Bands: What Happened?

[bmcclure7]

On 11/15/2022 at 11:29 PM, Karger said:

So during the lost metal the bands were rereleased into the public.  Additionally we met Kelsier.  We still have no clarification on how medallions are made but for now I'm going to operate under the assumption that it was the same method for now.  The bands were found to be out of attributes and our jackass of an admiral seemed to know that they would be.

I can't imagine the kandra allowing the bands detection so sabotage does not seem probable.  This removes the possibility of a switch.  I can thus only come to the conclusion that the power in the bands must have degraded over time(exactly like a hemalurgic spike).

Can anyone else think of another possibility in the meantime?

My guess is that it was the ghost bloods somehow Kelsier made the bands so he probably knows how to drain them we know he doesn't completely trust harmony so I think he would feel better with the bands in the hands of his worshipers. 

[ChickenChaser]

I posted in a different thread, and I apologize in advance for not quoting everyone else and book passages. I would like to point out a few things:

1. Kelsier doesn't mention the bands at all
2. Kelsier doesn't have any Scadrian abilities other than the spike in his eye that "ties his soul to his bones"
3. Marasi doesn't bring up the bands to Kelsier

However:

1. Death (ironeyes) can be invested directly by Harmony 
2. Death has all the powers that can be had (and could have had more added at any time)
3. Death mentions at the end of the book that he can help Wax take out his spike and presumably makes a comment referencing his fight with Vin about losing one that "he thought would kill him". 

So I believe the following events happened:

1. Marsh pulled out an eye spike (that he is surprised didn't kill him
2. Marsh went to south scadrial to save the Malwish and all those people
3. Marsh created the bands of mourning and made that ridiculous temple
4. Marsh created the medallions and the copper coins that we see "kelsier's" memories in as the Survivor
5. Marsh eventually drained the bands right under the Kandra's noses (or with their help)

I feel like Kelsier is somehow in the dark about the bands, but I seriously doubt it. He has to know about them. There's no way to keep that kind of secret from him.

Anyways, those are my points. 

[+robardin]

8 hours ago, Karger said:

I'm not sure how likely another Kandra traitor is.  I'm currently thinking that some process drained the bands naturally.  He may have been working with Autonomy but that seems incidental.

I don’t think the Bands - the real Bands - were drained at all.

I think that the kandra claiming to be TenSoon was not TenSoon, at least not the one that came back with the box with the so-called Bands of Mourning in them, already drained… The drained Bands were swapped in while the real ones were palmed.

TenSoon’s erratic behavior, speaking… as if… forced… at every step… Not to mention being in human form… And immediately agreeing to Daal’s suggestion of “alternating uses of the Bands” with the Southerners…

Very suspicious.

That, or Harmony Himself wants the Bands to go South, where TenSoon didn’t, and had to be forced to do it?

Combining that scene with the info that Kelsier had been on an airship over the ocean not long before - presumably meaning he had been in the South, where he’s The Sovereign - makes me put the chances that the Bands, in kandra hands, were somehow drained and now useless but Daal took them anyway, at exactly 0.00%.

[Jasin Natel]

Hard to say when, but we didn’t have any idea of Hoid’s actions in Era 1 until we got Secret History. Maybe we have to wait for Secret History 2. Just a thought I had, I may be completely wrong, but the WOB was intriguing. I came across it just after I finished The Lost Metal. 

[+Oltux72]

12 hours ago, Jasin Natel said:

Maybe Hoid drained the Bands…?

(Roshar)

Spoiler

Hoid really needs the alliance with Harmony. Where would be the reward worth with the risk?

If you are going for that explanation, go full tilt. SA1 to SA5 took place in the gap between TBM and TLM. Hoid gave the real Bands to his side's champion in the duell.

 

12 hours ago, Karger said:

I mean he didn't think they were impartial.  So if they knew then they would have been able to make their own.

Well, Harmony could just make Mistborn, as he did with Spook. If the admiral really thought that a god is on his enemy's side, he should surrender.

Yes, apparently Harmony is so far gone that cannot just make Mistborn anymore, but that is an assumption you cannot make from the outside.

[Frustration]

22 hours ago, ChickenChaser said:

1. Death has all the powers that can be had (and could have had more added at any time)

He only has 21 spikes actually, and several of those are repeated.

[ChickenChaser]

9 minutes ago, Frustration said:

He only has 21 spikes actually, and several of those are repeated.

At the end of the first era, sure. That doesn't necessarily mean that he has the same amount/configuration now.

[therunner]

13 hours ago, ChickenChaser said:

At the end of the first era, sure. That doesn't necessarily mean that he has the same amount/configuration now.

Hemalurgy no longer works as it did prior to Sazed's ascension, there is an upper limit now he could not get further powers.
He is just grandfathered in, because his soul was already modified.

And more importantly, Marsh would not want to get more, he really does not like what he became and what he did.

[Karger]

On 11/18/2022 at 5:54 PM, ChickenChaser said:

I feel like Kelsier is somehow in the dark about the bands, but I seriously doubt it. He has to know about them. There's no way to keep that kind of secret from him.

I don't know.  The bands seem exactly Kelseir's style.

On 11/18/2022 at 7:14 PM, robardin said:

Combining that scene with the info that Kelsier had been on an airship over the ocean not long before - presumably meaning he had been in the South, where he’s The Sovereign - makes me put the chances that the Bands, in kandra hands, were somehow drained and now useless but Daal took them anyway, at exactly 0.00%.

I don't follow.

On 11/18/2022 at 7:14 PM, robardin said:

That, or Harmony Himself wants the Bands to go South, where TenSoon didn’t, and had to be forced to do it?

Harmony said he wouldn't do that anymore.

On 11/19/2022 at 4:53 AM, Oltux72 said:

Well, Harmony could just make Mistborn, as he did with Spook. If the admiral really thought that a god is on his enemy's side, he should surrender.

The admiral doesn't accept a lot of the information we take as factual.  Also Kelseir would have some words about that.

 

[Isilel]

Could the Band-napping have been a heist of Kelsier's? He seems to be quite active in the South and he was there immediately prior to the ambassador switch. He might have had access to off-world connection-dampening devices that allowed the admiral to fool everybody into believing that the Bands were drained. I doubt that this was the case - it would be a massive waste to introduce such an artefact, explain nothing about how and why it came to be, or why it was abandoned and then just destroy it. Because the drained Bands are nothing but a piece of metal.

[+robardin]

On 11/20/2022 at 0:02 PM, Karger said:

Combining that scene with the info that Kelsier had been on an airship over the ocean not long before - presumably meaning he had been in the South, where he’s The Sovereign - makes me put the chances that the Bands, in kandra hands, were somehow drained and now useless but Daal took them anyway, at exactly 0.00%.

I don't follow. ... 

Harmony said he wouldn't [take direct control of a kandra] anymore.

So here are the moving parts, in chronological order (sorry for the info dump and recap, skim read since I'm sure you're well familiar with everything in it):

• The Southerners esteem "The Sovereign" (Kelsier) as someone who came to them after the Catacendre to save them all from freezing to death.
• The Southerners laid claim to the Bands as something "The Sovereign" wielded or created while with them in the South
• At the end of BoM the Bands were entrusted to the kandra, in the presence of Jordis (Allik's captain).
• Jordis evidently recognized the kandra as something their Southern lore knew about - but we don't know what that was:
  • Allik removed his translation medallion to launch into a "furious explanation" in their language
  • MeLaan "cocked her head" (receiving transmission from Harmony?) and, as if on cue, flashed translucent
  • Jordis then apparently accepted the Bands as being effectively "out of reach" for the Basin's everyday use.

Six years later,

• Aradel had stepped down from being governor "two years back", replaced by Varlance.
• The varying nations of the Southern Continent have united in a Malwish Conferedation.
• Varlance has a Terriswoman for Vice Governor, Adawathwyn, who Wax thought "looked familiar" from the Village, but without recognizing.
• Varlance, a former military man with a cache of unexplained medals, seems very compliant to Adawathwyn.
• And then, in the several days' timespan of events in TLM,
  • The Malwish Confederacy has sent a new ambassador to Elendel.
  • An apparently imminent disaster causes the Elendel government to demand to use to Bands.
  • A constable "Gorglen" is spotted by Steris and identified as a kandra because:
    • MeLaan said there were multiple kandra among the constables
    • Harmony had "promised help", which generally means sending a kandra, if not Wax and Friends
    • "Gorglan" looked awkward with using a "two-legged body"
    • He identifies himself as TenSoon.
  • Adawathwyn is the one who suggests getting and using the Bands to Push the bombship away
    • Daal immediately "stood up straight, his masked eyes fixated on Adawathwyn".
    • "TenSoon" pauses to "check with Harmony" and then says, "I will fetch the Bands"
      • He leaves and returns with a box containing a spearhead of many metals.
  • Daal demands that the only way to avert war with the Malwish is to agree to alternating possession of the Bands:
    • "We had dire need of this power to deal with our own problems, but couldn't use them; so, after you use them now, we get to use them".
    • TenSoon had "this distant expression" in reaction to this demand, then accedes.
    • TenSoon opened the box he'd brought back... And the Bands therein were "drained".
    • Daal takes them anyway, saying "our scholars will know if you are trying to pass off some fake."
    • Steris felt like everything Daal had said and done was somehow rehearsed, ... but how?
    • TenSoon says, with the apparent Voice of Harmony, that "you agreed to this".
  • Everybody starts leaving to room to evacuate themselves from Elendel, including Adawathwyn...
    • ...but Steris convinces Varlance to stay and work with her to evacuate the unwary civilians of the city.
  • Shortly afterward, TenSoon notes that with Daal and the senators having fled the city, "News is spreading"...
    • Once again with that distant expression, "they took the Bands. I shouldn't have brought them out... I didn't know they had been drained. I feel we were played somehow. I don't do... human very well anymore."

---

We never see TenSoon or Adawathwyn again in the book after Daal walks off with the Bands, except to learn that Varlance fired Adawathwyn as his Vice Governor after the crisis was over.

My primary assumptions/gut feelings:

• The Bands were not drained by the kandra, nor by secret use of them by agents unknown.
• Daal was in Elendel - and present at this meeting - expecting the Bands to be "put into play", with the express purpose of demanding their "return" after its (attempted) use.

And what we also know or can infer contextually from other events in TLM,

• Kelsier was on an airship some distance away from the Basin, flying over the ocean - sounds like he was just in the South, where he is the Sovereign.
• Kelsier is NOT a Fullborn nor even a Mistborn or Allomancer of any kind at the end of TLM.
  • Either he created the Bands and then lost those powers, ...
  • ...or he only had those powers to bequeath to the Southerners via the Bands, and then had to give them up.
• Kelsier is the head of the Ghostbloods, had a good idea that Autonomy and the Set were about to do something terrible, and doesn't trust Sazed to be able to act in Scadrial's best interests any more.

And my thery to explain/tie this all together boils down to this:

Adawathwyn is a Ghostblood agent, in cahoots with Daal with a plan crafted by Kelsier to engineer a crisis such that she could manipulate Varlance and the Basin senators to demand to use the Bands. They didn't know about the "bombship" threat, but simply the state of imminent civil war with the outer cities vs. Elendel would probably have been the original plan.

Daal would be present at the high level meeting where this demand could be issued (note that she had tried her best to exclude Steris from this meeting), to demand the "alternating possession" arrangement.

The "TenSoon" kandra may or may not be the real TenSoon - I am suspicious and disappointed if TenSoon has become so clumsy and "can't do human" any more after 350-ish years of mostly being a dog, but maybe it's true, he was also kind of stiff/unnatural as Brettin in AoL, but that could also have been just that he hadn't had a lot of time to prepare for the role (I mean, how and when did Brettin die in AoL?).

Let's assume he really was "Gorglen" and actually talking to Harmony when he freezes and goes distant from time to time. He was the most likely one to be able to fetch the Bands from wherever the kandra kept them, after all.

When TenSoon brings the box in and puts it on the table, Adawathwyn is eager to use them at once, Daal stands up stares down the governor (not Adawathwyn!), there is tension all around, all eyes are on Daal, the governor, and on TenSoon, who says "Harmony is preoccupied, but I'll agree if the humans do..."

The perfect time for Adawathwyn to swap the real Bands for a fake one. Her getting fired after the Bombship Crisis mattered nothing at all to her.

Daal walks off with the fake Bands, Adawathwyn with the real one. Does she give it to him later? Who knows. She probably just gives it to Kelsier. The point is that now the Basinfolk will not surprised to no longer have the Bands - they will believe they'd yielded them up legitimately.

Kelsier may or may not have had a way to forestall the bombship without using the Bands - he may not have realized how big of a threat that bombship was.

In any case, his plan was always to maneuver Daal into being able to leave with the (fake) Bands while Adawathwyn obtains the real ones, and that plan predated knowing about the bombship.

Edited November 21, 2022 by robardin

[Karger]

3 hours ago, robardin said:

In any case, his plan was always to maneuver Daal into being able to leave with the (fake) Bands while Adawathwyn obtains the real ones, and that plan predated knowing about the bombship.

The one flaw in that theory seems to be that Daal isn't actually surprised.  He feigns ignorance but if Steris is correct then he expected them to be drained.  He would also need to be a GB agent and I don't really see him as the type Kelseir would recruit.  Too prideful and no sense of humor. 

[+robardin]

6 hours ago, Karger said:

The one flaw in that theory seems to be that Daal isn't actually surprised.  He feigns ignorance but if Steris is correct then he expected them to be drained.  He would also need to be a GB agent and I don't really see him as the type Kelseir would recruit.  Too prideful and no sense of humor. 

No, he expected them to be drained in my conception - that he's in cahoots with Adawathwyn for swapping them out. He wouldn't be close enough to the box to do the switch. His dramatic staredown ultimatum and explicit threat of war was the distraction ploy (doesn't mean it wasn't sincere, too).

Adawathwyn said she was a Ferring of a mental metal, that could be a lie and she's a Steelrunner trained by Kelsier to do very rapid sleight of hand?

Oh, and why not just let Adawathwyn use the Bands, and then claim them per agreement? Well, Wax had already used it extensively, what if there was only one use left without compounding to refill it?

Ultimately I think Kelsier will have them... "Again"... However they were created originally.

Edited November 22, 2022 by robardin

[Maximus]

It's a bit of a reach, but what if the bands were drained to make Trell's perpendicularity?

[BinarySecond]

Is there any way TenSoon could have been controlled via Allomancy?

Daal could be spiked?

[Storyspren]

On 11/24/2022 at 2:55 AM, BinarySecond said:

Is there any way TenSoon could have been controlled via Allomancy?

Daal could be spiked?

OooOoooOoooOooo controlled by allomancy we haven't seen recently. I like it.

[Karger]

On 11/23/2022 at 11:00 AM, Maximus said:

It's a bit of a reach, but what if the bands were drained to make Trell's perpendicularity?

When and by whom though?

[Tglassy]

I...honestly just assumed the general had used an Allomantic Grenade to drain the bands.  Or perhaps someone did.  Can a Chromium Misting wipe investiture in a metalmind if they touch it?  Adawathwin or whatever her name is touches the bands first.  She could have a Chromium Spike, or be Twinborn.  She could have wiped them the moment she touched them.  And if the Nicrosilminds in them are wiped, they're basically just pieces of metal.  

[Frustration]

2 minutes ago, Tglassy said:

I...honestly just assumed the general had used an Allomantic Grenade to drain the bands.  Or perhaps someone did.  Can a Chromium Misting wipe investiture in a metalmind if they touch it?  Adawathwin or whatever her name is touches the bands first.  She could have a Chromium Spike, or be Twinborn.  She could have wiped them the moment she touched them.  And if the Nicrosilminds in them are wiped, they're basically just pieces of metal.  

Leechers probably could drain metalminds given the exchange in SoS, but I doubt they could do the same for the nicrosil that stores the ability, any more than they can strip a misting of their powers.

[Tglassy]

18 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Leechers probably could drain metalminds given the exchange in SoS, but I doubt they could do the same for the nicrosil that stores the ability, any more than they can strip a misting of their powers.

I mean...Nicrosil is just a metalmind storing investiture.  What would make that different than another Metalmind?

[Frustration]

Just now, Tglassy said:

I mean...Nicrosil is just a metalmind storing investiture.  What would make that different than another Metalmind?

Normal Nicrosil stores invesiture.

Medallions are something else, more like machines that can use investiture than metalminds. 

Spoiler

Raddatatta

In Era 1, Sazed says the only thing you can Feruchemically store while sleeping is wakefulness, but in Era 2 they have the sky ships that require everyone to be storing weight to fly and they don't land while people sleep. Was Sazed just wrong, or is that a difference between normal Feruchemy and using the unsealed metalminds?

Brandon Sanderson

Unsealed metalminds, I am moving toward complete—you probably already guessed this—mechanical uses of Investiture, and this indeed is a step toward that. And so we are stepping toward having a little machine that gives you powers. That's what the world wants to try to find. And this is—this being mechanical—we'll just say that the medallions and the things that they're building have more of a life-force, more of an Identity of their own than a traditional metalmind does, even though they're unkeyed and all of this stuff.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 5 (Dec. 2, 2022)

 

[StanLemon]

Alternatively, what if Daal is a Kandra and this is a scam to remove the temptation of the actual Bands, and maybe even trick Kelsier, in an effort by Harmony to encourage the North and the South to innovate and attempt to recreate the Bands while simultaneously keeping the actual Bands hidden and safe. Harmony seems to me to have learned his lesson on giving things and instead tempts people with the possibilities of what could be achieved.

[JustQuestin2004]

On 22/11/2022 at 1:16 AM, robardin said:

So here are the moving parts, in chronological order (sorry for the info dump and recap, skim read since I'm sure you're well familiar with everything in it):

Okay, I was going to suggest that maybe someone was Burning Copper, and that Copper could interfere with the Connection between someone and an Unsealed Metalmind.

But this makes so much more sense. I'll keep this in mind.

[alder24]

On 16.11.2022 at 8:16 AM, Price_McKinney said:

Maybe the bands really did belong to the Lord Ruler like the legend suggested.

I've just found this WoB, Rashek did not make them

Spoiler

Questioner

So I've always wondered, the Bands of Mourning, the actual spearhead that Wax uses. Was that made by the Lord Ruler or the Sovereign, or--

Brandon Sanderson

No. It was not made by the Lord Ruler. The Sovereign was involved.

Salt Lake City signing (Dec. 16, 2017)

 

I do think they were either suppressed/drained or switched, and Ghostbloods were the one that did it. The Malwish general (who has just been sent to Elendel) expected this, Terriswoman was very eager to get out of Elendel on Malwish ship, and she proposed using Bands (I think?), and Kelsier was suspiciously just on a little trip south. Also TenSoon, arguably the most skillful Kandra, was "out of practice in being human". I would not be surprise if Harmony wanted to bring Bands south.

[Stormtide_Leviathan]

On 11/21/2022 at 10:16 PM, robardin said:

Oh, and why not just let Adawathwyn use the Bands, and then claim them per agreement? Well, Wax had already used it extensively, what if there was only one use left without compounding to refill it?

There was a very imminent threat of an apocalypse on scadrial and no other apparent outs. I think, even if there was only one use left on the bands, Kelsier would be willing to use them to avert the apocalypse even if it means losing access to the bands.