Ex-Awakeners and Aging

[Trusk'our]

It's been a question to me for awhile about whether or not an old Awakener who has been kept young via Breaths would age and die as... (Mistborn spoilers)

Spoiler

Rashek did in Mistborn.

I don't believe that they would, though. Because... (more Mistborn spoilers)

Spoiler

Leras's body didn't age to dust after he died and his body lost all of it's Investiture. And since Awakeners are basically just mini-Shardic vessels, the same rule probably applies to them as well.

 

[Treamayne]

2 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

It's been a question to me for awhile about whether or not an old Awakener who has been kept young via Breaths would age and die as... (Mistborn spoilers)

  Reveal hidden contents

Rashek did in Mistborn.

I don't believe that they would, though. Because... (more Mistborn spoilers)

  Reveal hidden contents

Leras's body didn't age to dust after he died and his body lost all of it's Investiture. And since Awakeners are basically just mini-Shardic vessels, the same rule probably applies to them as well.

 

Well, we have this WoB:

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Depends on which definition of immortal you mean.

Doesn't age, but can be killed by conventional means. (You've seen some of these in the cosmere, but I'll leave you to discuss who.)

Heals from wounds, but still ages. (Knights Radiant with Stormlight are like this.)

Reborn when killed. (The Heralds.)

Doesn't age and can heal, but dependent upon magic to stay this way, and so have distinct weakness to be exploited. (The Lord Ruler, among others.)

Hive beings who are constantly losing individual members, but maintaining a persistent personality spread across all of them, immortal in that as long as too much of the hive isn't wiped out, the personality can persist. (The Sleepless.)

Bits of sapient magic, eternal and endless, though the personality can be "destroyed" in specific ways. (Seons. Spren. Nightblood. Cognitive Shadows, like a certain character from Scadrial.)

Shards (Really just a supercharged version of the previous category.)

And then, of course, there's Hoid. I'm not going to say which category, if any, he's in.

Some of these blend together--the Heralds, for example, are technically a variety of Cognitive Shadow. I'm not saying each of these categories above are distinct, intended to be the end-all definitions. They're off the cuff groupings I made to explain a point: immortality is a theme of the cosmere works--which, at their core, are experiments on what happens when men are given the power of deity.

So, we know that the Fifth Heightening grants Agelessness, but what we do not know for sure is: (Mistborn/Stormlight spoilers included)

Spoiler

The Agelessness used by Rashek did not affect his Spiritual Identity, compounding Atium simply kept "de-aging" the body - and we do not know of the Agelessness of the Fifth Heightening is the same (the body stops aging, but the soul continues to age) or different (neither the body nor soul age while you have the benefits of the Fifth Heightening). Since the only confirmed known example of this that is not also Returned (who have the Cognitive Shadow effects) is Vivenna/Azure and the effects of her Agelessness were not covered in Oathbringer.

 

[Quantus]

 

Probably age Rapidly, but it wasnt locked down as of 2018:

 

Quote

 

Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

If a person held enough breath to attain the 5th heightening, lived for a thousand years, and then sold all but their initial breath, would their spiritual age force them to rapidly age as we saw with Rashek, or would they resume natural aging from the point at which they ceased?

Brandon Sanderson (written)

I think they would rapidly age.

But I'm not ready to say 100%.

General Signed Books 2018 (April 17, 2018)

 

 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Quantus
The unintended Bold text bothered me..

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

On 11/3/2022 at 3:58 PM, Trusk'our said:

It's been a question to me for awhile about whether or not an old Awakener who has been kept young via Breaths would age and die as... (Mistborn spoilers)

  Reveal hidden contents

Rashek did in Mistborn.

I don't believe that they would, though. Because... (more Mistborn spoilers)

  Reveal hidden contents

Leras's body didn't age to dust after he died and his body lost all of it's Investiture. And since Awakeners are basically just mini-Shardic vessels, the same rule probably applies to them as well.

 

I imagine it is more of a pause to aging keeping at that age until you lose it and then allowing you to age regularly past that.   

We haven't seen a kid with 2000 breaths yet.   We don't know if they would have sped up aging like a child returned or anything.  

In my mind it is more of a pause than other options.  What we saw in mistborn we also have WoBs that say it was a wasteful and inefficient way to be ageless.  I think 2000 breaths would most certainly be a more effective and efficient way than that.    

[Stick The Savant]

Quote

In my mind it is more of a pause than other options. What we saw in mistborn we also have WoBs that say it was a wasteful and inefficient way to be ageless. I think 2000 breaths would most certainly be a more effective and efficient way than that.   

I believe the inefficiency of compounding fueled immortality is a due to the fact that TLR still needs to store a bit of age in order to compound. We do know that feruchemichal youth is not a "default state of being" since it only lasts as long as the person is compounding or tapping the attribute. Since TLR needs to store age while he is not burning the metal, he likely gets diminishing returns since it is implied he still ages in a way as can be seen when the Lord ruler is described as looking very old.

[Trusk'our]

15 minutes ago, Stick The Savant said:

I believe the inefficiency of compounding fueled immortality is a due to the fact that TLR still needs to store a bit of age in order to compound. We do know that feruchemichal youth is not a "default state of being" since it only lasts as long as the person is compounding or tapping the attribute. Since TLR needs to store age while he is not burning the metal, he likely gets diminishing returns since it is implied he still ages in a way as can be seen when the Lord ruler is described as looking very old.

Mistborn TFE spoilers...

Spoiler

I don't think that it's actually necessary to continue storing an attribute when you compound.

Quote

A Memory of Light Raleigh Signing (Feb. 20, 2013)

Questioner (paraphrased)

Why did the Lord Ruler have to stay aged at times?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

That's when he was doing his rebuild. He didn't really have to, but he let himself. He has to recharge periodically, and then stays on a higher and higher burn over the thousand years. It gets harder and harder. The way the magic works—he doesn't have to stay aged.

Questioner (paraphrased)

Is he burning or tapping?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He's tapping.

Rashek just wanted to do so. Perhaps to feel contrast somewhere in his life?

In any case, you could simply divert a portion of your Feruchemical attribute gained via compounding into another Metalmind that you wanted to burn, then burn that to get the desired Invested effect.

When we say that the method is inefficient, it's most likely because it requires a constant intake of Investiture to remove the effects of old age, and it requires more and more Investiture to maintain the youth of an individual the older they get. With two-thousand Breaths, you never need to worry about aging again, and it's possible that even if you were stripped of them you wouldn't age to dust as you would with Atium compounding.

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Trusk'our

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

On 2/25/2023 at 2:11 PM, Trusk'our said:

Mistborn TFE spoilers...

  Hide contents

I don't think that it's actually necessary to continue storing an attribute when you compound.

Rashek just wanted to do so. Perhaps to feel contrast somewhere in his life?

In any case, you could simply divert a portion of your Feruchemical attribute gained via compounding into another Metalmind that you wanted to burn, then burn that to get the desired Invested effect.

When we say that the method is inefficient, it's most likely because it requires a constant intake of Investiture to remove the effects of old age, and it requires more and more Investiture to maintain the youth of an individual the older they get. With two-thousand Breaths, you never need to worry about aging again, and it's possible that even if you were stripped of them you wouldn't age to dust as you would with Atium compounding.

 

Is it possible that breaths simply pause the aging process instead of keeping a person looking young?  

With enough breaths your cellular structure and age could stay the same for as long as you keep that many breaths.  Only once you drop below that 5th heightening threshold do they start to age.  

Even at that it would be severely decreased aging speed. If 50 breaths can add 10 years to a person then 1950 breaths could add 390 years to a person.  I imagine it would actually add more and slow down the rate that the person ages more and more per breath until they hit the threshold where aging stops completely anyway.  

 

Even if stripped of all of their breath I think, now, that they wouldn't go through a TLR moment and shrivel up.  They would simply start the rest of their life from that point as a drab.  Allowed to fight and find the breaths to elongate it more when and however they can.  

[Trusk'our]

1 minute ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Is it possible that breaths simply pause the aging process instead of keeping a person looking young?  

With enough breaths your cellular structure and age could stay the same for as long as you keep that many breaths.  Only once you drop below that 5th heightening threshold do they start to age.  

Even at that it would be severely decreased aging speed. If 50 breaths can add 10 years to a person then 1950 breaths could add 390 years to a person.  I imagine it would actually add more and slow down the rate that the person ages more and more per breath until they hit the threshold where aging stops completely anyway.  

 

Even if stripped of all of their breath I think, now, that they wouldn't go through a TLR moment and shrivel up.  They would simply start the rest of their life from that point as a drab.  Allowed to fight and find the breaths to elongate it more when and however they can.  

Correct. Breaths don't seem to be linear in how long they keep you alive; the more Breaths you collect, the more effective they become overall.

Otherwise, you couldn't actually become ageless; you'd have to keep extending your life by collecting more Breaths, as each one would have a limit to how much longer they let you live.

[+robardin]

On 2/25/2023 at 4:11 PM, Trusk'our said:

I don't think that it's actually necessary to continue storing an attribute when you compound.

Rashek just wanted to do so. Perhaps to feel contrast somewhere in his life?

This confused me heavily the first time I read Mistborn. I believe I was only set straight on the way his atiummind cycle worked after discovering this forum: invest some youth in an atiummind, burn it to compound up by around 10x of the invested youth; put most of it back into an atiummind and tap it at a 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, etc., multiplier in a constant tapping; when the metalmind starts running low, repeat the Compounding.

Until I thought about that mechanism, I assumed TLR had to spend some time aged while storing youth into an atiummind as part of the mechanics, like maybe he couldn't burn an atiummind (to Compound) at the same time as tapping an atiummind (to stay young), or perhaps couldn't tap one atiummind while filling another one.

But the "needed contrast" angle is subtle and insightful as to the psychology of a human who's lived far, far beyond a normal span. And not like Hoid who apparently "skims" through time, or like a Shard that has Ascended beyond mortality, or a dragon or a Sleepless or even a kandra who is functionally immortal by nature.

As Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy reflected: "Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but [he] was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards."

As we saw with his monologuing and "toying" with Vin and Marsh in his throne room, he's BORED, he's jaded, he's super OP, and yet at some level, still a petty and angry person.

He's long outlived anyone he ever knew or cared about. He has literally nothing to really challenge him, except the frustration of having given up on figuring out how to defeat Ruin for good, because he can't (not as a Sliver, not even as one that takes the power at the Well every thousand years or so).

Unless he can tap his atiummind while unconscious, he can't even SLEEP. Which means he's also constantly compounding a bronzemind as well as an atiummind, just to stay alive.

Spending an hour here and there as an old man, while in his ancient Terris hut surrounded by artifacts from his past, is probably the closest he ever gets to feeling normal and alive any more - the way Vin saw him when she burned malatium.

Edited April 6, 2023 by robardin