincidence that the clue is focused on the map on the floor instead of anything else that might be distinctive to the Sorceress' tower. What I propose is this: Hoid's curse is in part broken because he is brought into the influence of the (Lumarian) Aon Rao, restoring his mind and powers as an Elantrian. I'm not saying there's nothing else going on with his curse, just that this may be a factor in how it functioned.
  14. Ah, you've convinced me. I forgot about the appearance of Roseite evaporating, I assume that must have been in TLM. I didn't mean to equate it as one of the Ten Essences, I was more trying to point out the chain of connections from Midnight --> Re Shephir --> Lightweavers --> Spark which seems weird to me. Also, I've taken another glance down the list of the Ten Essences and am thoroughly disturbed by Heliodor/Sinew/Flesh. If that corresponds to an Aether, does that mean there are spores which sprout... meat? Ick.
  15. I was thinking there's a potential connection here too. However, I think that at some point Shai says that the Men of Red and Gold are "hard to control" or something like that, which very much contradicts their description in this story, which made it clear that they were actually easier to direct than the Midnight monsters.
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