Harmony, kandra,: and the Southern Hemisphere

[+robardin]

To recap:

Kandra are "elevated mistwraiths" that were created by Rashek while Ascended from "all living Feruchemists", who in turn were all Terris.

Rashek remade the world, moving land around (relocating Terris), creating ashmounts to offset the increased heat of the planet, and separating the Southern Hemisphere (with an uninhabitable "death zone" in between) as a kind of intentional "control group" of unmodified humans, in case his twiddles didn't work out.

After Sazed "double Ascended" to Harmony, the world was remade yet again - "restored", for the most part. At the end of THoA, it says he dumped out what the pre-FE world looked like from "the detailed maps and charts of the Bennett people" from his copperminds and "restored the continents and oceans, the islands and coastlines, the mountains and rivers".

But he obviously didn't stop there, because he then created the Basin with all of Rashek's storage cache/Ruiniation bunkers moved together into it, from which Spook, Ham, Breeze, and the rest of the Originators built Elendel and the surrounding cities.

Apparently first he hit the "reset" button, and then realized "I'm GOD now, I can do what I WANT TO", including making Spook a Mistborn. (Until the Intent of Harmony had time to rein him in, "but you DON'T want to, do you?")

What about the Southern Hemisphere, then? Was that always (even before Rashek) separated from the Northern Hemisphere, or did Harmony see some wisdom in keeping them separate (or some harm in rapidly reconnecting them) to the North?

When it says Harmony "restored human physiology" to a pre-Rashek basis, undoing the adaptations to living under ash and consuming red/brown plants and all, why wouldn't he also have undone the adaptations to the Southerners to living in much higher temperatures (without ash)?

But that kind of question has been posed to Brandon and officially RAFO'ed

Quote

Questioner

Why didn't Harmony heal or change *inaudible*? [from notes: Why didn't Harmony change Southerners on Scadrial?]

Brandon Sanderson

That is a RAFO. Good question.

Warsaw signing (March 18, 2017)

No, what I'm wondering about is what is implied - or not implied, full of loud silence - at the end of Bands of Mourning.

When Steris steps in between Wax and Jordis (the Malwish captain of Allik's original ship and crew) to de-escalate tensions over possession of the Bands by giving it to the kandra, she assumes a lot about kandra and how Harmony has interacted with the Southerners:

Quote

"Allik, your people have stories of creatures like her, do you not?" ...

He removed his medallion and launched into a furious explanation in his language, waving his hands, then gesturing at MeLaan. She cocked an eyebrow, then made her skin translucent ...

The captain took this in.

"We," Steris said, "will give the Bands to the immortal kandra. They are wise and impartial, tasked with serving all people. ..."

There was no way to tell what Captain Jordis thought...

So,

1) Why would the Southerners "have stories of creatures like her"? Mistwraiths were all created from Terrisfolk in the beginning and would only become kandra via spikes given by TLR, and so only have existed in the Final Empire of the Northern Hemisphere.

2) For that same reason, the kandra in turn didn't seem to know about the Southeners, either. ReLuur didn't recognize the writing or origin of the "temple" that he found. At best it was all a ruse by Harmony to manipulate the two continents to meet in just this way - the kandra weren't in on it.

3) At the same time, Allik didn't bat an eye when MeLaan volunteered to walk through the booby traps at the temple, exhibiting superhuman imperviousness to physical trauma (the first time she did something overtly kandra-ish in his presence). I mean, he "gawked" as MeLaan casually ripped a spear out of her torso and said "if I lose a spike due to an explosive, you'd better be ready to stick it right back in". But more in surprise, not of "I didn't know this was a thing!" kind of reaction.

And of course, those skeletal remains of the Sovereign's "priests", who Allik had described as "his closest servants... some of them eventually returned" from the temple to them to tell them about it... Seems like kandra?

But then why would ReLuur, MeLaan, and VarSell have talked and acted like they knew nothing about the Southern folks and ways? Has Harmony created a "Second Foundation" group of kandra? Or were they somehow "rogue" kandra?

Edited May 18, 2022 by robardin

[cometaryorbit]

3 hours ago, robardin said:

Apparently first he hit the "reset" button, and then realized "I'm GOD now, I can do what I WANT TO", including making Spook a Mistborn.

That wasn't Harmony just going crazy with the new power, Kelsier asked him to heal Spook's savantism damage and to make him Mistborn while he's at it. (Because "they'll need some Allomancers in the world that comes" -  I guess Kelsier thought the Mistings that survived, like Breeze, might not supply enough Allomantic genes with no Mistborn around.)

3 hours ago, robardin said:

1) Why would the Southerners "have stories of creatures like her"? Mistwraiths were all created from Terrisfolk in the beginning and would only become kandra via spikes given by TLR, and so only have existed in the Final Empire of the Northern Hemisphere.

2) For that same reason, the kandra in turn didn't seem to know about the Southeners, either.

I can see a couple of possibilities.

- TLR moved one or more of the newly transformed First Generation Kandra to the Southerners to keep an eye on his "control group" immediately, while he still had the Well's power. They stayed in the South permanently and haven't had contact with the Basin kandra, so the Basin kandra don't know about the South.

- TLR moved one or more kandra to the South later, for the same reasons. That would be tricky with the conditions in between, but maybe not impossible with TLR's abilities. (TLR himself could have made the trip with compounded steel and gold, the question is whether he could keep a kandra alive.)

- Harmony moved one or more kandra post Final Ascension but kept it secret from the Basin kandra.

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I *think* the implication with Harmony undoing the ash physiology changes but not the Southerners' lack of cold tolerance is that Harmony undid the changes TLR made (using the 'memory' Preservation's power had of past actions) but the Southerners' changes were "natural". That doesn't make a lot of sense to me in RL evolution terms, but it seems inevitable since by WoB TLR didnt change them genetically.

Edited May 18, 2022 by cometaryorbit

[Duxredux]

Well... I have a different possible direction to think, and hopefully it doesn't derail your thread. In general there's this huge thing called the Cognitive Realm, Shadesmar, and interplanetary commerce and travel that has been going on for millennia, and the vast majority of people on each planet is unaware of this. Why is this so hush-hush? I'm pretty sure we've gotten confirmation that there are worldhopping Kandra and Southern Scadrians. Maybe Southern Scadrial is just more aware of the bigger Cosmere and have met those world hopping Kandra?

Something that I haven't seen get brought up much is that the Southerners almost certainly have a Perpendicularity with their renewable and reliable source of ettmetal. They run their vehicles on that stuff it's so accessible to them. Considering that the Pits of Hathsin no longer produce Atium, Harmony had to move his Perpendicularity somewhere (and presumably the Well of Ascension) and he apparently he chose to move it south. If he knew what he was doing at the time, he was setting up Southern Scadrial to be the "port city" of interplanetary commerce. I think that's a huge indicator that Harmony does have interests in Southern Scadrial (or if he didn't know he was establishing a point of commerce, he almost certainly will have figured it out now), but I'm not sure why there is so little communication about different continents and worlds in general. It's not just kandra, and continents, it's the Cosmere. My guess is that he has Kandra down south, but hasn't said much to either side of the existence of other civilizations, how they got there, I dunno. Maybe they walked or took a boat, maybe they just explored. I don't know if there's this unspoken rule among the Cosmere that you just don't tell people when you're a foreigner? It probably also has a writerly reason of Brandon trying to keep a handle on how fast the worlds collide and managing the complexity and information curve that he and we have to follow.

Edited May 18, 2022 by Duxredux
added another thought

[cometaryorbit]

2 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

Well... I have a different possible direction to think, and hopefully it doesn't derail your thread. In general there's this huge thing called the Cognitive Realm, Shadesmar, and interplanetary commerce and travel that has been going on for millennia, and the vast majority of people on each planet is unaware of this. Why is this so hush-hush?

There's a WoB on this... so far, at the current tech level of most planets, most people in the cosmere don't have enough context to know what "another planet" means really - they take it either as a religious/mystical claim or just a distant land.

This comes up a bit in Stormlight

Spoiler

Ash complains when people call Braize another realm - "it's a planet. You can see it in the sky". Kaladin thinks (in WoR, I think) that Braize is another name for Damnation. And it seeks pretty clear that the Tranquiline Halls myth is derived from the exodus from Ashyn.

So some knowledge of contact with the other planets has survived in Rosharan culture, but been transformed into religious concepts like a version of Heaven and Hell - it's not connected with the physical, astronomical planets.

And when Shallan first hears about Nalthis and Scadrial in RoW she assumes they're regions of Shadesmar.

Some people involved with House Venture were participating in trade through the Pits, but I doubt they had any real idea of where those people were from.

[+robardin]

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

That wasn't Harmony just going crazy with the new power, Kelsier asked him to heal Spook's savantism damage and to make him Mistborn while he's at it. (Because "they'll need some Allomancers in the world that comes" -  I guess Kelsier thought the Mistings that survived, like Breeze, might not supply enough Allomantic genes with no Mistborn around.)

I can see a couple of possibilities.

- TLR moved one or more of the newly transformed First Generation Kandra to the Southerners to keep an eye on his "control group" immediately, while he still had the Well's power. They stayed in the South permanently and haven't had contact with the Basin kandra, so the Basin kandra don't know about the South.

- TLR moved one or more kandra to the South later, for the same reasons. That would be tricky with the conditions in between, but maybe not impossible with TLR's abilities. (TLR himself could have made the trip with compounded steel and gold, the question is whether he could keep a kandra alive.)

- Harmony moved one or more kandra post Final Ascension but kept it secret from the Basin kandra.

---

I *think* the implication with Harmony undoing the ash physiology changes but not the Southerners' lack of cold tolerance is that Harmony undid the changes TLR made (using the 'memory' Preservation's power had of past actions) but the Southerners' changes were "natural". That doesn't make a lot of sense to me in RL evolution terms, but it seems inevitable since by WoB TLR didnt change them genetically.

So, I mentioned Spook's upgrade mostly in the context of "Sazed did stuff immediately after Ascending that he probably wouldn't, or possibly even couldn't  do Intent-wise, do in Wax's time after hundreds of years as Harmony".

I mean, he carefully nurtured Wax as "His Ruin" (one of his chief "pawns") as a Crasher Twinborn who was "seasoned" in the Roughs, yet was head of a noble House with the commensurate standing in the Elendel Senate, and all that. And He has occasionally given Wax "a little help", such as arranging for his travel trunk with his Sterrions in it being in the same shipping container of the Vanishers as where his showdown with Miles occurred. If He could have "arranged" for Wax to be a Mistborn, or upgraded him at whim as with Spook, how much more effective a pawn would he have been? (Arguably more effective than a Crasher?)

As for how the Southerners know about kandra and in what context. It seems highly likely (given how Allik and Jordis react) that they DO know they exist as immortal shapeshifters in some divinely appointed capacity; I somehow feel like it's not the same context that Steris is coming from, though.

And I strongly suspect they were the Sovereign's priests that Allik described as being of "no people currently living among us". A strangely worded way of saying “a bygone people who died out”, but makes sense as “they are still alive but not among us, at least not as the same people”.

In which case, Harmony surely knows about them and their shenanigans with the Sovereign (being as they're hemalurgic creatures), but were they commissioned or directed to those actions by Him, or merely permitted to act of their own free will (within boundaries...) in that regard? He's certainly not told TenSoon and the 3+ Generation kandra about it that are still around in the North.

I also think that's what was going on when MeLaan "cocked an eyebrow, then made her skin translucent" in the milddle of Allik's impassioned talking to Jordis et al. while gesturing at MeLaan. She wouldn't understand their language, but Harmony probably DM'ed her to do it (thus the raised eyebrow as it would be a somewhat extraordinary circumstance, a literal Act of God for her).

And I think your guess is right about how/why He didn't "reverse" the physiological changes to the Southerners - that, plus He may already have foreseen how he'd need those changes to guide them to needing to develop medallion technology (being dependent on heat medallions for everyday survival).

Edited May 18, 2022 by robardin

[cometaryorbit]

53 minutes ago, robardin said:

So, I mentioned Spook's upgrade mostly in the context of "Sazed did stuff immediately after Ascending that he probably wouldn't, or possibly even couldn't  do Intent-wise, do in Wax's time after hundreds of years as Harmony".

Oh. Yeah. I definitely agree with that.

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I will have to re-read BoM and look closely at how Allik reacts to MeLaan.

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The Sovereign's priests: hmm, that is totally possible. I thought the implication was that they left to build the temple and died there, but that could be a red herring.

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One other possibility: a kandra could have ventured South on their own (say by taking an aquatic form to cross the oceans) sometime after the Catacendre, starting legends in the South. Not necessarily on Harmony's orders, either: did *every* kandra agree to work for Harmony? Even those Second Generation types like KanPaar who imprisoned Sazed? It's interesting that TenSoon seems to be the eldest kandra around...