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Splitting The Breath


sprocket

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First thing first, I don't know if this question has been asked (and/or answered) elsewhere, so if it has, let me know. 

 

OK with that out of the way, on to my question. 

 

What happens to an invested object when that object is broken? 

 

Say for instance, you place some Breath into piece of paper (ideally shaped vaguely like a person to bring the Breath needed down to one) and you split the paper down the middle. Do both halves keep operating based on their Command? Or does the Breath simply leak out and dissipate like when a person is dying. If the former is the case, does each half posses its own Breath that is half the size of the original? Then if each object gets its own separate breath, can these then be imparted to drabs to cure their... well, drabness? Would they then be half as invested as a person with a natural Breath? What would that feel like?

 

So my one question turned into far more than I anticipated, whoops. Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts and hopefully not hear there was some WoB or an instance in Warbreaker that I missed that would render my question moot. 

 

Thanks :)

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Yeah that makes sense. Although it makes me wonder if you could block the flow of Breath somehow, aluminum comes to mind. Although if you did get it to separate maybe it would just pull itself back together. This is also assuming that the Breath is distributed evenly throughout an object which might not be the case assuming that Breath exists largely on the spiritual realm.   

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This is a very interesting question.  There's actual a scene where this happens.

 

She Awakened a pair of rope pieces, telling them to grab when thrown.

 

A couple paragraphs later:

 

She tossed the rope at him, threw the other a Tonk Fah, then dashed into the room.

 

Denth reacted immediately, cutting the rope out of the air with his dagger.  The pieces of it twisted and wriggled, but weren't long enough to grab anything.

 

What's interesting is that she never attempts to recover the Breath from the rope pieces, so we don't know if the Breath has been indeed split into two smaller Breaths or if the rope still sees itself as one whole, which would mean one Breath is needed still.  In any case, splitting something that had Breath doesn't seem to have much effect on the object.

 

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that it boils down to how the object views itself in the Cognitive.  If you can dissect it enough that the object stops seeing itself as, say, a rope, then the Breath is lost and the Awakening is destroyed.

Edited by Terisen
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Oh wow, I had completely forgotten that scene. That makes me think that the human shaped paper cutout would actually be a bad way to do it because if you split it in half it might start viewing itself as having "died" and you would lose the Breaths. So if the Breath being retained is related to how the object views itself then I'd assume that trying to recover the Breaths would result in both halves losing their Breath regardless of physical connection.   

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You all know that every single example given so far takes way more than one Breath, right?

 

Well, yes, but the point still holds, I think.  If it takes, say, 50 Breaths to awaken a rope and that rope is cut, does each smaller piece take 25 Breaths?  If so, wouldn't that mean that they don't have enough Breath to power the Awakening and would, therefore, stop moving?  Or is it 50 Breaths still in two items that sees itself as one?  What would happen if you cut the rope into 51 pieces?

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My theory is that splitting an Awakened object only splits its physical form, not its cognitive or spiritual form. Think about it: to Awaken something is to tell a regular object that "you are now THIS, and behave like THIS, and all this extra Investiture that I'm putting into you is going to make it so!". That Awakened object now has a much stronger cognitive and spiritual presence than it did a moment ago, and there's no reason to think that this extra Investiture is damaged by a physical change. Especially since we're told several times by Vasher that an objects physical form has almost no bearing on what it is capable of doing once Awakened.

 

Practically speaking, I think that an Awakened object that's cut in half will try to behave as if it weren't cut (which is what the rope did). This may or may not be functionally useful, depending on the exact object and what it's been Commanded to do. Either way, I think the Breath is not damaged and not split, and the Awakener can reclaim the entire Breath by touching any part of the original object. This may start to break down after a period of time, but in an acute setting, I'm pretty sure this should be accurate.

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My theory is that splitting an Awakened object only splits its physical form, not its cognitive or spiritual form. Think about it: to Awaken something is to tell a regular object that "you are now THIS, and behave like THIS, and all this extra Investiture that I'm putting into you is going to make it so!".

 

Hmmm, this sounds more like Soulcasting. If one wants the stick to burst into flame, one has to convince the stick that it really out to be a flame instead by injecting enough Investiture into it. Not saying you're wrong, but usually the form chosen in Awakening is based off the Human ideal (most Awakened things try to act like humans, and the closer an Awakened object's form is to a human, the less Breath it takes to Awaken it)...

 

This topic though led me to ask this: what would happen if we stick some Breath into a piece of cloth and then set that cloth on fire; what then happens to that Breath?

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